(Un)covering ground: dance, space and mobility

Abstract

Ballet and modern dance teachers often exhort students to ‘travel across the floor’ and ‘cover ground’. These instructions invoke metaphors of travel and mobility that capture an array of common assumptions about dance, space and movement. This essay examines the spatial and mobility discourses that these instructions simultaneously build upon and produce while exploring the seductiveness of technique's promise of mastering space through the moving body. Threading auto-ethnography with critical theory and moving across different disciplinary fields and writing styles, the article explores the ways in which these instructions leak outside the perimeter of the dance studio to feed into the narrative of a dancer's extended physical, geographical and social mobility. Analysing the mobility and travel discourses of dance training vis-à-vis poststructuralist theorisations of the subaltern power of the nomad and theories of space and place, it is argued that this narrative becomes complicit in the construction of an idealised notion of artistic nomadism, which, in turn, aligns with current neoliberal logics organised around the production of mobile subjects.

Keywords::

• dance training
• mobility
• space
• nomadism
• spatial discourses
• auto-ethnography

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to all my colleagues who have read earlier versions of this essay, in particular, Leslie Satin and Laura Lovin for their invaluable guidance. I extend my gratitude to the Institute for Research on Women and the Dance Department at Rutgers University, the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research at LSBU, and the Gallatin School at NYU for inviting me to present (Un)Covering Ground, a performative lecture inspired by this essay.

Notes

^1. Discussing contemporary European choreographers commonly grouped under the umbrella of ‘conceptual dance’, André Lepecki (2006) reads the stillness in their works as a sign of the exhaustion of movement and an act of resistance to dance's dominant politics of time and space.

^2. I explored questions of mobility through a trilogy of video-dances, which became part of a solo performance titled The Aging Daughter (2001).

^3. In her landmark essay ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ (1980), Young articulates women's embodiment in relation to their social positioning and argues that girls are taught not to take up space, not to use their whole bodies or not to believe they can accomplish physical tasks; this is an argument she later revisits in an effort to revalue aspects of women's experiences (Young 2005).

^4. When referring to this structure of power, I do not suggest the body is a passive object of inscription nor does Foster – as she later qualified, the body both writes and is written about (1995). This conceptualisation is convergent with Elizabeth Grosz's (1994) critique of a passive body appropriated and coerced by external forces. As my narrative reveals, this performance of docility was later accompanied by acts of disobedience that resisted this disciplinary system.

^5. For a study of the culture of ballet and travel see Wulff (1998).

^6. Westbeth is a landmark building for the arts in New York. The Cunningham Studio was housed there from 1971 to 2012.

^7. Interestingly, former Cunningham's dancer Mary Lisa Burns (2010) remarks how ‘Merce's work has always looked so much more like the future than like the past’.

^8. For a discussion on how mobility has played a key role in the formation of the American nation-state and its ideals of freedom, see Ganser (2009) and Cresswell (2001).

^9. To this distanced gaze, de Certeau juxtaposes the actual experience of pedestrians, who are constantly writing and rewriting structures and evading the grid of the urbanistic system by creating significant subjective mapping through their walking about and shortcuts.

^10. Cunningham often cited Albert Einstein's quotation that ‘there are no fixed points in space’, from which he derived the title Points in Space for his 1986 work for video that was later adapted for the stage (Copeland 2004, p. 177).

^11. Interestingly, the survival and fame of Cunningham's choreographies and technique owed much to the world mobility that his company was afforded, not without difficulties, from its first international tour in 1964 to its closing in 2011. For a detailed account of the impact of the continuous and sustained international tours on Cunningham's company, from the troupe's early inception to the early 1970s, see Carolyn Brown's autobiography Chances and Circumstances (2009).

^12. Casey embraces the interpretation on space/place of Yi-Fu Tuan and humanistic geography.

^13. See among others, Caren Kaplan's (1996) critique of nomadic theories and the value given to distance in these metaphors of mobility.

^14. For detailed analyses of dominant pedagogies and training regimes in dance education, see Sally May Gardner (2011), Shantel Ehrenberg (2010) and Jill Green (1999, 2003).