Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot (eds.), Dance on Its Own Terms. Histories and Methodologies , Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 464 pp. ISBN 9780199940004 (original) (raw)
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Danza e ricerca. Laboratorio di studi, scritture, visioni, 2021
This book provides a two millennia perspective of the intricate interaction between theory and practice to reintegrate "dance theory" within the historical field of dance studies. By doing so, this critical anthology, edited by Tilden Russell-Professor Emeritus of Music at Southern Connecticut State University-, includes fifty-five selected readings from its roots in ancient Greece until the Twenty-first century postmodern "dance theory". The problem of tracing and linking the history of "dance theory" is discussed by Russell in the introduction. «Writers in every age have theorized prescriptively, according to their own needs and ideals» (p. xix) weighing down this discipline 1 , which leads to question whether it is a methodological problem, rather than dance being an ephemeral art. The book is organized chronologically in nine chapters by prevailing historical, intellectual and artistic eras. Dance Theory to ca. 1300 explores a millennium and-a half from Greek and Roman classical authors-Plato's ethics of dance, Aristotle and Plutarch's raw materials of dance or Lucian's culture of dance-up to the Fourteenth-century Parisian musical theorist Johannes de Grocheio. It reveals how after the fall of the Roman Empire dance had an immoral reputation under ecclesiastic dominance.
Before, Between, and Beyond, Three Decades of Dance Writing
Narodna umjetnost: hrvatski časopis za etnologiju i folkloristiku, 2008
James Hamilton's book is the second book-length study of theater to have emerged from the Anglo-American aesthetics tradition. The first was Paul Thom's For an Audience (Temple University Press, 1993) whose last paragraph reads as follows: "Given that there can be an autonomous philosophy of the performing arts, the question is, What would such a philosophy be like? This question remains largely a matter for speculation" (p. 211). We need no longer speculate. Hamilton's contribution will hopefully be the first in a long stream of attempts to bring analytic reflection to bear on the conceptually evasive dimensions of performance. Hamilton unfolds a case for the aesthetic autonomy of performed theater. Performance, Hamilton claims, is not a mere addendum to the play, as Aristotle thought. Actors are not props through which a literary text can be vividly accessed. Theatrical performances are aesthetically independent (Part I). Hamilton believes that advocating such independence generates a problem. How does the audience identify a performance once it is dissociated from its links with a text? His reply (Part II) consists of showing how a performance can be understood without explicit or implicit ties to some text. If we are able to understand an evolving object, we can ipso facto delineate and refer to it; hence the mystery involved in identifying it is lifted. But understanding and identifying an object are conceptually distinct from responding to it as art. Hamilton accordingly turns to defend the aesthetic autonomy of performance (Part III). An aesthetic appreciation of performance involves (1) a perception of the performance against a background that determines whether the performance is an "achievement" and (2) a capacity to evaluate why the performance proceeded as it did, which in turn depends upon an imaginative reconstruction and evaluation of the choices shaping the creative process.
The Life of a Dance: Double Take Part II
The documentation of dance regularly asserts a false concept. This is that dances can be fixed, like a text, script, painting or even a musical score. Dance academics and organizations like ballet companies and the trusts that claim to protect and preserve the heritage of specific choreographers protect this idea. Focused far more on outputs than production, they decontextualize dance by ignoring its context: the working process. Notwithstanding the problematics of this assumption about the archival form of such material, that the tokens of the types that Wollheim (1968) posits as necessary are simply too flexible to be captured as definitive, this in itself presents a creative opportunity. This paper posits this working process as played out in performance as well as the confines of rehearsal, and gives as a practical example the performance of a work by the same dancers across a thirty-year timeframe, presented alongside the original video material. For dancers and choreographers there is a more subtle process of evolution that occurs with the regular performance of a dance: the dance changes itself to suit its purposes, and this often renders the meaningfulness of documentation an academic (or more lately legal) exercise. Evidence for this can be found not only in the experience of dancers, but in the actions of choreographers dealing with their own works, even when they are considered classics. Dances, it seems, simply wear out unless they are subject to regular revision and a definitive version cannot be said to exist. This is not to say an account of a dance is impossible, but to suggest there are conditional features that need taking account of, and to question the artistic validity of ossified reproduction.