Round Robin Duet

As a millennial, studying visual culture has provided me with key tools to understand the network of visuals that dominates the modern, globalized world. However, I started to question how we came to think so visually abstractly to even consider a culture of visuals to exist. Some researchers argue that this stems from the legacy of Western society’s historical, active forgetting of touch. (Paterson 2005). Thus, I decided to study Contact Improvisation (CI), a dance form that focuses on touch, and use film and photography as research tool to investigate the dynamics between tactile and visual knowing in social communication.

CI has its origins in the United States during the 1970s, rising in the middle of the Cold War. It is an egalitarian dance form, in which participants reach an inner understanding of themselves and others through touch as the primary form of nonverbal communication and improvise based on their bodies’ interaction with gravity and momentum (Novack 1990). These events occur during CI jams, which last anywhere between an hour to three or four hours. Additionally, as pictured above, the common practice is to close blinds and cover mirrors to create a space obscured from the external world.

I took this photograph in the Atlanta Metropolitan Studio after eight months of practicing CI with the group. The dancers are engaging in a ‘round robin’. This is when dancers form a circle to observe improvised duets. This is one of the only moments in which the use of sight is prioritized to learn about others’ movements. I took pictures in this moment to avoid disrupting the space. In this image, we can observe the physical dynamism at play: the woman’s body is being pulled downwards by gravity, but her hand is anticipating the motion and the shift in position. Between her side and the man’s back, the point of contact is clear, but it will change location on both bodies. They use this ‘rolling point of contact’ to communicate and flow into more movements. Meanwhile, their eyes (sight) are passive but, if she were to slip, these would become handy tools for safety.

By using photography, I can assess when sight constitutes a secondary, active or passive mechanism to prevent and invite movement and interaction with another person. Additionally, due to the heightened tactile experience, the visual is deprioritized. Thus, visual discrimination and stereotyping decreases. One finds it visually insignificant if other dancers look old or young, queer or straight, big or small, or from another race and ethnicity. Such stark contrast to the visual dominant milieu makes CI a counter-cultural space. Based on this research, I argue that modern society cannot possibly become a single-sense vacuum. This is a provocative thought that makes me question in which ways the body is still active or passive whilst interacting in our predominately visual world.

Paterson, Mark. "The Forgetting of touch." ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities 10, no. 3 (2005): 115-132.

Stark Smith, Nancy. “A Certain Kind of Knowing – An interview with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen”. Contact Quarterly, Vol. 42 No. 2 (2017): 30-33.

Commentary on Rachel Tanur's Works: Dancer Rehearsing

In this photograph, “Dance Rehearsing” by Rachel Tanur, the subject is an unnamed dancing man. His eyes are focused, analyzing an object off camera. Perhaps, as in any dance studio, his gaze falls on a reflection of himself on a mirror. The shutter is fast enough to capture a stillness, a witnessing of the shadows on his back, extending onto his leg, composing a line almost perpendicularly to the picture’s frame. Yet, the shutter is slow enough to remind the viewer that time is present; evidenced by the dancer’s blurred hands. They deconstruct the line and lead us to the next movement. Rachel Tanur composes a full body portrait, forty-five degrees from the dancer to avoid obscuring his reflection. One can imagine him moving into the frame and hearing Tanur’s shutter at the raise of his leg. She observes him, observing himself, while we observe him. Her composition allowed for this natural, uninterrupted triple gaze, one that emulates the value of using photography for social and cultural research: an image that encapsulate the ‘peak of nonverbal expression of the human subject’ (Collier 1986). Although the geographical location is unspecified, the photographs provides the viewer hints like the deep green plants growing out of the right window, or the thin layers of paint that are naturally chipping away from the cement walls. Both are signs of the humid environment of Central America and the Caribbean. Mixing this observation with the visually immortalized leg and the emphasis on straight toes, the bars in the background, and the ballet shoes, this photograph situates the viewer into the space of a male, Latin American ballet dancer. Ballet is traditionally a Wester dance form. Thus, ‘Dance Rehearsing’ is a photograph that serves as evidence of the artistic, imperialist legacy in the post-colonial world region. Additionally, in ballet, the male body has been continuously re-evaluated. From allowing the embodiment of androgynous characters in the early twentieth century to valuing ballet dancers by their athleticism, the male dancer’s masculinity has remained unstable and changeable (Karthas, 2015). Tanur, however, illustrates a single male dancer stripped from his performance clothes and encapsulates his elegance, humbleness, strength, and drive. He dances, for himself, independent of the public gaze and social conscience. She celebrates this with the natural light that is being reflected by the polished floor and invisible mirror – just like a spotlight. Moreover, labelling the picture ‘Dance Rehearsing’ and omitting the mention of the specific location illustrates the mundanity of the art practice. It presents as a common expressive action rather than a spectacular art, as it is commonly perceived and encountered. I would say that this is the strength of Rachel Tanur’s photography. Her approach is not intrusive. She controls herself and not the environment, and lets the photographic subjects be their own, with their day to day sensibilities, actions, habits, and routines. Tanur makes her work a statement against the fetishizing of the ‘exotic’ as magnificent by presenting this world, perhaps foreign to some, as ordinary. Collier, John, and Malcolm Collier. Visual anthropology: Photography as a research method. UNM Press, (1986): 213. Karthas, Ilyana. When Ballet Became French: Modern Ballet and the Cultural Politics of France, 1909-1958. McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP, (2015): 246 – 255.