The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory

268 Pages·2003·2.875 MB·English

by  Helen Thomas (auth.)

The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory
Also by Helen Thomas
Dance, Gender and Culture(ed.)
Dance, Modernity and Culture
Dance in the City(ed.)
The Body, Dance and
Cultural Theory
HELEN THOMAS
© Helen Thomas 2003
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2003 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
Macmillan divison of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom
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Union and other countries.
ISBN 978-0-333-72431-6 hardback
ISBN 978-0-333-72432-3 ISBN 978-1-137-48777-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-48777-3
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thomas, Helen, 1947–
The body, dance, and cultural theory / Helen Thomas.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-333-72431-6 (hbk.) ISBN 978-0-333-72432-3 (pbk.)
1. Dance—Social aspects. 2. Dance—Anthropological aspects.
3. Body, Human—Social aspects. I. Title.
GV1588.6.T44 2003
306.4(cid:2)84—dc21 2003042928
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
To Paul and David
Contents
Acknowledgements x
Introduction 1
PART I CULTURAL BODIES
1 The Body in Culture: Before the Body Project 9
Introduction 9
Before the body project 13
The body as symbol 18
Non-verbal communication 25
2 The Body in Culture: The Body Project 34
Introduction 34
Bodies of difference 34
Bodies of discourse 39
Technologies of power 44
‘Get undressed – but be slim, good-looking and tanned!’ 51
Transcending the body/mind dualism? 58
3 Ethnography Dances Back 64
Introduction 64
Varieties of ethnography 64
Postmodernism and feminism: ‘the awkward relation’ 67
The researcher as object 75
Dance ethnography as a situated reflexive bodily practice 77
vii
viii Contents
PART II DANCE, THE BODY AND
CULTURAL THEORY
4 The Body in Dance 91
Introduction 91
‘The sensible and the intelligible’ 93
The celebration of the visual in ballet 95
The sense of touch in contact improvisation 102
Bodily sensing in ballet and contact improvisation 108
Technical shifts and aesthetic transformations 110
Water Study – then and now 113
5 Reconstructing the Dance: In Search of
Authenticity? 121
Introduction 121
The real thing? 122
Reconstruction in context 123
Varieties of musical authenticity 125
Dance as it was 129
Dance as it is/dance as it was 134
Dance as it is 139
‘Performance museums’ and lived traditions 142
6 Dance and Difference: Performing/Representing/
Rewriting the Body 146
Introduction 146
Exoticism, eroticism and auto-eroticism 146
Representations of women in western theatrical dance 158
Dance and body politics 165
Dancing bodies/subjects-in-process 167
Dance as a metaphor for ‘writing the body’ 173
7 Dancing the Night Away: Rave/Club Culture 177
Introduction 177
Contents ix
The 1950s dance hall experience and the 1990s
club experience compared 180
From acid house to rave culture 184
Dance culture, youth culture and subculture 193
From subcultures to club cultures 204
Conclusion 213
Notes 217
References 229
Name Index 255
Subject index 260
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people for their invaluable help,
guidance and support in the development and the fine-tuning of this
book. I wrote the first half of the book while I was Head of Department
and had a severe bout of RSI. I would like to thank Goldsmiths
College for enabling me to have the support of a research assistant over
a period of two years to stop me using the computer. As the research
assistant, Jamilah Ahmed, who was then my PhD student, sat silently
and patiently at the computer, sometimes for hours, waiting for the
words to come out of my mouth so that she could word process them,
I became acutely aware that writing is an embodied activity. I learnt a
great deal about writing/working with Jamilah and I am extremely
grateful to her for the time and effort she put into this book and other
research projects over those difficult, and sometimes hilariously funny,
times. Gay Morris read and commented on Chapters 1–6. I thank her
for the criticisms, corrections and suggestions, many of which I took on
board in the final draft. Through Gay’s efforts, I also learnt more about
the differences between UK English and US English. Thanks also to
Don Slater and Stacey Prickett, who read and commented on Chapters
1–3 and 4 respectively. Stacey also tried out some of the material in her
MA ballet course. Bryan Turner reviewed the manuscript and made
some very helpful suggestions to fine-tune it. Paul Thomas proof-read
the whole manuscript from a non-sociological point of view, correcting
my grammar on the way, for which I am extremely grateful. I also
thank my editor, Catherine Gray, for her insightful comments on the
first draft of four of the chapters and for making the final process run
smoothly and quickly. Despite all this expert advice and assistance, I am
only too aware that in the final analysis, the responsibility for the work
lies firmly with me.
HELENTHOMAS
x