Making dance research accessible
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DEBORAH FRIEDES |
A bulletin board near my flat, plastered with posters about dance concerts, yoga and Pilates classes, and folk dancing.
I promise I’ll start posting the meat of my experience soon, but I decided that one more post of context might be helpful. If you want to see what I have written up until now, you can check out the blog on my website, which has posts from my first 6 months in Israel. I have also been assembling a set of links to Israeli choreographers, companies, studios, performance venues, festivals, and dance associations on my website’s links page.
Now a bit more context about some of what I will post here on The Winger:
I have always gravitated towards research that involves interviews with dancers and choreographers. Our art form is passed down body to body, and so it seems to me that our art form’s history can best be gleaned and understood through a similar, personal form of transmission. In the past, though, the conversations I have conducted have remained in raw form, stored on mini audio cassettes and painstakingly transcribed so that I could quote and cite the interview subjects in my writings.
My current research is also centered on interviews with dancers and choreographers, but there are a few differences in my practices and my goals. Besides the switch to a digital voice recorder (hallelujah!), I am now viewing interviews not just as raw material to be incorporated into academic writing but as ends in and of themselves. Inevitably, my written work can only hold a small bits of what I learn in each interview, and large amounts of interesting, important information remain tucked away in my files because it is not directly relevant to my particular research question. But how much richer would our history be if this material could be accessible? What if other practitioners, scholars, and dance enthusiasts could hear more of my interviewees’ voices, both literally and figuratively?
These questions have surfaced time and time again since I entered the field of dance scholarship. I did not embark on this particular research project with the explicit goal of addressing these issues or with the idea of making my interviews more accessible to the larger public. Indeed, at first I just was wrapped up in familiarizing myself with the Israeli contemporary dance scene! Over the summer, I screened a few videos of the Batsheva Dance Company and the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. I also read as much English-language writing about Israeli modern dance as I could prior to arriving in the country - old copies of the magazine Israel Dance, reviews of Batsheva from its founding in 1964 to the present, and academic articles by writers including Ruth Eshel and Gaby Aldor in journals such as Dance Research Journal and The Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review. Once I was in Israel, I put my eyes and my body to work so that I could gain my own perspective on the dance scene. I spent my first few months attending performances, watching selected videos at the Dance Library of Israel, observing classes at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, and taking classes throughout Tel Aviv. I wanted to be as informed as possible before formally interviewing practitioners.
I spoke informally with people in the Israeli dance scene during these initial months but finally felt ready to interview dancers and choreographers in January. While schmoozing before a seminar on Jewish texts and Hebrew culture at Alma Hebrew College, my friend and fellow classmate Steve Ornstein suggested that I podcast some of my interviews on his website IsraelSeen, which hosts several blogs about Israeli society and has featured podcasts with major figures in Israeli culture. Brilliant! A new road on this journey opened up . . .
We got to work immediately. Steve has generously loaned me the use of an even-better digital voice recorder and microphone as well as his expertise in editing audio. After each interview, I type up my notes, mark them with time codes, and create a rough “edit plan” of how to tackle what can be anywhere from 40 minutes to 2 hours worth of material. Then we upload the sound file on his computer and trim it down to a more manageable 30 to 40-minute discussion that (we hope!) will be compelling for a wide range of listeners; the finished product is not the complete interview, but it is much more than what I could ever quote or cite in an article. I should note that all of the people I have interviewed so far do not speak English as their first language, but nevertheless, they are wonderfully articulate about their work.
So this is just a teaser of things to come . . . I’ll start posting interviews here on The Winger as well, and I will include links to the pages on IsraelSeen so that you can check out even more goodies like additional photographs and, best of all, links to short video clips of choreography by Israeli artists!
p.s. If you live in New York, or if you visit the city, I highly recommend a trip to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Besides the circulating collection, the dance division has an absolutely amazing assortment of films, videos, and DVDs featuring works by choreographers from around the world. It’s a great place to spend a rainy afternoon!
