Archive for michel foucault
January 27, 2008 at 8:12 pm · Filed under dance, TONY, competition, michel foucault, dance studies, dance culture, thoinot arbeau, dance tv, breakdancing, romeo+juliet, dance/USA
Two titans, two teams, one battle…this is DANCE WAR!
The trailer to ABC’s new gladiator spectacular tells us that “talk is cheap.” So to settle their rivalry “Dancing with the Stars” judges Bruno Tonioli and Carrie Ann Inaba “put their money where there mouth is” and battle two armies of dancers against each other. The casualties of this conflict are not the titans but the unfortunate dancers America decides to vote off each week.
Dance makes for good wars and wars make for good entertainment. As vulgar as all this sounds it is important that we try to develop the thinking around this little cultural treasure. We love a good battle dance. Is it not the battle between the Montagues and Capulets that becomes the centerpiece of Romeo and Juliet. See Kristin’s video on battle training here. Indeed Dance of the Knights, Prokofiev’s score for the battle scene in Act I, Scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet, becomes the sonic theme for the whole ballet.
We have looked at the close relationship between the making a military body and making a dancer before. In our discussions of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Arbeau’s dance manual we have seen the science of choreography as a general problem to be employed for developing military maneuvers and dance maneuvers alike.
In politics, business and the culture at large war is arguably the eminent form or discourse. It makes sense then that contemporary dance should investigate this form a bit more deeply. Though the work is valuble I am not talking about making dances about conflict, such as David Dorfman’s Underground or William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies. Rather I am looking at dances that are themselves conflicts such as the battle format in breakdancing. If we were to look at professional wrestling as a performance practice it too would fall into this category.
Perhaps we should have performances in which two dance companies compete against each other and the audience, voting on their cell phones, determines which gets to keep the box office. I would definitely go see that show. It will be exciting to explore the dance war as a valuble performance outlet to be experimented with.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
October 22, 2007 at 12:47 pm · Filed under studio, architecture, technology, TONY, science, theatre, space, dance technology, visible, stage, video cube, sarah lawrence college, you, politics, set design, performance, school, michel foucault, discipline, dance house, design, audience, intermission, ASHLEY, performance space, theory, art installation, THE ( INTER ) MISSION, social network
Over the past few weeks of my Dance and Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College, the students and I have been programing, dissecting and repurposing surveillance systems to develop mediated performance outlets/environments. To aid and inform our strategies in this project we have been thinking and reading about panopticism.
What is panopticism anyway? wiki wiki
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a theoretical architecture imagined in the 1780’s, is illustrated above. The name literally means the “all-seeing place.” He describes it as a multi-purpose architecture whose design principles are applicable to constructing factory, school, prison, hospital or asylum. A multi-story ring of individual cells surround a central watchtower; every cell is visible from the watchtower while the watcher remains invisible.
The viewer can see everything while remaining invisible.
This panoptic prison named Presidio Modelo, built under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado in Cuba, once held the one and only Fidel Castro. It is now a national monument.
Foucault uses the Panopticon to analyze the new ways in which power is exercised in the modern world and the role surveillance technologies play in creating a disciplined/docile body. He describes Bentham’s architecture as a kind of multi-staged performance space.
The unverifiable possibility that a subject is being observed at any time is the essential mechanism by which the machine operates. Visibility, as Meghan noted in class, makes one take responsibility for their own subjection.
He who is subjected to the field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play simultaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. Discipline and Punish 202
What does this have to do with performance? Everything…
Foucault describes the stacks of cells; “They are like so many small cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
In one way the panopticon is like a super-theater, a nesting of many stages.
However Foucault stresses that surveillance architectures are exactly the reverse of those of theater. He writes, “We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine.” Survellence allows one to see many while theater and spectacle is based on many seeing one
Compare the structure of the Panopticon to that of the Globe Theater.
Different yet the same. Definitely involved in a complex tangle.
This assembly can be used as a dance technology. On April 28th and 29th 2007 Martha Williams directed and performed in a dance installation entitled Stacked, converting an out of business clothing store into a surveillance menagerie. Each dancer took residence in one of nine changing rooms which they themed and designed the interiors of. Camera feeds from each cell were composed and projected in the central room so that all of the dances could be seen at once.
Turning the panopticon back into a performance space constitutes a double reversal.
With this in mind, take another look at the dance-cube I prototyped last fall. In this staging the cameras are on the perimeter of the studio so that the gaze is directed from the outside in (as in theater) rather than from the inside out.
Though still, looking at this dance I am reminded of the cells of the panopticon.
“They are like so many small cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
Could we characterize the structure of the internet as panoptic? Here is a great essay that explores that question.
This very space is haunted by panoptic geometries. Have a look at the contributor list in the sidebar, look at all those little faces, “perfectly individualized” subjects you can see all at once and may click on to reveal “so many small theaters.”
The design of social networking and internet dating sites, showing all your friends faces in an array, seduces us with a kind of panoptic fantasy, being able to see many at once. This is where things become slightly more complicated. Just like the panopticon embeds tiny theaters in an array, these social technologies embed so many small panopticons in a matrix of connectivity. Each cell is now its own theater and watchtower.
All these ideas should not creep us out. Rather, they should inform our thinking about performance and visibility and the way technology provides new venues for artistic expression. It is an open problem. In my estimation projects like Martha William’s Stacked, my dance-cube, or The(Inter)Mission are all part of a project to reverse-the-panopticon. While flirting with aspects of surveillance and making the subject hyper-visible, they enhance communication rather than simply separate us into little boxes.
So next time you feel like you are under surveillance consider it an opportunity to put on a show.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
October 8, 2007 at 1:05 pm · Filed under dance, artists, books, training, teaching, TONY, dance technology, sarah lawrence college, blog, education, michel foucault, discipline, pedagogy, thoinot arbeau, orchesographie
This fall I am back at Sarah Lawrence College teaching Dance and Technology. All of my students are smart, engaged and still unsure whether I am really crazy, or just pretending. We have set-up our own class blog where we discuss readings and communicate about building dance machines. The blog is appropriately located at http://dancemachines.blogspot.com. Come over for a visit. Other folks seem to be taking interest. Matt Gough wrote an incredibly encouraging post you can see here.
For readings we have started out with sections from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Here is a part of that conversation.
Locating dance within Foucault’s framework of docility is both difficult and provocative. In attempting to pin dance to this trellis it becomes apparent that dance is slippery and cannot be easily categorized. It is clear however that discipline and dance are deeply entangled. Natasha spots this in the body of the soldier.
These men of the 17th-late 18th centuries were molded into figures with upright postures, programmed steps and structured attitudes; compare to ballet, especially, where all of these are instructed from an early age. Even the goals are similar - achieving honour and respect (of movement), grace, alertness, agility and strength. The quote on pg. 136: “A body that is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved”, is applicable to any dance class or performance, even improvisational. We are constantly subjecting our bodies to our aspirations and limitations, using the body and our knowledge to further its abilities for the task at hand, transforming it (whether in attitude or structure) to execute movements and improving it for the short-term goals and the long-term benefits.
Foucault opens his section on docile bodies with a reading of Montgommery’s 1636 military manual La Milice francaise. It’s description of the dancerly pikeman, who ‘will have have to march in step in order to have as much grace and gravity as possible’ resonates with Thoinot Arbeau’s dance manual Orchesographie. Written less than 50 years earlier, it had illustrated the strong linkages between choreography in the court and on the battlefield.
Thinking that making a dancer is just another instance of creating a docile subject (be it a soldier, factory worker, school child, or mental patient) can be uncomfortable to say the least. Janet points out how subtle power mechanisms can operate to form the subject.
For example the idea of coercion - that the power structure is being so fully and well imposed because of the fact that it’s being slipped in the back door, so to speak. “Small acts of cunning endowed with a great power of diffusion, subtle arrangements, apparently innocent, but profoundly suspicious,” (p. 139). It’s not being beaten into people, it’s “proper” execution is being rewarded. It is being made convenient. I think that these ideas have a very great relationship to the more “open” versions of modern and contemporary dance technique. Even when we are not working from highly stylized and codified techniques, we are still being instructed by a teacher, being ordered into levels, being auditioned for placement and so on. Therefore if we are properly disciplined in WHATEVER is the “proper” kind of “technique” (even if that is merely a general body awareness?), we are being subject to a certain power structure based on WHO decided what is “proper”.
We are inside a discipline machine with all of the spatial and temporal markers Foucault describes. This class demonstrates that. A component of the dance {1,2}/3 or graduate study in the department of dance at Sarah Lawrence College. The class is physically located in a distinct place within a time table. The time and space within the class is also divided and in doing so controls the physical activities of the participant bodies. Some stand, some sit, some on the floor, some on chairs, some speak, some erase, some write and some read. We move inside the computer for a spell. Then there is time and space designated for dancing. Our bodies and activities are seem well placed within space, time and the structure of the academy.
But, Sarah Rosner pushes back with a contrarian maneuver.
I think the thing that hit me most about the idea of discipline via the control of movements is how much i DIDN’T feel like it applied to my experience of dance.
And Sarah Richison voices related discontent, but finds in it a contradiction.
say you revolt. are no longer docile. escape from prison. you find some way to do some other dance. so you move off and do your own thing and someone follows you. someone wants to do your dance. are you then the new discipline? yes. you have manipulated their body, right.
For those of you who were looking for straight answers I fear that we have none. Instead we are left with a set of contradictions and a general understanding that dance is slippery, at times obedient and located, at other times disobedient and dislocated. Here are one, two, three, four dances, two made inside the institution and two made outside. Dissect them with regards to this contradiction between dance’s discipline and disruption.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
April 2, 2007 at 12:23 am · Filed under dance, rehearsal, TONY, science, research, education, politics, sara rudner, michel foucault, choreography, discipline
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| Posted by Tony Schultz
Last week Sara Rudner invited me to sit-in on a rehearsal for Dancing-on-View: Preview/Hindsight. Rehearsal is such a rich environment. Watching everyone focused and communicating, physically and verbally, in a well lit studio is different than watching a performance. It involves problem solving and systematic thinking in much the same way that a scientist works in the laboratory. Rehearsal is a research and development practice. This makes perfect sense as dance, I believe, is a form of science.
I watched the rehearsal to with Sara’s son, Eli. He is a computer scientist, physicist, martial artist and just about to graduate from college. For the first half of the rehearsal Eli and I spoke about programming languages, computer vision, and augmented reality, mostly techie stuff. Then our conversation began to drift, as if directed by the moving bodies in front of us.
The topic turned to from electronic to more abstract technologies, namely techniques for imposing discipline over the body and how they relate to dance. I invoked the name of Michel Foucault. In his book Discipline and Punish, he systematically describes the modern emergence of these technologies of power over the body. His treatment includes a historical and critical presentation of what I will call choreographies of power. This includes: military choreography (marching and weapon manipulation), pedagogical choreography (unison seating of students on command etc), incarceral choreography (strict control of prisoner in time and space by strict schedule and segmentation in cells) and productive choreography (examination and encouragement of physical efficiency in productive labor).
Though Foucault never refers to dance explicitly, or choreography, it seems that his philosophy of power and the body is intimately connected to ideas about dance. Dance is a discipline and choreography requires a technique of power over the body. Indeed technique is what gives the dancer power over their own body. In this way the dancer is always simultaneously bound and set free by their technique. Is this a fundamental contradiction?
Watching the rehearsal from this particular theoretical perspective made Eli and I giggle since it brought, by analogy, comparison between Sara and the associated power personas of the drill sergeant, school master, prison warden and factory manager. I always have this vision of the old-school ballet mistresses who would walk around with a cane and use it to illicit disciplined limb work. Though she did shush Eli and I at one point in our conversation, Sara is definitely not one of the above mentioned whip-cracking dance masters. She is, in fact, one of the most kind and generous people I have had the pleasure of knowing. She is also very interested in critiques of power and ways of disrupting its formations. Sara knows that dance is about power.
This line of thinking clearly needs more development. In my next post I will try to describe the work I observed at the rehearsal and relate it to ideas from physical theory. I have started seeing many similarities between dance and physics, the two pure forms of physical science.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
