The Social Life of Dances

Chapter 3 pursues the thesis that commodity and gift forms of exchange are interconnected and inseparable. It does this through an examination of three case studies: hip-hop, private dance studio instruction, and powwow. The recent histories of these three examples is examined alongside some of their antecedents at the beginning of the twentieth century. Hip-hop is located along a continuum with the early twentieth-century African American social dances that fueled a dance craze taking place in the urban United States. Private studio instruction is traced back to the social and modern dance instruction offered by entrepreneurial teachers who codified and sold those dances. Powwows are connected to the Wild West shows and other exhibitions of Native dances that brought Native peoples into greater contact with one another and with white audiences. Analyzing the development of these dance practices over time enables a more focused inquiry into the values and belief systems that infuse dance in a given historical moment and the ways that these connect to larger systems of shared values. Each example also calls attention to the way that commodification yields values that collude with forms of social and political domination including racialization and racist ideologies, Orientalism and exoticism, and colonial settler logics.

Dance’s Resource-fullness

Chapter 1 introduces a hypothetical construct called “dance’s resource-fullness”—a set of conjectured but unverifiable capacities dance might have that could be tapped for exchange either as commodity or as gift. These capacities consist of the ability to bring people into relation, to generate as well as expend energy, and to adapt to a wide range of contexts and needs. In support of these conjectures about dance, the chapter utilizes a methodology of list-making and draws upon diverse studies of dance including philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and neurophysiological inquiries. Dance’s capacity to bring people into relation is assessed in terms of the ways it summons participants, how it develops the space in which it occurs, and the types of subjecthood it constructs. Dance’s facility at generating energy is explained through recourse to theories of dance as play, as synchrony, as bodily becoming, as virtual power, and as mobilization. Dance’s facility at adapting to an array of contexts is demonstrated through the vast number of typologies of dance that have been proposed concerning its structure and function.

Introduction

The Introduction poses the central question of the book: how is value defined and determined in dance? In answering this question it puts forth a definition of value as a central element within human life, but one that is always determined in relation to the specific histories, contexts, and people where it actualizes. Predicated on the symbolic encoding of actions as well as objects, value is often determined through exchange in which one object, service, or event is deemed equivalent to another. The Introduction then considers the general context within which the author’s study of dance as a form of exchange developed: the neoliberal, global marketplace; the increase in service forms of labor; the desire for authenticity; and the precarity of workers. The book argues that despite its ephemerality, dance manifests a materiality that makes it available for study as a form of social exchange. Teachers and students, choreographers and dancers, and performers and viewers all exchange dance. The study considers how value is produced during these exchanges by focusing on two types of transactions: commodity and gift.

Why Dance?

Chapter 4 excavates the structures of belief that rationalize and sustain the exchange of dance as either commodity or gift. It considers how the materiality of dance itself along with the ways that it is transmitted contains values that promise well-being, improvement, or success at the same time that they exclude or repress other sets of values. It looks specifically at categories such as the beautiful, the classical, and the natural as making universalist claims regarding the importance of dance, and it connects these values to notions of hard work, showing how for any given form of dance, any of these concepts can imply profoundly different physical actions. The chapter demonstrates how these sets of values permeate the vocabulary and style of a given form of dance, and how they also inform the way that dance is taught, performed, and viewed. It then probes the values inherent in the choreography of three dance artists, Deborah Hay, William Forsythe, and Savion Glover, whose distinctive forms of dance-making have consistently transformed commodified forms of dance exchange into opportunities for gift exchange.

Commodifying and Giving

Chapter 2 examines how dance might be exchanged either as commodity or as gift within the contexts of dance instruction and dance performance. It compares the ways that dance’s resource-fullness becomes utilized within either system of exchange. Within commodity exchange, dance’s ability to convene people produces an interactivity that is based in the autonomy of each individual; these individuals become connected but as isolated and independent entities within a network. Commodification of dance’s energy, presumed to be precious and somewhat scarce, entails the careful monitoring of bodily energy followed by strategic expenditure in order to achieve the maximum effect. The third of dance’s resources, its malleability of form and adaptability to place, is tapped in commodification so as to facilitate dance’s easy transport from place to place. To generate economic profit, dance must be quickly and cheaply manufactured, delivered efficiently, and disseminated as widely as possible. In contrast, within gift exchange dance’s capacity to summon people into relation becomes a way of creating mutual indebtedness among all involved. Circulating gifts connects people not as isolated agents but instead as mutually defining and dependent beings. Dance’s energy, considered to be abundant and always available, is widely given and reciprocated. And finally, dance’s adaptability, its protean form and function, is cultivated as a way to engage with and commemorate particular times, places, and people. Dance as gift is not transportable, and instead, binds itself to and operates within specific communities, connecting itself with and devising unique responses to their ecologies.