CORD Awards Panel 2014: “Celebrating the Scholarship of Deidre Sklar”

Abstract

You are not quite old enough to be my blood ancestor, but I am going to figure you as one anyway. My desire to claim you as a relative, intellectually speaking, is based on the groundbreaking work you have done across the fields of dance, performance studies and critical cultural studies. Your monograph Dancing with the Virgin: Body and Faith in the Fiesta of Tortugas, New Mexico (2001a) and seminal essays such as “On Dance Ethnography” (2001a) and “Can Bodylore Be Brought to Its Senses?” (1994) have demonstrated that we do not need to leave the body behind as we engage with new theories of cultural meaning. I had always admired your work and thought you were an interesting scholar and fun to be around, but it was being part of your panel on “corporeal rhetorics” during the international “Theory and Practice” conference in Paris, France, in 2007 that helped me make connections between our academic trajectories. This experience really pushed my thinking into new directions. I want to quote your abstract for that panel: This panel presents the concept of “corporeal rhetoric” in order to explore the question of agency vis à vis corporeal regimes. [This use of] “rhetoric” implies that bodily practices and events have somatic effects on performers and audiences that likewise work to convince. In short, kinetic sensation is a medium of persuasion. Acknowledging that techniques of the body carry ideological loads, we explore the persuasive force of manipulations of kinetic energy, the organization of rhythm and temporal dynamics, muscular tension and flow, spatial relations and shape, directionality and focus, to bring out the interplay of the somatic and the ideological in the transmission of movement practice. (Sklar 2007)