Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality

24. Channeling the Other: An Embodied Approach to Teaching across Cultures

[24] Channeling the other An Embodied Approach to Teaching across Cultures Research in Dance Education 4, no. 2, 2003. The potent intersection of dance theory and cultural studies has contributed to a much needed theorization of embodiment (the processes by which cultural values are internalized and represented by social bodies), and has led to an increasingly sophisticated elucidation of cultural difference within the dance field. This discourse of difference has helped dance scholars and dance teachers in both the United States and the United Kingdom to reevaluate dance traditions and experiences that have been long overlooked by mainstream histories of theatrical dancing. Thus, for many dance educators, a history course focused on twentieth-century dance in America now begins with discussions of minstrelsy and the influence of African-America dance, rather than a romanticized narrative of isadora Duncan as the “mother” or “originator” of modern dance in the West. This revisionist cultural framing does not necessarily diminish Duncan’s contributions to dance history, but it does help students to recognize the class-based and racist rhetoric in her writing, as well as the wonderfully feminist dynamics in her dance practice . An awareness of cultural difference has shattered any easy assumptions about modern dance as “natural,” “authentic,” or the undisputed origin of most twentieth-century and contemporary dance forms. The resulting deconstruction of historical canons and aesthetic assumptions has created a certain amount of unease for dancers and teachers alike. Unfortunately, as the specificity of our bodies (white, female, middle-aged) becomes radically highlighted, the complexity of these issues tends to lead us away from our own physical experience. in this essay, i argue for a pedagogical space in which we can at once honor cultural difference while at the same time affirming a willingness to engage our bodies in historical and cross-cultural analysis. in other words, how can we learn to use our own bodies to think about culturally different bodies? i teach dance history at oberlin College—a small, progressive, liberalarts college in the Midwest. When i teach twentieth-century dance history, i endeavor to find ways for the students to understand that sense of evangelistic mission and revolutionary fervor so endemic to modern dance in the early part of the twentieth century. For example, when i teach a section 264 pedagogy on isadora Duncan, i move back and forth between guiding the students through Duncan-based exercises that might approximate an experience of that earlier physicality, and challenging them to understand some of her writings through their own bodies and histories, asking them to imagine what movements might give them a similar sense of committed kinetic energy and power. i also ask my students to do an in-class movement and writing exercise in which their bodily experience becomes a primary source for their historical reflection. This studio class takes place after several weeks of introductory readings. i give the students Abraham Walkowitz’s famous sketches of Duncan’s movement and gertrude Stein’s prose poem on Duncan ,“orta, or one dancing.”1 i then ask them to improvise movement based on the kinesthetic information they derive from these images and words by artists who were contemporaries of Duncan. once i have given them about forty minutes to “think through their bodies,” so to speak, i ask them to write an essay that incorporates the information from the readings, as well as the embodied knowledge gleaned from their physical improvisations. These writings are often quite wonderful, with a marvelous interweaving of movement description and cultural context. indeed, i often find a seamless blending of kinesthetic and historical discussions held together with an unusually strong sense of the writer’s voice and bodily experience. generally, the students i teach enjoy this kind of adventure in the physical as well as the intellectual realm; they are happy to be challenged to move beyond the studio/classroom dualism still maintained by most dance curricula in this country. oberlin students are delighted to be improvising, and seem to feel quite comfortable exploring this slightly nebulous area of historical research. one of the reasons for this may be that i, their professor, get right in there with them, allowing them to see my own critical and creative process as i try to articulate my relationship with this movement style, and discuss how i have dealt with the tensions that arise in negotiating the more racist and class-based aspects of Duncan’s rhetoric with an appreciation of her visionary zeal. of course...