Reconstructing the Present Through Kinesthetic History: An Investigation into Modes of Preserving, Transmitting, and Restaging Contemporary Dance

Methods of dance preservation have evolved alongside conceptual themes that have framed dance’s historical narrative. The tradition of written dance notation developed in accordance with notions that prioritized logocentricity, and placed historical legitimacy on tangible artifacts and irrefutable archives; whereas the technical revolution of the late twentieth century saw dance preservation practices shift to embrace film and video documentation because they provided more accessible, and more convenient records. Since the 1970s video recordings have generally been considered to provide authentic visual representations of dance works, and the tradition of score writing has begun to wane. However, scholarly criticism has unveiled both philosophical and practical challenges posed by these two modes of documentation, thus illuminating a gap between theories of embodiment and the practice of dance preservation. In alignment with contemporary discourse, which legitimizes the body as a site of generating and storing knowledge, this dissertation suggests ‘kinesthetic history’ as a valid mode of dance preservation. Operating as a counterpart to oral history, and borrowing theoretical concepts from contemporary historiography, existential phenomenology and ethnography, the term ‘kinesthetic history’ suggests a mode of corporeal inscription and transmission that relies on the reciprocal interaction of bodies in space. The use of ‘kinesthetic history’ as a methodological approach to the preservation, translation, and reconstruction of movement material reflects the elements of fluidity, plurality and subjectivity that are often characteristic of contemporary choreographic practices. This theory is interrogated through a case study, which explores the ways in which both a written and digitized score, video recordings, and the ‘kinesthetic history’ of an original cast member operated as modes of transmission in a 2013 restaging of William Forsythe’s One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000) at The Juilliard School. Conclusions drawn from the case study challenge the traditional notions of reconstruction and restaging and suggest ‘regeneration’ as an alternative term to describe the process of preserving and transmitting contemporary dance works

Dancing Media: The Contagious Movement of Posthuman Bodies (or Towards A Posthuman Theory of Dance)

My dissertation seeks to define a posthuman theory of dance through a historical study of the dancer as an instrument or technology for exploring emergent visual media, and by positioning screendance as an experimental technique for animating posthuman relation and thought. Commonly understood as ephemeral, dance is produced by assemblages that include bodies but are not limited to them. In this way, dance exceeds the human body. There is a central tension in the practice of dance, between the persistent presumption of the dancing body as a channel for human expression, and dance as a technicity of the body—a discipline and a practice of repeated gesture—that calls into question categories of the human. A posthuman theory of dance invites examination of such tensions and interrogates traditional notions of authenticity, ownership and commodification, as well as the bounded, individual subject who can assess the surrounding world with precise clarity, certain of where the human begins and ends. The guiding historical question for my dissertation is: if it is possible to describe both a modern form of posthuman dance (turn of the 19th-20th century), and a more recent form of posthuman dance (turn of the 20th-21st century), are they part of the same assemblage or are they constituted differently, and if so, how? Throughout my four chapters, I explore an array of case studies from early modernism to advanced capitalism, including Loie Fuller’s otherworldly stage dances; the scientific motion studies of Muybridge and Marey; Fritz Lang’s dancing maschinenmensch (or the first on-screen dancing machine) in the 1927 film Metropolis; the performances of singer-dancer hologram pop star, Hatsune Miku; and American engineering firm Boston Dynamics’ dancing military robots. The figure of the “dancing machine” (McCarren) is central to my project, especially given that dance has historically been used as a means of testing machines—from automata to robots to CGI images animated with MoCap—in their capacity to be lively or human-like. In each case, I am interested in how dance continues to be productive of some kind of subjectivity (or interiority, or “soul”), even in the absence of the human body, and how technique and gesture passes between bodies, both virtual and organic, dispersing agency often attributed to the human alone. I propose that a posthuman theory of dance is a necessary intervention to the broad and contradictory field of posthumanism because dance returns us to questions about bodies that are often suspiciously ignored in theories of posthumanism, especially regarding race (and historically racist categories of non/inhumanity), thereby exposing many of posthumanism’s biases, appropriations, dispossessions and erasures. Throughout my dissertation, I look to dance as both a concrete example and as a method of thinking through the potentials and limitations of posthumanism

Movement in Contemporary Staged Adaptations of the Alevi Semahs (1982-2018)

The semahs are musical and movement practices enacted at the core of religious ceremonies called ayn-i cem which Alevis communities perform to fulfil diverse social and spiritual needs. As part of urbanization, migration, folklorization and heritage-making processes, since the 1970s, in urban environments of Turkey and Europe, these practices started to be adapted and performed also outside of these ritual contexts. As part of folklore and of professional performing arts projects, both Alevis and non-Alevi actors and dancers started to learn and perform the semahs on the stage. In this way, the practices became a summative emblem through which the core tenets of the Alevi belief systems and cultures and its resistant stance towards the national imagination came to be divulged and promoted to audiences of Alevis and non-Alevis alike. Paying attention to some of the public and professional performances of the semahs outside of the ritual context, in this thesis I argue that since the 1980s, the adaptation of the semahs into performing arts frameworks had a pivotal role in the contemporary ‘explosion’ of Alevi identities in Turkey and internationally. To sustain the argument, through the presentation of ethnographic material gathered during long-term and multi-sited fieldwork research, I analyse three performing arts projects. Resorting to scholarship in Anthropology, Performance, and Dance as well as to critical application of Laban-related movement analysis methods, I show how each of these stage projects displays a different layer in the imaginative re-workings and stylizations of the semahs on a transnational scale. Accordingly, by examining historical changes in the transmission of semah movements and participation in semah events, I impart new knowledge on themes of embodiment, interactivity, participation and presentation within Alevi cultures

The Object of Platform Studies: Relational Materialities and the Social Platform (the case of the Nintendo Wii)

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System,by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, inaugurated thePlatform Studies series at MIT Press in 2009.We’ve coauthored a new book in the series, Codename: Revolution: the Nintendo Wii Video Game Console. Platform studies is a quintessentially Digital Humanities approach, since it’s explicitly focused on the interrelationship of computing and cultural expression. According to the series preface, the goal of platform studies is “to consider the lowest level of computing systems and to understand how these systems relate to culture and creativity.”In practice, this involves paying close attentionto specific hardware and software interactions--to the vertical relationships between a platform’s multilayered materialities (Hayles; Kirschenbaum),from transistors to code to cultural reception. Any given act of platform-studies analysis may focus for example on the relationship between the chipset and the OS, or between the graphics processor and display parameters or game developers’ designs.In computing terms, platform is an abstraction(Bogost and Montfort), a pragmatic frame placed around whatever hardware-and-software configuration is required in order to build or run certain specificapplications (including creative works). The object of platform studies is thus a shifting series of possibility spaces, any number of dynamic thresholds between discrete levels of a system

Gestural Ekphrasis: Toward a Phenomenology of the Moving Body in Joyce and Woolf

This theoretical project seeks to introduce a new critical methodology for evaluating gesture - both represented in text and paratextual - in the works of Virginia Woolf - specifically The Voyage Out (1915), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), and Between the Acts (1941) - and James Joyce - particularly Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Though gesture studies has developed significantly as an interdisciplinary field in recent decades and performance studies has elaborated on the moving body\u27s significance to both text and performance, literary scholarship itself has not yet adequately incorporated possibilities for specific critical attention to gesture. Gesture is defined here as: any movement of a body, human or nonhuman, which is carved in space and time and experienced (or has the capacity to be experienced) as an embodied, sensate phenomenon. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories of gesture - psychological, psycholinguistic, musicological, and anthropological - this study moves primarily toward a phenomenology of the moving body in Joyce and Woolf. Its five chapters address musical gestures, ritual gestures, language-gestures, adaptation/process gestures, and archival gestures. In order to emphasize the intermedial capacity of gesture, I consider gesture within the framework of gestural ekphrasis: the rendering of gesture - comprising quotidian lived gestures as well as gestural art forms - in another artistic medium and/or the gestures enacted by the artist as part of an ekphrastic process

The Machine as Art/ The Machine as Artist

The articles collected in this volume from the two companion Arts Special Issues, “The Machine as Art (in the 20th Century)” and “The Machine as Artist (in the 21st Century)”, represent a unique scholarly resource: analyses by artists, scientists, and engineers, as well as art historians, covering not only the current (and astounding) rapprochement between art and technology but also the vital post-World War II period that has led up to it; this collection is also distinguished by several of the contributors being prominent individuals within their own fields, or as artists who have actually participated in the still unfolding events with which it is concerne