Sara Ahmed and Queer Phenomonology in dance

Sara Ahmed and Queer Phenomenology in Dance

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

 – James Baldwin from Giovanni’s Room.

My home, as in, the place where I grew up, where my Mum and my Dad and my Dog still live, is often described as ‘The Middle of Nowhere’. To others, I am sure it can feel like that. A small, two bedroom house made out of granite, with mice in the drainpipes and spiders in the sink, sat in the dip of sparsely populated moorland, with neither people, trees or buildings to help decorate the landscape. It is quite a barren place. Perhaps not an obvious place to find a homosexual, dance academic. Or, perhaps it is.

At the same time that someone might look at my house and think that ‘this is in the middle of nowhere’ (or as a friend once put it, ‘this is the most godforsaken place I have ever been to’), when I view my house, I think of it as very much in the middle of everything. Or if not the middle, a crucial starting point; of memories, of feelings, of ideas and dreams, of family. Sara Ahmed in ‘Queer Phenomenology’ defines familiarity as ‘what is, as it were, given, and which in being given “gives” the capacity to be orientated in this way or that’ (Ahmed, 2006). The crumbling outer wall of my house is to me, familiar. I know it through different memories; of playing tennis by myself and hitting the ball on and off of it, I know it through the bracken and lichen that I have seen grow through cracks over time, the swallow and jackdaw nests that are put to use in spring and summer that are made and re-made each year just between the top of the wall and the guttering, the guttering too has its own familiarity, its own memories, a thin plastic tube that somehow weathers the storms and gale forces that have sent trampolines and tents over our head, the memory of a failing water collecting system made from dustbins on slopes, that my mum introduced since an obsession over Armageddon took a hold of her and she started worrying that Donald Trump in power means that our taps would run out of water. To others, though, what is in front of them, is just a wall.

Of course, it might not just be a wall for them. The wall might remind them of something in their own lives. Perhaps they saw a wall like it in their favourite film, in their grandmother’s house. The grey colouring of the stone might match their hair, or their granite counters in their island kitchens back in their home in Kensington. Ahmed says, on this, that ‘even in a strange or unfamiliar environment we might find our way’ (2006). Even if you have no memory or feeling about my wall, you will most likely have enough knowledge to know that you can’t walk through it. So with familiarity, on what is immediately in front of me or because of a memory of a thing that I can relate to what is in front of me, I can orientate myself through a space, through the familiar and also, the unfamiliar, using knowledge I have to guide me.

My dance research has centred around this idea of noticing what I do in my dance improvisations. It’s been about noticing how I orientate myself in space.

I’ve noticed that I always orientate my body in response to something else. Perhaps what is in the space, perhaps a feeling, always many things, multiplicities of responses. Some of this orientation is a response to me inhabiting ways that my body has practiced moving before i.e., using my dance training. Some of this orientation is a response to me deliberately trying to not move like I’ve moved before, and perhaps move like someone else. I’ve also noticed though that responses are not attempts at replication, of moving using a certain technique in my toolkit or moving exactly like a choreographer who’s work I have seen, but instead, my body orientates itself in my improvisations through entering a conversation between where I’ve been (my dance training, work I’ve seen) and the present state of my body in that moment of dancing. To add to this mix, I also carry with me in my improvisations a desire to move. Some desires on some days are more specific, i.e., to move like a Cunningham dancer, some desires are opinionated, to be fucking excellent, other desires might just be, to move.

Ahmed says,

“If orientations are as much about feeling at home as they are about finding our way, then it becomes important to consider how “finding our way” involves what we could call “homing devices.” In a way, we learn what home means, or how we occupy space at home and as home, when we leave home.” (2006)

I am doing this research so that I can understand my movement habits. Both, to find new ways of moving and to be able to define how it is that I move. I am doing this research to notice what ‘homing devices’, what movement habits, draws me back into the familiar patterns I use when I move and dance. I am a product of technical dance training, and so the research comments on how my technical dance training has made me improvise. But, I am a product of many other things and so this research is not entirely biased of that training in dance. Let’s start there, though.

What is known.

I am a product of dance training that focused on what’s labelled as ‘contemporary dance techniques’. From 2020-2023, during term time, I trained in Ballet, Cunningham, Graham and Jazz dance techniques as my ‘core’ area of study. As I progressed through my training, weekly or twice weekly classes in the ‘Release’ technique, in improvisation and contact improvisation and in street dance styles also enriched my programme of study. My definition of the focus of this training and the course’s programme, having completed it, is to train contemporary dancers for the working dance industry (as performers), with an awareness of also equipping dancers with skills that can be used in dance-theatre, including jazz dance and musical theatre. For example, in my second and third years, singing and acting formed part of my study.

‘Contemporary’ techniques, in this context, aren’t that ‘contemporary’. Rather than chosen for their ‘newness’, the techniques have been chosen by what is deemed useful for a versatile contemporary dancer of today. Cunningham, Release and Ballet are common techniques studied by contemporary dance students in the UK. The addition of Graham is more specific to the institution where I trained. It’s worth noting here that, as an opinionated and belligerent 18 – 22 year old during my training, I was quite resistant to the dance techniques that took me away from my ‘axis’, my ‘correct ballet posture’ which I sought to ‘master’, and those techniques that took me away from western dance techniques in general.

Ahmed says ‘orientations are about the direction we take that puts some things and not others in our reach’. To be pragmatic and consider the logistics behind creating a course to train versatile contemporary dancers, choices have to be made. And so by incorporating the chosen core studies and additional techniques into a programme, some ‘orientations’ in my dancing have been practiced through the course, with the training programme designed to put some things within my reach (such as posture and placement of the Cunningham technique), and some orientations have been put out of my reach. I have noticed, for example, as I improve my ballet posture, the postures I attempt to find for hip-hop suffer.

With this knowledge from my training in my body, as I dance now in my improvisations, I can see traces of my body remembering things that it has been taught, even when I am not consciously thinking about ‘using’ these ‘techniques’ in my dancing and even when I am just dancing for the sake of dancing (for fun).

I notice:

I move on an axis that is up-right often,

I sometimes move to make shapes rather than feelings

I move with turnout

I move and turn

I move and I am often vertical

Jennifer Jackson, a ballet teacher and author of An Essential Guide to Classical Ballet says

Like all classical art forms, ballet draws on the classical ideals of balance, harmony and proportion. These qualities are found throughout nature, including in the human body, which is naturally vertical, symmetrical and balanced (2020).

If this is true, then what I notice, this search for the vertical, for symmetrical moments that are rarely deviated from, in my improvisations seem to come from being influenced by ballet. Especially, when I pair this with my noticing of how I often want to turn out my muscles or even just slot in ballet steps such as particular turns or jumps. It’s worth mentioning here that I was never particularly good at ballet. Growing up, I enjoyed watching it and would often watch rehearsal videos of royal ballet dancers (as this was what was most readily available). But it seems that ballet has been the loudest voice in my training simply because, perhaps, nearly every contemporary/jazz teacher that I have been taught by, has also studied ballet, and because it was the movement practice I learnt first.

Right now, in this time where I am been questioning why I move like I move and to counter some of these things, I have been seeking ‘affordance’ for ways of moving that contradict my practiced movement patterns. If I largely move within the constraints of western dance techniques, if ballet structures remain engrained in my movement, then how can I give myself more options to move away from these structures?

If I look at Jennifer Jackson’s definitions of ballet as balanced, harmonious and proportionate (2020), an obvious place to start is to go against some of this.

I started exploring how I can move in ways that feel like they counter what is ‘harmonious’:

I move across the body, sending limbs across my axis so that my body twists and scrunches.

I move my pelvis, my rib cage, knees in circles, getting bigger and bigger and bigger, so that I don’t lead from my arms, my legs.

I move, following my nose, entering my backspace.

I move, inverting my limbs so that they are ‘upside down’.

Physically, I am working to break away from something that feels proportionate.

But, I notice that another thing has entered and swarms the body from my training and from ballet. The feelings of doing these techniques. A kind of ‘dancer’ personality that wants perfection and virtuosity. The same personality can be anxious and fear moving altogether. It can be snooty and serious and moody.

I explored how I can move with different feelings:

I move with shifting dynamic textures

I move with different intentions (for example, move to be ‘imperfect’, move to make ‘a mess’, move without striving for virtuosity)

I move with my own humour

I move without fear

What I noticed was that much of these starting points for movement took me away from learned techniques from my training.

What I also noticed, is that my training was still being utilised. And so my movement becomes a conversation between trained pathways and new explorations.

My research question, after gaining knowledge and after noticing that some learned techniques linger in improvisations, even when I am trying to counter my training, and after seeing how ‘colonised’ the way that I move has become from learning such techniques is, what way of moving is my own?  How can I find ownership of a way of moving that feels free of fear and external pressure, but also one that feels satisfying and ‘worth’ something to me? Perhaps also to audiences?

What is my physical voice and how can I use it?