INTERNAL COLLOQUIUM 1
die Angewandte
Zentrum Fokus Forschung
November 29, 2022
TECHNIQUE CONCERNS:
Ballet Practice Against the Western Archive
PRESENTATION GUIDE
Short Exercise
Reflection
Little Autobiography
Address Research Topic & Question
Project Abstract
Questions
EXERCISE
Invite everyone in attendance at the internal colloquium, “the participants”, to stand and join me in a short exercise:
stand with legs apart, about one and a half of your feet distance apart (referring to 2nd position in ballet terminology)
I describe a focus, where to put weight down through specific points in the feet (big toe joint, baby toe joint, and heel).
I invited the participants to find equal pressure through all six of these points equally down into the floor
let your arms drop to your sides and make some bounces
I invite everyone to “slouch”, letting all their weight drop down into the floor “like you are 300 years old”
from this place I invite the participants to press down into the floor into the points across the foot, side to side (across the metatarsals), and front to back (from ball of foot to floor)
from there I instruct to go up from the top of their heads making space between their bones “without lifting their low ribs”
end exercise
REFLECTION
I invite the participants to think about the experience they just had with their bodies and offer two prompts to guide their reflection if they like, otherwise just to take time for their own reflection about any aspect.
Some guiding questions
How did you pay attention to others as you worked with your own body?
or
How was your imagination of what your body was doing or feeling intermingling with your imagination of others’ experiences in the room or screen?
BROAD QUESTION
How should we* continue to study western systems, styles and techniques?
* I planned to say this, but I didn’t: “we” refers to institutions where techniques are taught that have historically been composed of majority white students, in professional or pre-professional, market-driven or academic, educational settings, but also less visible settings.
A jump.
My knowledge of ballet technique is intimately felt. I began when I was four years old and practiced intensively until I was injured at 18 years old, at which point I admitted to myself that the commercial aspect, and perfectionist tendency, impaired my capacity to think freely. I wanted to imagine infinite possibilities to express beauty through my body and its movement, and connect with people in ways that didn’t represent heterosexuality. and it felt like the culture where ballet was happening was not interested in that. I left for a short time.
Some years later, like when I was four, I crawled back into the studio.
Ever since I returned, ballet technique has supported me in my work as a contemporary dancer and performer.
…as a maker.
…and as a teacher.
I learned to teach ballet through a teacher I started assisting who hosts a class that she calls, “Ballet for Contemporary Dancers” in New York City and abroad. The teacher’s name is Janet Panetta and like me she trained at an elite ballet institution in New York City and got sick of the proscriptions and prohibitions regarding what the dancers might do with their bodies and lives. Assisting her for ten years, I have been working with her ideas and expanding them, now as a teacher for a “contemporary dance” departments. In the past seven years I have been teaching at The New School University, Stockholm University of the Arts, Zurich University of the Arts, and University of the Arts Berlin where I was a guest lecturer for four years and sustained my teaching practice through the pandemic.
In university settings I have been able to reflect on classical technique with students and teachers interested in choreography as an ever-expanding notion.
COMPLEXITY
Teaching, artistic expression, and theory are enmeshed for me. Through the interrelationship I seek a balance of experimentation and rigor. A world view.
In much of the work I have done inside the frame of contemporary dance, ballet has been a pretense to talk about a state of affairs that exceeds commercial performance and specialised physical culture. I have observed ballet as a dynamic conversation starter and have used the technique, both theoretically and in practice, as a portal to enter broader debates about the ways in which Eurocentric tendencies are perpetuated through oral history as well as the archive.
There is a wealth of scholarship that attests to the lives, experiences and stories minimized by the machine of capitalism.
Here are two quotes from Adedola Akinleye that I like because they draw our attention to the ways in which ballet exists in proximity to the economic and political machinery of capitalism.
“Emerging at the time of European colonial expansion that began in the fifteenth century… ballet rides the inheritance of colonialism and cultural hierarchy. Ballet was born into this European social-economic exercise… This legacy informs the current Western understanding of the art world and is perpetuated in the way ballet is referenced, classified and represented. (2)”
“As an artform, ballet absorbed the richness of the cultures into which it was introduced. However, imperialist sponsors have repeatedly used the artform to further colonial aesthetics. Such heteronormative, classed narratives of the notion of ballet can pervasively drown out the spectrum of human sensibilities that dance can so ably exemplify, but the working class, non-White, Queer constituents who have loved and danced ballet steps have legacies of their own that prevail - albeit often as part of ‘underground’, invisibilized cultural histories and communities. (3)
”
RESEARCH QUESTION
What is at stake teaching ballet in the wake* of mass exclusion?
* ‘in the wake’ references Christina Sharpe’s inspirational book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)
CONCERN
From my perspective, “classical” techniques produce clear forms of rigor for artists to use in skill-building workshops or daily practices, however, the ways in which knowledge of classical techniques is transferred risks reifying (i.e. strengthening) attitudes and sentiments of the imperialist and colonial contexts from which they were established.
Referring back to Christina Sharpe’s concept “the wake”, I offer a quote from her text that also contains a quote of Saidiya Hartman:
“The “autobiographical example,” says Saidiya Hartman, “is not a personal story that folds onto itself; it’s not about navel gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social process and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them”. Like Hartman I include the personal here, “to tell a story capable of engaging and countering the violence of abstraction (Hartman 2008, 7) (8).
”
SITUATED PERSPECTIVE
As a technique teacher, the ethics of my teaching are entangled with my experience working with and against hierarchical power structures. Bodily training in social and natural environments, as well as the creative curiosities and desires I inhabit co-create my intuition as a choreographer, performer, and teacher.
I want to make it clear that in most cases, when I instruct how to do something I also do it physically, performing a manual labor which catapults me into relation to time forward and back. the temporality of the moment to moment dialogue I have with my body, joins the network of embodied memories of the instructions I have received, which amount to complex somatic aesthetic phenomena, at many time at odds with what is expected. In teaching and using technique, the manners and measures of “appropriate behavior” of the places where I learned them are illuminated; the feelings those techniques I generate bring forward link to the communities with whom I have endured these repetitions of coordinated rhythms and movements. Also the haunting of those who were not there. Thos who were excluded. Or maybe one day there, the next day not.
Technique is isolating and, simultaneously, embodying techniques helps me connect in non-verbal economies, in groups where exchanges in silence, through chance encounters, build environments of mutuality and joy.
These joyful, intuitive aspects are highlighted when I craft and facilitate technical exercises, or otherwise use the knowledge as a score when I perform for a public.
The fact that neoliberalism requires exclusions to thrive as a global economic model is highlighted for those in contemporary art settings and institutions in Europe and elsewhere.
APPROACH
Social Epistemology
Evaluation of the social dimensions of knowledge or information.
ABSTRACT
Classical ballet is highlighted as an historical practice through which to consider epistemic change in arts institutions and beyond. The project aims to produce a manual of ballet technique, allowing a practitioner's life-long experience of embodying the form to act as a lens on contemporary practice as it pertains to historical practices. The situated perspective, somatically and culturally constituted, interacts with philosophical perspectives on somatic realities and disciplinarity. The project considers how aesthetic ideologies and pedagogy become improvisational narrators in the unfinished story of the ways people learn to dance, including ballet.
FOR WHOM DOES THIS RESEARCH MATTER?
The obvious answer for me is that contemporary dancers and performers are interested in encountering systems that offer unique ways of learning about their bodies and what they can do. To quote Ben Spatz, who follows a long line of philosophical inquiry, from Spinoza to Deleuze, “We do not yet know what a body can do” (Spatz).
Clarifying this important question changes the language and expression of the research. It also, quite possibly, determines the form and aesthetic of the complex of art that comes alongside, with, and through the discursive elements.
FOR WHOM DOES THIS RESEARCH MATTER?
What is one word or notion you had while experiencing this presentation?
Be it a point of entry that gets to the heart of an idea you thought of in the last fifteen minutes, or a concept you find relevant to my project as you see it.