Dance As Art: a Studio-Based Account
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DANCE AS ART: A STUDIO-BASED ACCOUNT A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by Aili W. Bresnahan Diploma Date: May 2012 Examining Committee Members: Joseph Margolis, Advisory Chair, Department of Philosophy Philip Alperson, Department of Philosophy Miriam Solomon, Department of Philosophy Karen Bond, Department of Philosophy Elisabeth Camp, Outside Examiner, Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania Copyright © 2012 Aili W. Bresnahan ii ABSTRACT This dissertation is an attempt to articulate the conviction, born of ten years of intensive experience in learning and practicing to be a dance performer, that the dance performer, through collaboration with the choreographer, makes an important contribution to how we can and do understand artistic dance performance. Further, this contribution involves on-the-fly-thinking-while-doing in which the movement of the dancer’s body is run through by consciousness. Some of this activity of “consciousness” in movement may not be part of the deliberative mentality of which the agent is aware; it may instead be something that is part of our body’s natural and acquired plan for how to move in the world that is shaped by years of artistic and cultural training and practice. The result is a qualitative and visceral performance that can, although need not, be a representation of some deliberative thought or intention that a dancer can articulate beforehand. It is also the sort of thinking movement that in many cases can be conceived as expression; an utterance of dance artists that is not limited to the communication of emotion that can be appreciated and understood, at least in principle, by a public or audience. What this means for the Philosophy of Dance as Art includes the following: 1) there may not always be a stable, fixed “work” of dance art that can be identified, going forward, as the only relevant work on which critical and philosophical attention should be focused because of variable, contingent and irreducibly individual features of live dance performances, attributable in large part to the efforts, style and improvisation of particular dance performers; 2) the experience of dance artists is relevant to understand dance as art because experiential evidence of practice can supplement and ground the appreciable properties that we can detect in artistic dance performances; 3) artistic dance performance iii can be conceived as expression without being expressive of either an artist’s felt emotion or of human emotion in general – no particular content is needed as long as there is a content; 4) artistic dance performance conceived as expression can, but need not, function as representation in both the strong (imitative) and weak (referential) sense; and 5) artistic dance performance is real, not illusory and not necessarily either a transformation or transfiguration of the real. Dance as art, like theatre, like music and even, perhaps, like painting, sculpture and architecture, although in less clearly artist-present, extemporaneous and embodied ways, is human-constructed, human-understood, human- driven and a full, rich, interactive and meaningful part of human life. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The number of people who have helped to make this dissertation possible are too numerous to mention individually but in particular I would like to thank the following people: Joseph Margolis for his conversation, wisdom, friendship and mentorship over the past 5 years; Miriam Solomon for her keen eye for detail and assistance on clarity; Philip Alperson for remaining on my committee after his retirement to continue to give me the benefit of his philosophy of music, culture and art perspective; Karen Bond for her guidance on how to make the project speak more clearly to dance studies scholars; Elisabeth Camp for her detailed notes on my manuscript and for her insightful questions and comments as my Outside Examiner; David Davies, James Hamilton, Theodore Gracyk, Kristin Boyce, Renee Conroy and Margaret Moore for their comments on the portions of this dissertation that I presented at American Society for Aesthetics conferences; and finally to all the dancers, philosophers, and dance studies scholars in the DancePhilosophers googlegroup who have freely, generously and consistently given me their suggestions, experiential accounts and advice on issues of relevance to this work. In addition I would like to thank Art Bresnahan, my parents, Tom and Andrea Webber, and my children, Isabel and Arthur, for their continued belief in me and support of this effort. v DEDICATION To all dance philosophers everywhere. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................v DEDICATION ................................................................................................................... vi INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... viii CHAPTER 1 : HOW STUDIO PRACTICE CAN AFFECT DANCE AS ART ....................................1 2: WHEN STUDIO MEETS AUDIENCE ........................................................................43 3 : HOW MIGHT ARTISTIC DANCE PERFORMANCE BE CONCEIVED AS EXPRESSION? ...........................................................................................................86 4 : THE NATURE OF DANCE PERFORMANCE CONCEIVED AS EXPRESSION IN ITS RELATION TO REPRESENTATION AND REALITY ..........121 5: CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................151 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................159 vii INTRODUCTION Dance is underrepresented in the philosophy of art that is currently practiced in Analytic Aesthetics, a philosophic methodology that arose in Western European universities. 1 The reasons for this are varied. Some say, for example, that it is due to the exclusion of dance from the 18th-century system of the fine arts.2 Others say that dance’s origins as part of religious and pagan rituals and its continuation as a social and communal practice make it part of ordinary, and not properly “artistic” life. Lurking in the background is an old, persisting idea that the purpose of dance is to satisfy interests that are predominantly prurient rather than artistic, therefore putting dance as a whole into a category that is more appropriate for sailors’ dance halls than for aristocrats’ concert halls.3 Since one predominant trend in Western concert dance has been to put primarily the feminine or effeminized body on display for the male gaze there also have been some who have associated dance with the low and corporeal rather than the elevated and cultivated.4 Further, while ballet training might be considered acceptable for young girls from fine families to learn (at least as a way to learn posture and grace), white European culture has often made it uncomfortable for boys who are concerned with 1 I have capitalized “Analytic” here to refer to the methodological tradition of Analytical philosophy that is associated with Bertrand Russell’s method of breaking down complex systems of thought into simpler elements that allow the relationships between them to be analyzed. For more on Analytical philosophy in general see Thomas Baldwin’s entry entitled, “Analytical philosophy” (1998) in E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved October 05, 2010, from http://www.rep.routledge.com.libproxy.temple.edu/article/DD091. 2 See, for example, Francis Sparshott’s “The Missing Art of Dance.” 3 A dance studies scholar might ask why dance need be put into one category or another at all and why we cannot acknowledge that dance is in both in a non-dichotomous way. This is part of the difficulty of acknowledging what philosophers of art often do (categorize works into “art” and “not art”) in a way that does not speak to dance studies scholars, in which these categories are unnecessary and often obfuscating. 4 See David Michael Levin, “Philosophers and the Dance.” It should also be noted here, however, that in some periods of Western culture only men were allowed to perform onstage, even in female roles. For a feminist analysis that questions the primacy of the male gaze see Ann Daly’s "Dance History and Feminist Theory: Reconsidering Isadora Duncan and the Male Gaze" in Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts, edited by Lawrence Senelick. See also Sondra Horton Fraleigh, introduction to The Meaning of Body, particularly at xxx. viii preserving a heterosexual sort of masculine image to learn and develop an interest in and mastery of an art that requires one to wear tights.5 Most Analytic philosophers of art, then (who unlike dance studies scholars are predominantly male), have had little or no firsthand “studio” experience of artistic dance and so dance just does not spring to mind when they think about what it means to make and perform art.6 What this means for someone who primarily identifies as a philosopher who wants to engage in the conversation about philosophy of art that is happening in Analytic Aesthetics and who wants to concentrate on dance as art is that she is necessarily