Session W5-1
Location: Room L306
Time: 12/27 14:00-15:30
Moderator: Taiyueh Chen
W5-1-1
Elephant and the Blind: Apply Sensorimotor Contingency Theory to Teaching Contact Improvisation
Presenter : Taiyueh Chen
Abstract
Consciousness study is a field of philosophy that take scientific evidences into abstract assumptions about human consciousness. Sensorimotor Contingency Theory (SMC) belongs to embodied and enactive theory of consciousness, which believe our perception influenced by our action and is constructed by our interaction with the world. As Alva Noë claimed in Action in Perception: “Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do.” (Noë, 2004, p.1) Follow enactive approach, my main question of this paper is: “How can we apply SMC in teaching Contact Improvisation?”
Contact Improvisation (CI) is a form of dance emphasis highly on listening to our partners. But what is listening? What kind of listening make us a good contact dancer? How can we train ourselves into better listener? SMC descried a mechanism based on neuroplasticity of how our perception can be transformed in accordance to our action. In this paper I will share my pedagogical thinking of how to transform our perception and “make sense” of useful but hardly perceivable information in CI. I will share a series of practices I accumulated called “Elephant and the Blind” to provide another perspective from SMC. The name “Elephant and the Blind” was taken from a Chinese folk story, which interestingly captured the characteristic of our perception. I will also share feedbacks of my university students major in dance and others.
W5-1-2
Dance In Transit: The Ummathaatt And Kodagu’s Quest For A ‘Classical’ Identity
Presenter : Jyothi Jayaprakash
Abstract
This paper examines Ummathaatt - the only dance performed by women of the Kodava community, a minuscule group of people living in Kodagu, in Karnataka state, India. The paper argues that the invocation of their origins based on disputed Indian mythology, as well as attempts to project Ummathaat as the original classical art form of Kodagu is fraught with their demands to legitimize a unique identity and thereby claim a separate statehood for themselves.
The paper examines how the ‘legitimacy’ of the Kodava identity as one that has royal Kshatriya lineages is being validated through the performance of Ummathaatt by invoking songs of the legend of River Kaveri. This myth that accords a glorious past to the Kodava community, incidentally, is also the one uncontested theory that is being upheld as the true origin story of the Kodavas.
Through extensive fieldwork spanning four years of doctoral research, and through participant observation method, the paper also conducts a movement analysis of the dance by situating the various performances of Ummathaatt. Asserting that the dance has transformed visibly from its initial performance milieu from a sacred temple space and transited into the public space such as at competition venues, this paper argues that the recent mandatory invocations of the Ummathatt manifests as an imagined necessity for a ‘classical’ identity, operating through a gradual transition from a Lokadharmi to the Natyadharmi style.
W5-1-3
Borrowed Voices and Double Vision: Perception and Identity in Performance
Presenter : Karin Myhre
Abstract
Among only handful of descriptions of theatrical performance dating from middle period Chinese sources (Song through Yuan dynasties, 960-1368) are a few song suites (sanqu 散曲) that detail faulty perception by members of an audience. These examples of theatrical misperception are the result of viewers who fail to correctly perceive the relationship between the staged production and the represented world. Rather than apprehending a meaningful show, an inept viewer sees instead either a strange and incomprehensible spectacle or an uncanny extension of the ordinary world.
Colloquial works composed through this period are well known for an expanded range of poetic authorship and literary topic. In part it was the circulation of languages and cultures in the multi-ethnic middle period Chinese empire that made a place for dramatic song suites adopting more vernacular phrasings and a compass of subjects that might have been remarkable in another time. While this shift toward candor and more forthright diction might well have led to a championing of transparency, instead, and somewhat perversely, the motif repeated through a number of songs concerns not the ease of communication across now breached boundaries, but rather its difficulty.
Exploring new combinations of topical concern, literary composition and linguistic usage from the perspectives of performance and perception, this paper traces how portrayals of incompetence worked to reflect and also decenter both current day social and political realities and persistent notions of identity.
