“a dance of Identity” and “The Anthropological Approach” (LizB)

“We humans need words, labels, for the configurations we perceive” (Hatcher 18)

Categories, and the human need to label and organize the world around us, was the common theme of these two articles. Houston-Jones explores which categories people prefer to be grouped in and which categories they dislike to be grouped in through his exercise “the politics of dancing”. Furthermore, he forces people to make choices about which side they will stand on in the moment of questioning, not allowing them the comfort of resting in “the subtle grays of identity” (Houston-Jones 12). I was particularly interested to learn that “the statements “I CONSIDER MYSELF TALL” or “I THINK THAT I AM OVERWEIGHT” often produce two groups that look identical in terms of height and weight” (Houston-Jones 13). This connects to last week’s reading, which addressed how our perceptions can often be deceptive.

The “Politics of Identity” have sometimes emerged in my own rehearsals, as I push my dancers to step beyond their comfort zones and to viscerally engage with emotional extremes. Their trepidation is often evident as they try to reconcile who they think they are with this new persona they are embodying onstage. One of the points that I try to make with my work is that the dance of identity is extremely complex and often contradictory. Although my work is often perceived as being brutal and physically charged, it is my hope that through experiencing these states of being we can learn compassion for others, as we realize that we all have the capacity to be hard/gentle, angry/kind, hurt/healthy etc.

In “The Anthropological Approach”, the discussion of “art” as an ethnocentric term caught my eye. In my opinion, it is most certainly an ethnocentric term, constructed from our own Western viewpoint. Many languages do not have a word that can be translated as “art”, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they do not have related concepts. This is the same in the fields of ethnomusicology and the ethnology of dance, which recognize that many cultures do not have words for “music” and “dance”, rather music and dance are woven seamlessly into daily life, beliefs and practices. For instance, music in some cultures is not conceived of as solely a person playing an instrument, rather their definition may include the sounds of the natural world, such as birds, the wind, and the rain.

It is for this reason that a sculpture or a musical instrument on display in a museum are not really representative of the culture from which they came; they are completely and utterly decontextualized. Art is more than a product; it is a practice and a process. The author draws upon the sandpainting of the Navajo as an example of “ephemeral art”. Arguably, in the range between ephemeral and static forms of art, dance may be considered yet another degree more ephemeral than sandpainting. Dance is also particularly susceptible to the influence of context; it matters whether the dance is a part of wedding ceremony, takes place in a club or on the Broadway stage.

One of the points that I can stand behind is that meaning and metaphor are inherent to art and arguably lend art its force and power. In the book which I am reading for this class “The Meaning of the Body”, the author points out that our language-centered world often equates meaning with words, when in fact, “to discover how meaning works, we should turn first to gesture, social interaction, ritual and art” (Johnson 208). The reason for this false assumption lies in the philosophic tradition that associates art with beauty and therefore feeling and perceiving, not thinking. Rudolf Arnheim deconstructs the barrier between thought and perception by introducing the term “perceptual thinking” to emphasize that abstract thought is tied to what and how we perceive (Johnson 233). Linguistic meaning is not arbitrarily assigned nor does it exist separately from the physical world, rather it is a direct product of our visceral and sensory interactions with the world. I believe that art offers direct insight into our meaning-making processes and functions as a kind of wordless metaphor.