Self-Expression through Self-Discipline. Technique, Expression, and Losing Oneself in Classical Dance

MORA, ANA SABRINA

Music, Dance, Affect and Emotions in Latin America

Lexington Books

Lugar: Maryland; Año: 2017; p. 117 - 142

The main focus of my inquiry in this chapter will be on those experiences that can be said to surpass representations and will be based on the testimony of dancers with whom I spoke in the course of my fieldwork and, also, on my observations as an anthropologist and participating ballerina. I will begin by reviewing the connections between representations and experiences so as to discuss cases in which the experiences present aspects that appear to surpass the representations. I will then go on to orient my analysis towards the question of the connections between those representations which guide the way a technique is to be understood and expression in classical dance. My purpose here is to better understand the mechanisms and the possibilities of construction of agency in a practice is famous for its strictly codified technique, its discipline, and the chronometric and millimetric control over the body which it demands from dancers. As in any social space, the EDCLP is ruled by a coherent, but not unified body of representations, many of them divergent and conflicting, which guides its practices, constructs the sense of the experiences of subjects, and is interwoven into the selection of episodes that subjects choose to mention when they talk about their lives, about who they are. In the same vein, I will then relate the conflicts, divergences, and discrepancies between representations within the framework of the different dances taught at the EDCLP, in particular in connection with the ways in which technique and expression and the relationship between them is understood. In classical dance (ballet) above all, technique and expression appear as coinciding elements, in the understanding that the incorporation of technique is the condition for being able to express and feel oneself when dancing. This raises the question that I will address near the end of this chapter: the relationship that discipline and subjection have with pleasure, particularly the pleasure which is associated with achieving the incorporation of technique and the act of dancing with the means that this technique makes possible. I will emphasize that even in conditions in which agency appears to disappear or appears to exhaust itself at the limits of subjection, this is present in diverse ways and in multiple dialogues with the very elements that only appear to constrain it.