Papers by Sima Belmar
Contemporary Theatre Review, 2016
This dissertation examines how choreographers Bill T. Jones, Joe Goode, and Wallflower Order Danc... more This dissertation examines how choreographers Bill T. Jones, Joe Goode, and Wallflower Order Dance Collective mobilize auditory, visual, and kinesthetic modes of communication to underscore the unstable relationship between talk, dance, and gesture. I argue that this very instability affords dance theater its power to perform alternative racialized and gendered subjectivities. The project departs from dance studies' longstanding investment in the notion of choreography as bodily writing to examine theories and ideologies of dance's status as a form of speech. This dissertation is about how a generation of dance artists dealt with their anxiety around (modern, contemporary, postmodern, American, concert, art, stage) dance's status as a language that could speak for them so that they could be heard-not only as individuals (hear my story) but as representatives, public figures of underrepresented groups, experiences, lifestyles. The works I have chosen best exemplify or perform a productive tension between talking, dancing, and gesturing that illuminates the historical terms and contexts, the very history itself, of western concert dance practice and its autonomizing discourses. These works show us how the tension between talking, dancing, and gesturing expose related tensions between "high" and "low," art and street, art and social/popular dance practices; black and white; and between hearing and non-hearing cultural contexts. i Rather, I think that the problem is about learning to see, hear, and feel with dancing without succumbing to the "authority effect." 5 Jane Tompkins captures it nicely: re-enactment in lieu of reconstruction (Franko 1989; the entire Dance Research Journal 43/1, Summer 2011). 4 Contesting the prevailing assumptions around dance's relationship to language has been a driving force in Western concert dance's aesthetic, political, and ideological shapeshifting. Dance Studies as a field was built on a scaffold of structural and poststructural literary theory. The field valorized choreography as a practice and object, legitimating and making legible dance as a subject of academic inquiry. This strategy also liberated writers from the daunting task of preserving or capturing the ephemeral. The new dancer-theorists brought their kinesthetic, interoceptive knowledge of dancing to bear on these "readings" of choreography. Susan Leigh Foster's groundbreaking Reading Dancing was the first dance theory text to think dance through semiotics. Foster focused on choreography as a practice of writing that inscribes both the space of dancing and the body of the dancer. Foster laid the groundwork for theories of the dancer's agency through a metaphoric and material association between choreography and writing. The dancing body inscribes and is not merely inscribed on. The dancing body is "a bodily writing" (Barthes). Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dancing. Mark Franko's Dance as Text considers the political and ideological significance of the rise of "antitextual" dance in seventeenth-century France, a time "when a body, independent of language, could mean something 'more' or other than what language said it did" (Mark Franko, Dance As Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 5). Franko (who borrows the phrase "Dance as Text" from a 1988 MLA session organized by Foster, Franko, Dance as Text, 197, n.59.) informs us that the question of how to read dancing was already raised by dance theorists and practitioners in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Franko, Dance as Text, 14). Following the "Choreographing History" conference, several anthologies and monographs emerged that formed the core theoretical curricula of dance departments. These anthologies analyzed dances and dancing bodies as "texts," searching for "meaning in motion." See Foster, ed.,
, to share their reflections on the relationship between their body-mind practices and their acad... more , to share their reflections on the relationship between their body-mind practices and their academic research and teaching. We began with morning workshops in Iyengar yoga (Lucey), the Feldenkrais Method® (Constable), The Alexander Technique (Cranz), and social somatics/participatory performance (Kuppers). In the afternoon, we gathered for a roundtable discussion with graduate students from various departments at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and the Graduate Theological Union, including Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies, South and Southeast Asian Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Psychology. The event culminated in a panel discussion and Q&A with the symposium participants. * Lucey, who stumbled into an Iyengar yoga class in England in 1982 while he was a student at Oxford, connects his yoga practice with his intellectual life through a set of conceptual issues that "push at the distinction between practical knowledge and intellectual knowledge." 1
Garafola, Lynn. 1989. Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. New York: Oxford University Press. Kraut, Anthea... more Garafola, Lynn. 1989. Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. New York: Oxford University Press. Kraut, Anthea. 2016. Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance. New York: Oxford University Press. Novack, Cynthia. 1990. Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Serova, Sonia. n.d. Baby Work. New York, NY: Vestoff-Serova Russian Academy of Dancing.
In line with this issue’s theme, this essay focuses on what the scholar-practitioners who partici... more In line with this issue’s theme, this essay focuses on what the scholar-practitioners who participated in the symposium Somatics, Scholarship, Somatic Scholarship: Materiality and Metaphor on February 27, 2015 at the University of California, Berkeley, had to say about how somatic practices shape pedagogical practices in the context of the university. Although the panelists differ in their approaches to “the body” and in the degree to which they explicitly mobilize somatic exercises in the classroom, all four locate the academic seminar room as the site in which their embodied practices most clearly intersect with their academic work.
Author(s): Belmar, Sima Vera | Advisor(s): Jackson, Shannon | Abstract: This dissertation examine... more Author(s): Belmar, Sima Vera | Advisor(s): Jackson, Shannon | Abstract: This dissertation examines how choreographers Bill T. Jones, Joe Goode, and Wallflower Order Dance Collective mobilize auditory, visual, and kinesthetic modes of communication to underscore the unstable relationship between talk, dance, and gesture. I argue that this very instability affords dance theater its power to perform alternative racialized and gendered subjectivities. The project departs from dance studies’ long-standing investment in the notion of choreography as bodily writing to examine theories and ideologies of dance’s status as a form of speech.This dissertation is about how a generation of dance artists dealt with their anxiety around (modern, contemporary, postmodern, American, concert, art, stage) dance’s status as a language that could speak for them so that they could be heard—not only as individuals (hear my story) but as representatives, public figures of underrepresented groups, experience...
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016
Dance Magazine, Mar 1, 1999
TDR/The Drama Review
e question of how performance, and particularly dance, might o er a means of resistance to our cu... more e question of how performance, and particularly dance, might o er a means of resistance to our current neoliberal culture is frequently discussed in academic and artistic circles. Many dance artists and scholars believe that their practices can provide an antidote to the individualism, violence, and consumption of neoliberalism. However, in-depth interrogations of the potential of dance to undermine, undo, and provoke contemporary capitalism are relatively rare. André Lepecki's latest book, Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance, o ers a serious, detailed response to the topic. Lepecki's central premise is that dance's potential to produce "singularities" a ords it a unique capacity to disrupt normative modes of perception and experience, which in turn can draw attention to and challenge the conditions of neoliberalism.
This chapter seeks to recuperate the dance legacies in Saturday Night Fever (1977) through a chor... more This chapter seeks to recuperate the dance legacies in Saturday Night Fever (1977) through a choreographic and cinematographic analysis of the film’s dance sequences. The ways the camera centralizes racialized, dancing bodies offers a perhaps accidental acknowledgement of the debt owed to black dancers. Centered around John Travolta’s Italian-American character Tony Manero living in a homogeneous Brooklyn neighborhood—where blacks were (and continue to be) unwelcome—Saturday Night Fever paradoxically exposes and pays tribute to the black roots of the screendancing. Travolta’s training for the film uncovers a complex dance history that reflects significant interracial contact behind the scenes as well as between and within singular bodies. There was interracial mixing in the backgrounds of the film’s top-billed choreographer, Lester Wilson, and Travolta’s uncredited dance instructor, Deney Terrio, and the modern, jazz, and street dance roots of the choreography shifts the film into a history of American concert and commercial dance practice.
Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, Jan 1, 2010
Dance Writing by Sima Belmar
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Papers by Sima Belmar
Dance Writing by Sima Belmar