UCLA 129th Faculty Research Lecture - "What Dancing Does"

As a land-grant institution, the Academic Senate  at UCLA acknowledges the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of  Tovaangar which includes the Los Angeles basin and the Southern Channel Islands [Academic Senate Chair Shane White] I would like to welcome all of you to the 129th Faculty Research Lectureship which is sponsored  by the Los Angeles Division of the Academic Senate. I am Academic Senator Chair Shane White. It is my honor to host this Faculty Research Lecture w

hich presents the work of some of UCLA's  most eminent and distinguished scholars. The purpose of the lecture is to allow the  university and the Academic Senate to recognize the faculty for their superb achievements and  to give the campus and the wider community the opportunity to gain new perspectives on scholarly  achievements through the findings of the faculty members who are honored by the lectureship.  The Faculty Research Lecture was initiated in 1925 In 1986 the program was expanded to

two lectures per  annum one from the natural sciences or engineering, the other from the humanities social disciplines  or creative arts. Now I would like to present Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Emily Carter who will introduce our lecturer. [Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Emily Carter] Welcome everyone the Faculty Research Lecture is  both one of UCLA's greatest honors as well as a public forum for the presentation of research of  the highest caliber. I appreciate this opportun

ity to gather and celebrate the intellect ingenuity  and creativity of our distinguished faculty. So much of our work in academia is centered in  the laboratory or the library, but today's lecture reminds us that the stage and the performance  studio are also important sites of scholarship and edification. Professor Susan Leigh Foster  today's lecturer earned a BA in Anthropology from Swarthmore college and MA in Dance right here  at UCLA, and a PhD in the History of Consciousness from UC Santa

Cruz. From 1981 to 1990 she was  on the dance faculty of Wesleyan University. In 1990 she came back to the West Coast to  become Chair of the Dance Department at UC Riverside where she built the nation's first  doctoral level program in critical dance studies. For the past 20 years Professor Foster has served  the UCLA community as a distinguished professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures and  Dance. In this role she has shared her explorations of how movement and dance express idea

s and  emotions, how they respond to our politics, and how they shape the cultural moment. Her teaching has included dance composition and theories of dance writing and history. Professor Foster's scholarship has earned her support from the National Endowment for the  Humanities as well as many other accolades. Her acclaimed book, Reading Dancing: Bodies and  Subjects in Contemporary American Dance was the first to apply post-structuralist theory to dance  research and it won the de la Torre Bu

eno Prize for scholarship in dance. Her second book, Choreography  and Narrative: Ballet's Staging of Story and Desire examines gender and politics in the French  ballet of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Her third book, Dances that Describe Themselves: The  Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull is a study of improvisational practices in New York City  during the 1960s '70s and '80s. Her Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance, explores the  connection that viewers have with

their performers and her most recent book, Valuing Dance: Commodities  and Gifts in Motion asks deep questions about what dance is and why it matters. Professor Foster is also a celebrated choreographer her choreography has been supported by the  National Endowments for the Arts, Choreographers Fellowships and by the Rockefeller and Jerome  Foundations. Her danced lectures have garnered her honors from the Pew Center for the Arts  and Heritage and other organizations. Professor Foster's present

ation today is entitled  "What Dancing Does" We are very fortunate to have such a distinguished member of the UCLA community  share with us new insights about this ancient art form. and now I present UCLA's 129th Faculty  Research Lecturer, Professor Susan Leigh Foster My sincere thanks to Matthew McGinley,  Jose Carrillo, Luis Hanoa, and the crew in Schoenberg for their hospitality and terrific  organization, and a shout out to Sean Cruser who's on video today also thanks to Jackie Davis  and W

ill Laughlin for their help with Powerpoint and a special thanks to Sharon  Salinger who is assisting me today. My dissertation advisor and mentor Hayden  White taught here at UCLA from 1968 to 1973. After Los Angeles Police Department plain  clothed officers infiltrated the campus in order to assess levels of student unrest. He filed suit,  supported by the ACLU, against Police Chief Davis. Arguing that the presence of the  officers constituted an infringement of free speech. The California Sup

reme Court  agreed, in a ruling that established a precedent still referred to today as White v Davis. I'd like  to dedicate this lecture to his memory and also to my wonderful brilliant and deeply inspiring  colleagues in dance here at UCLA. "What Dancing Does" 105 years ago in 1916 the UC Berkeley Academic  Senate voted to rescind the campus ban on dancing, so as to enable Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn  to perform their dance pageant of India, Greece, and Egypt in the Berkeley Amphitheater acco

mpanied  by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. 105 years later, the first Faculty Research Lecturer in Dance Studies at  the University of California is taking place. Today, I will offer four different  perspectives on what dancing does: dancing as thinking, dancing as signifying, dancing  as coercion and as survival, and dancing as exchanging. I hope that each of these perspectives  will provide insights into dance's complex functioning physiologically, psychologically,  socially, aesthetica

lly, and politically. Dancing as thinking. What if this is a thought, and this is a thought, and this is a longer thought or a sequence of thoughts? What if this really is thinking? Not the expression of thought devised elsewhere and translated  into bodily action, but thinking itself. New conceptualizations of mind and of the  mind-body relationship that are being developed in an interdisciplinary approach within cognitive  science known as ecological or inactivist cognitive studies, suggest th

at sensory motor  feedback loops play a central role in all forms of thinking. Cognition is being re-envisioned  as a capacity that is both distributed and interactive. Thinking is not a process  that takes place in the brain but instead is accomplished through and across the  combined neural muscular and perceptual systems. Drawing on the work of perceptual psychologist  James Gibson, the ecological cognition thesis is grounded in the assumption that perception  is the product of neuromuscular

engagement with the environment. Our kinesthetic  system including proprioceptive, vestibular, and haptic forms of awareness of where we  are contribute vitally to our understanding and our ability to extract information from the  environment. This understanding of the coordinated synthesizing of information that occurs  across the different senses in combination with our kinesthetic awareness of where we are,  reverses earlier assumptions about the passive nature of perception. We do not passiv

ely receive  input and then actively respond to it. Instead, both perceiving and acting are continually entwined in  a process of actively negotiating our environment. Gibson further argues that what we perceive in  the world is not a stream of individual sense stimuli. Instead, our perceptual systems assess what  the environment affords in terms of opportunities for engagement with it. What we perceive  about a surface, for example is whether or not it is walk on-able or run over-able or climb

on-able or fall off-able or  get underneath-able or bump into-able. Expanding on Gibson's thesis Michael  Anderson argues, that we do not think up an action and then execute  it, rather we move so as to achieve the desired effect. Furthermore, we don't perceive  by measuring distances or calculating angles. We perceive throwability rather than weight,  reachability rather than distance, and climbability rather than slope. Thus behavior is not the result  of choosing the right response to a given

goal, but instead achieving the right perception given the  goal. A wonderful example of this can be found in the way that baseball players catch a fly ball.  Researchers have found that being in the right place to receive the ball has nothing to do with  calculating the ball's speed or its parabolic curve as it rises and starts its descent, then  calculating where it will land and running there. The player instead moves to the place where she/he  can no longer see the ball's acceleration towar

ds earth. When we can no longer see the ball's  acceleration towards earth we are where it will land. The ball affords catchability when we  position ourselves so that it looks a certain way. The running to the right spot the  spatial and postural adjustments the raising of the arm are all part of  thinking. Anderson adds, though to the ways that bodily motion is centrally involved  in sense making using the example of algebra. Studies have shown that when students learn to  write an equation th

ey use a spatial strategy that makes it easier to see what they need to do to  the various parts of the equation. Even an activity as seemingly cerebral as mathematics  turns out to be and even rely on seeing the right perception of the equation,  which in turn depends upon bodily motion. The implications for cognition resulting  from these kinds of findings suggest that the brain functions more as a coordinator  of various forms of information. Thinking is not the act of constructing a represen

tation of  events followed by a willful response. Instead, thinking consists of multiple processes of  assessment based on the affordances available, and as these continually change so do  the complex neuromuscular responses that enable us to effectively  engage with the world. Sometimes, we think up in a movement and then  do it yet in the imagining of the movement we are at an almost imperceptible degree  activating the muscles that will eventually execute that movement. Other times we don't i

magine movement first we simply move, and the moving  is itself an act of thinking. Dancing as a form of rhetorical persuasion. Dancing puts forward a persuasive argument, constructed from movement signs that are composed of  signifiers and signifieds and whose relationship is historically and culturally specific. These  individual movement signs are embedded within larger sets of codes and conventions. Some of which  are social and some genre and tradition specific. This means I'm a swan This m

eans, please don't shoot my swans.  (They're all lined up behind me here.) This means, I'm a dying swan. It also means I'm a ballerina  who's way too old for the part. Because these codes and conventions are culturally  and historically specific they change over time and across location. Choreographer and dance scholar John Weaver for example, explained in reference to his 1717 production of "The Loves of  Mars and Venus" that astonishment is represented by both hands thrown up to the skies, th

e eyes  also lifted up and the body cast backwards; and jealousy is shown by the arms suspended or  a particular pointing of the middle finger to the eye. While Weaver's description of astonishment  might bear some resemblance to contemporary codes for the representation of this feeling, the  enactment of his description of jealousy would never be identifiable as such today. Movement sequences utilized in Bharatanatyam, or in Javanese court dances, or in the Ohkay Owingeh pueblo deer dances are

entirely distinct and require different interpretive  knowledge in order to decipher them. As Bourdieu and many others have shown,  the habitus of any given cultural milieu consists of techniques of the body protocols  and codes of comportment within which dance's codes and conventions are situated. I'm  covering a lot of ground here very quickly fyi Within a given cultural and historical situation,  a dance's use of signs in relationship to other signs construct tropological configurations of m

ovement  that can put forward an argument. These tropes manifest through relationships among body parts  and the sequencing of movements. Here for example is one version of what could be waiting, performed  metaphorically. A single aspect of waiting the conscious passing of time  translates to the foot tapping repeatedly. And here is a version of  waiting metonymically, the gestures one might typically associate with waiting  are indexically reproduced in movement form. And here is waiting synec

dochally, the relationship  of various aspects of the experience of waiting such as yearning and searching is what is  recreated in the movement. And here is waiting ironically what is expressed in one part of the  body is undercut or commented upon by what is said in another. I'm covering a lot of ground  here very quickly... ironically, metonymically These tropes can be used to create characters  emotions and relationships between and among dancers. For example, the ballerina can choose  to pe

rform the swan queen in many different combinations of sequencing and gradations of  effort yielding different characterizations of her. Or look at the opening moments of Alvin Ailey's  revelations a work that Thomas de Frantz argues mapped rural Southern spirituality  onto the concert dance stage. He writes, "four women and three men stand close in tight  choral formation then spread their arms wide palms facing upward holding their feet  firmly planted in a wide stance. The dancers push their

weight downward even as  they search the heavens with upturned faces. These are people in physical bondage  invoking spiritual deliverance who must come together to complete the communal  expression of spirituality. I would add that the persistent tension between upper and lower bodies  and then the one arm that breaks away from the downward focus to climb heavenward construct  synecdochic relations among the parts of the body that represent searching yearning and a desire for  spiritual upliftm

ent. The final symmetrical motion of the arms with hands peeling forward suggests a  connection to spirit that is to be shared by all. Constellations of movement tropes build into  larger patterns of movement that drive plot and construct a narrative, or not. Regardless of whether  they tell a story these configurations of movement in concert with the organization and  trajectories of the dancers through space coupled with the relative intensity and  dynamism of the action all work to articulate

an argument about what the body is and who  the dancers are individually and collectively. These arguments can be made forcefully,  seductively, quietly, persistently, or tentatively. Yet however they reach out  to viewers of the dancing, they propose a hypothesis about  how the world is constructed or might be differently envisioned. In this sense  the act of making a dance is an act of theorizing. It is a form of speculating about and exploring  the nature of identity, sociality, community as

well as constructions of gender sexual orientation  ethnicity class ability, and much, much more. Dancing as coercion and as survival. As Saidiya Hartman and others have observed dancing featured as a key coercive strategy  supporting the slave plantation complex, and the white supremacy that endured in  its aftermath. Coerced dancing by slaves as a form of entertainment offered up to white  slave owners slave traders and white passersby occurred on plantations in coffils in the slave  pens and

on the auction block. Auctions, the premier site at which the objectification of the slave  body as flesh for purchase was accomplished, regularly relied upon dancing as part of their  ritualized format. Having been dressed in Sunday best for a parade through the marketplace before  arriving at the auction block they were then disrobed so that their nearly naked or naked  bodies could be examined in order to ascertain whether the slave had previously been whipped  a sign of unruliness or was br

anded the market applied to runaways. Slaves were then forced  to dance so as to demonstrate their health vigor strength and physical aptitude. Slave  after slave would be displayed and ordered to dance while potential buyers observed not  only physical vitality and alacrity but also the dancer's temperament whether meek  and compliant or obstinate and resentful. Dancing here functioned as an exceptionally  cruel ordeal since it reminded the dancer of a tribal identity, a past and a community, w

hile  at the same time affording the possibility that the slave would be sold for a higher  price thereby potentially securing better treatment by the new owner who had paid so much.  Dancing also served to mask over and even deny the fundamental violence of slavery. The fact that  the auctions took place as one kind of transaction among a number of other marketplace stalls  where products were displayed and sold only intensified the white supremacist command  over the black person. On the plant

ation itself, slaves were frequently ordered to dance or play  music for the entertainment of white owners, their families and guests. There were however, more  sequestered opportunities for slaves privately to join together in dancing and these may have  provided some sucker, and also an affirmation of connection to history and homeland. These  gatherings always at risk of discovery or betrayal by a fellow slave sometimes also included  improvised performances of satirical dances that mocked th

e white dancers that slaves witnessed by  exaggerating pompous and frivolous characteristics of white social dance etiquette. Such opportunities  to appropriate and creatively satirize the motions of their owners may have given slaves a momentary  sense of agentic command over their own movements. A second example of dancing as  coercion and survival can be found in the 1950s to '80s apartheid regime in South  Africa where black mine workers were paraded into the local stadiums on Sundays, their

one  day off, and forced to dance for the entertainment and amusement of white onlookers both locals  and tourists. Authorities reasoned that the dancing would display the general contentment and  well-being of the miners, while at the same time exhausting the workers so as to ensure  against any form of insurrection or rebellion. They also rationalize the dancing as a form of  relaxation and recreation for the workers. Mine owners bragged about their liberal willingness  to let the miners perf

orm native dances, and white viewers were reaffirmed in their stereotypic  assumptions that of African innate impulses toward moving together rhythmically. The choreography and  costuming further reinforced their assumptions about the primitive and savage tendencies  of South African blacks since mine owners provided the workers with ostrich feathers animal  skins and other accoutrements that would summon up a fantasized pre-colonial past, while also  confirming the difference between civilized

and primitive peoples. The mine owners also used  the dances to recruit new workers by advertising photographs of them that featured strong  looking healthy and seemingly happy performers. At the same time the dancing may have offered  the workers a source of pleasure and camaraderie unavailable to them during their grueling 14-hour  work days. Because the miners came from different tribes they had the opportunity to teach dances  to each other an occasion that could have affirmed their connecti

ons to friends and family back home,  and to the values embodied in the different dances. It is also likely that the dancers took  advantage of mine owners' lack of knowledge about the dances to choreograph  satiric versions of them that deviated in humorous ways that would have offered an  invigorating form of subterfuge and resistance. Dancing as a form of exchanging. Dancing is a form of immaterial labor  resulting in the transmission of knowledge the conditions under which this transmission 

occurs can be examined to determine what kinds of social connections and obligations are being  constructed. For example, dancing might be offered as a gift, or sold as a commodity, or passed on as  a combination of the two. When dancing is offered as a gift it obligates the receiver to reciprocate  thereby creating entanglements that are mutually defining and independent. Reciprocation can return  a gift to the giver or pass it along to another. Teachers can give knowledge of dancing to  stude

nts. Choreographers can give their visions of dancing to dancers and viewers; and dancers  can also give their performances to viewers. Students give back to teachers their diligent  hard work and growing expertise at dancing, and they can also pass the teacher's gift  along to their own students at some future time. Choreographers give their creative vision  to dancers and dancers give their virtuosity and hard work at attaining movement skills to  viewers. Viewers in turn give their attention

their applause... or not, and their responses  to the dance that they share with others. If in contrast dancing is sold, a completely  different set of priorities comes into play that in turn construct different social relations  between sellers and buyers. In commodity exchange the transmission of dancing needs to turn a profit.  Thus pedagogies and movement vocabularies become standardized and choreography and performance  become spectacularized. The labor of learning and making dancing must b

e accomplished in the most  efficient way, while at the same time yielding a glossy, enticing, most often eroticized, and  also orientalized eye-popping performance. Rather than the mutual indebtedness that  giving constructs the conditions for selling dance produce isolated independent agents who  purchase dance based on convenience pricing and market appeal. And whereas the giving of dance  entails a deeper engagement with ecological social and historical details of the milieu in  which the tr

ansfer takes place, the selling of dance detaches it from the specificities of  its location enabling it to circulate freely. Because dancing involves so  many types of participants its transmission usually combines instances of  giving and of selling the popular television show So You Think You Can Dance for example  clearly displays choreography that has been made as a commodity. Emphasizing as it does clear  lines for the limbs rhythmic precision speed and dexterity at coordinating parts of t

he  body, a marked orientation towards the front of the performance space, and fervent facial expressions  depicting a highly standardized range of emotions. Most viewers probably view it as a commodity  reveling in the on-time delivery of positions of extreme flexibility the breakneck pace  of the acrobatic action and the frequent intimations of sexual abundance and availability. Performers however, are often giving their dancing demonstrating their love of dance and their  willingness to give

their all to the viewers. Their commitment is to doing the very best  they possibly can do. A given genre of dance can also transform from gift to commodity and  back again over time. Hip-hop for example, a form that originated in the urban decay of inner  cities across the U.S. where disenfranchised Black and Latino youth took to the streets to invent  new expressions of social critique and protest, slowly morphed into a bling-ridden tits and ass  production number celebrating racial stereotype

s. Yet as the internet took hold and hip-hop hurtled  around the world it was taken up and adapted by various glocalized communities who repurposed it  as a form of protest and an expression of cultural specificity, returning its status to that of  gift. Thus the cypher-structured improvised solos and duets invented in the 1970s and '80s  in which individual dancers conversed with and commented upon each other's dance offerings,  flattened into the unison-driven precision and seduction-oriented

flashiness seen in 1970s  and 1980s and '90s MTV programming. More recently minoritized communities worldwide have  re-adapted hip-hop in order to claim visibility, and critique social inequities. Accreting to its  lexicon gestural repertoires and styles of moving with local significance, thereby commemorating  and celebrating their solidarity and vibrancy. The specific terms under which dance is exchanged  whether as gift or commodity strongly influence the kind of danced knowledge that is tran

smitted  as well as its purpose. Selling dance reaffirms notions of the ideal or the optimal instilling in  those who participate a confidence in standards of excellence, as well as an affirmation of their  independence as free agents choosing how to engage with dancing. Giving, in contrast, knits people  together while also imparting a strong sense of the specificity of time and place at which  dancing is happening. Selling dance alienates dancers as workers from their means of production  and

viewers from a deeper engagement with dancing. Giving dance binds dancers and viewers,  sometimes forcibly, into unending indebtedness. Dancing as a form of thinking,  dance as rhetorical persuasion, dancing as coercion and survival, dancing as exchange. Looking at dance in any of these ways helps us to uncover how it constructs and embodies a politics. Whether as a form of articulating signifying exerting or resisting control, or bestowing knowledge and  merchandising it dancing sets up power r

elations that are palpably felt by all those involved  in it. It can engage people in egalitarian or hierarchical social relations. It can construct  viewers as voyeurs, as co-choreographers, or as judges. It can impart a sense of  accomplishment or deficiency, embarrassment or joy. It can mobilize or sedate, protest or soothe.  And this list could go on and on and on... By way of concluding, I'd like to suggest that  another thing that dance can do is to help in the process of decolonizing the

university. With its  vibrant assertion of non-language-based ways of knowing in its challenge to cartesian notions of  what mind and body are. In its insistence that we re-examine long-held associations between the  body the feminine the emotional and the irrational and in its interdisciplinary reach dance  allies itself with de-colonial efforts to re-evaluate curricula admissions policies  and hiring practices and to renew diversity. Put differently hopefully it won't be another 100 years befo

re the  next Faculty Research Lecture in dance. Thank you so much for the gift of your attention.