on The Tourist
I am compulsively filtering ideas through my dancing body- dragging anything onto dance studies. I thought of several ways to apply MacCannell’s ideas to dance.
1. tourist=dancer / site=movement / marker=recognition of association
Like the tourist, the dancer navigates through space by moving in varying speeds and spatial patterns, continuously adjusting the spatial relationships both within the body and to the surrounding environment. From the perspective of a dancer, the body’s movement can be considered terrain or cultural site in which visits to the specific movement or choreography are like the touring through the site. In the dancers recognition or named associations of specific moments, movements and pathways can become spatial or temporal markers that could signify efficacy or beauty (or whatever else). Kinesthetic memory of previous association to a movement are the souvenirs, the ephemeral trinkets that link the tourist/dancer back to the visited site/movement.
2. tourist=audience / site=dancer / marker=movement
Likening the tourist to the audience is not a big leap as they are both seeking an experience of entertainment or exposure. In this comparison, the dancer or performer is the site in which the tourist/audience is witnessing. The perceived movements of the dancer, like the marker, mediate or explain the relationship/distance between the site and the tourist (audience/dancer). From the perspective of the dancer, movement choices are made knowing they are a site being witnessed. Choosing material that would communicate or represent something specifically is like Goffman’s front space. In my own experience performing, in some situations I have felt the need to differentiate the movement I do when being witnessed by an audience and my ordinary non-performing movement- between knowing what may be perceived as efficacious/beautiful/whatever to doing the awkward movements necessary to figure out an idea spatially/kinesthetically. The latter could be considered the back space.
Is this too much of a stretch?