Mapping Movement on the Move: Dance Touring and Digital Methods

Abstract

Her research sits at the intersections of dance, media, and performance studies, with a recent turn toward leveraging digital tools for scholarly inquiry. Her writing has appeared in numerous edited collections, as well as in The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Participations, Performance Matters, among others. Upcoming projects include a forthcoming book tentatively titled Dance as Common: Movement as Belonging in Digital Cultures, as well as Mapping Touring, a digital humanities and database project focused on the performance engagements of early twentieth-century dance companies.

Theater as Data

“…One will always be able to find meaning in any clustering of the data, the way one can always find shapes in tea leaves. This is sometimes called clustering illusion (Bedek et al 2018), and in the scientific literature it is often linked to harking, or hypothesizing after the results are known (Kerr 1998).…”

Mapping Touring: Remediating Concert Dance Archives

“…Feminist historian Kathryn M. Hunter cautions that when creating and using digital archives, researchers must take care to “not allow digital records to become an episteme instead of a tool” (2017, 210). Built upon the cultural biases and personal preferences woven into physical archives, digital archives, which both narrowly curate those contents and make them more broadly accessible, risk reifying rather than ameliorating absences in the archive (see Bench and Elswit 2016).…”

“…It may never even be comprehensive enough to fully manifest my underlying argument that, although globalization is a phenomenon that scholars tend to associate with the late twentieth century, a deeper examination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century touring reveals the multidirectional, global circulation of aesthetic information through touring artists, and their reach into small towns dotted throughout the interior of the United States, the implications of which dance scholars have yet to fully examine. Mapping Touring offers a launching point for posing new questions and investigations, or a means of supporting existing questions that can now be approached from a different angle (see Bench and Elswit 2016). In the next section, I elaborate my own investments in Mapping Touring as an intellectual enterprise that builds on archival research but is inspired by the ethnographic and revisionist histories that figured prominently in dance studies in the 1990s and 2000s.…”

Post-Soviet Primas: Challenging Archive and Repertoire

“…As Kate Elswit argues in "Mapping Movement on the Move: Dance Touring and Digital Methods," bringing together digital humanities and theatre and dance, offers new perspectives of looking at dance and theater, as well as their archives and repertoires. 10 Through the consideration of primas' narratives, available in the digital archives, this essay attempts to shed light on the ways female ballet dancers theorize ballet works and affect their audiences' perceptions of them. Emphasis on these oral narratives also challenges and undermines feminist scholarship that conceives virtuosity and technical excellence as the only empowering factor in ballerinas' careers and lives.…”