Dance Ethnography and the Limits of Representation

Abstract

The distance between representation and object has engaged the intellectual energies of those writing on dance as a kind of bricolage where the dance event appears to occasion writerly structure. These energies have been occupied in writing on other objects by a theory that simulates the complexity of the object in the writing itself. The traces of participation, the work an audience does to create a sense of the object as it is presented to them, are nowhere to be found in the standard means of representation and documentation and, as such, are absent from the ways in which history is conventionally conceived. Reception of dance, especially of the kinds of Western concert dance that will provide the focus for this essay, is realized only in the particular performance event. The dancers constitute themselves in anticipation of performance. This anticipation bears the anxiety of uncertainty, of something that can be completed only through its communication. The performance is the execution of an idea by dancers whose work proceeds in expectation of an audience that is itself only constituted through performance. The audience has no identity as audience prior to and apart from the performative agency which has occasioned it. As such, the audience is intrinsically "unstable," both in terms of its own presence and in its ability to occasion and then disrupt the very anxiety of performance. At the same time, it is the work that the audience does, the participation that it lends to performance to make the latter possible that is irrecuperable to representation. It is, like the dance activity itself, an untranslatable object. But unlike dancing, forms of representation rarely make an effort to recognize audience participation, which springs from this disruptive potential, itself an indeterminacy of representation internal to the performance. So if writing and documentation cannot recuperate the traces of participation found in performance, minimally they can recognize the disruptive effects of the work of participation lost to representation. The shift in perspective to participation rather than representation as suggested by the conceptual challenges posed by dance, here understood as the particularization of the performer-audience relation, has an import beyond dance writing. This perspective simulates a relation of performer and audience where the activity of performers (the artistic object of performance) puts into operation the notion of "agency," and where the audience suggests a mobilized critical presence such as that implicit in radical notions of "history."'