Choreographies of Landscape. Sally Ann Ness

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Landscape Performance Theory, an Introduction

      No matter how sophisticated you may be, a huge granite mountain cannot be denied—it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.

      —Ansel Adams, Yosemite and the High Sierra

      But is it possible to conceive the nervous system as living apart from the organism that nourishes it, from the atmosphere in which the organism breathes, from the earth which that atmosphere envelopes, from the sun round which the earth revolves?

      —Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

      The formations of the choreographic are many, expanding beyond the field of the aesthetic.

      —André Lepecki, Dance and Politics

       Introduction

      This book is about Yosemite National Park, the oldest preservation area in the United States, the original inspiration for the American conservation movement, and the template for the U.S. National Park Service as a whole. It is also a book about performance, both broadly and strictly speaking. It is a book about athletic performance and touristic performance, about human and nonhuman performance. Most especially, it is a book about cultural performance and choreographic forms of it in particular.

      Yosemite is not a small place. It inspires thinking on a relatively grand scale. In this regard, I seek in the chapters that follow to address in rather ambitious terms the very large issue of Yosemite’s cultural significance. I do so, however, in a way that compels attention to the very smallest details of the landscape’s character, through the standard ethnographic method of participant observation of visitor performances, including my own.

The chapters gathered together in this volume illustrate certain kinds of visitor performance that I observed to be occurring regularly in Yosemite National Park during a series of twenty-two visits I made into it beginning in 2004 and ending in 2012.¹ They are performances that differ somewhat in character from the kinds of cultural performance typically studied by ethnographers. They tend to be relatively informal, individualistic, and improvisational—more like jokes than like operas, to borrow Richard Bauman’s sociolinguistic terms (1977). In some cases, they push at the boundaries of what “performance” as a concept might best reference, as they often occur without any conventional sort of rehearsal process and without any human audience other than the visitors performing themselves. However, as with any cultural performance, whether it be something as spectacular as a masked Karneval parade in Upper Swabia or a god-dancing Cutalaimatan festival in Madras, or as rich in virtual meaning as a Balinese cockfight, Yosemite’s performances involve public displays of symbols popularly understood to be emblematic of given ways of life.² They are enactments by means of which people—“visitors” in the park’s conventional discourse—express “what they believe themselves to be,” to borrow Lloyd Warner’s original phrasing (Warner 1959: 107; cited in Singer 1984: 110). They express it passionately, ethically, imaginatively, and spiritually, as well as ideologically.

      I studied Yosemite National Park as a stage for the enactments of what anthropologist Milton Singer termed the “great and little traditions” of cultural performance (Singer 1984: 165). I became interested in the littlest of the littler of these, as well as in the most energetic and newly minted, although I partook of as wide a variety as possible. It was with the performance of minor, often coincidental or unintended movements and gestures that I became the most concerned. These were acts as small as tripping over a tree root, flicking a pine needle off of a camper’s tent, or slamming shut the door of a bear-proof storage box that wouldn’t latch any other way. They were the kinds of small, but densely layered, ubiquitous facts of visitor experience that might have become the raw material of a work of choreography about Yosemite’s visitors had that been the project at hand. Indeed, they literally did come to serve that purpose, although СКАЧАТЬ