An autoethnographic spiral: dancing “showerhead”

Abstract

This autoethnographic essay considers the duet Duo by choreographer William Forsythe. Autoethnography is practiced through blending ethnographic methodology and dance studies analysis, writing from my critical perspective as a former Forsythe dancer and current dance scholar. My investigation returns to inscriptions and materials gathered during my doctoral fieldwork (2016–2019) to rethink the interrelation of time, memory, and dance in my research onto Duo. My focus is a particular movement of Duo, called showerhead, which I use as a spiralling thread to interweave my arguments and movement analysis. My writing explores how dance historiography may follow practical movement logics, and thereby depart from chronological narratives of rehearsal to performance. Instead, through an autoethnographic spiral, I account for embodied memory that is holistic and nonlinear, articulated relationally and defined by the particularity of Duo’s choreographic labour and curvilinear movements. My longitudinal study of showerhead shows how movement-intensive processes may merge bodies and cross times, as well as challenge insider/outsider dichotomies.

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Author Biography

Elizabeth Waterhouse, Universität Bern

Elizabeth Waterhouse is a dancer and postdoc at the Institute of Theatre Studies where she is part of the research project “Auto_Bio_Graphy as Performance. A Field of Dance Historiographic Innovation” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Her research as a dance scholar focuses on choreographic practices and aesthetics, ethnographic and oral history methodology, as well as digital techniques for research and documentation of dance practices. Waterhouse’s viewpoint within dance studies makes use of her methodological competences across ‘research’ and ‘creative’ practices in the arts, the humanities and the natural sciences: an education comprising of a BA in Physics from Harvard University, an MFA in dance practice from The Ohio State University and a PhD in dance studies from the Universität Bern/Hochschule der Künste Bern. Between 2015-2018 she was a research fellow at the Free University of Berlin and leader of the project “Motion Together,” funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung, a ‘research-creation’ project on entrainment in the arts and daily life. As a performer, she danced from 2004-2012 in Ballett Frankfurt/The Forsythe Company. Since that time, in parallel and often nurturing her scholarly work, she has continued to develop performances and artistic research projects, including with the groups HOOD, tō, and Movement Forum Bern.

Published
2024-06-30
How to Cite
Waterhouse, E. (2024). An autoethnographic spiral: dancing “showerhead”. Mimesis Journal, 13(1), 17-36. https://doi.org/10.13135/2389-6086/10426
Section
Performing Memory Through Dance. Anthropological Perspectives