Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T14:38:50.807Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching, Dances in the Dark

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2015

Tiffany E. Barber
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In 1999, Bill T. Jones, in collaboration with digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, presented an installation at the intersection of dance, drawing, and digital imaging. Ghostcatching featured Jones's previously improvised movements recorded using motion capture technology. In 2010, Kaiser, Eshkar, and Marc Downie of the OpenEndedGroup revised Ghostcatching into a new piece titled After Ghostcatching, composed of unused sequences of Jones's movement and sound captured for Ghostcatching. This essay focuses on the extended relation between Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching to track a shift from so-called identity politics to a discourse of post-racialism over a ten-year period in U.S. history. A consideration of various media—motion capture technology, digital art and imaging, and improvised, virtual dance—as well as formal analysis of each piece, highlight the political effects and visual implications of each work in a racially mediated world. In this article, I question the status of Jones's raced, sexed, and gendered body within neoliberal fantasies of post-racialism. In spite of the persistence of visible markers such as skin color that are mobilized to construct racial subjects, with the development of digital imaging and new visual technologies, to what degree is race actually visual? That is, how are race and the racialized body in motion subject to and determined by specific media, i.e., photography and digital art, improvised dance and choreographic form? This analysis of Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching reveals how each piece tests the boundaries of choreographic form and digital imaging technologies as well as the category of race as inherently visual—a test that posits race as technology itself in visual, haptic, and spatial terms.

Keywords

Bill T. Jonesembodiment and disembodimenthaptic visualityimprovised dancepost-racial discourserace and technology.
Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , April 2015 , pp. 45 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Anderson, Jack. 1981. “Dance Festival: 5 Display Experimental Works.” The New York Times, July 13. http://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/13/arts/dance-festival-5-display-experimental-works.htmlGoogle Scholar
Andersson, Rani-Henrik. 2009. The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Banes, Sally. 1987. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Banes, Sally. 1993. Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theatre, 1962–1964. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Barclay, Winston. 1999. “World Premiere of ‘The Breathing Show–Bill T. Jones Solo’ Oct. 23.” October 1. The University of Iowa News Services. http://www.news-releases.uiowa.edu/1999/october/1001jones.html.Google Scholar
Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Christiansen, Steve. 1987. “Magnesium, Peripheral Vision, Soft Pallet.” VHS. East Charleston, VT: Videoda, Contact Collaborations, Inc.Google Scholar
Chun, WendyHui, Kyong. 2012. “Race and/as Technology, or How to do Things to Race.” In Race After the Internet, edited by Lisa, Nakamura and Peter A., Chow-White, 38–60. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Coleman, Beth. 2001. “Technology on the Line.” In AI: Performance for the Planet (Spring): 45. New York: Arts International, Inc.Google Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill, Young, Robert J. C., Duster, Troy, and Gilroy, Paul. 2002. “Review Symposium.” Ethnicities 2(4): 539–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Copeland, Roger. 2003. Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Croce, Arlene. 1994. “A Critic at Bay: Discussing the Undiscussable.” The New Yorker, December 26, 54–56, 58–60.Google Scholar
Cunningham, Merce. 1991. The Dancer and the Dance: Merce Cunningham in Conversation with Jacqueline Lesschaeve. London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd.Google Scholar
Dils, Ann. 2002. “The Ghost in the Machine: Merce Cunningham and Bill T. Jones.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 24(1): 94–104.Google Scholar
Dixon, Steve. 2007. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, Cora. 2007. The 1870 Ghost Dance. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Everett, Anna. 2012. “Have We Become Postracial Yet?': Race and Media Technologies in the Age of President Obama.” In Race After the Internet, edited by Lisa, Nakamura and Peter A., Chow-White, 146–167. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Foster, Susan Leigh. 2002. Dances that Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Franko, Mark. 1995. Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Against Race: Political Imagining Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, RoseLee. 1999. “Catching Jones.” In Ghostcatching (Exhibition Catalogue). New York: The Cooper Union School of Art.Google Scholar
Goldman, Danielle. 2003–2004. “Ghostcatching: An Intersection of Technology, Labor, and Race.” Dance Research Journal 35: 68–87.Google Scholar
Goldman, Danielle. 2010. I Want To Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
González, Jennifer A. 2008. Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hale, Grace Elizabeth. 1999. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Halprin, Anna. 1995. Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, edited by Rachel, Kaplan.Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Bill T., with Gillespie, Peggy. 1995. Last Night on Earth. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Jowitt, Deborah. 1989. Time and the Dancing Image. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kaiser, Paul. 1999a. “ON BIPED.” La Scena Digitale, an Italian Anthology on Technology and Art. http://openendedgroup.com/writings/onBiped.html.Google Scholar
Kaiser, Paul. 1999b. “Steps.” In Ghostcatching (Exhibition Catalogue). New York: The Cooper Union School of Art.Google Scholar
Kaiser, Paul. 2003. “On Motion-Mapping.” In Mapping in the Age of Digital Media: The Yale Symposium, edited by Mike, Silver and Diana, Balmori, 80–91. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Academy.Google Scholar
Kaiser, Paul. 2010. “After Ghostcatching (2010).” http://openendedgroup.com/artworks/agc.html.Google Scholar
Li, Stephanie. 2011. Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Marks, Laura U. 2002. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2009. An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2nd edition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mooney, James. 1896. The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee. New York: Dover Publications.Google Scholar
Morris, Gay. 2001. “What He Called Himself: Issues of Identity in Early Dances by Bill T. Jones.” In Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage, edited by Jane C., Desmond, 243–263. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Morrison, Toni. 1984. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari, Evans, 339–345. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984.Google Scholar
Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Morrison, Toni. 1997. “Home.” In The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, edited by Lubiano, Wahneema H., 3–12. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Mostern, Kenneth. 1999. Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noland, Carrie. 2010. “The Human Situation on Stage: Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of Expression.” Dance Research Journal 42(1): 46–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noland, Carrie. 2013. “Inheriting the Avant-Garde: Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, and the ‘Legacy Plan’.” Dance Research Journal 45(2): 85–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Novack, Cynthia J. 1990. Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Paris, Carl. 2005. “Will the Real Bill T. Jones Please Stand Up?” TDR: The Drama Review 49(2): 64–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paxton, Steve. 1972. “The Grand Union.” TDR: The Drama Review 16(3): 128–34.Google Scholar
Raengo, Alessandra. 2013. On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press.Google Scholar
Reynold, Dee. 2007. Rhythmic Subjects: Uses of Energy in the Dances of Mary Wigman, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. Alton, Hampshire, UK: Dance Books.Google Scholar
Salter, Chris. 2010. Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sturken, Marita, and Cartwright, Lisa. 2009. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2nd edition. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Taranto, James. 2009. “Obama's Postracial America.” Wall Street Journal. September 15. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203917304574414923099147990.Google Scholar