i n v i t a t i o n –
Please join us in our last spring 2018 Performance Research Seminar,
a special event sponsored by Athena SWAN (Scientific Women’s Academic Network):
Wednesday May 2: 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Drama Studio, Gaskell Building 048
Brunel University London, Cleveland Rd UB8 3PH
Hanna Järvinen (Theatre Academy, Univ. of the Arts, Helsinki)
“Gendering Dance Authorship: Historical Changes in Whose Bodies Matter”
Why are choreographers considered the authors of dance? Historically speaking,
the attribution of authorship to the figure of the (absent) choreographer is a
relatively new notion and by no means as universal as usually represented in
dance scholarship (Järvinen 2014). The rise of the choreographic author is also
explicitly gendered, so that the author is a male author(ity) over
(predominantly female) dancing bodies, and this has direct effect on who are
canonised as authors in the history of the art form and what qualifies as a
work of art. Authorship in dance has a regulative function and hence, the
author is more than simple shorthand for the group of individuals responsible
for tonight’s spectacle: the author of dance points to the uses of power it
obscures, and these uses of power also encompass dance research.
Taking Michel Foucault’s 1969 essay “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (“What Is an
Author?”) as a starting point, this talk focuses on how gender is intimately
tied to legitimisation of dance authorship. The four characteristics of the
author function that Foucault discusses in relation to literature have allowed
me to critically engage with how we understand the history of dance as an art
form where, “the word ‘work’ and the unity that it designates are probably as
problematic as the status of the author’s individuality” (tr. from Foucault
1998, 208). Although an author is intimately and inextricably tied to the
notion of an opus or an œuvre created through speech acts of attribution and
appropriation in which the author may or may not take part, Foucault does not
really delve into the ontology of what this work is; and his self-imposed
limits exclude certain kinds of authorship from his analysis that I would argue
have repercussions for a time-based art – dance – where the creation of a
“work” usually involves several individuals; where the identity of a “work” may
significantly change over time; and which also has a particular (anxious)
relationship to writing.
Bio
Dr Hanna Järvinen is a Senior Researcher in the Academy of Finland research
project How to Do Things with Performance?, 2016-2020, and she works as
University Lecturer at the Performing Arts Research Centre of the University of
the Arts Helsinki, Finland. She is a Docent in Dance History at the University
of Turku and a Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at De Montfort University,
Leicester. The author of Dancing Genius: The Stardom of Vaslav Nijinsky
(Palgrave Macmillan 2014) as well as articles in journals like The Senses and
Society, Dance Research, Dance Research Journal, Nordic Journal of Dance and
Avant, her research interests lie in the epistemology of twentieth-century
dance, in particular notions of authorship, gender, and ethnicity.
http://www.uniarts.fi/en/hanna-j%C3%A4rvinen
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Research Seminar Theme: Precarity and the Politics of Art: Performative and
Critical Empowerment after Democracy
Performance Research Seminar Coordinator: Johannes Birringer
Contact: +44 (0)1895 267 343
Check our whole series at:
http://people.brunel.ac.uk/dap/ResearchSeminarSeries.html
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