Nereson, Ariel
(2014)
Feeling History: Emotion, Performance, and Meaning-Making in Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
This dissertation examines Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Lincoln trilogy (works that deal with explicitly with American historical narratives) in the context of the cognitive science behind such sense-making tools as narrative, metaphor, and causation. Within this cognition-based theoretical framework, making the past meaningful in the present necessarily involves emotional response; making and understanding historical narratives are not simply “objective” endeavors. I argue that BTJ/AZ’s engagement with historical narratives, events, and figures within their choreographies happens through the relationship of emotional response and embodiment, and provides a corporeal route into history that critiques previous formulations of archive, identity, narrative, time, and space that compose historical inquiry. My interest in “feeling history” is in yoking feeling and moving as complementary processes rooted in the materiality of the body that reveal how individuals both create narratives as sense-making tools and find meaning within inherited and reimagined histories. BTJ/AZ’s work manifests transhistorical human conditions of meaning-making that are nonetheless situated in particular spatio-temporalities. Specifically, their emphasis on embodied emotional response as choreographic methodology reflects the biological reality of concepts like mirror neurons, conceptual blending, and empathic concern that interact with cultural sense-making tools that are historically situated (for example, Lincoln’s metaphor of “a house divided”). BTJ/AZ propose a corporeal relationship to history, one of interanimation through embodied cognition. We are moved, literally and figuratively, by the past and, in the archival repertory of BTJ/AZ, we move the past, choreographing historical events and figures into our present so that we might re-route our current paths.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
|
| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
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| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
29 May 2014 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
25 March 2014 |
| Approval Date: |
29 May 2014 |
| Submission Date: |
24 April 2014 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
229 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Theater Arts |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
Bill T. Jones, cognitive science, modern dance, historiography, Abraham Lincoln |
| Date Deposited: |
29 May 2014 21:55 |
| Last Modified: |
15 Nov 2016 14:19 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/21450 |
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