| How does critical theory account for the dance studio? This dissertation considers the history and legacy of the western theatrical dance studio not as a tabula rasa waiting to be filled but as a powerful performative space. Designed around a heightened attention to the optical, to both seeing and being seen, the space itself molds subjects who are especially honed to the kinetic demands of Modernity. The site of training, it is a space in which the promotion of heightened attention to the visual can either create a crisis of perception or, if harnessed with sensitivity to the vibratory powers of the space, generate stunning challenges to and transformations of limited conceptions of the subject.;We begin by pairing Martha Graham's 1957 documentary A Dancer's World with Lucianna Achugar's more recent work The Sublime is Us (2007) in order to define how space can make things happen and be considered performative in the sense that JL Austin defined in his seminal work for Performance Studies How to Do Things With Words (1962). Chapter two connects dance and discipline as it explores the military aspects of western theatrical dance. Chapter three interrogates the visual nature of the studio by exploring the influence upon dance of two major disciplines that developed concurrently and bridged science and art during the Renaissance: linear perspective and the anatomy theaters. Chapter four returns to the work of Lucianna Achugar, this time pairing her with video artist Bill Viola and philosopher Elizabeth Grosz in order to witness the studio as a site of erotic and primal transformation.;In The Archeology of Knowledge (1972), Foucault delineates a form of historiography that embraces the ruptures, discontinuities, and fissures of the archive, distancing itself from the ideological constraints of teleological history and genre divisions. Following this project, instead of engaging in a taxonomical survey of various studios, this dissertation engages with history as archeology, unearthing the studio as an architectonic idea as it manifests itself in such diverse correlative spaces as the contemporary dance stage, the military training field, and the anatomy theaters and formal gardens of the Renaissance. |
