Dance Techne: Kinetic Bodily Logos and Thinking in Movement by Jaana Parviainen [Part i]
Dance technique as a technical operation and technisation
The difference between a machine and a human being does not matter on this level... Like sport and athletics in technically developing their training, Western theatrical dance is drawn into a process through which it becomes a mere art of achieving, a calculating technique functioning according to technical rules.
Introduction
Though no one is likely to deny that dancing is a creative process, nevertheless, the production of "dance technique" is often understood as a laborious and mechanical process. The special strategy of the present article is to narrow the gap between "technique" and "thinking" in contemporary dance. In criticising technical attitudes and technisation in the production of dance technique, the article aims to develop a new concept, "dance techne". Drawing on Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's description of a kinetic bodily logos and Martin Heidegger's notion of thinking and the ancient Greek term Techne, the purpose is to interpret the Finnish dance teacher and Professor Ervi Sirén's method of teaching contemporary dance.
First, I will show how the production of the dancer's technique is regarded in modern and contemporary dance as a primarily technical operation. Next, I shall describe Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's notion of thinking in movement improvisation and a bodily kinetic logos. Thereafter Heidegger's techne is introduced in order to re-think creativity and skills in human production. Finally, illuminating Ervi Sirén's teaching method, my aim is to show how we might take a leap from dance technique to dance techne.
The deepest question addressed here concerns the ontological nature of movement, a question persistently present in movement and dance research even if seldom stated and analysed. Using technique as a rational discipline designed to ensure our mastery over our bodily movements, we fail to understand the origin of movement in human skills and needs. The only way to gain access to movement is to let movement be and to let it address us, challenge us. In a paradoxical way, the aim is to outline the attitude of Gelassenheit in contemporary dance.
First, I will reflect on how technique is employed by dancers to accomplish a variety of movement tasks.
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The term "technique" may refer to a number of different things in Western theatrical dance. Modern choreographers have developed techniques as movement vocabularies to support their choreographic goals. Traditional modern dance techniques such as those of Graham, Humphrey-Limón or Cunningham constituted personified movement vocabulary styles (1).
Modern choreographers have established schools or worked actively as teachers to produce skilled dancers in their technique classes. Thus, the usage "dance technique" in the modern sense came to embrace simultaneously four different aspects: movement vocabulary, skill, style and method. By reiterating a choreographer-teacher's movements in a technique class, a student became skilful in terms of movement vocabulary and its aesthetics. This general style comprised a set of movements or permissible movement sequences held together by a system of kinaesthetic motivation (Armelagos and Sirridge, "Personal Style and Performance Prerogatives") (see note 2).
In addition to skill and style, dance technique was regarded as a teaching method, since the pedagogy of the dance technique class was based on either identification with or imitation of movement phrases demonstrated in the class. This implies that students acquired movement through visual mimesis. As a legacy of this teaching method, exercises in dance technique classes are to this day highly repetitive and regimented. Phrases or sections of dances may be taught, but performing skills, interpretation, improvisation and choreographing are usually excluded in traditional dance technique classes (3).
The achievement of the practical competences in a particular dance technique provides a framework which both enables and limits the body's kinaesthetic potentials. In Heidegger's terms, this type of dance vocabulary as a system of movements is a mode of enframing (Gestell). Gestell is sometimes translated as "frame" or "framework" (The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays), but "enframing" emphasises the verbal sense of ceaseless functioning which also ceaselessly modifies the dancer's grip by bringing new movements and manners of taking hold of the body into the framework and excluding some as slightly dated.
As noted, the traditional modern dance techniques are understood as a rational discipline designed to ensure our mastery over our bodies. Dance students should work on a daily basis to reach this goal. Dance technique exercises have a transformative effect on the body; for the dancer, the repetition of daily practice will over time yield measurable improvement in the body (Martin, Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics).
In dance technique classes the initial phrases of movement are designated as warming-up, to prepare the body for the activity. Movement activity focuses on internalising certain co-ordinations in the body. One typical feature in traditional classes is that all movements can be divided into smaller units as movements of different body parts or as phrases of movement exercise (Ernestine Stodelle, Dance Technique of Doris Humphrey). Dancers concentrate on head, arm, leg or torso movements by turns, working out one phrase at a time or combining these units together in various ways. The finer the unit acts are grained and the more firmly they can be combined, the more markedly they become technicised.
For instance, focusing exclusively on the co-ordination of body parts lifting left arm at the elbow, bending the body left side as the arms pull down and stepping left we may leave aside the meanings of that movement or movement as gesture.
Contemporary choreographers do not usually aim to develop a new technique as a movement vocabulary to support their choreographic goals, but rather encourage dancers to train in several existing movement techniques (Foster, "Dancing Bodies). Contemporary training systems attempt to efface personified style aspects from dance technique; dancers should create means of executing any movements and dance vocabularies. There are no longer "Graham dancers" or "Cunningham dancers", just dancers who should be able to work with any choreographer. The contemporary usage "dance technique" seems to refer to efficient means to transform the body and take hold of the body as capable of executing any movement.
The contemporary dancer's technique should be invisible. Dancers simply utilise certain exercises in order to secure the body ideals and aesthetics they need or aspire to. In dance technique discourse it is common to say that technique is in the service of dancing or it simply facilitates dance (Schlaich & DuPont, The Art of Teaching Dance Technique). Technique itself has no symbols or styles; it reflects nothing, but creates new actualities and potentials. It seeks to attain in movement the maximum results with minimum expenditure of power and energy.
In order to render the body stronger, more sensitive and flexible with less energy, dancers pay attention to training techniques, daily schedule, nutrition, weight control and the prevention and cure of injuries. It is common for dancers to take a diversity of classes in ballet, contact, release, aikido, Pilates, Alexander, Feldenkrais, Body-Mind Centering, stretching and yoga, while their individual exercise program includes jogging, swimming, weight-lifting, etc.
The pervasive traits of the ideal contemporary dancer are functionalisation in using the body in anatomically correct ways, the body's symmetry, systematic improvement, perfection and a kind of automation-producing mode of movement. The coercive presence of dance technique is not concealed even though there is no direct exercise of coercion by a corporeal authority.
The criteria for this training program are becoming to an increasing extent shaped by sport and physical education specialists, nutritionists and physicians, who tend to reduce the body to the principle of physics, measuring heart rate, general level of strength and flexibility and muscular tone (Foster, "Dancing Bodies"). These specialists offer knowledge of body techniques whereby one can improve the body's capacity to execute movements (Mauss, "Body Techniques").
Body techniques used in dance training sometimes become the principal object and end of the dancer's life (Van Dyke, "Modern Dance in a Postmodern World"). Their use aims at a dance technique which should help dancers evolve their bodies to execute any movement needed. Technique is not only a tool and a means but a struggle, almost a weapon: it demonstrates the dancer's competence in the dance field. Struggling with financial problems and selling their own work, dancers are forced to defend themselves by the only weapon they have in this highly competitive field.
Technique in this present context is exclusively a topic of both the late Edmund Husserl (technisation/Technisierung) and the late Heidegger (technology/Technik). Using Husserl's words, we can define the way of thinking in general as technicisation, as a schematic relation between causes and effects which operates independently of the meaning of activity (Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology). For instance, a printer and my computer are connected by a machine which prints my text precisely without reflecting on its moral implications.
The difference between a machine and a human being does not matter on this level, as we notice in listening to the ways sport and physical specialists discuss the body. Technisation means greater reliability, tighter coupling of elements, less dependency on contexts, and more efficiency of control. Like sport and athletics in technically developing their training, Western theatrical dance is drawn into a process through which it becomes a mere art of achieving, a calculating technique functioning according to technical rules.
Discussing technisation in terms of dance technique, I am not accusing dancers of drifting into a mere instrumental relation between means and ends in dance training; I simply seek to show that the production of dance technique is entangled in the Western technical way of thinking. In criticising technisation in contemporary dance my purpose is to inquire into the nature of thinking in bodily movements and the body's creative aspects. In what follows I try to illuminate other possibilities of connecting thinking and dancing skills, questioning the production of dance technique as a mere technical operation.
NEXT: Improvisation as thinking in movement
EDITOR’S NOTE: Bold emphasis is used throughout this essay to highlight key points and help the reader navigate the digital text. The choices of emphasis are the Editor’s.
NOTES
1/ Martha Graham has asserted, “I have simply rediscovered what the body can do", in denying that she has founded a "Graham technique" (Horosko, Martha Graham: The Evolution of Her Dance Theory and Training 1926-1991).
2/ “Style” is understood as a twofold concept. Style1, or general style, consists of a spatial vocabulary, a set of movements or allowable movement sequences held together by a system of kinaesthetic motivation. Spatial vocabulary is basically similar in meaning to the term movement vocabulary. Movement vocabulary is often used to refer solely to the discrete positions characteristic of a particular style such as the Graham technique or ballet. Style2 or personal style, is the dancer's particular contribution within style1.
3/ This characterization of "the traditional dance technique class" is related to the American modern dance and its legacy to the European dance after the Second World War. Improvisation formed the core of Mary Wigman's "Tanz Technik". Although Technik classes emphasised the acquisition of technical skills, it was taught through improvisation. At the Wigman School during the Weimar period, students acquired not a "technique" in the American sense, a codified movement vocabulary, but Technik in the German sense (Susan A. Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993, 91).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adina Armelagos and Mary Sirridge, "Personal Style and Performance Prerogatives", in Maxine Sheet-Johnstone, ed., Illuminating Dance: Philosophical Explorations (London & Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1984)
Susan Foster, "Dancing Bodies", in Jonathan Crary & Sanford Kwinter, eds., Incorporations. Zone 6, (New York Urzone, 1992)
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, transl. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977)
Marian Horosko, Martha Graham: The Evolution of Her Dance Theory and Training 1926-1991, Chicago: A Capella Books, 1991, 2
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, transl. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970)
Randy Martin, Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1998)
Marcel Mauss, "Body Techniques", transl. Ben Brewster, Sociology and Psychology (London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979)
Joan Schlaich & Betty DuPont, The Art of Teaching Dance Technique (Virginia: American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, 1993)
Ernestine Stodelle, Dance Technique of Doris Humphrey (London: Dance Books, 1979)
Jan Ellen Van Dyke, "Modern Dance in a Postmodern World", Doctoral dissertation (The University of North Carolina, 1989)