Sally Gardner

Dancing beyond Exercise: Young People's Experiences in Dance Classes.

Dance classes in urban settings may have a role in health-promotion programmes seeking to increase physical activity amongst young people. However, little is so far known about the motivations, experiences or health outcomes of those participating in dance classes. This qualitative study of young people attending recreational dance classes addressed motivations, the nature of the class experience, and implications for health and well-being. Data show that young dance participants’ experiences of ‘the physical’ are embedded in social, community/cultural or other values, and involve respect for older teachers and physical knowledge/expertise gained over the long term. Encouragement of dance-class participation may offer an important strategy for health promotion as long as the physical activity value of dance classes is not promoted in narrow, bio-mechanical terms.

From training to artisanal practice: rethinking choreographic relationships in modern dance

In the first part of the twentieth century early modern dancers created both a new art form and the forms of group social organisation that were its condition of possibility. This paper critically examines the balletic and disciplinary ‘training’ model of dancer formation and proposes that the assumption of training in dance can obscure other ways of understanding dance-making relationships and other values in early modern dance. An ‘artisanal’ mode of production and knowledge transmission based on a non-binary relationship between ‘master’ and apprentice and occurring in a quasi-domestic and personalised space of some intimacy is proposed as a more pertinent way to think the enabling conditions of modern dance creation.

Notes on Choreography

i n d e x i n g The word ‘kinaesthetic’ appeared in 1880: it is a recent concept. There is no term for ‘kinaesthetically apprehending’ in the way that for vision and audition we have looking/seeing and hearing/listening respectively. What are we doing when we apprehend with our sense of movement? There is a difficulty in language. We cannot culturally ‘index’ a particular level or modality of sensing that is in the joints and our relation to gravity and instability. This is a problem for understanding notions of ‘writing’ and ‘reading’ movement – how and when and where does it occur? Because of this difficulty of naming, instead of recognizing a kinaesthetic response to dancing we may seek to interpret choreography (‘the representational frame, “dance”, always invites an interpretation of the activity, “moving”, “walking”’) (see Phelan 1995: 206). ‘Interpretation’ and ‘choreography’ can mutually define and support one another, while the kinaesthetic can become the ‘traceless expenditure’ or residuum seeking, elsewhere, a perceptual, neuro-muscular index.1 French commentator Laurence Louppe notes that while in the other arts it might be possible to celebrate that the identity of the work of art and its authorship have, in the twentieth century, been thrown into question, in dance the contemporary work has not yet actually had ‘a specific frame nor fixed references’ that could be challenged (1997). Spectatorial regimes have always subordinated danced gesture to nondance values: regimes of production and reception of performance work rarely foreground specifically kinaesthetic (as opposed to the more spectacular ‘kinetic’) value (Dempster 1993). In other words, there may still be need for a politics of dance identity – given that dance, historically, has always been defined (as a minor, derivative art) in relation to other practices and frameworks – whether these have been theatrical, pictorial, musical, psychological or, as is increasingly the case within universities, those of ‘expert registers of writing’ (see Melrose 2003). In this context modern and post-modern dancers’ defining of an autonomous art in which they elaborate and investigate ‘movement’ or gesture in its sensuous-kinaesthetic-forceful dimensions in a (modernist) anti-representational aesthetics, remains an incomplete project.

… dance for the time being: Russell Dumas in conversation with Sally Gardner

Russell Dumas’s life-long practice as dancer, teacher and choreographer has intersected with generations of dance practitioners in Australia and internationally. Dumas grew up in Yeppoon, Queensland, and danced with the theatrical organisation JC Williamson Ltd before leaving Australia in 1969 to work in companies as numerous and diverse as the Royal Ballet, Nederlans Dans Theater, Ballet Rambert, Culberg Ballet, Strider (UK) and the Gulbenkian Ballet in Europe, and with Twyla Tharp and Trisha Brown companies in New York. Dumas’s own group, Dance Exchange, established in Australia in 1976, continues, today, to address Dumas’s belief in the need for direct transmission of physical information in dance, from body to body, from generation to generation. Over an unbroken 40-year period, his approach has produced a distinctive and original body of work described as ‘sensuous, non-decorative, pedestrian classicism’. Dumas’s ongoing research on body instability, including in his doctoral thesis (2016), has been central to his understanding of different aesthetic and cultural fields and is relevant to the elaboration of political, social and cultural values in the broadest terms. The concept of ‘managing instability’ informs Dumas’s dance practice and his search for new imaginaries that can create different trajectories for dance as an art of movement. These still-to-come new forms of dance will have the potential to impact on our changing political and cultural imaginaries and their related unstable, future social realities. With dancers: Jonathan Sinatra, Beth Lane, Megan Payne, Jamie Laverty, David Huggins, Tom Woodman, Baden Hitchcock and Stuart Shugg, Dumas contributed to the ‘Re-orienting the Postcolonial’ Conference held at the IPCS in July 2017.

Uses of the Sampur in the Halus (Refined) Style of Yogyakarta Court Dance

In this essay I discuss how a familiar costume element in Javanese court dance, a long piece of patterned cloth known as the sampur, functions poetically through the ways it is used by the dancer. I elaborate on eight categories of use of the sampur, primarily from the point of view of a Western dancer first encountering the techniques of working with the scarf. I draw on scholars and other commentators to discuss the many dimensions of meaning embodied by these uses. The sampur emerges as a dance element rich in virtuosic potential and nuance, and resonant with numerous dimensions of cultural values.

Dancing and Listening: Odissi across Cultures

This paper discusses issues that arose for me when I interviewed an Odissi dancer about her learning this Indian dance form, travelling as she did from Australia to Orissa to spend several months of each year over an 11-year period to live with her guru, the late Sanjukta Panigrahi. The issues I discuss are the problems associated with making a text from a live encounter, and the choice of perspectives used in analysing that text. Drawing on discussions by ethnographers, anthropologists and others about the role of poetics in intercultural research, and on my own dance experience, I reflect on my ‘positioning’ in the various stages of the research. I go on to propose that the live, the temporal and what is remembered in the body are important, potentially poetic modalities of knowledge, which can easily be elided in academically validated ways of thinking and doing.