The first installation of the Center for the Humanities Monday lecture series, “Moving Images,” kicked off at Russell House, and offered the audience slightly more than the average lecture. Susan Foster, professor of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California at Los Angeles, did not just read her lectur—she also danced it.
“Foster…has had an extraordinary career in choreography and performance,” said Jill Morawski, Interim Director of the lecture series, in her introduction of the speaker.
Foster started teaching dance at Wesleyan in 1981 when highly esteemed professor Susan Cutler headed the department. In 1990 she moved to the West Coast to teach in the University of California system. Foster has published the books “Reading, Dancing and Choreography” and “Narrative” on stories told by dance, and has edited volumes, including “Choreographing History.”
Foster’s lecture, “Choreographies of Writing,” concerned performative writing, a term rooted in linguistic philosophy, which refers to a new way of approaching the tricky terrain of writing about performance. Coming out of various movements, including semiotics and Dance Studies, performative writing seeks to understand not just written language but other media, such as dance, as “texts” through which we can understand cultures.
Foster believes that the common perception of dance and writing as opposite art forms causes writers to doubt that a dance performance can be captured on paper. If writers conceptualized their task differently, contended Foster, they would be able to re-choreograph the dance through language.
“Writing is manual labor,” Foster said. “[A writer should put] as much physicality into the writing as possible, to choreograph a dance between writing and dancing bodies.”
Foster added that dance scholarship and criticism, too, are undergoing a transformation, as they contain a political element not often recognized. According to Foster, traditional dance criticism is governed by a hierarchy which associates dance with the physical, the feminine, and the ephemeral, all of which are subordinated to writing, the mind, the masculine, and the durable.
“Over the past fifteen years, dance scholars are trying to find plurality in response to physicality,” Foster said. “[This gives] body to the writer and thought to the dancer. It gives them parity of status, while acknowledging their disparity.”
Underscoring her message of the dance-writing connection, Foster danced continuously during her address. She delivered some sections from under a table; during others, she opened and closed the shutters or moved her podium around. Often, her choreography directly matched her words—for instance, by talking about absence while taking items from audience members and giving them to other people.
Foster’s unusual style of lecture delivery delighted many audience members.
“I enjoyed the at times shocking simultaneity of extreme and brilliant dance movements with the equally challenging, cogent and brilliant lecture,” said Alvin Lucier, the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music. “We don’t often recognize that our physical movement—ody languag—uring tasks such as writing, reading etc., resemble dance movements, in an expanded definition of the term.”
Johanna Goetzel ’07 was also impressed.
“I found the lecture stimulating and extremely engaging,” said Goeztel. “I was inspired by how Foster expressed the fusion of two disparate disciplines.”
Not all of Foster’s public left Russell House as convinced. During the question and answer period, some audience members expressed concern about not being able to follow the verbal aspect of the lecture because they were focused on the dance. Some wondered why Foster didn’t memorize the speech to make the presentation more of a conventional performance piece.
These questions echoed the problem Foster had spoken abou—that people have conceptualizing dance and writing, presented as one. Foster’s response, in turn, reiterated the point of her lecture.
“I’m trying to deconstruct ‘the lecture,’” she said. “So many people refuse to believe that a lecture is a performance.”
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