Sunday (last day)

Sunday

It has been the last day (half a day).

Last nights performance was really great. Yjastros (flamenco dance) was so amazing. It was as if passion took the form of sound in the singing and guitar and then vitality sadness, joy, life and death all bubbled in the skin and bones of the dancers and exploded into their movements. I was exhausted after watching.

Dancing Earth was also great, a beautiful performance that was made more layered by the gentle, clear reverence for the lived experience of being on this earth.

This morning there were two panels and a closing plenary. The first panel looked at the influence of language on gender identity in Breaking. It looked at how some dancers have moved away from the word ‘Breakdancing’ because of the commercialisation of the word to calling what they do b-boying but then what are the women doing then. Some call themselves b-girls but others feel that makes it seem as if what they are doing is a different kind of dance purely because they are girls doing it.

Then Melissa Hudson Bell gave a paper about the work of Amara Tabor Smith who uses the eating of food as part of the performance experience. I really enjoyed the paper and want to read it again because I was distracted during it by how it reaffirmed how much I love to create dance myself, that has a community based  / ethnographic based starting point. How much I love the idea of an audience being a part of a ritual hand-washing as they enter the performance space as Melissa described Amara’s work.

The last paper in this panel looked at Jarabe Tapatio: dances in Mexico that were taught as traditional dances. In many papers, this weekend, exploring dances from different countries I have heard about traditional dances that were designated ‘traditional’ but only taught or even created in twentieth century. The were all responses to governments wanting to establish or recreate an identity for the whole country for instance in Cambodia after 90% of the artists were killed during Khmer Rouge, Korea as a part of shaking off colonialism, in Mexico (as this paper explored) when the country was made up of a number of differing groups of people with different languages and customs. It made me think how powerful the arts are. Governments turn to them to give cohesion to their country – look at UK Olympics. Music and arts and dance are how we define who we are as a nation and yet when it comes to funding that importance does not seem to be echoed.

The second panel was about the different re-stagings of Einstein on the Beach (first paper) and the second paper was about the history of Breaking from early dancers to 1990 and pointing out the importance of video replication in how the dance spread across the globe. People videoed battles and then people in other countries or places or genders watched the videos and learnt a shared vocabulary that later when they came together gave then something in common. But Mary Fogarty was pointing out that many of the things they assumed they had in common in person were not there. She has published this paper and again I am going to read it again.

The closing Plenary was nice but I went into it very up and hopeful but at the end we talked about the separation between practice and theory which I don’t acknowledge. And I had felt others came from the same place so talking about it as something to strategise for made me question if people thought as I do as widely as I had assumed. For me my practice is my theory: it is how I understand the world.   

It has been great to meet so may interesting, interested people at the conference.

I have been posting each day I was here for two main reasons. Firstly, in order to give you an idea of the range of research topics and methods that fall under dance, and how you are a part of a large community of people who are working in dance to open up inquiry across dance forms, risk asking difficult questions and trust their own passion and interests enough to follow them. Secondly, as a new way (for me) to share my life experiences as part of my teaching practice which is about how I believe that as I continue to engage in  my own reflective processes and growth I use my own lived experience as an example of what not to do / or what to do however you read my ideas.  

Adesola

Saturday (pm)

Today I went to a number of panels. I went to one about teaching dance in higher education. One paper was about teaching ballet from a feminist paradigm. We talked about how as a teacher you negotiate how the expected way to teach a technique might contradict your own principles. The question set by Gretchen Alterowitz was about teaching ballet without adhering to the power structures often associated with ballet, such as the teacher being the only voice in the room, assumptions about what beauty is and genderise movements. In order to teach in formed by a pedagogy that involves notions raised by feminist writers she draws on democratising techniques such as having students self assess, work in pairs, collaborate in meaning making, comment in class and link their experience in the ballet room with outside experiences. I thought about how rigours I am with my principles of teaching on BAPP and MAPP and how I do not fight half as hard to adhere to those principles in my practical teaching. I am planning to re-think many of my technique classes to see where I tacitly accept the rhetoric of the dance studio at the expense of my moral / ethical beliefs.

Another discussion was about assessment (particularly in choreography classes). Most of the room agreed that it was not so much the choreographic aesthetic that was assessed but the students transformative journey within the learning experience. This is how we assess BAPP and MAPP too. It is about the student articulating the learning they gain through the process of the course. I talked about how we had introduced the Professional Artefact at Middlesex in order to allow students to create a comment on their learning process within their own terms (and the terms of their profession).

I then went to a workshop run by a MFA student I had when I was guest teaching in USA last summer. She shared her whole process and really constructed a whole approach to contemporary dance informed by her ethnographic experiences of being Korean  born, having trained in “traditional’ dance and western forms of ballet and contemporary  (Graham). It was really interesting and inspiring.

After lunch I went to a roundtable talk about Jazz dance. What Jazz is? How it is taught again we had some deep conversations about the ontology of dance itself. The panel talked about how Jazz ‘takes you there’ and you can’t be afraid to go. You are one with the music feeling the beat in your body. Jazz is also its history linked to roots in Africa and yet at the same time defined by it experimentation with the ‘here and now’. I thought about how one teaches a style of dance (any style) where that is what it is to you a ‘style’. And you know that for someone else it is away of life – away to connect with the world. Do you say sorry I am not passionate enough about that to be a good teacher in it or do you turn to the codified version of it (and teach it as a process of accomplishing steps)?

The conference has really encouraged me to feel we are not alone at Middlesex in an insistence in deep reflective practices and links to ‘other subjects’ as part of the process of being a dancer. Particularly for me not to compromise my interests because things I am most passionate about (interested in) give me an energy to explore with rigour and brings deeper meaning to the work. Funny because its what I am constantly telling Module two and three students!!!!!

I am going to the performance tonight – looking forward to that.

Saturday morning

Today is another day full of activity. I am really looking forward to the performance tonight. Of yesterday I have been thinking most about the Dancing Earth company and the papers presented in the first panel I went to yesterday. My presentation was about the ethics of the work I created in 2010 (the Jingle Dress) and this company works within the same issues. I am hoping I can do some kind of collaboration with them because it is so exciting to find other people exploring the same ideas you have. Overall the conference so far has been really stimulating hearing all the interesting work people are doing in dance. Today I am planning to go to some panels that explore more pedagogical issues.

My presentation went well (I think), like a performance, I can never really remember what happened once I start going!!! I had done so much work on identity issues in preparation (and in the paper itself) and I did not feel I talked about that but then I hope that this work on identity was thread through the whole presentation. When I get back after the conference, I will work toward having a definitive version of the paper. Two useful answers to my ethical questions from the audience were:

The need to keep returning to the community (audience) from which the work is contextualised to hear how they are reading the work and get feedback. This resonates with my artistic principle of community in my work.  

The other was to more clearly see the work I create as a response to the experience I have. It is personal response and not trying to be the end-all to any issues but is a product of my own reflective processes.

Adesola

Friday (pm)

It’s been a really long day; so many ideas. Here are a few:

The first panel I went to was about ‘Indigenous Dance and Archives of Activism’. There was a paper on Mohave Bird dancing and singing – Michael Tsosie, Dancing Indigenous Decolonization Dancing Earth (who I am going to see perform on Saturday)- Jacqueline Shea Murphy, and New Hula movements in terms of activism – Adria Imada. A question that resonated across the three papers was the idea of commodification as a counter-colonial tactic. That is the economy to support these dances is often through competition etc.. Such as Pow Wow dancing supporting itself through the pow wow sales and competitions since it is unlikely to get any funding, at that scale, as an art form from Government funding. I thought that it was also to do with placing value  on forms that come from cultures that have historically been de-vauled in Western mainstream (art).

Then I went o a workshop on the history of contact improvisation – Nita Little.

·      Some great ideas and points of conversations were:

·      Opening towards not just making the body available.

·      Thinking about pathways in space and in the other body as part of the same thing.

·      The world is full of beautiful partners

·      Contact improvisation is a rhetoric that teaches a particular politic – goodwill.

·      If you start to fall my job is not to save you but to help you find a good way down

All these conversations and ideas were part of a bigger idea that the experience of Contact Improv. and the principles for it to happen are also the same as for wider life. All the above could be about movement or about living in general.

I went to a working lunch: Diversity Working group.

Then I presented my paper. It was part of a panel called ‘How Newness Enters the World: dance  (in) Transition’. It went well, some interesting conversations after the presentation. I talked less about identity than I had planned but I think you cannot have too much in one talk. In the paper itself I go much more in to identity and the gaze of the audience.

Then I went to a ‘Outstanding Scholarly Research in dance award plenary’. The award was given to Susan W. Stinson. It was great to hear the history of her work in Dance Education particularly. She talked about the importance of reflection. How she identifies and idea with in her own body (experience) then look to it as a kind of metaphor for a wider understanding and then critiques her ideas using theory. So it starts with a bodily feeling and generates out to a scholarly critical reflection. She talked about the importance to her of:

Curriculum theory: personal narratives, lived experience and embodied description, action research and collaboration.

Voices of young people: interpretive inquiry and critical reflection, research as art-making

She said that rather than looking for X (what I would call ‘answers’) we should attempt to be wide awake. The uncertainty and discomfort of your work is important, just as finding the ‘troubling’ in your work is important because it is part of being wide awake.

Karen E. Bond talking about Sues work said Sue asks two questions

What is the meaning of life?

How shall we live together?

The work must respond to these questions to avoid being trivial. I felt that the idea was that we all have two questions like this and in order to continue to work within a framework that we will not look back at and think we have trivialised what we care about, we must constantly refer to those questions in order to give our work rigour and in order to be ‘wide awake’.

Lastly, I went to a copyright workshop talking about fair use of images and video  etc… in scholarly work. It was really useful although I am not sure if the law is at all similar to UK law.

Very tired.

Adesola

Friday, morning

Morning:

Yesterday afternoon was the opening Plenary. Three dance scholars spoke. It was really inspiring for me because they talked about ideas within the terms of dance rather than ‘about dance’. I found that how they presented resonated with my thinking that dance study is about starting within the thinking and knowledge that dance (and the arts) offers and using this to critically look at the (whole) world not just how high your arabesque is. Dr. George-Graves talked about her life, citing bell hooks call to connect our lives through honest openness to our research, in order to acknowledge the messiness of things at times. She talked about her washing machine braking, Children’s theatre, the texts and performance legacy of slavery and also said sometimes she feels as if she is banging her head ‘against a brick wall and a glass ceiling’ at the same time – totally verbalises my feelings at times too!!!!

Dr. Garcia talked about oppressed and labouring bodies the way Mexican migrant worker’s bodies are treated. New possibilities in interdisciplinary work, that can explore more complex identities in a multi-cultural world. How dance is connected and disconnected to cultural studies.

Dr. Wong talked about how dance can situate itself. How people see it as ‘fun, entertaining and eye candy’ and as dance scholars we sometimes have to defend the very aspects of dance we are critically deconstructing. (example me defending Ballet last week at Re:Generations London!!!)

I was affirmed in feeling that dance gives a kind of knowledge and this knowledge can be brought to other fields. Not so much inter-disciplinary as a widening of the narrow expectations that people outside dance assume we are interested in.

Today is a full day. I present this afternoon.  In other news it turns out I am almost in the heart of the city (downtown) its just people don’t really walk much!!

Adesola

Arrive

This week I am at a dance conference (CORD). It is my first big conference in USA and I have given myself the task of sharing the experience with you!! I am posting duel posts on my MAPP and BAPP blogs. I wanted to share the experience because it is a bit foreign to me and I thought if I share my experience then when you go to give a paper (or maybe you have) or give your oral presentation, you will have the friendly voice of my experience in your head along with all the newness.  Shared experiences across a community of practice as a benefit to the whole group. I sort of did this when I went to the conference in Berlin in 2010 see past BAPP posts 

Going to talk about BAPP and hear what other people are doing

Conference continues (first day)

Conference second day

I am in a room in the very big hotel. The conference is being held in the hotel also. It seems to be quite far out of the centre of town but then USA towns are often not walking-to places anyway (so maybe I am in the centre of a town with big spaces between the buildings). I arrived last night and went for a walk along a highway to a Mexican café that was like the New Mexican equivalent of a caf. in East London but with Mexican Food and no English speakers!  

Today I am going to work on my presentation (‘The Jingle Dress- claiming a philosophical legacy as a cultural act.’), which I give on Friday. Registration for the conference is at 1:30 so I have sometime to deal with the jet lag too! I have looked on line at the draft schedule and I know a couple of people from guest teaching I have done and I also know one person - Dr. Welsh-Asante from the Re:Generations Conference last week at the Place, London. I am really excited to say hello to her here and hear her presentation (‘Gender-bending in traditional African Dance: The case of the Ganksete and Manjanata Dances’)

More later

Adesola