Contents

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1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………4

2. Ritualised activity……………………………………………………………..5

3. Influences of Halprin's work on my project…………………………………...7

4. Authenticity and imitation……………………………………………………..8

5. Community dance……………………………………………………………..10

6. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….11

7. Bibliography.......................................................................................................12

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1. Introduction

 

This essay discusses why and how the project “Archiving my friends’ movement in video and through my body” might be recognised as an integral part of a ritualised practice, connecting this aspect to the concept of community as part of the whole process. This discussion explores Anna Halprin’s ideas to find a thread between her performance rituals and this project. This parallelism between my project and Halprin’s work is discussed in my presentation and a video clarifying further how I guided the participants throughout this ritualised activity.

 

The notion of ritual is extended beyond a narrow connection with religious institutions and formal worship (Bell, 1992). Ritual has been defined various times and in various ways, so that “even to say [the] word, ritual, is asking for trouble […] it means very little because it means too much” (Schechner, 1993, p.228). Ritual will be used as an analytical tool, as well as, a universal human experience (Bell, 1992). Simultaneously, the process of ritualization will be seen “as a flexible and strategic way of acting” (Bell, 1997, p.138). Additionally, this paper will explore the concept of authenticity within the project context, especially when referring to imitation.

 

The project consisted in creating a film archive of my non-dancer friends’ movements followed by a learning process, when I, a dance educated body, learned their movements and filmed myself doing so. I explored my project through a ritual and community dance lens, concentrating on the process, rather than the final product, the archive. Furthermore, I became progressively aware how a ritualised activity was being built and how I was bringing a community together through movement.

 

 

2. Ritualised activity

 

Similarities between certain aspects in a ritual and some features of this project seem unmistakeable.

 

Firstly, one may notice the embodied nature of ritual when considering this project and how “rituals are memories in action, encoded into actions” (Schechner, 2002, p.45), which immediately implies a certain physicality. The whole concept surrounding the project includes ideas of how to pass movement generated by a certain body into another one with very different past experiences. Indeed, the body is part of the strategies’ roots in ritualization, particularly, “the interaction of the social body within a symbolically constituted spatial and temporal environment” (Bell, 1992, p.93).

 

Secondly, as in every ritual, the action has a certain intent, a specific purpose, function and meaning.

 

Thirdly, the moment when the movement created by the non-dancer is being transferred to the dancer’s body may be considered as the liminal stage of this process. A liminal period in ritual differentiates state from transition and the characteristics of the ritual subject are ambiguous (Turner, 1969) and these aspects are present in my project, the stage of transition being the moment when anything can happen, and no one knew exactly what the outcome would be. This period includes characteristics such as detachment, anti-structure and creativity (Schechner, 2007), which were essential ideas for the learning stage. The length of this stage varied, depending on what the person improvised in front of the camera, as well as on how I (the person going through this liminal stage) encountered what I would have to learn and perform. This was an in between positions moment which involved a modest behaviour, similar to what characterises the liminal stage in any ritual (Turner, 1969). This self-effacement and vulnerability might also connect to its opposite, the idea of power. This was retrospectively explored when I realised how I was providing the participants the performative power to choose what I will had to do/imitate, meaning that they could have chosen to challenge me on purpose, as a result of the embodiment and exercise of power of this ritual activity (cf. Bell, 1992, p.170).

 

Fourthly, another ritualistic aspect of the project lies in its communicative meaning and social function. I created suitable situations to exchange with each participant ideas and expectations, triggering conversations that would never otherwise have happened and that influenced the project.

 

Fifthly, the consideration of the place where the dance happens as part of the ritual (Turner, 1969) is another discernibly ritualistic aspect, once participants had to be in a dance studio, which implies a specific consideration about the location, “because rituals take place in special, often sequestered places, the very act of entering the ‘sacred space’ has an impact on participants” (Schechner, 2002, p.63).

 

Indeed, the place had noticeable influences in people’s behaviours: while dancers, are used to be in a studio, non-dancers, might feel it as an alien and uncomfortable space. Opportunely, the studio where occurred the sessions had no mirrors, so the participants could not look at themselves, preventing eventual visual judgments of their own movements. 

 

Sixthly, formality and invariance, two rituals’ characteristics (Bell, 1997) were present in this project. Activities can be formalised in different ways, setting up contrasts between informal or casual ones (Bell, 1997). Normally, “the more formal a series of movements and activities, the more ritual-like they are apt to seem to us” (Bell, 1997, p.139). In this project, each step was formalised, having a specific order, nonetheless, the movement introduced by each participant was always new and different from the others. Invariance includes sets of actions with precise repetition and physical control (Bell, 1997). Once again, invariance was present in the project, since this activity included a precise repetition of actions, uniting past and future (Bell, 1997).    

 

 

3. Influences of Halprin's work on my project

 

Throughout the process I identified similarities between Halprin’s notions of ritual, time and space and what happened during each studio session. This identification partially arose from reading about Halprin’s work, in which the term ritual both comprises and opposes traditional anthropological definitions and situates her dance happenings in a new context away from the proscenium stage perspective (Ross, 2007). Halprin’s workshops have much in common with the liminal period and similarly, in my project, the learning stage may be seen as a rite of passage. While Halprin recreated and ritualised space, creating an altar, introducing flowers, fruit, rocks and feathers, (Halprin, 1995), in my project there was always a sharing of grapes.  

 

Halprin’s conception of dance performance as an urbanised ritual, introducing critique beyond the simple approach of diversion and entertainment, reframed the role of the spectator as a supportive, reflexive and conscious witness (Ross, 2004). This new audience role generated an awareness of how the work will be received by others. Performance becoming an experience of perceptual awakening, for performers and audience, instead of a spectacle of decorative and highly theatrical entertainment (Ross, 2007). Ritual became a performance and aesthetic methodology, and ritual developed into “a nested relationship to sensory life” (Ross, 2007, p. 158). Similarly, in the context of my project, spectacle and entertainment are only consequences of the experience the participants and I went through, not a goal we aimed to achieve.   

 

Halprin’s approach blurred boundaries between art and life, conceiving art as being “far from being divorced from life, the two feed each other” (Worth & Poynor, 2004, p.61), which generated an interrelation between art and personal process (Burt, 2008). Halprin achieved this through the use of “improvisation, tasks, and slow or repeated gestures to create dance theatre works that were deliberate confusions of life and art” (Ross, 2004, p.51). Indeed, “we perform our existence, especially our social existence” (Schechner 1982, p.14). This continuous process of interchange was visible throughout my project, each person doing what they did in the studio, feeding from their previous life experiences related to dance. That evokes the emphasis put by Kringelbach & Skinner on “the importance of dance in a person’s life, strong identifications carried with them” (2014, p. 2). Likewise, Halprin enlightened as follows the importance of blurring those boundaries:

 

We began to work with real-life themes, so now the dances we made had a real purpose in people’s lives. We were tapping into our own personal stories, and the dances we made had transformative powers. (Halprin, 1995, p.xii).

 

 

4. Authenticity and imitation

 

The very nature of my project leads to the apparently conflicting concepts of authenticity and imitation. Throughout the project I struggled with a permanent search for authenticity, being aware that this aspiration cannot be attained, but rather discussed as part of the process. Indeed, if “art is a crucial terrain for the ideal of authenticity” (Taylor, 1992, p. 82), it is unavoidable to search for ways of thinking the ethics of authenticity without being captured by the individualistic/self-indulgency contemporaneous moral trends, without falling into "the culture of narcissism" (Taylor, 1992). This critical move will save the “culture of authenticity” from discredit, relating it to an idea of self-fulfilment which cares for causes transcending the self (Taylor, 1992). In Halprin’s case this aspiration for authenticity has a spiritual resonance within that association of ritual as a source of authentic dance (Bond, 1996). In fact, Halprin considered authenticity vis-à-vis her experiences in Fritz Perl’s workshops: “We wanted to live an authentic situation, not play-act with being authentic” (Halprin, 1995, p.112).  

 

More specifically, this ambition encouraged some reflections concerning both, the links between authenticity and skill, and the relationship between imitation and authenticity. During dance training, one is somehow incentivised to believe that once a dancer’s technique is stable, the dancer has more space to discover and explore an authentic style, but one might notice that sometimes dance training discourages this search (Henderson & Gabora, 2013). The concept of imitation appeared to be relevant to question authenticity in my project. One can conceive imitation as a unidirectional and passive process of absorption, a conformity process of the subject’s activity to the model, or, alternatively, imitation can be interpreted as an interactive process as Jerome Bruner (1990) conceived it. I think that this late conception fits better with what happened in my project. 

 

Besides, Sawyer suggests that in jazz performance, freedom does facilitate authenticity:

 

cognitive processing capacity is minimal during real time improvisation, and thus improvisational creative forms must evolve to constrain the amount of decision making necessary during a performance (Sawyer, 1992, p.253).

 

By questioning the possibility of teaching improvisation, Halprin realised that awareness is teachable, leading into spontaneous improvisation (Halprin, 1995). To achieve a certain degree of awareness Halprin developed a sequence of four stages, called Movement Rituals. Movement Ritual I includes a series of movements starting from lying on the back, till coming to standing. Its aim is to lengthen the spine, increase flexibility and strength to release tension and to maintain a healthy body (Worth & Poynor, 2004), bringing a kinaesthetic awareness and an attention to the physical sensation. This is present in the massage section, the first part of the warm-up in my project. Similarly, Halprin uses an exercise called towelling, the towel creating an indirect way of contact (Halprin, 1995). In both actions, participants experience their moving without controlling or reacting to it.

 

In my project, every participant had the initial trend of reacting, helping the movement, or sometimes, holding certain body parts until I asked them to transfer their weight to me. Participants revealed difficulties with relaxing and a lack of both, gravity and inertia consciousness, and inner awareness. They would not notice until I vocally intervened or dropped their limb, for example, to physically show them that they were holding it.

 

Movement Ritual II comprises standing up, falls, lifts, swings and balances and I included yoga-based movements, the rotation of the body articulations, and heightening awareness of the rhythms of the breath. Movement Ritual III moves through space (walks, runs, crawls), which is very similar to the various ways of shifting weight that I incorporated in the warm-up. Movement Ritual IV varies and combines the previous movement rituals. In Halprin’s workshops, these movement rituals were the initial stage in a movement exploration leading into scores for performance (Halprin, 1995). In my project this warm-up section was part of its stage of preparation, which entailed talking and discussing ideas, the preparation for a performance (filming the participant’s solo), bringing to mind the preparations of the participants in sacred rites. This preparation becomes a personal ritual where one experiences the body as a personal myth, story and ritual. As Halprin states, “how they experience their body, is going to be their story” (1995, p.203), and this connection between the body and a person’s story becomes visible when each participant in the project performs their solo. Those movements created with their body become their myth. Everyone has a different story and myth, which goes back to the search of identity and authenticity in a ritualised activity, establishing ritual as a source of authentic dance (Bond, 1996). Halprin expressed this idea by stating that “how they perform it is their ritual” (1995, p.203). There may also be the idea of a collective myth, which in the case of the project was bonded by me, the common factor connecting everyone’s story/movement, bringing the personal and the collective together and using movement as a vehicle for that connection.

 

 

5. Community dance

 

Ritual dance involves a community component, the role of dance being “instrumental in developing community through the expression of these myths and rituals [taking] an inevitable direction – the experience of community” (Halprin, 1995, p.xii). Initially, there were no intuits of connecting my project to a community dance realm, but after getting feedback from the participants, their feeling of satisfaction made me realise how they also gained from the experience. I had no expectations about what transformation the participants would undergo because I had not considered the project as a transformative exchange between the participants and myself, but more of an experimental collection of data. Unexpectedly, at the end of each studio session, not only the initial movement had been transformed, but the body had experienced something new, which would transform it, allowing me to understand that I also underwent a transformation.

 

When referring to her work in community, Halprin uttered: “We began to deal with ourselves as people, not dancers” (Halprin, 1995, p.79). This declaration conveys the power of dance to affect people’s lives not solely as dancers (Burt, 2008), enhancing something that was experienced when bringing together non-dancers and a dancer in a studio, where technique was disregarded, and individuality and authenticity encouraged. This goes with the community dance conception that anyone can dance, since the participants invited to take part on this project are all non-dancers and they can all dance, and hopefully they have felt empowered through experiencing that. My friends would never have danced in a studio or even outside a social context, and while participating on the project they became someone different from their daily person, by temporarily enacting a ‘second reality’, something out of their ordinary life actions (cf. Schechner, 2002, p.45).

 

This point highlights another community dance component of the project: the distinction from professional dance while engaging communities in dancing, often led by a professional dancer. Another common element in the project and community dance is that the process was considered over the product, its main goal being to film people’s movements and my version of it, those results being mere outcomes of the whole previous process.

 

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6. Conclusion

 

In the vein of a community dance approach, future plans arose with the aim of including a more diverse group of people. Halprin noticed:

 

as we researched new uses of dance and movement, […] our forms became accessible to more people and began to exist outside the theatre and in daily lives of ordinary people, [and] as the forms expanded, the kinds of people who participated became more diverse (Halprin, 1995, p.xi).

 

This “pluralistic involvement” (Halprin, 1995, p.xi) is something that would be interesting to further explore, observing and experiencing what happens when various ethnic groups and nationalities, people of different economic backgrounds, ages or physical abilities are included in this project. Additionally, “rituals may also be invented – both by official culture and by individuals” (Schechner, 2002, p.73), and new rituals may open the way one looks at rituals and ritualised activities, through a broader and freer lens, a way of endeavouring “to overcome a sense of individual and social fragmentation by means of art” (Schechner, 2002, p.73).

 

Alongside this project, I realised how there are many different layers that have to be looked at through various lenses. This essay, concentrated on a ritual lens, which led into a community dance perspective as well. Such a complex and layered project, bring out new disciplines and subjects, which tangles with the idea that the more one looks at a ritual, the more details and different perspectives are identifiable to further study.

 

It has been enriching to include my own studio practice into this project, comparing certain aspects of it to other artists’ practice, as well as, backing up my ideas with relevant literature. Using my own experience as a start for my research has enabled me to explore exactly what I aimed. Following Schechner perspective, I went behind the opposition   between practitioners and theorists, working from what I have done and seen, departing from concrete situations and theorizing them (cf. 1982, p.15). Besides, the ritual nature of the project helped to overcome this theory-practice divorce, once any ritual may be seen as “a type of functional or structural mechanism to reintegrate the thought-action dichotomy” (Bell, 1992, p.20).

 

Finally, my project gave me the feeling of a self-fulfilment which cares for causes transcending the self: the democratic and trustful relationships I maintained with the participants.

 

 

 7. Bibliography​

 

• Bell, C. (1997). Ritual: perspectives and dimensions, New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.

• Bell, C. (1992). Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.

• Bond, K. (1996). Review of Moving toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance by Anna Halprin and Rachel Kaplan. Dance Research Journal, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 86-89Published by: Congress on Research in DanceStable (Accessed: 03-03-2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1478594).

• Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• Burt, R. (2008). Review of Anna Halprin by Libby Worth and Helen Poynor; Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance by Janice Ross. Dance Research Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 91-94.Published by: Congress on Research in DanceStable (Accessed: 28-02-2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20527611).

• Halprin, A. (1995). Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.

• Henderson, M. & Gabora, L. (2013). The recognizability of authenticity. Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2524-2529). Held July 31 - Aug. 3, Berlin. Houston TX: Cognitive Science Society.

• Houston, S. (2005). ‘Participation in Community Dance: The Road to Empowerment and Transformation?’ New Theatre   Quarterly, XXI (2),166 – 177.

• Kringelbach, H., & Skinner, J. (Eds.). (2014). Dancing Cultures: Globalization, Tourism and Identity in the Anthropology of Dance. Berghahn Books. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qcxqs.

• Ross, J. (2004) ‘Anna Halprin’s Urban Rituals’, The Drama Review, 48, 2, 49-67.

• Ross, J. (2007). Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance, California: University of California Press.

• Saule, B. & Aisulu, N.  (2014). Problems of translation theory and practice: original and translated text equivalence. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences (pp. 119 – 123). Toronto: Elsevier Ltd.

• Sawyer, K. (1992). Improvisational creativity: An analysis of jazz performance. Creativity Research Journal, 5, 253- 263.

• Schechner, R. (1982). The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

• Schechner, R. (1993). The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance, New York: Routledge.

• Schechner, R. (2007) ‘Living a Double consciousness’, in Teaching Ritual, New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.

• Schechner, R. (2002). Performance Studies, An introduction, London: Taylor & Francis Ltd.

• Taylor, C. (1992). The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

• Turner, V. (1969). ‘Liminality and Communitas’, in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti Structure, Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press.

• Worth, L. & Poynor, H. (2004).  Anna Halprin, London & New York: Routledge.