That History/This History

If I had to pick the stage of my inquiry that I'm in I would say I was nearing the end of the data collection stage and entering the analysis stage. In a way though, I feel as if the analysis stage began the moment I started this project as I immediately began thinking about and accommodating new knowledge as I acquired it.

My inquiry began as an attempt to map Graham in the UK. It doesn’t seem so much as if that is what it is about anymore. In looking at others’ perceptions of the technique and work of Martha Graham surrounding conversations have begun and recurring themes have emerged. These have included: expectations (ours and others of us), how we think about different types of space, influence of training, categorisation and labelling, internal and external landscape and many more that I have yet to notice. I feel as if many of these ideas are linked together but at the moment I’m not sure how.

In one way or another though, everyone I have spoken to has referred to Martha Graham in a historical context. There seems to be a consensus that Graham is a part of history and that looking ‘at history’ and having knowledge and understanding of it is important to us as dance professionals. Different people have described how they have seen rep, read about or studied the work of graham and it’s importance in the development of American modern/contemporary dance, taken Graham class or learned about her choreographic approach. There are many different ways that people describe how and why this might be important in their experience. At first glance there seems to be a trust and understanding that it is important to know what was then, look at what is now and explore what could be. There seem to be different degrees as to how much people talk about dance history as something to learn about and learn from.

This way of talking about history can seem like it separates us rather than connects us to it. The passing of time and where something sits amongst our own history gives an added sense of closeness to or distance from the thing in question and gives it varying levels of relevance to us. It’s not that we aren’t seeing ourselves as part of dance history, or dance history as part of us, but there are differences between how passively and actively we view it in terms of the moving body.

The last few weeks I have been learning/teaching repertory ‘from the past’ and so use this here as an example. When we learn rep we are in a sense trying to reconstruct something, however we are not learning it then, we are learning it now, this is different, our bodies have new information, different information from the dancers of the time and from each other. If there is a political context for a piece, or emotional aspect we need to convey, the experiences we draw from will often be different from the initial stimulus. As someone recently said to me “we don’t really dance that way anymore.” What does this experience of ‘dancing that way’ do to us now? Is our differing moving history something that separates us or connects us?

We can all have the same experience, but we each view it in a different way. How are we all physically connected through 'doing' history, how could making these links perhaps be useful to us now? Is the past something behind us, another thing we should learn about, or something that still lives in us now and that we should practice? How does physically learning history and putting our body through old and perhaps alien patterns feed back into our current work? How does the this idea of this changing, active, bodily information as history relate to the teaching of a technique that people feel varying levels of distance and closeness to in terms of their own active developing history?

Any thoughts, experiences, reading recommendations?

Thank you for reading! J