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Dancing Place/Disability1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2015

MARGARET AMES
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Abstract

This article is developed from a paper presented at IFTR as part of the Performance and Disability Working Group in summer 2013. The work considered is a practice-as-research contribution by Welsh dance theatre company Cyrff Ystwyth towards a large Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded enquiry into performance, place, dislocation and vulnerability. The article uses contrasting concepts drawn from the work of critical theorists and dance scholars André Lepecki and Carrie Noland to think about the implications of Cyrff Ystwyth's site-specific performance authored by choreographer Adrian Jones, who has a learning disability. The research question is interrogated through the lens of the practice and understandings of place, performance and vulnerability, and proposed in the light of theory and its application to practice. The practice's challenge to theory is then considered as it confronts the researcher's expected outcomes and posits new understandings.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , July 2015 , pp. 170 - 185
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2015 

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References

NOTES

2 The project discussed formed part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council UK (AHRC)-funded enquiry headed by Professor Sally Mackey at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in the UK. Mike Pearson and myself were the co-investigators from Aberystwyth University.

3 Sally Mackey, Research Grant Standard Proposal, AHRC Reference AH/I000364/1, 2010, p. 1.

4 Freeman, John, ‘Ineffability: Illustration and the Intentional Action Model’, in Freeman, ed., Blood, Sweat and Theory Research through Practice in Performance (Oxfordshire: Libri Publishing, 2010), pp. 1–8Google Scholar, here p. 5. Borgdoff, Henk, ‘The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research’, in Biggs, Michael and Karlsson, Henrik, eds., The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 44–63, here p. 56.Google Scholar

5 See Buttimer, Anne, Sustainable Landscapes and Lifeways: Scale and Appropriateness (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001).Google Scholar Anne Buttimer translates Paul Vidal de La Blache's term genre de vie, thereby stating a commitment to relationships with people and environment rather than environmental determinism. It is an encompassing term and refers to how the environment one is in can create possibilities rather than determine one's situation. I use it in this spirit as it holds psychological and social factors as well as physical and environmental aspects of geography all in one. ‘Way of life’ seems to suggest personal choice alone, whereas ‘lifeway’ suggests all the factors at work in a person's life. It also means that you can live in the same place but have different lifeways.

6 Freeman, ‘Ineffability’, p. 5.

7 Ames, Margaret, ‘Working with Adrian Jones Dance Artist’, Journal of Arts and Communities, 2, 1 (2010), pp. 41–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 André Lepecki, ‘The Body in Difference’, SARMA Laboratory for Criticism, Dramaturgy, Research and Creation (2000), at http://sarma.be/docs/608, accessed 31 January 2014.

9 Contemporary concerns about the potential and actuality of how people with learning disabilities are able to feel included and valued members of society remain pressing across the statutory sector, among voluntary organizations and at the immediate level of the experience of families and friends. As a small example, the Foundation for People with Learning Difficulties state on their website ‘the economic and social barriers and prejudices that people with learning disabilities face throughout their lives’; see www.learningdisabilities.org.uk/about-us, last accessed 22 November 2014.

10 Cynefin is a Welsh word that translates loosely as ‘habitat’. The word has been taken up by systems analysts who understand the more nuanced meanings in the word. It carries a sense of deep and complex structure such that one's habitat, although well known, will be composed of layers of things one understands one cannot know. It refers to understanding as composed of different types and experiences of knowledge that run deep. In this sense, the idea of cynefin might be used to understand home and place as more than the sum of its visible parts and a relationship with it to be emotional, rational and visceral, based on empirical knowledge and gut feeling and a sum of many varied parts of different ways of knowing.

11 For a discussion on this see Ames, Margaret, ‘“It's a Ghost”: The Uncanny in Rural Welsh Identity’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 33, 1 (2013), pp. 29–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Lepecki, ‘The Body in Difference’, p. 1.

13 Richard G. Fox quoted in Lepecki, ‘The Body in Difference’, p. 1.

14 Sklar, Deidre, ‘Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance’, in Dils, Ann and Cooper-Albright, Ann, eds., Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), pp. 30–32, here p. 30.Google Scholar

15 Lepecki, ‘The Body in Difference’, p. 2.

16 Noland, Carrie, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2009), p. 175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Ibid., p. 175.

18 André Lepecki, ‘Undoing the Fantasy of the (Dancing) Subject: “Still Acts” in Jerôme Bel's The Last Performance’, in de Belder, Steven and Tachelet, Koen, eds., The Salt of the Earth: On Dance, Politics and Reality (Brussels: Vlaams Theater Instituut, 2001), pp. 43–8; available at http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/lepecki-stillness.PDF, pp. 1–7, here p. 3.Google Scholar

19 Noland, Agency and Embodiment, p. 189. Emphasis in original.

20 Ibid., p. 194.

21 Here I am using terms drawn from the effort system of Laban movement analysis. For more information see , Irmgard Bartenieff and Lewis, Dori, Body Movement: Coping with the Environment (Langhorne, Berlin, Yverdon, Reading, Camberwell, Tokyo, Paris and Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1980).Google Scholar

22 Lepecki, ‘The Body in Difference’, p. 4.

23 Butterworth, Jo, Dance Studies: The Basics (London and New York, Routledge, 2012), p. 177.Google Scholar

24 Ann Ness, Sally, ‘The Inscription of Gesture: Inward Migrations in Dance’, in Noland, Carrie and Ann Ness, Sally, eds., Migrations of Gesture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 1–30.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., p. 22.

26 Lepecki, André, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. 14.Google Scholar

27 Lepecki, ‘Undoing the Fantasy’, p. 44. See also http://depot.vti.be/dspace/bitstream/2147/281/1/HetZoutderAarde_TheSaltoftheEarth.pdf, accessed 29 January 2014.

28 Lepecki, ‘Undoing the Fantasy’, p. 46.

29 DeFrantz, Thomas, ‘Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement’, Drama Review, 51, 3 (2007), pp. 189–91, here p. 190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Ibid.

31 Lepecki, Exhausting Dance, p. 44.

32 McCormack, Dereck, ‘Geographies for Moving Bodies: Thinking, Dancing, Spaces’, Geography Compass, 2, 6 (2008), pp. 1822–36, here p. 1823. Emphasis in original.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Ibid., p. 1826.

34 Hans Thies Lehmann, lecture given on 4 May 2012 in Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Aberystwyth University. Lehmann discussed his thinking since the publication of his key work Postdramatic Theatre. He discussed the condition of theatre as ‘the community that never happens’ and reflected on ‘the promise that is broken’. He referred to the social dimension of art being in the form itself and in relation to the social moment. This is theatre's political being. These comments are taken from my notes at the time.

35 Lepecki, ‘Undoing the Fantasy’, p. 46.

36 Kuppers, Petra, ‘Toward the Unknown Body: Stillness, Silence and Space in Mental Health Settings’, Theatre Topics, 10, 2 (September 2000), pp. 129–43, here pp. 137–8. Emphasis in original.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Kuppers, Petra, ‘Identity Politics of Mobility: Kara Walker and Berni Searle’, Performance Paradigm, 5, 1 (May 2009), pp. 1–21, here p. 16.Google Scholar

38 DeFrantz, ‘Exhausting Dance’, p. 190.

39 Noland, Agency and Embodiment, p. 206.

40 McCormack, ‘Geographies for Moving Bodies’, p. 1827.

41 See Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

42 Freeman, ‘Ineffability’, p. 59.

43 Noland, Agency and Embodiment, pp. 213–14.

44 Borgdoff, ‘The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research’, p. 61.