Dance as L'intervention: Health and Aesthetics of Experience in French Contemporary Dance
This article investigates the ways in which discourses and experiences of health and healing have shaped the development of contemporary dance in France. It confronts the problem of how to situate contemporary dance in relation to other dance genres and suggests Robert Desjarlais’ concept of the ‘ae...
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Published in | Body & society Vol. 11; no. 4; pp. 109 - 139 |
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Main Author | |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi
SAGE Publications
01.12.2005
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | This article investigates the ways in which discourses and experiences of health and
healing have shaped the development of contemporary dance in France. It confronts
the problem of how to situate contemporary dance in relation to other dance genres
and suggests Robert Desjarlais’ concept of the ‘aesthetic of
experience’ as a helpful framework for understanding the ways in which
technique and virtuosity operate differently in contemporary dance than in other
dance forms. The article is ethnographic and historical and attempts to create a
dialogue between dance studies and medical anthropology. The ethnographic and
historical material has three parts. First, I offer an analysis of the cultural
idiom of illness as blocageand argue that contemporary dancers in
Aix-en-Provence experience their work as a form of healing or
dÈblocage. Next, I show how two historical and political events
in France led to the promotion of dance as a means of social reform: (1) the
Situationist art movement of the 1960s and its idea of
‘awakening’ society through public art; and (2) the renovation
of the French Ministry of Culture in 1982 and its subsequent promotion of
contemporary dance in state-funded community outreach projects in the 1980s.
Finally, drawing on rich narratives from fieldwork interviews, I define awareness,
expression and presence as the primary technical elements of contemporary dance in
Aix-en-Provence, France, in 2002, and explain their relationship to the notion of
‘dance as l'intervention’ that has grown out
of the historical context of contemporary dance in France. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 ObjectType-Article-2 ObjectType-Feature-1 |
ISSN: | 1357-034X 1460-3632 |
DOI: | 10.1177/1357034X05058023 |