Shifting Cultural Power by Hope Mohr

Author:Hope Mohr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Akron Press

Chapter 6

Expanding the Canon

history

many histories

and these histories

all act on each other

what are the histories?

they wind together to make the present and then everyone sees it

everyone sees it from a completely different point of view

a completely different view

—Simone Forti, performing her “News Animation” in Have We Come a Long Way, Baby?, part of The Bridge Project in 2014209

To re-imagine the future, we must reconcile with the past. Reconciling with the past differs from repeating it. “To know a pattern is not to be forced to repeat it.”210 In the art world, our time is marked by “an upsurge of interest in memory”211 and an “obsession with performing and redefining the past.”212 In dance, with the death of modern masters like Martha Graham, José Limón, Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, and Paul Taylor, legacy has become a pressing topic. In response to the loss of these foundational voices, some single-author modern dance companies have become repertory companies that mix the founder’s voice with other voices. Others have undertaken explicit legacy projects, such as Stephen Petronio’s Bloodlines. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company made the decision to disband after Cunningham died, but it continues to set repertory on other companies and lead educational programming; they recently presented a massive international series of projects honoring Cunningham’s one hundredth birthday. Despite ongoing conversations about legacy in the field, dance, compared to other art forms, remains “particularly resistant to change, whether from choreographic trusts, diehard classicists, or others who fear the loss of a choreographer’s legacy.”213 Often, when institutions develop practices to preserve a dance artist’s legacy, these practices can take on a powerful life of their own, separate from the work itself.

Art history has long been presented in tidy, linear terms, with the assumption that culture progresses through a series of one-on-one conversations between master and student in which the master casts a long shadow of overpowering influence that their progeny must metabolize (as proposed in literary critic Harold Bloom’s 1973 book, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry).214 Likewise, art history is often framed as a neat parade of conceptual paradigms, each of which spawns the next conceptual framework in a tidy progression of “isms.”

Transmission of historic dance forms enables contemporary artists to situate themselves in a progression of ideas. Dance legacies, like any form of history, are valuable archives that, in the words of poet Claudia Rankine, both “influence and challenge the definitions we construct for ourselves.”215 Yet linear paradigms of influence, as stories of successive dominance, reify the tendency, present in any lineage, for one voice to dominate others. Traditional paradigms of lineage also fail to account for the nonlinear way ideas travel through and across culture, such as laterally from peer to peer, in networks, and across disciplines. Choreographer Netta Yerushalmy, who conceived and directed Paramodernities, a multidisciplinary engagement with many strands of the dance canon, asks, “What does it feel like to consider the legacy as a horizontal thing and not as the chronological historicized narrative that we know?216

Traditional paradigms of legacy also ignore the multiplicity of identity.

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