TO MOVE AND BE MOVED: INTERRELATIONALITY IN/BETWEEN DANCING BODIES A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE TEXAS WOMAN’S UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF DANCE COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES BY ROBIN CONRAD, M.F.A. DENTON, TEXAS MAY 2019 Copyright © 2019 by Robin Conrad DEDICATION To Matty Ward for making my life beautiful. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, my most heartfelt thank you to my advisor, Dr. Matthew Henley whose mentorship, advice, and insight shaped this process and product and helped me grow as a scholar and person. I am deeply grateful for his kindness and support, for his faith in me, and for meeting me where I was in all the various moments— the twists, turns, challenges, and triumphs. I also submit my warmest gratitude to Dr. Rosemary Candelario for her teaching, guidance, and support. She provided me with a foundation and also an aspiration. I thank her for challenging me and making me a more articulate human. Thank you to SaraH Gamblin for sustaining a calm presence throughout my doctoral experience. I am so appreciative of her support as well as her willingness to join my committee so late in the process. I am here as a result of a confluence of life events, one of which is the real chance that the late Dr. Linda Caldwell took on me. I remember her for her faith in me and for all the students like me that she taught, mentored, and shared her contagious joy of learning. I hope I made her proud. I deeply appreciate the founders, administrators, and dancers at Oxygen Tango and The Sweat Spot for allowing me to conduct this research in such inspiring communities. To all the participants, I so appreciate the time and commitment to sharing your stories, your observations, and your time with me. Without you, none of this research could have happened. iii Thank you to the 2014 Texas Woman’s University Ph.D. in Dance cohort. Having the opportunity to learn from and share with my colleaGues was fruitful and unforgettable. A special thank you and debt of gratitude to Melanie Van Allen, close friend, ally, writing partner and so much more. I look forward to our future adventures, scholarly and otherwise. And finally, my life my love, Matt Ward. Your patience and support of me always astounds me and delights me. Thank you hardly covers it but thank you indeed. iv ABSTRACT ROBIN CONRAD TO MOVE AND BE MOVED: INTERRELATIONALITY IN/BETWEEN DANCING BODIES MAY 2019 As human beings, we constantly navigate environments comprised of other people, animals, and objects. The way that we are in the world, our sense of self as we in move in/with/through our surroundings, is not often talked about or represented through specific language in our everyday lives but affects us on implicit and explicit levels. Interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry from the fields of dance studies, feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and cognitive and social science attempts to grasp what happens between and amongst our animate selves and our ever-shifting surroundings. However, much of this scholarship happens outside of situated and embodied contexts. This dissertation closely analyzes two adult dance communities in Los Angeles—Oxygen Tango and The Sweat Spot—examining both the cultural aspects of these sites and the first-person felt sensations of participants’ dancing experiences, focusing on accounts of interrelational happenings. A close evaluation of the data reveals two cultures that are built on both pre-conscious and conscious structures of intercorporeity, intersubjectivity, and affect that foster shared kinetic understanding. v Utilizing a phenomenology-based ethnographic methodology, this study acquired data through qualitative interviews, participant observation, and cultural artifacts (including social media). Studied in tandem, the findings at these two communities indicate cultures based on a need for dancers to be individually expressive through movement while engaging in collective embodied dance practices. This dissertation argues that in doing so, they create intimacy in and through their bodies. They re-discover a vital kinesthetic way of being that is not always prioritized as we transition to speech, supported by the work of phenomenologist and dancer Maxine Sheets-Johnstone who theorizes the developmental phase after learning to speak as post-kinetic, or a shift away from our tactile-kinesthetic way of being in the world. These communities also foster kinesthetic belonging, or a body-belonging, that transcends tHe normalized traits of tastes, predilections, and verbal conversations that commonly link us to social involvement, and instead connects dancers through the action of moving together within these cultures. This research situates existing scholarship by placing it within lived/danced contexts and extends it by contributing to the theory, developing innovative possibilities for how we might conceive of dance, an articulate experience of movement, as an intervention that inteGrates body and theory. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION .................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iii ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ v Chapter I. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1 Notes from the Beginning ................................................................................................... 1 Ideas Emerging ................................................................................................................... 3 Bodies Being Together: A Basis in Key Terminology ....................................................... 5 Theoretical Underpinnings: Dance Studies and Interdisciplinary Scholarship .................. 6 In the Coming Chapters .................................................................................................... 10 Before We Begin… ........................................................................................................... 12 II. THEORY MOVING IN/WITH/THROUGH THE DANCING BODY ..................... 14 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 14 The Body: Traditional Western Conceptions ................................................................... 16 Rethinking the Body: An Overview of Phenomenological Perspectives ......................... 17 Rethinking the Body: An Overview of Feminist Perspectives ......................................... 20 Body, Subject, and Agency: Advancing Constructions/Extensions of the Body ............. 26 Embodiment: A Distillation of Varying Conceptions ...................................................... 30 Kinesthesia (Sensing Self-Movement) and Its Implications ............................................. 36 Intercorporeity, Intersubjectivity, and Conceptions of Affect (Affect/Emotion and Affective Practice) ............................................................................................................ 39 Affect and the Affective Turn ............................................................................... 40 Affect and Emotion ............................................................................................... 44 Affective Practice .................................................................................................. 45 Summary ........................................................................................................................... 47 III. METHODOLOGY: PHENOMENOLOGY-BASED ETHNOGRAPHY ................. 49 vii Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 49 Research Statement of Purpose ......................................................................................... 49 Design ............................................................................................................................... 50 Ethnography ...................................................................................................................... 51 Dance Ethnography ............................................................................................... 52 Kinesthetic Modes of Attention ............................................................................ 52 Phenomenology-Based Ethnography .................................................................... 53 Positionality ...................................................................................................................... 54 Data Collection ................................................................................................................. 57 Site Approval ........................................................................................................ 57 Interviews .............................................................................................................. 58 Observations and Field Notes ............................................................................... 64 Analytic Memos .................................................................................................... 66 Complementary Data Sources: Casual Conversations