In Repairing the Web: Spiderwoman’s Children Staging the New Human Being, 4 the power that performances can hold over an audience is explicated when Carter regards the “voluntary,” fleeting experience, which enables audiences to leave the “real world” at the start of a performance and “come back to life” once the show ends, as problematic.Ĭarter describes these events as “performative utopias,” in which particular social groups briefly retreat from themselves, while simultaneously enacting an ideal future.
Rainer reflects: “Early on, I began to question the pleasure I took in being looked at, this dual voyeuristic, exhibitionistic relation of dancer to audience.” 3 By regarding the ephemerality of dance as both difficult and elegant, Rainer and others from the Judson Church collective, including and not limited to Steve Paxton, David Gordon, Alex and Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, Elaine Summers, William Davis, and Ruth Emerson were all investigating relationships between the spectator and performer.Īnishinaabe/Ashkenazi artist scholar Jill Carter has also regarded ephemerality in dance and theatre. 2 At the time, Rainer had a strong desire to rail against the conventions of modern dance which centralized the drama of expressiveness, virtuosity, and narrative choreography. She ended the essay with the now infamous No Manifesto. In 1965, a white-bodied settler dance artist known as Yvonne Rainer wrote about a dance she had created, titled Parts of Some Sextets, for the Tulane Drama Review. All this to say, this article traverses those overlaps, and is less concerned with drawing a singular conclusion and more concerned in “what happens” and “what doesn’t happen” between spaces of performance and spectatorship. I have written, interrogated, and researched the overlaps between these seemingly disparate disciplines for some time now. I first identify as Yaqui (enrolled, Texas Band of Yaqui Indians), but am also a contemporary dancer, performer and choreographer. I have dedicated many years, practicing and researching the seams between dance, theatre, performance studies and Indigenous studies. In the spirit of generosity and transparency, I offer the reader a bit of background here. Although this occurred over a month ago, I take some time here, to reflect and perhaps “trouble” some of the perspectives that I have long associated with experiences like these. The current that this produced seemed too powerful to resist, and this experience created a feedback loop for me.
It occurred to me that the camera lens had an inexorable magnetism to it, generating an undertow. Of course, Stubbe’s “all-seeing eye” of the camera was present as well, recording everything it encountered into the realm of perpetuity. 1 This put me in a slippery place, wanting to shed my hypervigilance to the fact that where there was once just the unintrusive and unassuming gaze of choreographer/director, Rosy Simas (Haudenosaunee, enrolled member of the Seneca Nation of Indians), there was now the gaze of the two non-Native, white-bodied spectators, reporter Sheila Regan and photographer Glenn Stubbe. Recently, while in a movement practice with six other local Minneapolis dancers, we found ourselves being photographed for an article, which would appear in the Star Tribune. Tags : audience dance indigenous art physics spectatorship utopias witnessing 1Sam Aros Mitchell in Rosy Simas’ Skin(s), 2018.
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