Dance as a Mnemonic Practice: Cultivating, Shaping and Activating a Memory of Cueca Dance through Research-Creation

Abstract

In this dissertation I focus on dance as a mnemonic practice: a practice that commits to memory and re-members or pieces together anew ways of relating through movement. In this dissertation, I specifically take up and forward memory as a sense, inspired by anthropologist C. Nadia Seremetakis (1994) and Indigenous author, orator and Stó:lō rememberer Lee Maracle (2015). By taking up memory as a sense, then, I am suggesting that memory can be cultivated and shaped through dance. Dance as a mnemonic practice, then, considers how cultivating a memory has the potential to reinforce the status quo or deviate from it to create an expansive, otherwise memory of the dance form. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how my multi-modal research-creation process allowed me to cultivate and shape a memory of cueca dance. Through a research-creation process, I bridged what I could not remember with what I could re-member by bringing together a set of practices and media to re-member and remember cueca dance at a distance (from family, from community, from Chile). These set of practices and media included sensorial encounters with pañuelos (handkerchiefs) and vocalizing rhythms; watching YouTube videos on cueca dance; listening and dancing to cueca music; and reading cueca literature. By scaffolding and layering my interactions with these media over a period of a year, I was able to cultivate an expansive and nuanced memory of cueca dance. The central questions guiding this research are: How do the ways of relating imparted and enacted through movement cultivate and shape a memory of a dance practice? And what are the implications of not attending to the cultivation and shaping of memory while learning a dance form? I argue that a critical memory practice in dance (scholarship and practice) is pertinent to bring awareness to how dance forms inform perception; and to remind that dance forms are relational praxes that are often intertwined with other-than-human beings and lives. In short, what dance forms enact and present has consequences for ways of relating, being and becoming beyond that context.