Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism

3. Criticism as Ethnography

16 Writing Criticism / History example, Beardsley's "suggestings") and (b) they are intelligible, owing to their historical context, as rejections of the traditional categories. In meeting the first requirement, each movement is a type of action - namely, a refraining. Specifically, each movement is a studied omission of the movement qualities found in ballet and modern dance.8 In the context of the sixties, this sort of refraining implied a commitment to the idea that dance consists primarily of bodily motions. However, the movements used to articulate that position were actually anything but mere bodily motions. They were actions, refrainings whose implicit disavowal of the traditional qualities ofdance movements enabled them to be understood as polemical. Thus, though we feel that certain developments in postmodern dance, specifically task dances, threaten Professor Beardsley's conceptofdance, we do not believe that the existence of dances like Accumulation challenge Beardsley's point that dances consist of actions rather than mere bodily motions. 3 Criticism as Ethnography About a month ago, I told a philosophelr friend the topic of my talk for today. "I can immediately think of two important differences between dance critics and ethnographers," he said. Now this friend, the son of an African statesman and an upper-class British woman, grew up in Ghana, was educated at Oxford, and teaches at Cornell. Not only does he literally embody cross-cultural experience; he is also one of the leading contemporary philosophers of mind. "This is great," I thought. ''I'm about to get a brilliantly insightful theoretical groundwork for a complicated topic. The talk is as good as written." "So ... 7" I asked, taking out a mental notebook, and gearing up for some subtle philosophical discourse. "It's this," he replied: "Ethnographers get a lot more grants to go to much more interesting places." Well, here we are in San Francisco, as we know, the site of the first DCA annual conference outside of New York. That's already a more Keynote address, Dance Critics Association Conference, San Francisco, 1989. Criticism as Ethnography interesting place for many ofus, but I doubt that any ofus is here on a hefty National Science Foundation grant. Ironic and lighthearted as my friend's comment was, one thing about it seemed to me a valuable starting point. And that is the hidden antitopic in the title of my talk. That is, if we are going to think about critics as ethnographers, I want to begin by looking at the differences between the two, differences that, as I will address, have become complicated in the last decade or so, when both ethnography and dance criticism have undergone changes in method and substance. I would next like to ask why this has become a topic ~ that is, why we are now interested in thinking about ourselves as a particular type ofsocial scientist. And finally, I want to suggest where this comparison might (or might not) prove useful in conceptualizing in our own field. In order to mark some of the differences between ethnography and criticism historically but briefly, I'd like to divide both practices into two stages: the modern and the postmodern, or, if those labels seem too problematic , the "traditional" (in quotes because for ethnographers this is, of course, a loaded term; I mean it here in its common usage) and the current; or, roughly speaking, presixties and postsixties twentieth-century practice. Of course, within those two large stages one could trace much more detailed processes of change, and I will talk about some of those changes, although in broad strokes. But it is still important to divide those two stages, for in the first the distinctions between criticism and ethnography are much more salient, while the second stage is perhaps closer to raising the kinds of questions we are here today to address.! Both ethnographers and dance critics share a certain intellectual task: our role is that ofa translator ofsorts, one who translates, not between two languages, but between experience and language, between experience and (by and large) the page. In looking at the work ofeac~ discipline, then, we might divide it into two steps: the experience that is to be cast into writing, and the writing itself, or the event and its representation. For the ethnographer, the experience or event is fieldwork; for the critic, going to the theater. (Here it should be understood that I am referring to "traditional " ethnography and dance criticism.) This aspect ofthe work involves a number ofcomponents. What exactly is...