Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the Worlds of Dance ed. by Dena Davida (review)

Fields in Motion is a rich collection of essays written by dance world insiders, artists, scholars, and researchers who reflect on their own artistic practices and that of fellow artists and scholars. These essays are shaped by broad theoretical frameworks such as anthropology, ethnography, social sciences, phenomenology, hermeneutics, choreography, creativity, gender studies, feminist theories, critical pedagogy, history, religious studies, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. Fields in Motion presents a new approach to dance ethnography that highlights a shift to researching in one’s own community, field, or practices and documenting these phenomena. This new approach to dance ethnography challenges the existence of a single coherent field and the possibility of an objective observer, and explores ethics that guide the works of an outsider-researcher. It also aims to decolonize, which entails analyzing and exposing power relationships embedded in the representation of knowledge – who is being studied by whom, and for what purpose – and measuring those responses against imperialist principles that have pervaded academic research. This eclectic collection of essays verifies the potential of the new ethnography to unearth fresh methods of study, including excavating the body itself as a visceral site of knowledge.

Some contributors adopt an emic approach and serve as their own subjects or objects of study while others adopt an insider-outsider approach to researching their own practices or works of individuals or groups of artists and scholars. Generally, the various researchers engage in participation and observation as they move into and out of the field and consider individual and collaborative creativity, performances and interviews, audiovisual documentation, and the analysis and interpretation of data. Fields in Motion addresses a range of artistic and scholarly practices such as the transmission of bodily construction and choreographing movement, dancers’ clothing and costumes, and cultural artifacts. The collection also considers health and ethical issues in dance; the significance and meaning of choreography and dance performances; economics and the aesthetics of dancing for a higher power; ethics and power dynamics among dance professionals and academics; new methodologies for artistic dance ethnographers; and culture, gender, and identity in choreography and pedagogy.

The book is organized into four main sections: section 1, which is broadly titled, ‘Inventing Strategies, Models and Methods,’ presents new strategies for conducting dance ethnography and hybrid methods that transpose and adapt traditional anthropological practices to the field of art world dance in postcolonial times. Section 2 provides auto-ethnographies of some of the researchers and practitioners. For example, it features the work of Karen Barbour, who was inspired by the theoretical and creative works of Stinson and her conception of kinaesthetic sense and empathy, which fuses improvisation and play in dance to shed light on the contextual and experimental nature of knowledge. Section 3 examines aspects of creative processes and pedagogies, including the processes of transmitting dance knowledge from teachers to students and from choreographers to dancers. It features the work of Pamela Newell and Sylvie Fortin which examines the choreographer and dancer’s relational dynamics, the socio-political and somatic health of dancers, and the four dancers’ roles of executant, interpreter, participant, and improviser. Section 4 reveals choreographies as cultural and spiritual practices. It features, for example, the work of Juanita Suarez, who examines the Mexican American female dance-makers working within the discipline of contemporary dance; the voice of the Chicana artists and their sense of identity, issues of isolation, invisibility, silence, and assimilation, and the intersection of gender, class, race, and heritage are foregrounded.

Fields in Motion is an innovative and groundbreaking book that captures voices of dancers, choreographers, dance teachers, scholars, and ethnographers and provides a new direction in the field of dance. It is a significant contribution that would be of immense benefit to dance practitioners, students, scholars, ethnographers, and other interdisciplinary scholars and researchers in relevant fields.