REMEMBERING AND REPRESENTING DANCE: RE-TRACING THE GENEALOGY OF NONFICTIONAL ANALOG DANCE MEDIA IN THE FORMATION OF THE NORTH AMERICAN DANCE FIELD

Abstract

This dissertation shed light on the hitherto overshadowed area of nonfictional analog dance media by contextualizing and historicizing it within the North American dance field. It is a revisionist historiography examining how nonfictional dance media has been conceptualized, regulated, and institutionalized in tandem with the North American dance field's agenda of legitimizing dance as an artistic and academic field. Approaching the discursive shape of nonfictional analog dance media as a unique cultural construction, I argue that nonfictional dance media is not a simple stand-in for live dance, but an ambiguous and ambivalent object reflecting our beliefs and desires projected on dance. Thus, I suggest that nonfictional dance media provides a strategic setting for reconsideration of the operation of the dance field, especially that of North America. The research questions this study addresses include the following: how was the field of nonfictional dance media formulated and institutionalized according to the North American dance field's agenda of legitimizing dance as an artistic and academic field; how has nonfictional dance media constituted and reconceptualized the knowledge claims in the dance field by preserving and representing dance; and how has the discourse of nonfictional media resonated with the discourse of dance in modernity? As a historiography, I re-write the genealogy of nonfictional analog dance media within the formation of the North American field between 1927 and the 1980s. Also, for case studies, I compare the New York Public Library's Dance Division and the George Balanchine Foundation Video Archives to examine the discourse of dance preservation, while analyzing the schism between the intention and the reception of an ambitious TV dance program Dancing (Channel 13/WNET, 1993) to examine the discourse of dance representation. In so doing, I explore how nonfictional dance media has shaped and been shaped by the North American dance field's internal conceptualization of dance knowledge and external advocacy of legitimizing dance in its society. This study suggests that nonfictional dance media is--just as dance is--a phenomenon with cultural, economic, and political implications and imbalances. Particularly highlighting that media's duality of an icon and an index corresponds with the conceptualization of dance as choreography and performance, I further find that this duality resonates with the ambivalent desires of the modernist temporality. While time has been rationalized, the attraction of contingency has also increased in reaction to it. Similarly, while nonfictional analog dance media has been rationalized, controlled, and institutionalized according to the American dance field's agenda of legitimizing dance, this effort of rationalization not only raised the criteria of knowledge claims but also enhanced the attraction of the irrational, contingent aspect of dance. Given that, this dissertation argues that nonfictional dance media is not a simple imprint of dance but the barometer of ambivalent and fluid beliefs and desires projected on it.