Visceral Data for Dance Histories

Harmony Bench,Kate Elswit

doi:10.1017/s1054204321000708

Abstract

Between 1947 and 1960, choreographer Katherine Dunham spent over 5,000 days in hundreds of cities on six continents. During that time, almost 200 dancers, drummers, and singers traveled with her, performing 166 repertory pieces. Dunham’s expansive work lends itself to digital approaches that illuminate the complex ways history is iterated across bodies, and how the specific questions raised by dance history underpin a visceral approach to the digital humanities.

Highlights

During the 14 years from 1947 through 1960, choreographer Katherine Dunham spent over 5,000 days in approximately 190 unique cities over 433 trips on every continent but Antarctica.1 At various moments during that time, 189 dancers, drummers, and singers traveled with Dunham, performing over 166 pieces of active repertory in various configurations.2 We know this because we have been working through Dunham’s extensive archives, manually curating datasets that trace these people, places, and pieces as part of an ongoing project combining qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the questions and problems that make the analysis and visualization of data meaningful for dance historical inquiry
In “Against Cleaning,” Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz point to pervasive lingering suspicions of data-driven approaches, based on the fear that data models are reductive (2019). They argue that these very approaches can demand deeper research into the meaningful messiness of distinguishing features, overlaps, and similarities, which reintroduces the kind of ontological complexity that more conventional historical narratives sometimes occlude in favor of discrete, narratable chunking
Working in relation to data challenges typical models of thinking dance history at the scale of the privileged example and the signature work, or what we have previously described as the “mid-field view [used] to build broad narratives through a small set of exemplary moments that anecdotally illustrate an argument about the arc of an artist’s lifetime or their body of work” (Bench and Elswit 2020a)

Summary

Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit

During the 14 years from 1947 through 1960, choreographer Katherine Dunham spent over 5,000 days in approximately 190 unique cities over 433 trips on every continent but Antarctica. At various moments during that time, 189 dancers, drummers, and singers traveled with Dunham, performing over 166 pieces of active repertory in various configurations. We know this because we have been working through Dunham’s extensive archives, manually curating datasets that trace these people, places, and pieces as part of an ongoing project combining qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the questions and problems that make the analysis and visualization of data meaningful for dance historical inquiry.. Touring here is most appropriately retained as a gerund, since Dunham’s company was almost always traveling, without discretely identifiable starting or stopping points for years on end Such touring further connects people, places, and pieces; Dunham reimagined and circulated African diasporic representations through her choreography, and new performers brought practices with them when they joined. Following Rebecca Schneider’s “visceral cultural analysis” (1997:17), our approach to archival research draws out the visceral experiences that underpin and haunt such data to begin with This methodology—in which bodies are articulated as experiential, in which practices of embodiment arrange knowledge, in which bodies stand as repositories of memory, in which they are recognized as in process, and in which physicality produces relationality—serves dance history while modeling ways to retain the materiality of the body in a manner that is relevant to interdisciplinary digital scholarship.

The Company as Dynamic Movement Community

Diasporic Movement in Motion

Findings

Reconfiguring Repertory and Repertoire