In the spring of 2017, I invited the authors named above to present a short paper celebrating Mark Franko's lengthy editorship of Dance Research Journal (DRJ) from January 1, 2009 to December 31, 2016. His editorship period also involved managing the transition of the journal from the University of Illinois Press, which had published DRJ for many years, to Cambridge University Press (CUP) in 2011 and the expansion of the journal from two to three issues a year starting in 2012; throughout Mark maintained a clear editorial strategy of internationalizing the themes and articles in the journal. Rather than simply pointing out Mark's successes such as these, I asked the first four speakers to run with a theme or themes that they considered important to Mark's editorship, and that perhaps related to their own research interests and expertise. Given the highly successful shift to CUP, it seemed pertinent to ask the current CUP editor, Holly Buttimore, to consider Mark's contribution to the development of DRJ from the publisher's perspective. What follows are the papers presented by the panel members to honor Mark Franko's editorship at the Ohio conference on October 20, 2017. There has been minimal editing and tweaking of the papers, and I have taken the liberty (with the presenters’ agreement) to reorder the presentations from the order in which they were originally given, as they seem to flow better, historically and theoretically, from a reader's viewpoint. In order not to disrupt the flow, the references appear at the end of the panel discussions in the Works Cited section.
Introduction
Mark Franko's “Repeatability, Reconstruction and Beyond” (Reference Franko1989), which later became the epilogue for his seminal book Dance as Text (Reference Franko1993), begins with a discussion of Susanne Linke's 1988 reconstruction of Dore Hoyer's Affectos Humanos (1962). As Franko notes, Linke began the performance by walking to a costume rack placed onstage, where she methodically put on Hoyer's costume. “At the outset,” writes Franko, “she established a distance between herself as reconstructor and the artist whose work was to be reconstructed. Indeed, each of the dance's four parts was punctuated by a similar meditative interval in which Linke disrobed and recostumed herself” (Franko Reference Franko1993, 131). According to Franko, this distancing was precisely what allowed Linke's reconstruction to become something other than a mere simulation of the original. As Franko noted at the time, “such effects of distancing [were] rare in reconstructions of historical dance” (131). So, too, was the idea of reconstructing a work of a predecessor among contemporary choreographers.
Of course, such projects are no longer rare. Franko's editorship of Dance Research Journal (2009–2016) coincided with a renewed interest in dances of the past among contemporary choreographers and theorists. As André Lepecki notes in his essay, “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-enact and the Afterlives of Dances,” which was published under Franko's editorship in the Winter 2010 issue of DRJ, “turning and returning to all those tracks and steps and bodies and gestures and sweat and images and words and sounds performed by past dancers paradoxically becomes one of the most significant marks of contemporary experimental choreography” (Lepecki Reference Lepecki2010, 29).
This talk reflects on some of the important ways in which, as editor of Dance Research Journal, Franko framed and encouraged a diverse constellation of artists and scholars to develop ideas about contemporary reenactment. Ever eager to open dance studies to broader humanist inquiry, to engage in rigorous debate, to consider a dancer's knowledge, and to recognize dancing as a theoretical act, Franko never seemed to “claim” theories of reenactment as his alone. Rather, as editor, he generously invited more of us into the discussion, linking contemporary reenactment and reconstruction with notions of historicity, authorship, choreographic identity, the score, and the archive.
So: What Might a Dancer Have to Say About ReEnactment?
Throughout the eighties and nineties, Franko explored alternatives to conventional reconstructions of historical dance not only through writing, but also through his performance and choreographic work with the company NovAntiqua. As Franko notes in the preface to the Reference Franko2015 revised edition of Dance as Text, at the time of its initial publication, as a choreographer, he had been resisting the outcomes of conventional dance reconstruction, which tended to rely exclusively on the interpretation of dance treatises and dance notation rather than on embracing an interdisciplinary approach to the past. Franko explains,
At this time I was reacting against the outcomes of its methodology, which, in the area of historical dance, was carried out chiefly by musicologists rather than dancers or choreographers. Their assumption seemed to be that nothing significant about movement could escape capture by textual signification, that there was no surplus corporeality that evaded documentation. (2015, xviii)
Of course, dancers know otherwise, and in the Winter 2009 issue of DRJ, Franko introduced a new feature called “A Dancer Writes.” In that issue, readers were invited to consider the long and complex performance history of Yvonne Rainer's canonical dance Trio A, narrated by Rainer herself. Although Rainer initially gave tacit permission to anyone who wanted to teach the dance, eventually, in the work's fourth or fifth generation, she “finally met a Trio A [she] didn't like” (Rainer Reference Rainer2009, 16). But this was not an easy thing to acknowledge, especially given the tropes of democracy and openness that surround the work. Rainer continues:
In the spirit of the 1960s a part of me would like to say, “Let it go.” Why try to cast it in stone? Why am I now so finicky and fastidious, so critical of my own performance, so autocratic about the details—the hands go this way, not that way, the gaze here, not there, the feet at this angle, not that? In the last decade, I have become far more rigorous—some might call it obsessive—not only with respect to the qualifications of those whom I allow to teach the dance but in my own transmission of its peculiarities. (17)
In addition to Rainer's essay, the inaugural issue of “A Dancer Writes” also includes writings by Ramsay Burt and Jens Giersdorf as well as reflections on Trio A from Pat Catterson, who has performed and taught the work for over forty years. Recalling her first experience dancing Trio A in 1969 at the American Dance Festival, Catterson writes, “The night of the show, as I walked out of Crozier-Williams West Gym, where we had performed, I stopped in my tracks, thinking about what I had experienced, and privately vowed to myself that I would never forget this dance. … . I never wanted to let it escape my body's memory” (Catterson Reference Catterson2009, 6).
ReEnactment: The Archive
In some ways, Lepecki's Reference Lepecki2010 essay, “The Body as Archive” picks up where Rainer and Catterson left off. Through a careful consideration of works by Julie Tolentino, Martin Nachbar, and Richard Move, Lepecki posits the notion of the body itself as an archive and of dancing as acts of archiving. As Franko writes in his “Editor's Note,” “Rather than leading to deathly reconstruction, … this bold move points instead to a choreographic afterlife central to contemporary creativity” (Franko Reference Franko2010a, vi).
This choreographic afterlife poses a challenge to rigid authorial control, a glimpse of which can be detected in Rainer's newfound fastidiousness regarding the transmission of Trio A, and moves theories of reenactment away from old debates regarding authenticity toward questions of the archive. As Lepecki puts it:
Re-enactments transform all authored objects into fugitives in their own home. The paradox is that re-enactments, because they seem to return somehow to a past and an origin, need to bypass the arresting force of authorial authority. … Thus the political-ethical imperative for re-enactments not only to reinvent, not only to point out that the present is different from the past, but to invent, to create—because of returning—something that is new and yet participates fully in the virtual cloud surrounding the originating work itself—while bypassing an author's wishes as last words over a work's destiny. (Lepecki Reference Lepecki2010, 33)
Choreographic Identity
To be sure, a rigorous consideration of reenactment or reconstruction in dance inevitably entails questions about who is authorized to perform which dances where? It is a testament to Franko's work as editor that readers of DRJ get to wrestle with the likes of both Rainer and Lepecki. Furthermore, through the work of writers like Anthea Kraut, DRJ has offered ways to think through questions of authorial control and its linkages with property and the privileges of possessive individualism. In “White Womanhood, Property Rights, and the Campaign for Choreographic Copyright: Loie Fuller's Serpentine Dance,” published in the summer of Reference Kraut2011, Kraut recounts Fuller's quest to gain legal ownership of her dance through legal copyright, underscoring the ways in which ownership in dance has been inextricable from restrictions of race and gender. Kraut's article appeared as part of a collection of essays that, as Franko notes: “question the ambiguities of choreographic identity” (Franko Reference Franko2011, v). These contributions include Yvonne Hardt's consideration of the “research” that choreographers such as Jerome Bel and Eszther Salamon perform on stage. As Franko points out, “We are now witnessing versions of past dances as amplification, reenactments, and ‘lectures’” (v). Along these lines, Fabian Barba, yet another “dancer who writes,” shares his process of embodied research and his approach to staging his reenactments of Mary Wigman's solo work from the early 1930s.
Revaluing the Score: Archival Futurity
Given the extent to which recent reenactments have entailed dancers staging their research through a complex interaction with historical documents including film, photographs, texts, and oral history, it's fitting that DRJ would be a place to radically reconsider understandings of a score and its performative potential. In another version of “A Dancer Writes,” we return to Dore Hoyer's Affectos Humanos, this time through the Berlin-based performer and choreographer Martin Nachbar, who first encountered Hoyer's work through a video of a black-and-white film of her cycle of solo dances. In “Training Remembering,” Nachbar lovingly recounts his experience studying with an eighty-four-year-old woman, Waltraud Luley, who had been a close friend of Hoyer's and had become a kind of custodian of Affectos Humanos. Nachbar writes with humor and humility about his attempts to perform the solo “Hate.” He recalls:
We worked on the beginning of the dance ‘Hate,’ which works with a refined coordination of high tensions running through the arms and shoulders. But I, at the time mostly trained in the above-mentioned release techniques and contact improvisation, did it rather softly, almost sloppily. Luley sprang out of her chair and yelled: “Mister Nachbar, this is hate! The whole body is a cramp!” So I put myself into a state of rather unrefined, yet high body tension, only forgetting my little fingers. Waltraud Luley reacted immediately: “The small fingers, Mister Nachbar, the small fingers!” (Nachbar 2012a, 8)
Although one can laugh at the thought of this scene of pointed correction, Nachbar was engaged in sincere and meaningful study. After all, it's between bodies that so much of dance happens. And, actually, it is through trying to learn Hoyer's dance that the historical distance between Hoyer and Nachbar emerges with texture and detail. Nachbar stages this distance in his work in a way that is not so dissimilar from the distance Franko theorized upon watching Susanne Linke changing in and out of Hoyer's costumes in the late eighties. For Dance Research Journal, Franko brilliantly pairs Nachbar's writing with an essay by Maaike Bleeker, who draws from Robin Collingwood's Philosophy of History and Alva Noe's Action in Perception as well as theories of musical “covers” to theorize reenactment as a process of sharing thought. As Franko notes, for Bleeker, “the tendency within re-enactment to avoid impersonation of an earlier artist is grounded in a decision to differentiate between who thinks and what is thought” (Franko Reference Franko2012a, 1).
In trying to track a single thread of discussion that developed under Franko's editorship of Dance Research Journal, there is undoubtedly much that I have overlooked or oversimplified. But it was a delight to go back through these pages. The “Editor's Notes” are where one encounters Franko's vision most directly. But one can sense his generosity and commitment to dance studies on every page of every issue. They exist in the curation of articles, the interdisciplinary body of literature that is engaged, the seriousness with which dance is considered, and the precision of prose. It's not surprising that so many of the articles published in the DRJ have become chapters or case studies in well-regarded books. If Dance as Text invited readers to imagine lively historical performance as well as dance theory, Franko's inspired work as editor of Dance Research Journal has gone a long way in actualizing that promise.
I have known Mark since 2001 when we met each other at the SDHS/CORD (Society of Dance History Scholars/ Congress on Research in Dance) multiorganizational megaconference in Washington, D.C. I had recently completed graduate school and landed a job as an assistant professor at the University of Iowa; Mark was an established scholar. During Mark's panel, as any young scholar might want to do, I made some provocative comments to engage him in conversation, and after that we established an on-and-off scholarly correspondence, given our common interest in midcentury modern dance in the United States and especially in the work of choreographer Martha Graham.
As the new hire in a dance history and theory department full of active choreographers, I was in need of some scholarly mentoring in order to turn my American studies dissertation into a book. Mark offered to read a chapter-length essay from this project, and I jumped at the chance for his “feedback.” As this panel is organized to pay tribute to Mark's work as editor of Dance Research Journal, it seems apt to begin with a personal anecdote that puts his editorial acumen on full display.
The excerpts I am about to share are drawn from my first serious editorial correspondence with Mark in 2004.
September 5, 2004
Dear Rebekah:
“I enjoyed reading your piece, and since you asked for ‘feedback,’ here goes: ‘Visible Difference’ covers the same ground as the last piece I read of yours, but has a different historical context going back to Graham and Limon. … By and large I think, of course, that you are right in the broad lines of the argument. My problem is more in the detail and the way your micro-moves support or do not support the overarching argument. … To be perfectly frank, although the argument is certainly well founded and ‘right,’ the essay seems to me weak. I think this has to do with the construction of the essay itself. There is not enough rigor in what you choose to demonstrate, and how from the dances themselves, and the interdisciplinary materials, although very well cited, draw forth arguments that are surprisingly simple. There is not a compelling ‘twist’ to gel the interdisciplinary perspective and create a new ‘object.’ …[2 pages later]”
Warm wishes and stay in touch, Mark
September 17, 2004
Dear Mark,
Sorry not to have responded sooner. I've had a busy couple of weeks. … Now I have a chance to reflect on what you've said. I want to thank you for this very careful reading of my work, and for your insightful comments. I have to admit that I bristled at some of them, but this is to be expected given their incisiveness. Many of your points are well-taken, especially those aimed at helping me clarify the parts of my argument that are blurry, jumbled or not substantiated. … [4 pages later] I don't want my work to seem simple or obvious in the sense of seeming insignificant. However I do hope that I can present things in such a way as to seem justified in my challenging many received versions of this era in modern dance. … Thanks for reading my article and for considering my intentions as well as their inherent problems and pitfalls. This letter has really helped me to clarify my thinking about what I'm doing. I am grateful for your interest in my work, and for your thoughtfulness about it. Our correspondence has provided an impetus for its articulation.
Sincerely, Rebekah
Returning to my archive and finding this humbling correspondence has me wondering how I ever got here, on this panel, among colleagues whose work I find truly inspiring, and paying tribute to Mark Franko, who has been a model for us all.
But since I am here, I would like to consider what Mark's and my correspondence reveals about Mark's approach as an editor as that is what we are here to celebrate. Blunt comes to mind. But there is more to it than that. As I read our exchange again and think about its impact on my thinking, I am struck by Mark's investment in my methodology—the ways I was bringing my source material to bear on the formulation of my arguments and the “micro-moves” I was or was not making in support of my claims. Mark was also not afraid to push me to be more ambitious about my intervention—to work more rigorously to discover a “twist” in my approach that would lead to the creation a new “object” that would move beyond a rehashing of precedents. Mark's attention to detail, his erudition and voluminous mental catalog, his commitment to advancing the field of dance studies, and his sometimes brutal but also nurturing honesty: these are features of Mark's work as an editor that make his scholarly research so comprehensive and compelling.
The conversation Mark and I began in 2004 about my research and about methodology in dance historiography and best practices therein continued. At various stages in the preparation of my book manuscript, How to Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America, Mark underlined the importance of letting archival materials speak for themselves—not predetermining the outcome of archival research or imposing an a priori argument on materials. This advice has served me well, and although I cannot claim ever to be perfect on this count, Mark set an aspirational standard that has fueled my research for some time now. As a sign of how our relationship has evolved, Mark will be editing my new book project in his Studies in Dance Theory series for Oxford UP.
In the time I have remaining, I would like to attend to Mark's investment in scholarship as a mode of creative practice: a way of leveraging the “being” in the work with respect both to the scholar and to subject matter.
In the introduction to their edited collection Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines” (2000), Mark Franko and Annette Richards contemplate the possibility of “actualizing absence” in the historiography of performance. They contend that “performances are always in a state of appearing and vanishing … they are immediate yet quickly becoming historical” (1). Here Franko and Richards envision an approach to historical study in which the “historian's interpretation becomes the prosthesis of an imaginary performance practice” (1, emphasis mine).
In such an approach, the historian's faculties of mind and body play an integral role in finding connections, in their words, “between present and past, one in which archive and act, fragment and body, text and sounding, subject and practice, work in provocative interaction” (1). In this light, scholarship becomes a creative practice committed both to rendering and to making meaning of what happens/what has happened.
Mark Franko, in this case in partnership with Richards, was certainly not the first or the only proponent of corporeal-centered historical research (see for example Foster Reference Foster1995, Reference Foster1996), nor was this the first time he had articulated ideas of this nature For example, Franko has an essay in Foster's Reference Foster1996 edited collection entitled: “History/Theory—Criticism/Practice,” in which, writing an essay as a palimpsest, he seeks to rectify the “artificial split between history and theory which is only now beginning to be recuperated by dance studies” (28). Yet, Franko has been one of the field's foremost advocates and innovators in this vein, as demonstrated in the methodologies he has developed in undertaking myriad projects and in his contribution to the production of knowledge in Dance Studies in these terms.
I had reason to examine Mark's methodology in this respect closely when fellow panelist Gay Morris, who was serving as book review editor for DRJ at the time, asked me to write a review of Mark's book, Martha Graham in Love and War: The Life in the Work, published in 2012 (Franko Reference Franko2012b). Needless to say, I was seriously terrified, thinking who in their right mind would review a book written by the editor of the journal in which the review would be published.
Accepting the assignment as a challenge, I felt greatly relieved when I realized as I was reading that I really liked the book. My review recognized many of the book's accomplishments, namely, its focus on Graham's life in years from 1938 to 1953, a period Mark calls her “most productive,” for its reveal[ing of] the interrelationships and intersections between Graham's life experiences and her art making during and after World War II (quoting myself from the article). I find that his careful reading and analysis adds personal, intellectual, and psychological dimensions to our understanding of the artist and reacquaints us with her seeking and sentient sides.
Thinking again about the book and its core contentions for the purpose of this tribute, I am drawn to Mark's subtitle, The Life in the Work, and what it implies about the intimate connections between Mark's methodology as a mode of discovery and what his approach ultimately reveals about his subject matter.
Franko dedicates the book to “rehumanizing” Graham and “breathing life into her memory.” He goes further than precedents in investigating the personal and psychosocial aspects of Graham's relationship with her own image and its hold on her imagination. To bring us closer to Graham's being, Franko delves into the then newly available archival treasure trove at the Library of Congress of 350,000 items and included excerpts of interviews with former Graham Company dancers, many of which he conducted himself. In engaging these sources, Franko transports readers into Graham's experiences of being in the world through accounts of the ways she engaged in creative thinking and making (not only in choreographic and dance practices, but also through feeling, reading, writing, and in the context of significant relationships). As he puts it: “I situate the life in the work as the life of the work. This life, like most lives, is both personal and political” (2012b, 5). Franko imagines an afterlife for Graham's dances through embodied research that allows him to “rediscover,” for himself and for readers, dances that had disappeared.
Mark's book on Graham (Reference Franko2012b) reworks ideas from his 1989 essay, “Repeatability, Reconstruction and Beyond,” in which he theorized that the reconstruction of historical dances was not, as is commonly thought, an act of reproducing an extant work. Instead, it involves “reinventing” the original for contemporary purposes, thus engaging in embodied “cultural critique” and “foster[ing] new creativity” (Franko Reference Franko2012b, 73). In many ways, Martha Graham in Love and War carries out these ideas about reenactment to their eventual conclusion, as an approach to scholarly research that enlists the corporeal imagination of author and reader toward the creation of a new “object” from materials shared in common.
In one of his earliest issues of Dance Research Journal, published in summer Reference Franko2010, entitled “States of the Body,” Mark considers these ideas again with respect to the articles he had curated for publication. As only Mark could, through Benedict Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, and Barbara Browning he asks: “What can a body do?” And further: What is the “place of the body in dance scholarship?” “How do matters of the body and embodiment, feeling and doing, inform research concerns?” Mark answers: “Across the board, the bodies imagined here integrate mind and matter, affect and imagination” (2010, vi).
Mark's inquiry challenges us to consider how the scholar's experience of being in the world informs an interpretation of being in the past. In other words, in conceiving dance research as a creative act, Mark brings us back to aspects of embodiment—mind and matter, affect and imagination—which are capacities of being in the world that can be cultivated to live better in the present and also to “quicken” our recollection of the past.
In my brief contribution to our gathering, I would like to approach Mark's relationship to “writing dancing”— to evoke the title of chapter 1 of his groundbreaking book, Dance as Text: ideologies of the Baroque Body (Reference Franko1993). The rearticulation of the constitutive relationship between writing and dancing in Western choreographic tradition is one that has informed Mark's work since his very first book, The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography (Reference Franko1986). Franko's approach to that relation, which is simultaneously historical, critical, theoretical, political, and aesthetic, has fundamentally reshaped the relationship between dance and (its) theory.
In a sense, this reshaped relation is also another way of reconceiving choreography by expanding its notion from the aesthetic dimension into the dimension of theory. Mark reconceived the assemblage between writing and dancing through his meticulous hermeneutic and technical analyses of dance manuals, which he then furthered thanks to his own knowledge, as a dancer, of the techniques described in them—whether those techniques were baroque, or modern. In doing so, Mark advanced a powerful hypothesis, which derived directly from his careful exegetical empiricism: dance's relationship to theory is not an extrinsic and forced relation, one that is artificially forged by suspiciously bookish scholars and inserted into dance from the outside; rather, the relation of dance and theory is immanent to any choreographic practice, and it manifests itself through the embodiment of dance techniques. Consequently, theory is immanent to the invention of dance techniques, but theory also names that force leading dance toward an autonomous art form within the aesthetic regime of the arts.
It is worthwhile quoting Mark's extraordinary first book, the already mentioned The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography (Reference Franko1986), a book whose richness is still to be fully explored by dance history and dance theory, particularly given how its ambitious methodological project remains a powerful template not only to address its explicit object of analysis (i.e., Renaissance dance manuals), but all sorts of live performances, including and most notably contemporary live performances—in our time when what Catherine Chaput (Reference Chaput2010) calls neoliberal epideitic is coursing through the veins of contemporary subjectivity in a strange historical return of its rhetorical-political function.
In that book, Mark wrote the following, in the introduction:
I should clarify immediately that by theory I do not mean that practical theory involved in the identification of a dance form or type by the limitations it imposes on the interpretation of a step, in the underlying order of the “mesures” (patterns of step groups) or in the breaking down of individual steps into a movement analysis. Nor do I mean by theory the universal key to step notation within a dance type. All dance manuals, to a greater or lesser degree, include this kind of theory whose concept is borrowed from and relies heavily on musical disciplines. The theory I am concerned with, on the contrary, is a theoretical one related to the aesthetic of step execution: a systematic and generalizable perspective on movement quality within choreographic descriptions. (Reference Franko1986, 4)
It will be Mark's task, in his next book, Dance as Text (Reference Franko1993), and later in his two important books on 1930s dance, Dancing Modernism/ Performing Politics (Reference Franko1995) and The Work of Dance (Reference Franko2002), to identify the operations of this theoretical theory of “step execution” not only in choreographic descriptions—in performance photographs, techniques, dance reviews, and choreographer's books and interviews—but also in choreographic inscriptions as these are described by Mark as “the living expression of dancing's theory,” and “as the technical labor of the dancer” (Franko Reference Franko, Franko and Richards2000, 37). Inscription is the cooperator that binds a practical theory of choreography with a theoretical theory of dancing. This is precisely Mark's project of “see[ing] theory at work in the body” (Franko Reference Franko, Franko and Richards2000, 37).
For me, this project of looking for the work of theory in the dancer's body at work has the profound merit to bypass the always too harsh dichotomies established between body and theory, but also between those artificial barriers dividing writing dance and experiencing dance, witnessing dance and performing dance. The identification of a theoretical theory immanent to the dancing of dance deeply marked (and here, the pun is intended!) Mark's editorial approach to Dance Research Journal.
There is another aspect to Mark's dance scholarship that every single writer who has had the privilege of working with him as an editor knows quite well, one that also expresses Mark's approach to the labor of editing that he brought to DRJ during his tenure as its editor in chief. I witnessed his signature trait in editing when Mark and I worked together on the DRJ special issue dedicated to “Dance in the Museum” (Reference Franko and Lepecki2014, 3). What is this approach? For me, it derives from yet another highly productive gift to dance studies that Mark offers as one of the main methodological premises articulated in his Renaissance dance book (Reference Franko1986). It is the notion that dance—by its very nature as a quasi-total social fact, as a quasi-total transsemiotic fact, and as a quasi-total bodily fact—requires for its analysis a radical intertextual approach. But how does Mark inflect the notion of the intertextual, which in that book he derives from the semiology of Michel Riffaterre? He does this by adding to it a kind of “wild” force, or uncontrollable impetus, a momentum coming from the comobilization that seeing dance provokes on the viewer and of the comobilization that reading and writing provoke on the scholar.
Taking up Riffaterre's notion that meaning is neither in the text nor in the intertext but is rather found in the dynamic space that the writer navigates between the two, Franko pushes analytical writing into an essential drifting whose task remains that of rigorously understanding movement as that fundamentally excessive element, whose excess precisely must inform any theoretical approach to its immanent, moving surplus. Thus, that common experience we have when returning to a text we thought was “ours” after that text has passed through Mark's careful, dynamic, intense and, yes, always kind of wild reading of it. Mark's edits demand (almost as in an ethical imperative) that the writer step out of his or her comfort zones of habitual perceptual, historical, or methodological clichés and enter into the turbulent comobility of the theoretical zones that movement is always informed by and that movement also constantly invents. For Mark, it is because movement invents more theoretical movements outside of the bounds of expected perceptions that a dance writer must have the utmost linguistic agility.
Mark's singular epistemological/methodological approach—to recap: (a) to see theory at work in the body, (b) to see that work of theory as immanent to dance, and (c) to see that dance theory is theoretical theory that is both incorporated and excorporated by dancing—has led to a renewed understanding of scholarly work in dance and performance studies as one being inextricably bound to the imperative that a dance theorist must dare to initiate something new out of all the dimensions and forces that converge in the creation of a dance event. Historically, in Dance Studies, the dimensions deemed to pertain to the dance event had been reduced almost exclusively or hegemonically to the visual. We know how Dance Studies and dance criticism have been historically attached to a long love affair with the scopic. Under this regime, the task of the dance scholar was to give an account of whatever in dance is present-as-visible: forgetting that there is no ontological, aesthetic, ethical, political, sensorial, or epistemological link between presence and visibility.
As a young student of Mark when he was a visiting professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University in 1993/4, I witnessed firsthand how Mark's insistence on the materiality and relevance of invisible facts in dancing (i.e., ideological facts, historical facts, rhetorical facts, theoretical facts, political facts) challenged the optical-centric and immediatist approach to dance scholarship advocated by scholars such as Marcia Siegel. I remember in particular a public debate between Mark and Marcia conducted in performance studies, where the tensions and dissents between the two kinds of projects for dance scholarship were masterfully set forth by both scholars to an attentive audience of faculty and graduate students riveted by the passion and knowledge of both speakers. Dance Studies was hinging then, taking a new swerve, one marked by Mark's particular historical materialism, one attending to invisibles forces and absent presences shaping and moving choreography's history.
Mark insists (and once again I think this is very clear to any of us who have had our writings edited by Mark) that Dance Studies must patiently, cogently, attentively, and rigorously expand its range of attentiveness as a transdiscipline and thus identify, in the dance itself, other presences, other invisible yet present matters in motion, that include historical ones, political ones, ideological ones, literary ones, affective ones. In and through these matters choreographic imagination also performs its materiality—it reveals dance as an event always occurring beyond, below, and beside the visible.
This true redistribution of the sensible (to use the conventional English translation of Jacques Rancière's notion of “partage du sensible,” a translation, by the way, which I remember hearing Mark once losing his temper about in a conference in Germany in 2010) that Mark has offered to Dance Studies throughout his entire academic life is also his legacy to Dance Research Journal. Let me conclude with a final example. I would like to end by sharing a recent personal experience of how Mark's search for the event of theory in dance, which to a certain extent is his own way of believing in the event of thought emerging in all sorts of forms outside cliché images of what thinking should look like and move like, manifested itself in his work as DRJ’s editor.
As I mentioned earlier, I had the privilege to work closely with Mark when we coedited the special issue “Dance in the Museum.” For that issue, Mark and I cowrote the introductory editors’ note. Mark asked me to give it the first stab, which I did. I wrote a first draft and e-mailed it to him. A few days later I received Mark's additions, deletions, and modulations on what I had sent to him. Toward the end of the note, I had originally written the following:
In this vein, two projects stand out quite powerfully. One, initiated by an invitation from Laurence Rassel, chief curator at Fundacion Tapiès in Barcelona, is the exhibition Retrospective, on the work of French choreographer Xavier LeRoy. This remarkable exhibition, conceived and choreographed meticulously by LeRoy himself, rearticulates the whole choreographic protocol, since here, it is clearly the dancer who emerges as archival agent of Le Roy's body of work—and yet, an archive understood as a dynamic system of formations and transformations of statements, much as Foucault (1972) defined it. Performed in Barcelona, Spain (2012); Salvador, Brazil (2013); Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2013); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2014); and MoMA-PS1, Retrospective reworks an understanding of choreography in the sense that each and every one of its instantiations is deeply singular (its dancing) while the whole structure remains rigorously in place (its choreography). Retrospective points to another key aspect of dance's presence in the museal world: its own status as virtual museum to which the work of Boris Charmatz testifies as well.
In other words: a bunch of names, some titles, and a bunch of dates. And then, we have what Mark wrote back to me, which ended up being published without any change. Mark had added to what I thought was a kind of okay ending for our “Note” just four sentences. See how a paragraph that had been nothing more than a serial presentation of choreographers, performances, and dates of their opening nights endures an unexpected turn under Mark's project of identifying in all expressive dimensions of the world a theoretical theory that is not the artificial imposition on the world of prefabricated narratives, but the identification in the world of a real moving aspect inherent in the phenomenon at hand. To my descriptive lines, Mark added four sentences, thus inscribing a dizzying theorization of the relations between dance, archive, and museum. For me, Mark's rewriting of the original paragraph is a compact manifesto for an archival theory yet to come:
Dance becomes museal when it highlights and accumulates evidence of its relation to the historical past: to the past of art, as well as to its own past. Hence, beyond the phenomenon of the site specific through which dance might emancipate itself from the stage, there is the specificity of the museum as more than just another site, but as a properly archival site that should also be taken into consideration. As an archival site, the museum inspires dance to emulate the artifactual quality of the archive while also trans-forming it—and itself—into a new version of the act. It is this unstable shifting between settings and set-ups that a number of the articles in this issue explore. (Franko and Lepecki Reference Franko and Lepecki2014, 3)
I would just add, that those articles only explored those transformative dimensions of dance in the museum and the museum in dance after being marked by Mark's keen editorial critical moving and his always slightly wild, slightly dancerly, and always generously shared, theoretical sensibility.
Introduction
It is a great pleasure to be part of this panel honoring Mark Franko. Mark has not only made major contributions to dance through his writing and choreography, but as editor of Dance Research Journal, he also took the publication to a new international level. Mark and I have been friends and colleagues since the early 1990s when he agreed to contribute to Moving Words, Rewriting Dance (Morris Reference Morris1996). Since then we have worked together on a variety of projects and met often to talk and exchange ideas. Most important in the context of this panel, Mark and I worked together from 2009 through 2015 when he was the editor of DRJ and I was the reviews editor. During that time, Mark positioned the journal at the center of the field's most pressing issues, bringing to readers views and discussion from across the globe on topics vital to Dance Studies. These included questions surrounding dance in the museum, which have continued to gain importance as visual art institutions increasingly commission and produce dance performances. In December 2014, as discussed before, Mark and André Lepecki coedited a special edition of Dance Research Journal devoted to dance in the museum. In our many conversations, Mark and I also returned often to this subject. The following paper was inspired by our talks and by DRJ's museum edition.
The Museum Workout
Over the past decade, museums have rushed to add dance to their programming, and as a result, debates have arisen on a number of issues concerning dance in the museum. The major question, put succinctly, is: What does dance have to gain by moving into institutions whose aim is to collect and display objects? Does dance find opportunities to reimagine itself in new spaces, or does it simply become part of the museum economy, collected and exhibited as a living, time-based art? The answers to these questions are complex and depend much on the museum and dance involved. However, Monica Bill Barnes & Company provided one answer in an event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York entitled The Museum Workout.Footnote 1 The workout was initially scheduled to be performed sixteen times in January 2017. It was then extended several times and finally continued through December, a year from the date it started. Here is a description of the workout I participated in during February 2017.
At 8:45 a.m., before the museum opened, Barnes and her dance partner, Anna Bass, met a group of about a dozen participants in a room off the main lobby of the museum. Wearing sequined dresses and running shoes, they were there to lead the workout. “Workout,” however, is a misleading word because although the vocabulary of steps might have been taken from the gym and parcourse, the nearly one-hour piece was meticulously choreographed and proceeded, without a break, over an intricately routed two miles of the museum's corridors and galleries. So, the workout was truly a dance, and the participants, dancers.
With Barnes and Bass at the head of the group, we started by jogging through several large galleries, pausing to jog in place before such works as Antonio Canova's marble Perseus with the Head of Medusa, then jogging on to perform modified jumping jacks at several sites, including Franz Xavier Messerschmidt's bizarre metal bust of A Hypocrite and a Slanderer. We continued weaving through galleries and up and down stairs, speed walking much of the time, then stopping before various works to perform aerobic and stretching movements. Joining us on the journey was the company's producing director, Robert Saenz de Vitaeri, who carried a portable recorder that played disco and Motown hits, including “Staying Alive,” which seemed particularly appropriate by the third jumping jack sequence.
Barnes created the workout with her permanent collaborators, Bass and de Vitaeri, who normally make artistic decisions together. In this instance they also brought onto the team writer and illustrator Maira Kalman. Kalman has produced many books and is also known for her articles and cover illustrations for The New Yorker. Kalman chose the objects to be visited during the workout. There were about a dozen of these, and we stopped in front of each for several minutes. Six we visited twice, but the route was so disorienting we never knew exactly where we were at any given moment, so it was a surprise to come upon a work we had seen twenty minutes before, now approached from a new direction and consequently looking just a little different.
As crucial to the project as Kalman's choice of works were her recorded comments, which alternated with the pop music. They dealt primarily with how the act of looking at art makes her think and feel. She said nothing about the art itself, none of the anonymous bullying usually found in museum commentary, which instructs people on the supposed meaning of the painting or sculpture and how they are expected to respond to it. We were free to use our own thoughts and imaginations and to respond accordingly.
Kalman's commentary was recorded from parts of an informal conversation she had had with the Barnes team. Here is an example:
When I'm in a museum I often feel like I'm having some kind of hallucination. It's like a waking dream, or a walking dream, and parts of my brain are released in a way I didn't expect or anticipate, and I wonder, what is it we're looking for in a museum, and when do we start needing it—the idea that we're just walking through these places looking for honesty and truth and inspiration—so when I'm looking at works of art, in a way I think of them as guardian angels that are there to protect me, that are there to give me a sense of connectedness and a sense of purpose—so I can go on my way. Footnote 2
These were the kinds of comments that played as we walked or jogged along. Kalman's remarks constantly reinforced the relationship between the body and the museum that we were experiencing through the dance, a v relationship that is dynamic even if we are not normally aware of it. That, for me, was one of the most enlightening lessons of the event.
I must say that during the first part of the workout I was so concerned with the choreography and the speed with which we were moving, I was not concentrating much on the art, but, as I said, the route took us past some works twice, and as we continued there seemed to be increasing time to look more closely at the objects and the spaces around us. (As it turned out, this deceleration was built into the choreography.) There was also something thrilling about being in the vast rooms of the museum with only a few security guards and an occasional staff person in sight. It felt expansive and empowering.
There are two ways in which dance is most commonly presented in the museum. First, it is seen in a place specifically set aside for performances, either an actual theater within the museum or a designated room or area (the ubiquitous white cube). Second, dance is presented in the galleries and other public spaces of the museum. Performances may take place in the evening when the museum is closed, but often they are presented during opening hours with crowds moving around the dancers, either trying to see them or trying to view the paintings and sculpture that the dancers obscure.
The Barnes event was quite different. There were no spectators; everyone there was a participant. Because it occurred when the building was closed, the dance was able to take over the space. It was as if the museum were ours as we jogged, strode, and pranced through the galleries, stopping to execute wide, squatting pliés beneath John Singer Sargent's painting of Madame X or doing quad stretches before Henry VIII's monumental suit of armor. Our bodies cut their own patterns in the museum spaces as we flowed around a bronze Diana, zigzagged through a room of Roman marbles, lined up before a disquieting masked figure from New Guinea, or encircled a medieval saint.
The choreography was simple enough for most anyone to do. It did not call for virtuosity or anything more than a vague familiarity with what goes on in an exercise class. It was not choreography for viewing; it was choreography for doing. And since there was no audience, the dance did not lend itself to the form of a museum exhibition nor did the dance or dancers become objectified. The dancers did not disrupt the museum spaces or fit awkwardly into them, which sometimes happens. Rather, they streamed easily through the galleries or inhabited them on their own terms. (I like to think that twelve people doing squats beneath Madame X's averted gaze are inhabiting space on their own terms.) And this brings up another point: Barnes's well-documented sense of humor, which showed itself in a refusal to be overawed by the Met's magnificence. There is a touch of Duchampian cheekiness in doing aerobic exercises amidst artistic masterpieces.
But if the dance held its own in the august halls of the Metropolitan Museum, it also provided something for the Met. Kalman's sensitive commentary reminded the dancers of what is inspiring in visual art, why we look at it and return to certain works again and again. And in the process, it suggested the value of museums that preserve objects, even as the dance moves on.
There is one more point I would like to make. According to Limor Tomer, general manager of concerts and lectures at the Met, it is the museum's policy to require dance artists performing in its spaces to interact in some way with the collections. This may not be so much enlightened thinking as a holdover from a time when dance was thought of as less than the other arts. No matter its history, the policy has its advantages, as The Museum Workout attests. Most museums separate dance from the art on the walls, either isolating it in a space where no other art exists or placing it in galleries that have no particular relationship to the performance. While this may be seen as an attempt to give dance disciplinary autonomy, it means the museum's primary function is to provide a venue and little else. A performance at the Met calls for fresh thinking on the part of both the museum and the performers, resulting in a relationship that is, at least to a degree, collaborative. While this arrangement tends to produce increased commitment on both the performers’ and the museum's part, it also means that projects can take a good deal of time and energy to come to fruition. More than three years passed from the time the Met invited Monica Bill Barnes to create a work until The Museum Workout was ready to be performed. The process was complex, taking a combination of trust, cooperation, and compromise, which is not always easy. But judging by The Museum Workout, the Met's policy encourages a kind of inspired invention that would be hard to achieve in more conventional museum/dance relationships.
It is my great pleasure to be here, in such esteemed company, to celebrate the wonderful editor, colleague, and scholar—Mark Franko. My name is Holly Buttimore, and I am the commissoning editor at Cambridge University Press with responsibility for the journals’ program in music, theatre, and dance.
As many of you will be aware, Dance Research Journal, colloquially DRJ, began publishing with Cambridge University Press in 2012, continuing its illustrious history as the longest-running, peer-reviewed journal in the field of dance. My colleague Gillian Greenough was responsible for arranging the journal's transition to Cambridge, and not long afterwards I became Dance Research Journal’s in-house editor—a role that in dance production terms could perhaps be best described as somewhere between a minder, a runner, a roadie, and a choreographer's assistant. Mark, of course, being the choreographer.
I met Mark for the first time in London's West End in the summer of 2013, over a convivial dinner with Helen Thomas, then chair of the editorial board. I was, frankly, very nervous; I had only recently become an editor and was keenly aware of the many accomplishments of my dinner companions. Thankfully though both Mark and Helen turned out to be lovely and instantly put me at my ease—a characteristic of all great editors. During this dinner I was struck by Mark's generosity—with his time, with his expertise, with his passion for dance, for excellent scholarship and for learning. His dedication to ensuring Dance Research Journal published the best scholarship in dance was matched by his determination to make even the best, better. As we ate we discussed various pieces that had been published in the journal—upcoming articles, rising scholars, a translation program Mark wished to institute, and emerging areas in the discipline, all of which he was giving himself to without a thought for the rigors of his own schedule. Mark was always fiercely, but peacefully and kindly, ambitious for what DRJ could achieve and for how he, as editor, could make that happen. In this first meeting the three of us, together, discussed our many goals for the journal in the coming years:
How to ensure the journal is widely available and read internationally; how to attract and nurture the very best scholarship from around the world; how to drive forward the field of Dance Studies; how best to serve and represent CORD now of course DSA; the opportunities afforded by the move from two to three issues, and what more could be achieved for dance and for the journal.
Prior to its move to Cambridge, DRJ had been largely read and submitted to from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Mark sought to internationalize the journal, in terms of both readership and contributors, and has succeeded magnificently in this goal. Dance Research Journal now has over 2,000 institutional subscribers around the world—28 percent of those are in the Middle East and Africa, 20 percent are in Asia, 15 percent in Europe, 8 percent in South America. Cambridge also collaborates with key international aid schemes throughout the world and thanks to this, in addition to DRJ's subscribers, the journal is electronically freely available in many developing countries. Consequently, there has been an increase in international submissions, which has resulted in many excellent publications throughout the years of Mark's editorship.
On a related note, I would like to mention something that is not strictly on topic, but I know that Mark will forgive me, as this subject is close to his heart too. There is a charitable organization called AuthorAid, and they would love to hear from the people in this room. I wanted to take advantage of this captive audience to ask you, as they say in England, to do your bit. AuthorAid is a global network that provides support, mentoring, resources, and training for researchers in developing countries. Cambridge works with AuthorAid, and they are crying out for scholars at all stages of their careers to act as mentors. Please consider visiting their website to see what they do and help your colleagues around the world fully participate in the development of the field: http://www.authoraid.info/en/.
It has been a pleasure for me watching Dance Research Journal thrive these past four years, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the area of readership and the using of content. It is great for any journal to be available around the world, but what use is that if it is not being read? If it is not being downloaded, if it is not being cited? At Cambridge we track the usage of all our journals—visits to the homepage, reading of abstracts, reading of articles, downloading of articles, citations and Altmetrics, a new portmanteau to describe the tracking of an article's life on social media. We have been delighted to report that since December 2012, usage (an umbrella term for all the actions above) has more than doubled. DRJ's usage climbs higher still each year—in 2015 articles were downloaded on average 471 times a month. In 2017 so far, articles have been downloaded on average 780 times per month, showing a consistent growing interest in the journal's content year-on-year.
The growth of DRJ from two to three issues in 2013 was no small undertaking. While an expansion of this magnitude is always exciting to be a part of, it is a nerve-wracking time too, even from the sidelines. Mark handled it all with great serenity and aplomb and immediately set to work on the projects that this greater flexibility and page count would allow DRJ to encompass. Special issues and collaborations with guest editors suddenly became something the journal could accommodate without compromising the timeline between acceptance and publication of DRJ's regular submissions. DRJ has published many excellent special issues over the years, during my tenure most notably those on Randy Martin and Dance Studies, Indigenous Dance Today, Body Parts, and Dance in the Museum. We were delighted to be able to bring the special issue “Dance in the Museum” to a wider audience by ensuring that in addition to free access online for the year, print copies of the issue and promotional postcards filled London's Tate Modern when it became Boris Charmatz's Musée de la danse in May 2015. Mark coordinated all of this with admirable calm and energy and has always had an eye for the places that Dance Research Journal can go to reach and inspire a new audience.
Since that first dinner in London Mark and I have met to scheme and dream for the journal in some wonderful places. A lovely long lunch in the Ashmolean Museum, where he gave me some invaluable tips on feet muscles—I had been using mine all wrong for quite a while it seems. A wonderful and detailed board meeting, generously hosted by Gay Morris in her home in New York in 2014. A hurried corridor chat at the 2016 International Federation of Theatre Research conference in Stockholm, where Mark was serenely heading off to be part of a special panel on the Drottningholm Court Theatre, while I was trying to overcome my nervousness at having to make a 90-second speech in the Aula Magna. It was my pleasure to see Mark again in the Sullivant Building, Ohio State University, the day before this conference commenced, still serving the journal but now in a new role, that of editorial board member. The DRJ editorial baton has been passed into the capable hands of Helen Thomas, who has already demonstrated her level-headed talents during a smooth editorial transition and the publication of her first two issues. While I was, of course, sad to lose Mark as my choreographer, I am delighted to be working more closely with Helen and cannot wait to see the bright future of the DSA's journal flourish under her stewardship.
It has been my very great privilege to work with you Mark for these last four years, and I hope you can now enjoy a well-earned rest, knowing that your editorship enriched DRJ in ways beyond counting.
