Dancing Across the Page: Narrative and Embodied Ways of Knowing - Brossura

Barbour, Karen Nicole

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1841504211 ISBN 13: 9781841504216

Casa editrice: Intellect L & D E F A E, 2011

Riassunto

An innovative exploration of understanding through dance, Dancing across the Page draws on the frameworks of phenomenology, feminism, and postmodernism to offer readers an understanding of performance studies that is grounded in personal narrative and lived experience. Through accounts of contemporary dance making, improvisation, and dance education, Karen Barbour explores a diversity of themes, including power; activism; and cultural, gendered, and personal identity. An intimate yet rigorous investigation of creativity in dance, Dancing across the Page emphasizes embodied knowledge and imagination as a basis for creative action in the world.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Karen Barbour is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. She is a member of the World Dance Alliance and the Congress on Research in Dance.

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Dancing Across the Page

Narrative and Embodied Ways of Knowing

By Karen Nicole Barbour

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-421-6

Contents

List of Photographs and Figures, 7, 
Mihi, 9, 
Acknowledgements, 11, 
Chapter 1: Being: Introductions, 13, 
Chapter 2: Becoming: Feminist Choreography and Dance Research, 25, 
Chapter 3: Dancing Across the Page: Representing Research Through Narrative, 45, 
Chapter 4: Dreaming Yourself Anew: Choreographic Strategies in Women's Solo Contemporary Dance, 61, 
Chapter 5: Knowing Differently, Living Creatively: Embodied Ways of Knowing, 83, 
Chapter 6: Standing Strong: Pedagogical Approaches to Affirming Identity, 107, 
Chapter 7: Improvising: Dance and Everyday Life, 131, 
Chapter 8: Performing Identity: Tattoos, Dreadlocks and Feminism in Everyday Life, 149, 
Chapter 9: Imaginings: Reaching for a Vision, 163, 
References, 175, 

CHAPTER 1

Being: Introductions

Writing at my computer now as a dancer and writer, a feminist researcher, teacher in tertiary dance education and mother, I wonder how you will connect with me, with my different experiences, ways of knowing, cultures and environment. I share my experiences with you in this book – a narrative exploration of embodied ways of knowing as a means of living creatively in the world. I feel deeply in my bones that the specifics of my embodiment as a woman and a contemporary dancer living in Aotearoa are integral to my engagement in qualitative research. My embodiment is crucial to the ways in which I understand my personal experiences in relation to the social and political world around me. My contention as a feminist is that the specifics of my embodiment are pivotal to epistemology too, just as the specifics of my cultural, social, discursive and geographical context are also integral to what I can know. Consequently, this book contains a collection of specifically located, personally embodied narratives and autoethnographies based on lived experiences.

Recollections

A remote rural area of Te Ika a Maui, Aotearoa (the North Island of New Zealand) was my first home. Surrounded by native bush, rugged farmland and cool fresh rivers, my days were clear blue and full of adventure, and my nights alight with family discussion and the imaginary worlds of books. My sisters and I ran barefoot, playing in the rivers, exploring caves, climbing hills and building tree huts, watched casually by our parents. We knew the deep, quiet pools and the secret space behind the waterfall, the route up the limestone cliffs to where we could see over the whole valley, the best spots for gathering watercress and picking wild plums, the places glow-worms lit and the calls of the Ruru (Morepork owl) in the night. School was a long drive away, our bus crawling along familiar dusty roads and picking up neighbours every few kilometres before reaching the little town. Some summers our spring would run dry and winter storms could leave our valley isolated and without electricity for days. We learned to live with the seasons and we made our own fun.

As a naive but precocious young girl, my parents took me to see popular Limbs Dance Company perform in the local community theatre. I remember sitting near the stage, my eyes wide as dancers transformed into reptiles, moths and all the fancies of my young imagination. Enraptured with the strength, fluidity and charisma of the dancers, I knew then that contemporary dance was what I wanted to do. After pestering my parents for months, I had my first real contemporary dance experience in the big city of Auckland.

My 11-year-old body was filled with nervous anticipation as I set out for my first morning of the ten-day Limbs dance workshop. After catching buses from my aunt's house to the central city, I walked through the tumbledown houses and boarded-up buildings of the early 1980s inner-city suburb of Ponsonby. Climbing eagerly up the creaky wooden stairs to the third floor of the old Limbs Dance Company building, I arrived at last. Dressed in my new black footless tights, leotard and T-shirt under my street clothes, I was ready to become a dancer. To my elation, I was greeted by one of the marvellous dancers I remembered seeing perform, and from then on I imagined myself one of them. I remember distinct things from that first workshop, like the smell of one woman's perfume and the absolute thrill of moving in new ways. Though always in awe of those around me, somehow I also felt at home too.

That first dance workshop and those clear blue days of adventure are some of my fondest childhood memories. Or at least, these are what remain in my memory anyway, because after this, the realities of being a young woman began to sink in. The days seemed to get shorter and there was not enough time for wandering and adventuring. Saddened, I noticed the hillsides scar with landslides in the winter storms after the farmers began logging more forest. Our rivers changed too as the water was contaminated with silt and with animal effluent from increased livestock. As time went on, my outside play reduced to running and swimming for competition rather than for pleasure. Study for exams also meant that I did not get to attend many dance workshops and I had to make do with leaping around my bedroom and imagining I was dancing in Limbs Dance Company.

The books in front of me morphed from novels to textbooks and study ate steadily into our family discussion time. I suppose that I was well prepared for my tertiary education, but I still reflect sadly on this inescapable change from childhood to adulthood. Inevitably I left my remote home environment and family for the city and university, choosing to study philosophy and psychology because dance was not offered in tertiary education in those days. By the time the tertiary dance programme in Auckland city became established, I had completed my Master's degree in philosophy. Enrolling in dance training at long last, I immersed myself in the dance world, my childhood dream of professional training and performance coming to fruition, albeit briefly. It was not long though, before I traded in the struggle of professional dance and returned to the academic environment in search of a more sustainable career and lifestyle.

My nostalgia for both the seemingly uncomplicated rural life of my childhood and my naive dream of a career as a dancer are balanced now with a much greater awareness of the political, social and artistic context of Aotearoa, and by my experiences travelling internationally.

Dance in my footsteps

As the short vignette above illustrates, I share my own lived experiences in this book, beginning by providing some context through the autobiographical vignette above and extending my writing style throughout the book to more substantial narratives. Within these pages I develop richly descriptive, visceral and kinaesthetic methods of writing to deliberately draw attention to the constructed, contextual and embodied nature of my experience and research. I believe that, as a member of the dance community and social context of Aotearoa that I study, my own dance-making experiences and research with others should be represented to convey lived experience as fully as possible within written forms. Thus, I consult my own embodiment for understandings and I search for evocative words to articulate my understandings. My hope is that I can inspire you to engage kinaesthetically and empathetically with my experiences, so that you can 'dance in my footsteps' through these pages.

Throughout my chapters I engage in practices of feminist research, narrative inquiry and dance making, drawing on the words of academic writers who have influenced me. I weave these academic words with my own experiences and with the voices of research participants and friends. In a number of chapters I weave these creative feminist narratives together with short excerpts from more traditional academic texts, such as sections from my doctoral thesis literature review, and from research proposals and conference presentations. In this weaving I demonstrate the range and forms of texts I need within my multiple roles as dancer, writer, researcher, teacher and mother. While I reveal the challenges I have in writing both narratives and traditional texts, my passion lies in crafting personal narratives of embodied experience.

Within feminist research there is a particularly strong history of use of personal experience and representation of lived experience through autobiographical writing. According to Nicola Armstrong and Rosemary Du Plessis, feminist researchers

write themselves into their texts as a way of making explicit their positioning as readers, as interpreters, and as constructors of theoretically informed stories [...] . The researcher is identified as actively constructing research narratives, rather than as engaged in the transparent transmission of 'authentic' or 'true' accounts of 'real' experiences [...] . (1998: 109)

As individuals, we make our experiences into narratives in our everyday lives, by telling stories that relate causal links, justifications, characters and interactions between characters, and explanations of why things happen for us (Richardson 1997). Writing such stories is a representation of our perspective on our experiences in the world, and a construction within which we interpret these experiences. Writing narratives can also provide an understanding of the lived experiences of others (Richardson 1997). In areas of enquiry such as sociology, this approach to writing narratives of personal experience is called autoethnography, what Carolyn Ellis describes as

writing about the personal and its relationship to culture. It is an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness [...]. Back and forth autoethnographers gaze: First they look through an ethnographic wide angle lens, focusing outwards on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then, they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations. (2004: 37)

So I write to reveal myself to you as a person in this book, using my various voices and experiences as a dancer, researcher, writer, teacher and mother. Each narrative makes links to wider philosophical, cultural and social theorizing, reaching outwards to understand and articulate my experiences. Each narrative is also locally situated in my everyday life, whether in the context of preparing a guest lecture or conference paper, travelling around the world, writing in my office or at home, dancing in the studio or performing. In this process of writing narratives or autoethnographies I am also discovering myself, writing to know and to reveal the multiplicity of my experiences. Laurel Richardson writes that such narratives of the self are

highly personalised, revealing text in which an author tells stories about his or her own lived experience. Using dramatic recall, strong metaphors, images, characters, unusual phrasings, puns, subtexts, and allusions, the writer constructs a sequence of events, a 'plot', holding back on interpretation, asking the reader to 'relive' the events emotionally with the writer. (1998a: 356)

Within my text I represent the voices and experiences of dance research participants, family members, friends and colleagues. Together we are the 'characters' that inhabit these narratives of lived experience.

In writing about my life, about research participants and intimate others, I am particularly mindful of ethical issues that can arise. In addition to the requirement that all my research be approved in terms of ethical conduct and methodology before being undertaken, I also consider relational ethics. 'Relational ethics requires researchers to act from our hearts and minds, acknowledge our interpersonal bonds to others, and take responsibilities for actions and their consequences' (Ellis 2007: 3). Writing personal narratives and autoethnography are ethical practices – practices in which I must work with a feminist ethic of care and constantly consider the impact of what and how I write on all those real people I include as characters, on our relationships, on myself in the future and on readers of my work. As Carolyn Ellis (2007) writes

No matter that we might feel differently now than then and see ourselves as changed from the characters presented in the story, this portrayal of ourselves is edified in print. An important element in writing autoethnography then is considering the ethical responses to one's own story by readers. A second is considering the people in your life who might

be distressed by your revelations. (2007: 22) As a consequence of my commitment to considering relational ethics, all research participants, and each of my family members, friends and colleagues who feature as characters, have read, had the opportunity to comment and consented to appearing in these pages.

As I develop my narrative approach to research through the following chapters, I draw from the excellent practices argued so eloquently and demonstrated so clearly in the work of Carolyn Ellis, Laurel Richardson, Pirkko Markula, Jim Denison, Norman Denzin, Yvonna Lincoln and others. Carolyn Ellis' (2004) wonderful book The Ethnographic I. A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography sits in pride of place on my bedside table, guiding me in progressing my writing through new research projects. As I edit these pages to share with you, her words remain a solid voice of support. Underneath Ellis' work on my bedside table are two other significant books. Firstly, Possession by AS Byatt (1990) and, secondly, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram (1996). Both continually remind me that writing can be moving and rigorous, conversational and theoretical, poetic and academic, and that there are multiple ways to engage in writing practices.

Throughout my chapters I engage with a range of authors whose words provide philosophical and methodological understandings that help me to theorize and articulate my experiences as a dance researcher more fully. Listening to their voices helps me to understand my political and social context, and in particular, to express my feminist commitments. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Iris Marion Young, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger and Jill Tarule are all key feminist authors with whom I engage. Not surprisingly, I am also inspired by a range of dance researchers and writers. Sondra Fraleigh, Sue Stinson, Ann Cooper Albright and Susan Foster are dancers whom I admire for their ongoing scholarship and pedagogy. Other researchers are professional artists and insightful writers, such as Carol Brown, who I see as a catalyst in the development of creative practice as research. In seeking to understand my social, political and bicultural experiences within Aotearoa, I make connections to writing by feminists Ngahuia Te Awekotuku and Avril Bell, as well as historian Michael King.

I introduce a range of academic and philosophical terms throughout my chapters. For fuller definitions/discussions and links to other pages where terms are explored, you can refer to endnotes. I make use of nga kupu Maori (Maori language words) throughout my text. I offer contextual interpretations of these words in parentheses on the first use of each word (except where they appear within a quotation) as well as in endnotes when further discussion is required (drawing on the Ngata Dictionary 2007). Endnotes also provide links between my discussions of underlying themes in the book that span different chapters. Photographs of dancing add further detail alongside my words and suggest more of the aesthetic of the dancing I describe.

Finally, to help guide you as a reader, I provide an outline of each chapter below. Each chapter has a specific narrative focus on articulating a topic of interest in terms of narrative and embodied ways of knowing. However, read in sequence, the content of the chapters accumulates, as experiences do in life, to offer a detailed engagement in embodied ways of knowing.

Reading your way

In Chapter Two – Becoming: Feminist choreography and dance research – I share some of the main influences that shape my solo dance making and refer to a specific choreography – This Is After All the Edited Life – as I introduce feminist perspectives, postmodernism and contemporary dance. Framed within the context of preparing and presenting a guest lecture, I embed my narrative in tertiary dance education in Aotearoa. I draw from my embodied experiences of crafting movement in the dance studio and of performing this solo dance. As I share in this narrative, travelling away from home prompted me to consider the themes of home and journey, and how both weave through my solo dance making and research. These themes resurface as I reconsider identity and culture in later chapters.

I specifically explore issues concerning representing dance research through narrative and autoethnography in Chapter Three – Dancing across the page: Representing research through narrative. This chapter features my colleague and supervisor Jane and I working together in Vanuatu, and our discussions as I develop a writing methodology for my research. In a sense, this chapter is a writing story, making transparent some of the processes and decisions I make in representing my research findings based on interviews and journal writing. These methods of narrative and autoethnographic crafting are applied throughout this book.

Chapter Four – Dreaming yourself anew: Choreographic strategies in women's solo contemporary dance – is focused around feminist choreographic strategies. Initially in this chapter, I discuss in depth the opportunities a phenomenological approach to dance research offers for examining lived experience and particularly dance making. Using a feminist and phenomenological approach, I represent the dance-making experiences of other solo contemporary artists – Raewyn, Jan, Susanne, Bronwyn and Ali – and discuss our specific solo dances. In the context of the discussion, we explore feminist choreographic practices in our work, leading me to articulate alternative modalities of feminine movement.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Dancing Across the Page by Karen Nicole Barbour. Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Intellect L & D E F A E
• Data di pubblicazione: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1841504211
• ISBN 13: 9781841504216
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 187
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile