DCE 200

Which of the following is an example of ethnographic description?

"At about 10:30p.m., the spectacular dancers begin to disengage themselves from the music, the dancing, and the conversations and move back toward the front entrance. In almost a procession-like manner, dancers with fedoras, brightly feathered ruffles, trench coats, and sparkly silver shoes call attention to themselves as they move toward a room on the other side of the lobby."

Which of the following is one of Susan Foster's critiques of Alan Lomax?

Lomax's system suggests a seemingly neutral frame of analysis.

Category of Latin Dance​

"Latin dance" generally refers to dances of Latin America, which includes Central and South America, and the Caribbean, mostly referring to regions speaking Spanish or Portuguese. When American and English ballroom dancers "borrowed" these Latin dances, the newly acquired dance styles diverged from their practices in Latin America. Suddenly these social dances became the foundation for a genre of dance in competitive ballroom (often referred to as DanceSport) around the globe, while also remaining important within a noncompetitive social sphere, whether at home or within diasporic Latinx communities.

Susan Foster's critics of Lomax, Sachs, and Vissicaro

-"For Sachs dance is a pan-human phenomenon that originates in the experience of the 'effervescent zest for life' that animates the body, and reaffirms its spiritual as well as social vitality. Regardless of the form the dance takes, its power resides in this primal urge to connect with the divine rhythms of the universe." -Lomax calls dance an "information system" which analyzes the body as a vesicle for channeling culture instead of comparing culture. Lomax integrates dance into a social system where the way the body moves resonates with other physical properties. Lomax's theory applies universal categories that gives a standard measurement which all dances can be analyzed and then compared, however it also has a hierarchy of different cultures which moves from primitive to complex. Lomax and Sachs both suggest that dance's history, can be understood through the chronological study of its development over time, using classificatory rubrics that prove one dance's influence upon another. -Vissicaro conceptualize dance as a complex event affecting both practitioners and viewers through multiple sensory channels. Whether as a representation of individual or cultural states of being, However, dance, as a fundamentally ephemeral and transitory event, can only reflect cultural value and meaning. Vissicaro measures dance by the changing distances between parts of the body and the concomitant alteration in their silhouettes as well as the distance among dancers and their paths through space.

what an ethnographic description looks like? What are field notes?

-Description is "not simply a process of accurately capturing as closely as possible observed reality" (Emerson, 5) because any written account will select and emphasize certain features and actions while ignoring others, and different people will make different choices about what to emphasize and what to marginalize. This is because fieldnote accounts from different people will rely on different lenses to interpret, frame, and represent these matters. -"Descriptive fieldnotes are products of active processes of interpretation and sense-making that frame or structure not only what is written but also how it is written." (Emerson, 9)

how to identify Flow, Focus, Energy, Contact, Number of dancers, and Improvisation vs. Choreographed Movement

-Flow: Does the movement quality seem to be free or bound? -Focus: Where is the dancer's focus? Does it seem to be internal (indirect) or external (direct)? In other words, does the dancer look directly at the viewer (direct) or seem to avoid looking directly to viewer (indirect)?' -Energy: What is the quality of the energy? Is it sharp, or is it sustained and smooth—silky, even? -Improvisation: Yes or no—do the movers make up each move in the moment, or have the moves been planned out (choreographed) ahead of time? -Contact/Touch: Do the dancers touch one another? -Number of Dancers: How many dancers are required to participate in this form?

difference between Joann K. And Cynthia Novack's claim of the relationships between dance and culture

-From Joann Kealiinohomoku we learned that "[a]ll forms of dance reflect the cultural traditions within which they developed" (Kealiinohomoku, 33). Cynthia Novack, however, is asking to consider not just that dance reflects cultural traditions, but that "the body and movement are social realities interacting with and interpreting other aspects of culture" (Novack, 405). -The main difference between these two visions of dance's relationship to cultural traditions is that for Kealiinohomoku, dance and culture are passively related. Dance acts as a mirror, reflecting the culture within which it's located. Novack's view pushes us to consider dance in a more active relationship to culture. Dance, in Novack's perspective, can reflect culture, but it can also interact with culture and interpret aspects of culture in ways that may be different than pure reflection.

Saleros

-I argue that to move up the salsa social hierarchy, local salseras/os perform an LA-style salsa that distances them from practices associated with Mexican-ness. Based on my ethnographic work at Chuck's Grill and a number of other LA salsa spaces from 1999 to 2005, I analyze how such danced distinctions underscore a social choreography entangled with the politics of migration.7 At Chuck's Grill, salsa practitioners evaluate one another's performances of belonging based on whether they have trained their bodies to dance LA-style salsa—the practice marked by acrobatic lifts and neck drops, accelerated spins, dramatic poses, and meticulous timing. If you fail to pass as an LA-style salsera/o, you may be accused of "dancing salsa wrong."

How all dance can be considered an ethnic form

-Our aesthetic values are shown in the long line of lifted, extended bodies, in the total revealing of legs, of small heads and tiny feet for women, in slender bodies for both sexes, and in the coveted airy quality which is best shown in the lifts and carryings of the female. -The term 'world dance' intimates a neutral comparative field wherein all dances are products of equally important, wonderfully diverse, equivalently powerful cultures... The titling of art as 'world' also promises maximum exposure to a cornucopia of the new and exotic." -ll dance is world dance, so just like using the word "ethnic," it's redundant to use the term "world." Contemporary dance is world dance. Hip-hop is world dance. Native American dance is world dance. Any kind of dance is world dance. People have used the term "world" in the past as a euphemism to gloss over a colonial legacy of placing certain dance forms in "other" categories.

Characteristics of ballet by Joann K

-Our cultural heritage is revealed also in the roles which appear repeatedly in our ballets such as humans transformed into animals, fairies, witches, gnomes, performers of evil magic, villains and seductresses in black, evil stepparents, royalty and peasants, and especially, beautiful pure young women and their consorts. -Think how our world view is revealed in the oft recurring themes of unrequited love, sorcery, self-sacrifice, through long suffering, mistaken identity, and misunderstandings which have tragic consequences -The ethnicity of ballet is revealed also in the kinds of flora and fauna which appear regularly. -Think how our religious heritage is revealed through preChristian customs such as Walpurgisnacht, through the use of biblical themes, Christian holidays such as Christmas, and the beliefs in life after death. -Many economic pursuits are reflected in the roles played in ballet such as spinners, foresters, soldiers, even factory workers, sailors, and filling station attendants. However, we would not expect to find pottery makers, canoe builders, grain pounders, llama herders, giraffe stalkers, or slash and burn agriculturists! -Our aesthetic values are shown in the long line of lifted, extended bodies, in the total revealing of legs, of small heads and tiny feet for women, in slender bodies for both sexes, and in the coveted airy quality which is best shown in the lifts and carryings of the female.

three different styles of ballet and be able to identify them (Romantic, Classical, Neoclassical)

-Romantic ballet (early 1800s) sprang up after the French Revolution and the subsequent Industrial Revolution that transformed European society. Many people were now living and working in urban centers. In response, Romantic ballets glorified nature, the rural small town, and a pre-industrial past. Romantic art is often characterized by a yearning for an unattainable and often spiritual ideal, personified in many Romantic ballets in the form of a woman. -Classical ballet (1850) developed about 50 years after Romantic ballet. It found ways of depicting tenets of classicism. Whereas the female dancer in Romantic ballet was covered by a long, gauzy skirt, classical ballet shortened the tutu to expose the legs, emphasizing the body's form. In Romantic ballet, ballerinas had just started going up on the tips of their toes (pointe work). This was a shocking—and thrilling—evocation of otherworldliness, a spiritual realm. By the time classical ballet evolved, ballerinas had mastered pointe work. It was no longer mysterious; it was displayed. Pointe work became both a literal gesture and a metaphor for balance. Beyond this, balancing the body over a tiny point could be a metaphor for definitive traits of classicism; order, organization, stability, mastery, technique, and idealized geometry. -George Balanchine is known for his development of Neoclassical ballet, the dominant aesthetic of ballet in the 20th century. Balanchine founded what would become the New York City Ballet (1948), which emerged as one of the world's premiere ballet companies. He defined a look and style of dancing that was unique, and came to be known as American Ballet. Balanchine also referenced social and vernacular dance forms of the time in his ballets.

What are Sabars performed for? Understand the attributes of Sabar.

-Sabar is a dance event, but it also refers to a family of dance and drum rhythms, and is the name of the drum. While it is a tradition of the Wolof people, the dominant ethnic group in Senegal, all ethnicities practice sabar. Sabar events have traditionally been part of women's social dances and popular culture, with men usually performing as griots and drummers. -While sabar is a traditional practice, it would be misleading to consider the sabar tradition a thing of the past, somehow unchanging, like objects in a museum. It would be more accurate to think of sabar as being in flux. Sabar engages in a process of negotiation between its practitioners, changing social and cultural ideologies, and the realities of globalization, which have spread sabar far beyond Africa to every part of the world. Sabar has been and continues to be a part of commercial pop culture. It's an urban practice that, as mentioned, defies categorizations of "traditional" and "popular," having a fluid relationship between street, theater, and commercial versions of sabar dance. Sabar is a vibrant part of Senegal's music industry as its rhythms (called bàkk) are recorded and sold, and new Afropop takes on sabar music (often called mblax) combine sabar bàkk with electronic beats and Latin grooves.

definitions for the following: selection, fieldnotes, ethnographic participation, inscription, ethnocentric

-ethnographic participation: is defined as participating directly within your field of study and then recording your observations. -fieldnotes: is defined as experiences are being noted and the deeper meanings of this culture are written down to be defined and considered. -inscription: is defined as the observations and notes are transferred onto paper. -selection: is defined as deciding which notes from the large amount of notes you have collected will be most useful in the final ethnography to showcase your experiences.

Diedre Sklar's 5 Premises

1.) movement knowledge is a kind of cultural knowledge 2.) Movement knowledge is conceptual and emotional as well as kinesthetic. 3.)Movement knowledge is intertwined with other kinds of cultural knowledge. 4.)One has to look beyond movement to get at its meaning. 5.)]Movement is always an immediate corporeal experience.

Susan Foster's meaning of examining dances as culture

As culture, dance is in(sinew)ated with power relations. Built bone-deep into the dancing body and permeating its practice and performance, these structuring of power both discipline and pleasure the body. And this cultivation of the corporeal takes place within and as a part of the power relations that operate throughout the body politic.

Cynthia Novack proposes a connection between "the 'right' way to move and to dance" and "the 'right' way to live" (p. 407). The movement style of rock and roll influenced the daily lives of dancers, and these values carried over to contact improvisation in the 1970s. In the 1980s, however, in aerobics and disco dancing, a very different set of movement values can be observed, such as:

Controlled and presentational movement.

Sally Banes' Operations

D.I.C.E. - Description, Interpretation, Contextualization, Evaluation

Tendencies occur when a dance is appropriated

Dance appropriation occurs when a dance style is "borrowed" from one social group by another. When dances move social groups, the specifics of the dance style usually change. Often dance styles are either desexualized or hypersexualized, and improvisation tends to give way to choreography. Often upper classes and dominant groups will appropriate dances originating in lower classes or non-dominant populations. Vernon and Irene Castle, a husband-and-wife team dancing in the 1920s, provide an excellent example of how a dominant group appropriated dances of a non-dominant group, and the changes that occurred as a result of crossing this racial and class boundary.

Both Joann Kealiinohomoku and Susan Foster agree that the word "ethnic" is not used in its objective sense; instead, the word is used as a ______________, a term that perpetuates racialized hierarchies in the arts.

Euphemism

The following video is not an example of an ethnic dance.

False

In the video of football players kneeling for the national anthem, what is the cultural knowledge being expressed by kneeling for the national anthem?

Football players are kneeling to protest racial inequality in the U.S.

Is Susan Foster closer to Joann Kealiinohomoku or to Cynthia Novack in how she understands dance's relationship to culture?

Foster is closer to Cynthia Novack because she writes that the chapters in her text "examine dance, not as a reflection of individual culture, or culture values, but as culture."

Which of the following is an example of an ethnic dance? Select all that apply.

Good Time Jackson Linedance Urban Bush Women: Caught In The Act Kulu Mele-Guinea Lamban

What is the key difference between Joann Kealiinohomoku's claim, "All forms of dance reflect the cultural traditions within which they developed" (p. 33) and Cynthia Novack's claim, "The body and movement are social realities interacting with and interpreting other aspects of culture" (p. 405)? Be succinct.

I believe the main difference is that Joann is saying how all dance has developed over time with certain traditions and with their respected culture. On the other hand Cynthia is stating how dance takes in all other cultures and tries to resemble it through their movement. For Cynthia she views dance as different types of social matter that has been developed through all types of different culture. Where as Joann views different dances with different cultures.

What is the tension about Latin dance that this trailer from the movie Dance With Me illustrates?

Illustrates a class tension between Latinx laborer and upper class competition dancer. Appropriation and racialization of dance by privileging choreography over improvisation through the dance's migration to the U.S. Idea of "authenticity" with a "right" and "wrong" way to dance.

methods used in participant observation in ethnographic research

Immersion/Presence Perception Selection Interpretation -The ethnographer immerses themself in the lives of others by being present, participating in key places and contexts of daily life in order to observe and understand these actions and contexts. Immersion involves being with people to perceive how they respond to daily events, and experiencing for themself these events and the circumstances that give rise to them (Emerson, 3). This is not a passive mode of researching; by being part of the social world, the ethnographer must take an active role. The ethnographer cannot and should not try to be a "fly on the wall," for it is the ethnographer's responsibility to select what activities to engage in (no one can do everything) and then to interpret the selected events, with attention to the priorities and points of view of those they engage with.

Know what movement analysis entails

Movement analysis describes a process of first observing movement in a focused and critical way, and then interpreting the meaning of that movement into words. Take a moment to reread the quote by Mabel Ellsworth Todd above; what does she seem to be saying about movement and meaning?'

Which of Diedre Sklar's premises is illustrated in the following video?

Movement is always an immediate corporeal experience. One has to look beyond movement to get at its meaning. Movement knowledge is intertwined with other kinds of cultural knowledge.

Which of the following are used in participant observation methods of ethnographic research?

Participation, observation, interviews, surveys, research, analysis.

Polycentrism

Polyrhythm is the layering of different rhythms over one another and polycentrism is the idea that movement can initiate from any part of the body. These two qualities play together because different parts of the body dance to different instruments that are playing at different rhythms

Joann K's definition of ethnic

Rather than defining ethnic dance in its objective sense—to help explain how a group uses movement to express their common genetic, linguistic, and cultural ties—Western dance scholars have tended to use it "as a euphemism for such old-fashioned terms as 'heathen,' 'pagan,' 'savage,' or the more recent term 'exotic'."

Foster critiqued Curt Sachs for which of the following reasons?

Sachs' argument that dancers are "possessed" by the dance Sachs' system assumes certain dances have never changed. Sachs' evolutionary approach.

how Cindy Garcia differentiates dancing Salsa "right" and "wrong

Salsa is the social text Cindy Garcia examines in order to construct a study that focuses on how a politics of migration is embedded into the different ways people dance salsa. The politics Garcia analyzes shows that the choices people make about how they dance salsa, what they report salsa means to them, and how they understand a "wrong" and "right" way about dancing are related to how they understand key issues of identity like race, class (upward mobility), and belonging within the diasporic and transnational communities they make themselves at home in here in the United States.

socializers

Some of the socializers described LA salsa as too flashy, too Hollywood, too much like a competition. The socializers, many of whom self-identify or who are identified by others as migrants, workers from the service industry, and/or Mexican and Central American, accuse LA salseras/os of no longer being Latina/o. The socializers view LA salseras/os as contaminated by Hollywood influences and perhaps as having rejected their premigrant familial, social, and cultural connections.

Discuss the textual (remember Jane Desmond's notion of "social text") differences you see between these samba videos:

Something like the "samba show" video is an appropriation of samba, the first has been adapted to a competition setting, the samba by the non-latina performers has been hypersexualized. The second is a performance of samba during carnival.

Which of the following are examples of its ethnicity?

The small waists and long necks of the dancers emphasized an aesthetic standard for Chinese women in the 7th Century BC The movement of the dancers with the sleeves suggests multiple movement energies such as moving dragons, birds in flight, snowflakes, rainbows. As Chinese opera developed, Long Sleeve Dance emphasized characterizations of the dancers.

What does Susan Foster means in this passage?: "The term 'world dance' intimates a neutral comparative field wherein all dances are products of equally important, wonderfully diverse, equivalently powerful cultures. The titling of art as 'world' also promises maximum exposure to a cornucopia of the new and exotic. Yet through this relabeling the colonial history that produced the ethnic continues to operate." (Foster, p. 2)

The term "world dance" is misleading because, on the surface, it seems to treat all dances as equally important, but in fact, it continues to perpetuate the same hierarchies that existed before.

Susan Foster's definition of world dance

The term 'world dance' intimates a neutral comparative field wherein all dances are products of equally important, wonderfully diverse, equivalently powerful cultures... The titling of art as 'world' also promises maximum exposure to a cornucopia of the new and exotic."

what terms perpetuate racialized hierarchies in the arts, according to Susan

This is not to say that all cultures can tidily be separated into cohesive units and their contacts with one another carefully recorded. Nor is it justification for the distinction between 'emic' and 'etic' points of view, a framework that perpetuates the possibility of cross-cultural comparison using standardized categories of analysis -Examining the legacy of Western history and its use of universal terms, Chakrabarty characterizes Western historical time as 'godless, continuous, and homogeneous,'

Larry Lavender's Specialized Seeing and his 3 different components of Description

Three such standards that Banes details include standards of morality (this can include political aspects like: does the dance meet ideals regarding the representation of class, race, and gender?), cognition (for example, ways the dance meets the terms of the dance style's cultural meaning), and aesthetic standards. Sometimes this means acknowledging the reviewer's personal aesthetics ("This dance was too slow for my taste") or comparing the dance to others of the same dance form ("As an example of tap dance, this dance was a fine specimen.").

described for Rock and Roll, Contact Improvisation, Disco, and Aerobics

When you are to look at the history of dance in America, you can see a correlation between the styles of dance that were popular during a time period and what was going on during that time. For example, according to Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull, "The powerful influence of black dance and music in shaping American culture has a long history, the emergence of rock-and-roll dance and music is a key movement in that history. Central to this development were social changes, most notably the civil rights movement, which challenged former boundaries between blacks and whites. Also key, and historically unprecedented, was the postwar media explosion of television, which consolidated rock-and-roll as a mass phenomenon" (Bull 407). I chose to include the whole quote because it showcases just how dances reflected what was going on in America during that time. Rock and roll dance allowed teenagers to integrate and break apart the barriers created between African-Americans and White Americans. It being showcased on television allowed black artists to be played on mainstream radio and television. See, it's never just about dance. Just like Deidre Sklar said, "One has to look beyond movement to get at its meaning." In terms of contact improvisation and how it reflected American society, the style of dance were "thought to teach people how to live (to trust, to be spontaneous and 'free', to 'center' oneself, and to 'go with the flow'), just as the mobile, communal living situations of the young, middle-class participants provided the setting and values which nourished the form" (Bull 406). Cultural improvisation showcases this idea that people should start to live freely and to just go with it, an idea of living that arose during the 80s. This relates to one of the five premises Sklar proposes: "Movement is always an immediate corporeal experience." The meaning of this premise is that in order to truly understand the dance, one must actually perform the dance and go along with the motions of it to fully get what it is about.

Jane Desmond's 9 questions for reading dance as a social text

Who dances? Where? When? In what ways? With whom? To what end? Who does not dance? What ways of dancing are looked down upon? By whom? What is the wrong way of performing the dance?

Cultural ___________ is the action of taking something for one's own use, typically without the owner's permission. During this process, the dance form is transferred from one group to another, most typically from a ____________ socioeconomic class to a __________ socioeconomic class.

appropriation lower upper