Dance Fields: Staking a Claim for Dance Studies in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Ann R David, Michael Huxley, Sarah Whatley, Binsted, Hampshire: Dance Books, pp. 220-248, 2020
This chapter is particularly concerned with the status of history, dance history especially, with... more This chapter is particularly concerned with the status of history, dance history especially, within Dance Studies. It asks what has befallen the more recent status of history, once an epistemological support at a critical stage in Dance Studies’s early development, now that Dance Studies is better established, relatively speaking, within the academy. What, then, becomes of (dance) history? If history is not actually discarded, is it at least demoted? Indeed is history, having fulfilled its purpose in enabling the disciplinary plant to take root, so much scaffolding waiting to be dismantled?
Three factors will be identified and proposed as having particular significance in this connection, imbuing this chapter with a tri-partite structure. The first concerns the strong imprint of Cultural Studies on Dance Studies and the possible bearing of this imprint on dance history’s status within Dance Studies. For the particular manner in which Dance Studies has construed Cultural Studies may, this chapter will suggest, have impacted upon dance history’s standing within communities of dance scholarship.
The second factor has to do with the implications, for dance history, of a particular critique based in a branch of dance scholarship, that perceives phenomenology, which it deems a good fit for dance inquiry, as inherently antithetical to history. In particular, this critique takes the work of Michel Foucault - which it identifies closely with, and as, historical practice - as incompatible with dance enquiry. Incompatibility is staked on the twin grounds of Foucault’s break with, and supposed resulting and enduring antipathy towards, phenomenology; and his perceived embrace of history which is, itself, also understood to result from such a break. In effect, then, this critique questions the very suitability, for dance research, of approaches based in history-focussed inquiry.
The ability to call this critique into question, in the ways that the present discussion, in seeking to rehabilitate Foucault, and so history, needs to demonstrate, constitutes the third factor. This final factor makes two particular, further demands of this chapter. Namely that the interrelated questions of Foucault, phenomenology, and dance; and of the position which phenomenology has itself adopted in relation to history, be re-visited and re-evaluated to the extent that space reasonably allows. Fortunately, these interrelated questions are ones which have - relatively recently - preoccupied scholarship on Foucault, and on phenomenology, respectively. This preoccupation may in and of itself be one possible indicator that there is indeed more at stake, and so to consider, regarding both questions, than the lines drawn by the aforementioned critique might suggest.
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Three factors will be identified and proposed as having particular significance in this connection, imbuing this chapter with a tri-partite structure. The first concerns the strong imprint of Cultural Studies on Dance Studies and the possible bearing of this imprint on dance history’s status within Dance Studies. For the particular manner in which Dance Studies has construed Cultural Studies may, this chapter will suggest, have impacted upon dance history’s standing within communities of dance scholarship.
The second factor has to do with the implications, for dance history, of a particular critique based in a branch of dance scholarship, that perceives phenomenology, which it deems a good fit for dance inquiry, as inherently antithetical to history. In particular, this critique takes the work of Michel Foucault - which it identifies closely with, and as, historical practice - as incompatible with dance enquiry. Incompatibility is staked on the twin grounds of Foucault’s break with, and supposed resulting and enduring antipathy towards, phenomenology; and his perceived embrace of history which is, itself, also understood to result from such a break. In effect, then, this critique questions the very suitability, for dance research, of approaches based in history-focussed inquiry.
The ability to call this critique into question, in the ways that the present discussion, in seeking to rehabilitate Foucault, and so history, needs to demonstrate, constitutes the third factor. This final factor makes two particular, further demands of this chapter. Namely that the interrelated questions of Foucault, phenomenology, and dance; and of the position which phenomenology has itself adopted in relation to history, be re-visited and re-evaluated to the extent that space reasonably allows. Fortunately, these interrelated questions are ones which have - relatively recently - preoccupied scholarship on Foucault, and on phenomenology, respectively. This preoccupation may in and of itself be one possible indicator that there is indeed more at stake, and so to consider, regarding both questions, than the lines drawn by the aforementioned critique might suggest.
Its case study is "Maleficent" (2014), the Angelina Jolie popular cinema radical retelling, as prequel, of the back story of "Sleeping Beauty’s" slighted fairy Carabosse. "Maleficent’s" status as dance intertext is many-faceted: its titular character’s conjunction of malevolence and magnificence and the sourcing of her predicament to an originating act of socio-economic disenfranchisement are familiar from the characterisation of Carabosse in Marius Petipa’s choreography for the ballet "The Sleeping Beauty" (1890). Unspecified in the ballet, this act is elaborated in the film: ‘the winged creature who rose to be protector of The Moors, a kingdom which needed neither king nor queen’ to quote the film’s narration, Maleficent is shorn of her wings in an act of land-grab motivated premeditated human interspecies violence. This act, betokening rape for Jolie, renders Maleficent’s aerial choreographic spectacle pedestrianised; everyday and earthbound, just as Carabosse, denied vertiginous danse d’école vocabularies, must substitute more mundane mime in their place.
This paper begins by establishing the strong bonds which bind Disney to dance; the extent to which, to quote Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, ‘the art of animation… has its forerunner in ballet…At least in Fokine’s ballets for Diaghilev...’.2 Drawing on analyses of neoliberalism, those of David Harvey in particular, this paper then moves to consider "Maleficent" as the articulation of a critique of neoliberalism, one which – it will be suggested – relies heavily on Cynic philosophy for its formulation. Cynic philosophy, especially in the extended consideration of the Cynic life presented by Michel Foucault’s final series of Collège de France lectures 3 will be critically important here. Arguing for Maleficent as the choreography of Feminist ethics in response to neoliberal policies that render human relations to the land ever more ethno-biologically precarious, this paper will point up the strong parallels that exist between the film and Cynic thinking. In Foucault’s account, Cynicism especially prioritises the vie autre (other life). This makes Cynicism particularly effective as a vehicle for questioning neoliberal values and proposing others in their place.
"Maleficent’s" critique will be shown to be choreo-philosophical in the sense that it mobilises, and is highly reliant upon, a range of dance histories - those to do with "The Sleeping Beauty" especially - and dance practices, particularly those bound up, ultimately, with pantomime dance in Hellenistic ancient Greece. This article will suggest that pantomime dance as a close, cognate ally of Cynic philosophy, was already imbued, in some significant sense, with philosophical intent. It is pantomime dance’s philosophical intent - this paper argues - that endures and is mobilised to such effect in the roles of Carabosse and Maleficent. Attention then turns to Alain Badiou’s concept of cinema as philosophy. This article will suggest both that Badiou’s concept is more indebted to dance than is generally acknowledged, and that it arguably strengthens the sorts of claims that can be made for "Maleficent" as choreo-philosophical critique. This paper also proposes, in a similar vein, that on the basis of his reading of Cynicism as actually highly motile, the late Foucault is more phenomenological in orientation and - so it would follow - less antithetical to dance and its study, than has hitherto been suggested.
1. The fuller quotation reads ‘the freelancer is one of the sovereign figures of neoliberalism, the person on contract, who makes short-term deals for obligation and thrives through the hustle over the long haul. She prefers entrepreneurial precarity to the too closeness of the world.’ (Berlant: 76).
Zygmunt Bauman comments similarly but less sanguinely, for he does not share what might, from Berlant’s slightly ambiguous account, be construed as neoliberal precarity’s redemptory feature, namely its potential as a strategy for managing an individual’s relationship with the world. According to Bauman’s characterization, ‘an ideology of privatisation’ is ‘a new ideology for a new individualised society: as Ulrich Beck has written, individual men and women are now expected, pushed and pulled to seek and find individual solutions to socially created problems, and to implement such solutions individually, with the help of individual skills and resources. This ideology proclaims the futility (indeed, counter-productivity) of solidarity…This is also an ideology made to the measure of the new society of consumers. It re-presents the world as warehouse of potential objects of consumption…’,Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Happiness in a society of individuals’, "Soundings", 38 (Spring 2008) pp. 19-28; pp. 20-21.
2. Sergei Eisenstein, "Notes on the General History of Film" (1948), quoted in Khitrova, p. 83
3. These lectures were subsequently published, in an English translation, as "The Courage of the Truth (The Government of Self and Others II) Lectures at the Collège de France 1983-1984", ed. Frédéric Gros, general editors: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, English series editor Arnold I Davidson, transl. by G Burchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2011, henceforth to be referred to as Foucault.
Three factors will be identified and proposed as having particular significance in this connection, imbuing this chapter with a tri-partite structure. The first concerns the strong imprint of Cultural Studies on Dance Studies and the possible bearing of this imprint on dance history’s status within Dance Studies. For the particular manner in which Dance Studies has construed Cultural Studies may, this chapter will suggest, have impacted upon dance history’s standing within communities of dance scholarship.
The second factor has to do with the implications, for dance history, of a particular critique based in a branch of dance scholarship, that perceives phenomenology, which it deems a good fit for dance inquiry, as inherently antithetical to history. In particular, this critique takes the work of Michel Foucault - which it identifies closely with, and as, historical practice - as incompatible with dance enquiry. Incompatibility is staked on the twin grounds of Foucault’s break with, and supposed resulting and enduring antipathy towards, phenomenology; and his perceived embrace of history which is, itself, also understood to result from such a break. In effect, then, this critique questions the very suitability, for dance research, of approaches based in history-focussed inquiry.
The ability to call this critique into question, in the ways that the present discussion, in seeking to rehabilitate Foucault, and so history, needs to demonstrate, constitutes the third factor. This final factor makes two particular, further demands of this chapter. Namely that the interrelated questions of Foucault, phenomenology, and dance; and of the position which phenomenology has itself adopted in relation to history, be re-visited and re-evaluated to the extent that space reasonably allows. Fortunately, these interrelated questions are ones which have - relatively recently - preoccupied scholarship on Foucault, and on phenomenology, respectively. This preoccupation may in and of itself be one possible indicator that there is indeed more at stake, and so to consider, regarding both questions, than the lines drawn by the aforementioned critique might suggest.
Its case study is "Maleficent" (2014), the Angelina Jolie popular cinema radical retelling, as prequel, of the back story of "Sleeping Beauty’s" slighted fairy Carabosse. "Maleficent’s" status as dance intertext is many-faceted: its titular character’s conjunction of malevolence and magnificence and the sourcing of her predicament to an originating act of socio-economic disenfranchisement are familiar from the characterisation of Carabosse in Marius Petipa’s choreography for the ballet "The Sleeping Beauty" (1890). Unspecified in the ballet, this act is elaborated in the film: ‘the winged creature who rose to be protector of The Moors, a kingdom which needed neither king nor queen’ to quote the film’s narration, Maleficent is shorn of her wings in an act of land-grab motivated premeditated human interspecies violence. This act, betokening rape for Jolie, renders Maleficent’s aerial choreographic spectacle pedestrianised; everyday and earthbound, just as Carabosse, denied vertiginous danse d’école vocabularies, must substitute more mundane mime in their place.
This paper begins by establishing the strong bonds which bind Disney to dance; the extent to which, to quote Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, ‘the art of animation… has its forerunner in ballet…At least in Fokine’s ballets for Diaghilev...’.2 Drawing on analyses of neoliberalism, those of David Harvey in particular, this paper then moves to consider "Maleficent" as the articulation of a critique of neoliberalism, one which – it will be suggested – relies heavily on Cynic philosophy for its formulation. Cynic philosophy, especially in the extended consideration of the Cynic life presented by Michel Foucault’s final series of Collège de France lectures 3 will be critically important here. Arguing for Maleficent as the choreography of Feminist ethics in response to neoliberal policies that render human relations to the land ever more ethno-biologically precarious, this paper will point up the strong parallels that exist between the film and Cynic thinking. In Foucault’s account, Cynicism especially prioritises the vie autre (other life). This makes Cynicism particularly effective as a vehicle for questioning neoliberal values and proposing others in their place.
"Maleficent’s" critique will be shown to be choreo-philosophical in the sense that it mobilises, and is highly reliant upon, a range of dance histories - those to do with "The Sleeping Beauty" especially - and dance practices, particularly those bound up, ultimately, with pantomime dance in Hellenistic ancient Greece. This article will suggest that pantomime dance as a close, cognate ally of Cynic philosophy, was already imbued, in some significant sense, with philosophical intent. It is pantomime dance’s philosophical intent - this paper argues - that endures and is mobilised to such effect in the roles of Carabosse and Maleficent. Attention then turns to Alain Badiou’s concept of cinema as philosophy. This article will suggest both that Badiou’s concept is more indebted to dance than is generally acknowledged, and that it arguably strengthens the sorts of claims that can be made for "Maleficent" as choreo-philosophical critique. This paper also proposes, in a similar vein, that on the basis of his reading of Cynicism as actually highly motile, the late Foucault is more phenomenological in orientation and - so it would follow - less antithetical to dance and its study, than has hitherto been suggested.
1. The fuller quotation reads ‘the freelancer is one of the sovereign figures of neoliberalism, the person on contract, who makes short-term deals for obligation and thrives through the hustle over the long haul. She prefers entrepreneurial precarity to the too closeness of the world.’ (Berlant: 76).
Zygmunt Bauman comments similarly but less sanguinely, for he does not share what might, from Berlant’s slightly ambiguous account, be construed as neoliberal precarity’s redemptory feature, namely its potential as a strategy for managing an individual’s relationship with the world. According to Bauman’s characterization, ‘an ideology of privatisation’ is ‘a new ideology for a new individualised society: as Ulrich Beck has written, individual men and women are now expected, pushed and pulled to seek and find individual solutions to socially created problems, and to implement such solutions individually, with the help of individual skills and resources. This ideology proclaims the futility (indeed, counter-productivity) of solidarity…This is also an ideology made to the measure of the new society of consumers. It re-presents the world as warehouse of potential objects of consumption…’,Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Happiness in a society of individuals’, "Soundings", 38 (Spring 2008) pp. 19-28; pp. 20-21.
2. Sergei Eisenstein, "Notes on the General History of Film" (1948), quoted in Khitrova, p. 83
3. These lectures were subsequently published, in an English translation, as "The Courage of the Truth (The Government of Self and Others II) Lectures at the Collège de France 1983-1984", ed. Frédéric Gros, general editors: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, English series editor Arnold I Davidson, transl. by G Burchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2011, henceforth to be referred to as Foucault.