THE DIALOGICAL DANCE (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Dialogical Dance: Self, Identity Construction, Positioning and Embodiment in Tango Dancers
this is just a draft. the final version will be published on Integ. Psych. & Behav. Sc. by the end of 2014
Argentine tango is a complex phenomenon, involving music, dancing and lifestyle, today practiced by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. This is already a good reason for psychology to make it an object of study. Besides, studying tango could also help to develop a dialogical way of theorizing and a dialogical methodology, taking into account both the genetic historical and eso-systemic dimensions and the individual experiencing. As any other product of human psyche, tango creates an universal and abstract representation of life starting from very situated and individual acts. Such institutionalized representation, which is at the same time epistemological, ethical and aesthetical, becomes a tradition -that is the framework distanced from the individual immediate experience- within which the meaning of the experiences to be make sense in return. To illustrate this epistemological and methodological stance, a history of the development of tango as dialogical social object first is sketched. Then, an ethnographic study about the Self actuation in a community of Italian tango dancers is presented. Results show how participants construct and actuate their identities in a dialogue between their I-positions inside and outside tango community.
Trading in Imaginaries: Locating Authenticity in Argentine Tango
Phenomenology & Practice, 2017
Argentine tango tends to be associated with highly gendered images of women and men locked in contorted embraces. These images constitute a tango imaginary that is removed from the lived experience of the dance. Remaining close to the experiential core of tango, this paper provides a Heideggerian-inspired phenomenological account that re-imagines tango as a mode of being-in-the-world. By situating us in direct and constant relationship with an attentive partner and furnishing a complex grammar of constraints, tango generates a frame for creating and sustaining worldhood. By examining the how of dance, the kind of experience it offers up, we approach the dynamic emergence of Being. In what follows, I draw on my years of dancing tango to elaborate an understanding of the experiential dimensions of the dance, and how these relate to the development of shared focal practices that disclose insights associated with embodied being-in-the-world.
Attempting to uncover and document the history, or rather histories and pre-histories of Queer Tango is difficult. Superficially, the history ought to be easy. The term ‘Queer Tango’ barely existed before 2001 when it was first used by LGBT dancers in Hamburg, Germany. It was perceived of by them as a riposte to ‘hetero-normative’ leader-follower relationships in mainstream Argentinian tango, proposing instead women as leaders, men as followers, same sex couples and ‘active’ rather than passive followers. Queer Tango has subsequently been characterized by the emergence around the world of Queer Tango organizations, of international festivals and an international community of dancers, thriving by contact through social media. Yet as the author, who is collaborating with writers and dancers Birthe Havmøller and Olaya Aramo in editing The Queer Tango Book, an online anthology of writings about Queer Tango, has found out, there is still no settled agreement as to what, precisely the term means; there is disagreement about the premise that ‘hetero-normative’ tango was quite as oppressive to women in the ways it was originally made out to be; and there is no agreement – indeed so far, precious little discussion – as to which dance practices in Buenos Aires and beyond from the late 19th century onwards might legitimately be enlisted as forming the pre-history. Were the men-only prácticas which ran for decades, a part of it? Or women teaching each other at home? When so little was written down, how is one to find out?
Embodying Cultural Identities and Creating Social Pathways through Mallorquin Dance
A new emphasis in the revival of dance on the Spanish Balearic Island of Mallorca at the beginning of the 1980s focused on improvisation, and challenged the Mallorcan dancers’ notions of tradition and previous choreographed dance practices of the Sección Femenina. This chapter explores the practice of improvisation at the ballada (a new social dance event), and considers why Mallorcan music bands were instrumental to its formation. The transient and transitional nature of the ballada creates a network of social pathways across the Mallorcan landscape, where individuals negotiate nationalist politics, gender relations, and their cultural identities through improvised dance practices. In this way a new sense of community is articulated in the politics of the spatial environment of the ballada. (2014, in Linda E Dankworth and Ann R David (eds), Dance Ethnography and Global Perspectives: Identity, Embodiment and Culture: Palgrave Macmillan)
Genuine but marginal: exploring and reworking social contradictions through ritual dance performance
Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 1999
The article analyzes how ritual dance drama performances have become privileged sites for people in Cusco to explore and rework the ambiguities and paradoxes of their history and everyday lives. While focusing on the analysis of the Qollas dance drama and dance as- sociation in the town of San Jeronimo, the article studies the meanings of this dance in terms of both the regional and national contexts. The Qollas dance, one of the most popular and widespread in Cusco, embodies indigenous identity. It thus brings to light one of the main con- tradictions of this identity: it appeals to cultural belonging and legitimacy, but it also implies low status and social mar- ginal ity.