Abstract
From the perspective of a historian, the practical pedagogical environment of an arts university offers many challenges. Dance is often begun at an early age, which means that practitioners often create a sense of the past of the art form from an ‘oral history’, comprising narratives told by teachers and colleagues as well as events and encounters. As a historian, I suggest that obligatory history classes should integrate the practical interests of the students to enable their sense of agency in relation to the past, and dancing beyond the often expensive practice of reconstruction . This requires a redefinition of dance history as a discourse constantly constructed anew and re-evaluated, a discourse which is corporeal and embodied as well as written. The pedagogical principle of this history—or rather, genealogy in the Foucauldian sense—should be in assisting the student to learn to unlearn: to question beliefs and aspects of their practice they have thus far taken for granted. For the teacher, this principle requires openness about our (institutional) positions of power, both restrictions imposed by curricular demands and our cherished canons of art. In this paper, I address some of the methodological and practical insights that artistic research in dance offers for historiography and the pedagogy of history.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Acocella, Joan. 1991. Nijinsky/Nijinska revivals: The rite stuff. Art in America October: 128–137, 167, 169, 171.
Archer, Kenneth, and Millicent Hodson. 1993. Decoding Nijinsky: Nijinsky’s Faune restored by Ann Hutchinson Guest. Dance Research 11(2): 60–65.
Borgdorff, Henk. 2011. The production of knowledge in artistic research. In The Routledge companion to research in the arts, ed. Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson, 44–63. London: Routledge.
Bull, Michael, Paul Gilroy, David Howes, and Douglas Kahn. 2006. Introducing sensory studies. The Senses and Society 1(1): 5–7.
Burke, Peter (ed.). 2001. New perspectives on historical writing. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Burt, Ramsay. 2006. Judson dance theater: Performative traces. London/New York: Routledge.
Chartier, Roger. 1977. On the edge of the cliff: History, language, and practices. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Fink, Robert. 1999. ‘Rigoroso (=126)’: The rite of spring and the forging of a modernist performing style. Journal of the American Musicological Society 52(2): 299–362.
Foucault , Michel. 1991. Remarks on Marx. Interview with Duccio Trombadori. Trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. New York: Semiotexte (Italian 1978).
Foucault, Michel. 2001. Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire, Dits et écrits tome I: 1954–1975. Paris: Quarto/Gallimard.
Franko, Mark. 1989. Repeatability, reconstruction and beyond. Theatre Journal 41(1): 56–74.
Guest, Ann Hutchinson, and Jeschke Claudia. 1991. Nijinsky’s Faune restored: A study of Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1915 dance score and his dance notation system, Language of dance series 3. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach.
Halstead, Narmala, Eric Hirsch, and Judith Okely (eds.). 2008. Knowing how to know: Fieldwork and the ethnographic present. New York: Berghahn Books.
Hodson, Millicent. 1996. Nijinsky’s crime against grace: Reconstruction score of the original choreography for Le Sacre du Printemps. Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press.
Hodson, Millicent. 2008. Nijinsky’s Bloomsbury ballet: Reconstruction of the dance and design for Jeux. Hillsdale: Pendragon Press.
Hunt, Lynn (ed.). 1989. The new cultural history. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press.
Järvinen, Hanna. 2013. Some steps towards a new pedagogy of dance history . In Proceedings of the Nordic Forum for dance research and society of dance history scholars joint conference. ed. Ken Pierce, Trondheim, Norway June 8–11 2013. https://sdhs.org/conferences/proceedings
Järvinen, Hanna, and Anne Makkonen. 2012. Speaking, moving, dance: Incorporated language in practice and research. In Näyttämöltä tutkimukseksi: Esittävien taiteiden metodologiset haasteet – From the stage to research: Methodological challenges in performing arts, ed. Liisa Ikonen, Hanna Järvinen, and Maiju Loukola, 68–81. Näyttämö ja tutkimus 4. Helsinki: Teatterintutkimuksen seura. www.teats.fi/julkaisut
Kirkkopelto, Esa. 2008. New start: Artistic research at the Finnish Theatre Academy. Nordic Theatre Journal 20. Accessed 4 Aug 2013. www.circostrada.org/IMG/pdf/Kirkkopelto_Artistic_Research.pdf
Kirkkopelto, The Theater Academy. http://www.teak.fi/Research. Accessed 4 July 2014.
Kuppers, Petra. 2000. Accessible education: Aesthetics, bodies and disability. Research in Dance Education 1(2): 119–131.
Lepecki, André. 2006. Exhausting dance: Performance and the politics of movement. London/New York: Routledge.
Lepecki, André. 2010. The body as archive: Will to re-enact and the afterlives of dances. Dance Research Journal 42(2): 28–48.
Makkonen, Anne. 2007. Loitsu: Danced histories? DVD of a lecture demonstration. In One past, many histories — Loitsu (1933) in the context of dance art in Finland. PhD dissertation, University of Surrey.
Makkonen, Anne. Personal webpages. http://www.wwwmakkonen.kotisivukone.com. Accessed 4 July 2014.
Monni, Kirsi. 2007. Tanssiesteettinen perintö ja Deborah Hayn radikaali taide: Ontologisen eron pohdintaa. In Liikkeitä näyttämöllä, ed. Pia Houni, Johanna Laakkonen, Heta Reitala, and Leena Rouhiainen. Näyttämö & Tutkimus 3, 36–61. Helsinki: Teatterintutkimuksen seura.
Scholl, Tim. 2004. Sleeping beauty: A legend in progress. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Stalpaert, Christel. 2011. Reenacting modernity: Fabian Barba’s a Mary Wigman dance evening (2009). Dance Research Journal 43(1): 90–95.
The Theater Academy. http://www.teak.fi/Studies/Degrees_&_Study_Programmes. Accessed 4 July 2014.
White, Hayden V. 1973. Metahistory: Historical imagination in nineteenth century Europe. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Järvinen, H. (2016). Corporeal Memories: A Historian’s Practice. In: DeFrantz, T., Rothfield, P. (eds) Choreography and Corporeality. New World Choreographies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54653-1_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54653-1_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54652-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54653-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)