for recording dance (but see Franko 1993). Now, of course, there are a number
of these systems. Labanotation records the dancing body’s changes in position
and the timing of these changes (Farnell 199 4 ). Effort-shape analysis documents
the effort and flow of movement and the body’s shaped configurations in relation
to its own parts and other surrounding objects (see, for example, Farnell 199 4 ).
Smith has experimented with ‘dance hieroglyphs’ (Albright 1989; Stewart 1998).
These are all systems which both write dance and also make dance into a kind of
writing.
EXERCISE. Imagine a writing instrument is located at the top of your head
at the soft spot where the bones of the skull meet. Imagine you can draw with
this instrument as a sky-writing plane draws in space. The space around you
is a three-dimensional canvas. Allow your writing object to draw pathways on
the canvas letting the rest of your body be loose and responsive. Adjust your
body to accommodate your drawing pathways, always letting the top of your
head lead. Explore different speeds, levels, and degrees of locomotion. Allow
your eyes to scan, seeing all but focussing on nothing. Work to the point of
disorientation and stop.
(Gamble 19 77 : 38)Yet dance has a particularly rich history consisting of experimentation with many
genres and styles, which is of immense significance in trying to forge a sympto-
matology of movement which can help us to both understand and create expressive
potential by gesturing to new ground. I will point to just a few of the ways in
which dance can aid in this search.
Dancing the body
The first – and most obvious – is through the body. Dance can perform
the ‘techniques of the body’ (Mauss 1993: 19) now and through history in a
number of ways which go to show that ‘the facts as documented in any recorded
discourses... do not a body’s meaning make. They substitute the casual relation-
ship between a body and these cultural forces that prod, poke and then measure
its responsiveness. They substitute only bodily reaction. They lie askew from
a body’s significance’ (Foster 1995: 8). To begin with then, dance can sensitize
us to the bodily sensorium of a culture, to touch, force, tension, weight, shape,
tempo, phrasing, intervalation, even coalescence, to the serial mimesis of not quite
a copy through which we are reconstituted moment by moment. In history, for
example, much interesting work has been done on the rise of so-called ‘serial’ or
‘interval’ cultures (see, for example, McAloon 1995). Then, dance can help us to
realize the bodily theories – performative theories and theoretical performatives –
that cultures hold dear and which are often potent sources of power without the
need to understand these theories as total systems.
Any standardised regimen of body training, for example, embodies, in the
very organisation of its exercises, the metamorphs used to instruct the body,140 Part II