Dance Geeks at Play

I was up in Saratoga Springs (NY) this weekend, attending the Society of Dance History Scholars conference at Skidmore College.  Academic conferences sometimes make me wonder if I actually want to get a doctorate.  I can't easily rattle off phrases like "to mediate the intermediality" and "the intersectionality of the intersection" (honest-to-ghod quotes from an actual session) and I'm not sure I want to develop the habit of doing so!  It's all quite different from the other sort of event I'm used to attending that features panel-shaped presentations (science fiction conventions) and even felt quite different from the other two academic conferences I've attended, Kalamazoo and the Dolmetsch conference in England.  I'm sure there were just as many jargon-laden academics at Kalamazoo, but the two times I've attended I've hooked up with other social dance scholars and we've had a grand old time.  And Dolmetsch, of course, is full of social dance historians with whom I instantly have common ground.  SDHS is a bit different: most of the presentations focused on 20th- and 21st-century dance, and most of them focused on meta-analysis rather than on the dances themselves.  There was surprisingly little social/vernacular dance (and what there was leaned toward the not-dead-white-European).

The campus was beautiful, but isolated from the actual downtown in a way that would have made me nervous as a student; I like cities.  I did remember my digital camera, but I didn't feel like taking pictures of pretty campus landscaping or stately Victorian homes in Saratoga, But with my usual evil appreciation for kitsch, the sculpture above left, located at Skidmore, caught my eye.  Yes, that's a giant sculpture of a shopping bag, not an actual shopping bag (click the thumbnails in this post for full-size photos).  The little black thing in the corner is my laptop bag doubling as a size reference, since no one happened to be passing by to conveniently pose next to it.  This makes me think less "art!" and more "some artists have way too much time on their hands!"

I knew all of three people before I arrived, only one of them well, and since I'm shy in big crowds of strangers I had a hard time meeting people.  That's another difference: at Kalamazoo and Dolmetsch, I've presented papers, so people came up and initiated  conversations with me.  I know I need to network at these things, but I find that sort of interaction absolutely agonizing.  I did manage to attend the Early Dance Working Group luncheon, which did address the lack of "early" dance (defined as pre-20th century, which is one century more than I generally think of as covered by "early") at this particular conference and possible strategies for remedying this and attracting new scholars.  I'm an oddball in being (1) relatively young for the group, but not a 20-something grad student, (2) possessed of a research blog and reasonably net/web-savvy, and (3) an independent scholar.  The age gap left me feeling rather like I was at a Boskone - my parents' generation and my (nonexistent) children's generation, but few of my own generation.  By Sunday I managed to find presentations at which I could ask intelligent questions and was able to strike up conversations with a couple of other researchers with interests that overlap mine to some degree and collect some useful contact information.

I was thinking about the sort of scholarship I do and why I felt somewhat out of place at this conference.  My research and that of other scholars leans much less to the meta-analysis side; there's much less scholarship about the cultural/racial/class/gender significance of the dances, and much more about what the dances were and how they were performed.  I think that may be an inherent difference for research on dance prior to the 20th century: before looking at the significance of the dances, we first have to determine what the dances were.  No one has to figure out what ballet is or what Lindy hop is; the dance forms are living or within recent memory and have been recorded in the myriad ways modern civilization records its culture.  Martha Graham is not a mysterious historical figure with no biographical data.  But when working with pre-20th century dance, the information void opens up very, very quickly.  Before one can analyze the dances, one has to work out what they were, reconstruct them, perhaps actually perform them. Many choreographers are merely names on a page about whom we know little to nothing.  The surviving iconography is not photorealistic. I've experienced this myself to a mild degree; it's amazing the difference having actual video of 1910s dancing makes in the research process.

The other aspect, of course, is that most of my research focuses on social dance, rather than theatrical/performance dance.  There was some of that at the conference (I enjoyed  papers on Lindy hop and Cuban dance), but less than I was expecting.  I miss my mentor Patri; he was one of the founders of SDHS, and I desperately wish I could call him up for perspective on this conference.

It wasn't all work and stressful social networking, though.  My friend Lizbeth Langston and I also escaped Saturday afternoon for a couple of hours to ride the carousel in Congress Park and then sit around and catch up with the last couple of years of our lives.  The Saratoga carousel is not especially large or unusual, but Lizbeth really loves carousels, and I'm reasonably fond of them myself.  We each took a couple of rides, taking turns standing out so we could take pictures of each other (that's me at left trying not to look grim.)  Then we walked around the carousel taking more pictures; the thumbnails at the bottom of this post are the carousel, four of the horses, and two of the medallions on the top rim.

Saturday night, I attended a dance performance (part of the Saratoga ArtsFest) split between the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company and the Tango Fusion Dance Company. The Sinopoli company is a modern dance company, and while I enjoyed the obvious skill of the dancers and the interesting choreography, I don't really connect emotionally with modern dance.  Tango Fusion made me very happy, though.  The performers successfully transposed social dances into a theatrical setting with just the right amount of theatricality to make it interesting.  It was essentially modern ballroom dances, but the problems are similar in presenting vintage dance.  Pure social dance is just not necessarily exciting to watch, but if you pour on too much theatricality, it ceases to be social and becomes Dancesport or "Dancing with the Stars" or ballet dancers trying to suppress their technique down to normal social levels.  Tango Fusion got it exactly right.  The dances were convincing as social dances, and I really enjoyed the little storyline they laid over the whole performance.  The conceit was that the dancers were all attending a cocktail party, and through dance and inter-dance mime they very effectively communicated an entire soap opera as the hostess tried to keep the party together while the host was drinking, a male guest was groping the maid, a female guest was doing very sexy dances with a much younger woman whose boyfriend was getting steamed (both senses) in the corner, and so on, ever so often breaking out into group dances (nicely choreographed) or star turns for different couples.  This is how social dance ought to be presented in a performance context!

Next weekend, I go off to Goucher College in Maryland for a different sort of play, a weekend of dance workshops sponsored by the New York Baroque Dance Company, whose director, Catherine Turocy, I met briefly in Saratoga.  I'll probably do mostly 19th- and 20th-century social dance with Richard Powers, but if I feel ambitious I might do a little bit of beginner-level Baroque, that being one of my weakest dance eras.

Carousel photos for your viewing pleasure:
      

Comments

[Serge]

"to mediate the intermediality" and "the intersectionality of the intersection"

Those wacky academics...

As for the carousel ride, I hope that it wasn't operated by that Mister Dark.

[Fledgist]

I generally have my eyes glaze over whenever people start talking about intertexuality. I know that the nonsense has set in at that point.

[Lila]

Heh. The last conference I went to had a panel on "interprofessional professionalism". This was in a medical rather than an arts-historical field, but academic jargon appears to be interchangeable.

[Marilee J. Layman]

Nice carousel!

[Neil Willcox]

It's obvious to me that intersections have intersectionality, but without context I'm stuck on mediating the intermediality.

There's an awful lot of history that we think we know but, is actually missing; for example we know that Nero composed and played music, but we don't really have any idea what it was like (Wikipedia suggests that 40 Ancient Greek scores exist, but almost no Roman). What's amazing is not that we* have to work hard to recreate dances from before the 20th century, but that later dances are well recorded.

* We in this case meaning Susan

[Susan de Guardiola]

I fully agree that intersections have intersectionality, but isn't that circular?

Some later dances are well recorded and some aren't - there's plenty of 20thc stuff I find very difficult to work on. Working from video is very challenging, and of course plenty of stuff just wasn't filmed or taped. There's a dance notation system called Labanotation that's supposed to be able to handle all aspects of body movement; I don't know to what degree it succeeds in this.

On music - for 15th-century dance, we have quite a few tenors for dances, meaning a series of long notes around which the musicians would improvise and embroider. We have few (no?) examples of the improvisation; by its very nature it just wasn't written down. I'm no music historian, but I'd be startled if we had anything detailed for ancient Greece.

[Neil Willcox]

A swift google got me this site:

http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/agm/

which has music files based on ancient greek scores. As it notes, the tuning is known as they are in ratios determined by Pythagorean theorists. It's mostly fragments, but from clicking on a few at random some of those fragments are several minutes long.