folk-moving

[folk-moving]

“folk dance,” diasporic loss and the kinaesthetics of absence in the wake of imperialism and colonialism

introduction

The first iteration of "Folk: Moving/Mourning in Still Images” was created in May 2020 in the midst of a global pandemic and amongst all the racialised deaths and devastations of an unprecedented scale. It was undertaken as a virtual collaboration between June Yuen Ting (MFA student in Dance and Embodied Practice, University of Roehampton, UK) and Jeremy Guyton (MFA student in Dance, Florida State University, US) via phone calls, text messages, and image/sound/text sharings.

Over the course of one month, 3 prompts comprised of selected photographs and written descriptions were created and used for multi-medium, creative research in the forms of movement improvisation, free writing, and mobile photography. While the texts and images hence produced are shared here in the blog, along with excerpts of scholarship that forms the contextual studies of this practice-based research, the movement improvisation component of the work was deliberately not documented. Neither a reanimation/imitation of the dance seen in photographs, nor a presentational choreography to be performed and consumed, movement improvisation in this research is taken as a method of embodied enquiry--it is the technique and the process of research itself.

This project began with a reckoning with the dance of June’s grandmother, and specifically, June’s kinaesthetic relationship with her dance. June’s grandmother, Huang Hong Chou, passed away in 2019 in Taiwan. She joined a dance troupe in her neighborhood when she was 57, and for the next 32 years, she practised a community dance form called “tu feng wu,” or simply “folk dance” in some English sources. In dance scholarship, "tu feng wu” is commonly understood to be a derivative of “international folk dance” that first emerged in cultural societies and recreational centres in the US in the 1930s where Americans of European descents practised folk dance forms of various European origins. It was introduced to the island during the cold war era as part of the US cultural diplomacy and propaganda programmes that, along with economic and military interventions, expanded US overseas influence in countries deemed strategically critical to US interests. The dance form was later appropriated by the settler colonial Chinese Nationalist government in Taiwan as a physical training to promote patriotic sentiments amongst its subjects.

From the position of a diasporic subject, experiencing displacement and estrangement that is both cultural and embodied—what does it mean to reckon with "tu feng wu” and its complex genealogy after June’s grandmother’s passing? Meditating upon the kinaesthetic of unmeasurable distance and irrecuperable loss, this movement research seeks to trace a disremembered lineage in a musculoskeletal system that has been unmoored and displaced beyond recognition. In so doing, it posits a practice of mourning in movement and in diaspora in the wake of imperialism and colonialism.

[folk-moving]

image: the 1st anniversary of the establishment of the “women’s aerobics committee” under the aegis of the shi-lin district sports council, taipei city (1980); my grandmother, huang hong chou, can be seen in the front row (11th from the left)

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excerpt: matthew reason, documentation, disappearance and the representation of live performance (2006)

“The still image must always enact a distinct interpretation, a selective construction, which in its choices, omissions and creativity tells us more about attitudes to and understandings of performance than merely pointing us towards what it purports to show.” (114)

“The moments would be entirely invisible in life, entirely subsumed into the flow of the performance, if not prompted into existence by the photograph. Yet although the images presented in the photographs do not exist (as such) in the performance, these moments dominate and define my memory of the performance.” (120)

“in freezing and isolating a moment of the performance the photographs present the work to us in a new and changed manner from that experienced by the live audience... looking at these photographs now transforms the live aesthetic of presence into an aesthetic of absence inherent to all historical records and documents. This distance, however, is replaced by a new kind of closeness, the particularly photographic closeness... that results only from stillness.” (128)

image: my grandmother, huang hong chou (right), in a dance performance at my elementary school

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excerpt: daniel walkowitz, city folk: english country dance and the politics of the folk in modern america (2010)

“in the United States during the Cold War... the liberal version of internationalism that characterized much of the dance revival movement had special resonance, for it often served a nationalist agenda... Liberal revival groups or individuals, often claiming to be nonpartisan or nonpolitical, celebrated the diversity of song and dance they performed as a testimony to uniquely American pluralism and democracy—a version of American exceptionalism that was popularly advanced by anticommunist liberal cold [war] warriors.” (169)

“the celebration of diversity (what a later generation called multiculturalism) and nationalism underpinned the appeal of International Dance to both liberal and conservative participants... First, although [the International Folk dance and English Country Dance] communities had few if any dancers of African American, Hispanic, or Asian background, the ‘whiteness’ of the international community was ‘colored’ by the presence of large numbers of white ethnics, who only more recently had ‘become’ white. Second, a 1946 survey conducted among 117 California Federation dancers attending a folk festival found the occupations of dancers to be white-collar workers and predominantly professionals and semiprofessionals.” (174)

image: the record cover of “folk dances of many lands, vol. 2” (1949) by michael herman, who walkkowitz calls the “father” of the international folk dance movement in the us

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excerpt: mirjana laušević, balkan fascination: creating an alternative music culture in america (2007)

“The use of international folk dancing to represent the American nation, however, took representation of ‘the folk’ to a different level; it offered a visual and sonic rhetoric of a multicultural American folk united in the celebration of diversity. It is hard to imagine a practice that could depict this vision more effectively than international folk dancing.” (171)

“It is perhaps ironic that folk dancing at the New York World’s Fair took place at the American Common, a space that became available in 1940 when the Soviet Union withdrew from the fair on the eve of World War II... In the form of an international fair, America was forging a national image opposed to that of other world powers, emphasizing the uniqueness of its ‘colorful’ citizenship. The ‘differing ways’ of its cultural groups were to be shown as peacefully integrated and joined in an abundant, festive celebration of life in America... The crowds of up to a thousand fairgoers who joined Michael Herman [some referred to as the ‘father’ of international folk dance] at the American Common were able to sample different folk dance steps as they would sample ethnic foods. The message of hundreds of people joining hands and dancing peasant dances of European countries was clear. Whatever the background of the participants, they were Americans partaking in the vision of a united [Eurocentric] nation and a united [Eurocentric] world.” (171-72)

“Herman describes... a homemade fantasy of being somewhere else and somebody else. Cultural difference is reduced to stitching patterns, colors, and spices used to enrich the perceived colorlessness of American culture... One of the activity’s important premises is that elements of symbolic culture can be recreated and appropriated for an enactment of difference. Needless to say, real difference has not been explored.” (176)

image: [american] national anthem follows folk dancing at the waldorf astoria hotel in new york city (photo courtesy of sally ray), date unknown, included in balkan fascination, pp. 174

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excerpt: matthew reason, documentation, disappearance and the representation of live performance (2006)

“The perception that performance disappears is dependent on retention and documentation... there can be no concept of ephemerality without documentation, no sense of loss without memory. We can only lament the erasure of dance history and performances past because some rumours of their splendour survive. Consequently, within discourses of disappearance it is necessary to recognise that some continued existence and retention within memory is always at least implied.” (26)

“However, the logic here must work both ways: there can be no concept of documentation without a sense of that which is not (or cannot be) documented... a documentation of a live event is partial and incomplete. Consequently, that which is missing (the unrepresented, unrepresentable and liminal) re-inscribes the continuing absence of the ephemeral performance. The discourse of documentation continually re-inscribes perceptions of ephemerality; the act of documentation marks and brings into being the fact of disappearance.” (27)

“documentation does not halt disappearance, but contains within it a memory of transience... what is shown and said also returns to reinstitute what is left unsaid and unshown. At the same time, however, disappearance would be [unexpressed], unknown and unknowable, without some form of trace or residue... In this manner, the act of documentation makes disappearance visible.” (27)

image: my grandmother, huang hong chou (in a red top) at a dance practice

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june’s writing response, may 17

practice in moving/mourning #3: the diffused gaze

render/surrender. a vertigo of gaze. intricate and cellular. to see, i closed my eyes. moving in faint light and dark haze. she sees beyond the now. the way she looks away is the sign of her prophecy. some 40 years later, her vision comes to me as a daze, a start. enthralled and awaken, i see without seeing, remembering without memory. bound.

image: june’s movement snapshot, may 17

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excerpt: philip auslander, reactivations: essays on performance and its documentation (2018)

on the performativity of documentation

“I am using the term performative in J. L. Austin’s most basic sense. Speaking of language, Austin calls statements whose utterance constitutes action in itself ‘performatives’ (an example is saying ‘I do’ in a marriage ceremony). Distinguishing performative utterances from constative utterances, Austin argues that ‘to utter [a performative sentence] is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it.’ If I may analogize the images that document performances with verbal statements, the traditional view sees performance documents as constatives that describe performances and state that they occurred. I am suggesting that performance documents are analogous not to constatives but to performatives, that the act of documenting an event as a performance is what constitutes it as such. Documentation does not simply generate images/statements that describe an autonomous performance and state that it occurred; it produces an event as a performance.” (31)

“Ultimately, the crucial relationship is not the one between the document and the performance but the one between the document and its audience. Perhaps the authenticity of the performance document resides in its relationship to its beholder rather than to an ostensibly originary event; perhaps its authority is phenomenological rather than ontological.” (39)

“It may well be that our sense of the presence, power, and authenticity of these pieces derives not from treating the document as an indexical access point to a past event but from perceiving the document itself as a performance.” (40)

image: my grandmother, huang hong chou (second to the front in the right row), at her dance performance

[folk-moving]

jeremy’s writing response, may 17

practice in moving/mourning #3: the diffused gaze

[folk-moving]

jeremy’s writing response, may 17

practice in moving/mourning #3: the diffused gaze

Here you are.

Found. With me. This room. 

I’ve looked at myself a lot. Recently, too much. 

Ew. 

How? Who? 

Ew.

Be back soon.

I hope, she says. 

Ew. No. I’m here. I’m here. Look at me. 

See me.

I’m not leaving. 

We lost. You lost. We’ve already lost – so much.

Not me. Not this time. 

See me. Look at me. STOP. Look. 

Stop. Look at me. STOP. Look at me. STOP. Look at me

STOP LOOKING AT ME.

Why? Why me? 

This room holds so much of you. So much of us in this 

         room.

     Make room. See. Make room

Easy, right? 

Am I the future you wanted to see? Am I seeing clearly? Does it

     even really matter at all?

What am I chasing you? Why?

image: jeremy’s movement snapshot, may 17

[folk-moving]

excerpt: david eng & shinhee han, “racial dissociation” in racial melancholia, racial dissociation: on the social and psychic lives of asian americans (2018)

“’psychic nowhere,’ a condition often correlated with the absence of a clear geographic belonging or destination... ultimately manifests in psychic states of racial dissociation.” (109)

on the migration of asian international students to the global north--“the displacement of Asian youth into the diaspora implicitly reinscribes the East as ‘problem’ while reconstituting the West as ‘solution’... In this manner American exceptionalism is reinvented in the age of globalization under ideals of neoliberalism and multiculturalism: the fantasy of the United States as an accommodating land of equal opportunity, a ‘level playing field’ where individualism, self-determination, and merit can lead to success unavailable at home (the capital costs of US higher education notwithstanding).” (117)

“[by way of] intersubjective dissonance... racial dissociation functions as an everyday social and psychic mechanism in a society in which it is often difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the ways in which others see you with the ways in which you see yourself.” (126)

“state of psychic suspension is mirrored by... linguistic dislocation... [one] has no ‘native tongue.’” (127)

“With parents and family remaining in Asia—or often scattered among various global locations—there is no clear sense... whether they are immigrants or sojourners, whether they are coming or going, and where they might physically or psychically locate themselves. In this sense, they are also nowhere.” (127-28)

“removed from the context of family, home, and nation, [asian student migrants] negotiate the trauma of relocation on their own. They do not experience the security of negotiating problems of immigration, assimilation, and racialization in the context of intergenerational family conflicts. Put otherwise, they do not mourn the loss of language, culture, customs, and community in the context of kinship relations—between first-generation parents and their second-generation offspring... but in faraway isolation.” (128)

“psychic nowhere is also racial nowhere” (129); “to grow up on [one’s] own... without a language for the everyday traumas of immigration and race.” (138)

image: chinese students' athletic association soccer team, vancouver, canada. circa 1925.

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may 15 | practice in moving/mourning #3

improvisation: read the score. play a song. move. afterward, take a picture (of anything). and do some free writing (time it for 5 minutes).

the diffused gaze: play with different ways of seeing/unseeing in movement. adjust the focal distance of the gaze; alternate between looking far into space and shortening the gaze. how does the variability of the gaze yield information about movement? how does the gaze become a part of the movement? and what if you turn the gaze inward? your eyes have muscles, too.

she is seeing; she is also not seeing. the way she looks is diffused and it resists being found. she seems to be seeing beyond the present—in her movement she travels in time. is she gazing inward, seeing with her body? is she gazing into a different world, a different time? she is seeing and remembering, moving and envisaging.

image: my grandmother, huang hong chou, in a dance performance at my elementary school

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image: my grandmother, huang hong chou, taking a picture on the side of a performance event

for practice in moving/mourning #3: the diffused gaze

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image: my grandmother, huang hong chou (left, facing front), in a dance performance at my elementary school

for practice in moving/mourning #3: the diffused gaze

[folk-moving]

june’s writing response, may 14

practice in moving/mourning #2: the over-crossed fourth position

“you are not supposed to do that.

you are not supposed to feel that.

faltered. drained. trapped.

she was here. a kinaesthetic spectre.

where was i? i don’t know where i was. where i have been.

caught under a spell.

i am not following the instructions.

i can’t follow my own instructions.

the body is taken over. taking me over.

somewhere i can’t see.

from tilt to dust. from twist to stone.”

image: june’s movement snapshot, may 14

[folk-moving]

excerpt: anthea kraut, choreographing the folk: the dance stagings of zora neale hurston (2008), p. 20-21.

“consensus among scholars... holds that ‘the vernacular’ and ‘the folk,’ whatever their referents, are fully constructed categories... cultural historian robert cantwell... maintains that the folk are a ‘social, political, and aesthetic fiction,‘ the product of a ‘particular way of framing’ certain social processes. as folklorists like john w. roberts and henry glassie point out, this framing of the folk necessarily hinges on an oppositional concept of the ‘nonfolk.‘”

 “however invented, contingent, relational, and elusive a concept, constructions of the folk are almost invariably premised on a rather consistent set of stereotypes... among the most dominant images of the folk is that of an anonymous, communal mass of spontaneous cultural producers, or as regina bendix puts it, the ‘idea of a ‘singing dancing throng’ collectively composing.’ this notion of unindividuated, impulsive expression facilitates the countervailing idea that nonfolk art is produced, or rather authored, by the solitary creative genius. it also liberates nonfolk artists to ‘borrow‘ or draw on folk forms without the burden of crediting (or compensating) their creators. in addition, the folk are typically figured as belonging to a fading or bygone era, a view that permanently consigns them to a prior, often mythic temporal moment and thus denies them coevalness. this particular aspect of the folk exposes the constructedness of the entire category, for it inevitably emerges out of and in response to modernizing forces and broader historical changes. modernist nostalgia, in other words, gives rise to the concept of a premodern folk.”

“the folk represent a zone of purity. it is precisely this presumed untaintedness that renders folk forms desirable as ‘raw material’ for consumption... finally, and fully in line with the set of other assumptions, the folk are imagined to be a homogeneous group who speak in unified voice--a stark contrast to the hybridity, complexity, and cacophony that characterize ‘modern’ culture. again, this vision of an undifferentiated, harmonized collective contributes to the perceived simplicity and authenticity of the folk.“

image: my grandmother, huang hong chou (centre left), at a dance performance

[folk-moving]

jeremy’s writing response, may 12

practice in moving/mourning #2: the over-crossed fourth position