Dancing, in the dark: Situating a discipline

In 1917, dance pedagogue Margaret H’Doubler launched the discipline of dance studies, blending embodied psychology with anatomical science to study how bodies move and create meaning through movement. Since then, the discipline has advanced highly productive historical, cultural, and critical perspectives. However, neglecting dance’s situatedness harbors the same analytic risks as extrapolating real-world results from empirical research conducted under reduced circumstances. Dancers perform within made worlds in which not only movement but also the visible and sonic environment are composed to engender affective valences through the production of perceptual accords and conflicts, emphasis and obscuration of action and detail, and cross-modal augmentation of sensory impact. Postdramatic staging of dance acutely highlights the situated nature of dance perception by departing from presentation of musically reflective dancing upon well-lit, open stages to instead offer performances that challenge the senses and, as a result, received expectations of the spectatorial experience.

Calling on theories of affordance design (Norman 1999, Hartson 2003, Still & Dark 2013) and interfacing with McKinney & Palmer’s notion of an “expanded scenography”, this paper will discuss choreography and staging in Limb’s Theorem, a 1990 work by choreographer William Forsythe in which darkness, blinding light, and auditory contrast play prominent roles. As I discuss, analysis of this and similar choreographies is necessarily contingent on consideration of the visuo-sonic environment within which they are performed. As such, this paper advocates a refocusing of the analytic lens of dance studies through recognition of the impact potentials of the choreographed environment.