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" Choreographers and Yogis: "
Aubrecht, Jennifer F
Shea Murphy, Jacqueline
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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903688
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TL8ww020mb
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| Main Entry
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Aubrecht, Jennifer F
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| Title & Author
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Choreographers and Yogis:\ Aubrecht, Jennifer FShea Murphy, Jacqueline
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| College
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UC Riverside
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| Date
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2017
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2017
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| Abstract
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Choreographers working in the United States have been practicing yoga since the early 1900s. They mention their yoga practice in autobiographies and interviews, include physical poses (asana) in their choreography and classroom exercises, and rely on breathing techniques (pranayama) to support their movement technique and personal practice. Meanwhile, yoga practice in the United States has increasingly become associated with thin white women in elaborate poses and tight pants smiling on the beach at sunset. So how did this association come about? I contend in this dissertation that this is at least partly due to white choreographers’ portrayal of yogis onstage and incorporation of yoga into their dance training. I focus on renowned (post)modern dance choreographers, such as Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Bill T. Jones, and recover the influence of yoga on their careers to help us better understand how yoga has shaped modern dance throughout its history. As their use of yoga became a tool in their creative and innovative interventions in dance, these (mostly white) choreographers encouraged or facilitated the forgetting of the labor of the yogis and yoga teachers who instructed them. This dissertation therefore also attends to the innovations of their teachers, such as Swami Vivekananda, Swami Paramananda, Yogi Vithaldas, and A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who strategically and selectively emphasized aspects of their yoga teaching to suit contemporaneous cultural trends and confront Orientalist fantasies. I apply the tools of movement analysis and the theoretical frameworks of critical race studies and critical yoga studies to autobiographies, published scholarship, archival records of dance technique training and choreography, yoga training manuals, and dance and yoga videos. My dissertation interweaves the frequently disparate fields of yoga studies and dance studies, reorients scholars to the historical affinities between these two modes of physical practice, and complicates contemporary models of cultural appropriation. This work disrupts the economy of affirmation and forgetting that places yogis as non-agentive culture bearers and concert dance choreographers as individual geniuses via the logic of colonialism. It also encourages us to recognize the stakes of naming and valuing genealogies of practice under the system of racialized capitalism.
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Shea Murphy, Jacqueline
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UC Riverside
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