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- Convenors:
-
Keiji Ideta
(the University of Tokyo)
Rieko Tanaka
- Stream:
- Moving bodies: Affects, Movement and Stillness/Corps mouvants: Affects, mouvement et repos
- Location:
- MNT 103
- Start time:
- 3 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
The panel reconsiders the paradigm of body from the concept of "embodiment", and explores diversity of the continuity and variation of bodily experiences through the practices of dancers, musicians and other practices in various fields.
Long Abstract:
So far, it has been commonplace for the paradigm on how the body is understood to take the position of representationalism and symbolism in different ways with the analytical way of "reading the body"
However, some existing literature of "embodiment" and "experience", such as Cscordas(2011), point out there is a great need for the reconsideration of the body in different cultures. Although many studies contribute to understanding how the body turns toward the synthesis, or relation to experiences and practices, the perspectives of our bodily experiences are also significant in reconsidering embodiment in terms of different practices.
To best understand the problem, this panel explores diversity of the "continuity and variation" of bodily experiences. For example, in the case of dancers in Thailand, how do they continue their own bodily 'images' through dancing western ballet for the synthesis in the pre-object/subject space? Or in the case of musicians in Cuba, how do they perform various music as integrated one in the pre-categorized internal time?
Finally, we will argue that the bodily experience appearing in the different practices is a "continuity of bodily experience" as "paradoxical embodiment" and capable of being disconnected from what the body was as well as of being continued as what it has been.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Rieko Tanaka
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the following topics: experience of continuity, reflect body for situation, variation and conceptualization of music, and body as multilayered experience, through the case studies of some Cuban musicians who perform various categories of music easily.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the variation and continuity of bodily experience of music in Cuba. For some musicians, it is possible to perform various categories of music. Even western classical musicians, who are known to play undergoing various constraints formally, perform Cuban popular music and jazz, singing and dancing. However, they feel that performance of these various things is "something similar" rather than "different". This is influenced by their daily musical experience and flexible music education in Cuba. Besides that, the following cases are of great interest. One day a piano student practiced only a 5 seconds phrase for 2 hours repeatedly. In this "crazy-like" sound, she aimed at the learning of automatic and highly reproducible form rather than diversity. Moreover, a guitarist played, using the various form of combinations in the jazz session, he had just enjoyed feeling the music. In fact, he only had responded to the music automatically. In contrast, a percussionist absolutely recognized the difference between the play for dance music and the play for instrumental one. It is worthwhile mentioning the point that the variation of music does not consist of a linear scheme of learning such as "for the diversity of music, from learning the variations". In this essay we see the following topics: experience of continuity, reflect body for situation, variation and conceptualization of music, and body as multilayered experience. The very Cuban case would give us an opportunity to consider this theme in the anthropological field.
Cassandre Ville (University of Montreal)
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic fieldwork among students in a classical music department in Montreal, this research explores how mind-body duality collapses in musical performances. It examines the discourses and practices around performance anxiety that embody student’ identities as musicians.
Paper long abstract:
Based on a fieldwork among music students at a Montreal university, this research explores the place of the self, the body and the mind in classical music performances. The French expression "stress de la performance" (performance anxiety) is used to refer to a set of sensations, thoughts and affects that accompany the very act of playing music in public. This performance anxiety, depending on its intensity, can be considered both as something very disturbing and as something necessary for artistic expression. Whereas discourses are important to understand the social meanings of performance anxiety in classical music, practices of stress management help to understand how the duality mind-body may collapse, a topic that arouses a great deal of interest in anthropology (Csordas 1990; Lock 1993). In this sense, practices of stress management invade musicians' identities as performers. They embody in a concrete way the relationship between the musician and the audience. They also embody -more abstractly- the relationship between the musician and the music that is being played. Through the way they speak about, feel and live their performance anxieties, musicians participate in the constant elaboration of norms that frame the use of the mind-body self on stage. This also reveals the centrality of the notion of control. Musicians explicitly express the desire to "let the music flow" which allows a complete expression of musical emotions that are to be communicated to listeners. This very goal can only be reached through a perfect control of technical aspects of the music that allows for a totally liberated mind.
Keiji Ideta (the University of Tokyo)
Paper short abstract:
By focusing on dancing practice at a professional ballet company in Thailand, this paper argues that how a variety of bodily movements are continued and varied in a cross dancing way that they dance different kinds of dances.
Paper long abstract:
This paper opens a path toward understanding the bodily experience in dancing, which is a site of embodiment of experience as well as of emergence of a variety of different bodily images. We experience the world directly through our body. In dancing bodily experience emerges as a bodily image for those dancing as well as for those seeing them dancing. Although we can allocate dancing itself in the field of bodily experience as such, dancing has been paid scant attention in anthropology as a site of bodily experience.
Based on my ethnographic fieldwork, this paper discusses dancer's bodily experience that lies in between 'variation' and 'continuity' in embodiment, describing and analyzing the daily practice at a professional ballet company in Thailand, reflecting the influential aspect of bodily experience of learning dancing at school and the company.
The dancers have been trained as professional classical ballet dancers at the company through daily practice of dancing classical ballet there; however, most of them had experienced learning classical Thai dance at school as a part of their school education system in Thailand before they became professional ballet dancers.
This paper argues that how a variety of bodily movements are continued and varied in a cross dancing way that they dance different kinds of dances such as classical Thai dance, classical ballet, contemporary Thai dance and so on, describing the practical process of dancing.
Anne-Sophie Reichert (University of Chicago)
Paper short abstract:
Building on ethnographic fieldwork with a performance art group, I analyze the performer’s aim to engage with the past in a sensuous manner and I discuss the practice of cross-temporal relational embodiment which challenges notions of embodiment as being limited to an individual body proper.
Paper long abstract:
This paper proceeds from ethnographic fieldwork with the Chicago-based performance art group Every house has a door. I analyze the performer's aim to engage with the past in a sensuous manner and I discuss the practice of cross-temporal relational embodiment, which challenges notions of embodiment as being limited to an individual body proper.
Every house's arts practice can be understood as what Marilyn Strathern has termed dividual being: bodies comprise a field of relations, a plane on which that which we might perceive as single skin-bounded individuals are complexly interwoven (Strathern 2009). Drawing on my fieldwork with the performance artists, I argue that Every house's members are continuously enmeshed in meaningful relations to each other, thus producing common experiences and worlds (Haugeland 1982). Understanding these relations as a practice, Every house enable a contingent performance space which, as the director Lin Hixson frames it, is made up of "connective tissue" (Hixson 2013). Hence, relational embodied inquiry and the production of collective affective worlds question a phenomenological account of an experiencing self that is bound to an individualized "experience-collecting […] body proper" (Farquhar/Lock 2007). In order to grasp the quality of the performer's relational embodiment and the affective forces it generates, neither a purely phenomenological perspective nor a structuralist perspective suffices on its own. In this light, I hope to show how a less oppositional treatment of the respective positions might be more appropriate. I conclude with an outlook on the normative consequences of understanding being in performance as fundamentally relational.