A dancer in the mirror: body identity and body motion in Danza Española

This thesis is grounded in ethnochoreology and incorporates a psychoanalytical understanding of body identity and a phenomenological understanding of body motion. What is investigated is a professional Danza Española dancer’s relationship with the reflected image inside the mirror to meet with the demands of this formalised dance genre. Accordingly, my primary research question is: Can the mirror ultimately sustain fundamental aspects of a dancer’s body identity and body motion wherein the codification of dance practice is based on a primarily visual above proprioceptive sense of corporeal awareness and agency? Initially, I position the Danza Española genre within a broader historical reading of the sociocultural interdependence that developed between both the artefact of inquiry (the mirror) and subject of inquiry (European-originated formalised dance practice) climaxing in what I term the primacy of gaze during the height of the Baroque period. Subsequently, upon tracing the elaborate cross-influences found within the principal four forms of the Danza Española genre itself, I consider the contemporary complexity inherent in a dancer’s identity as embodied in motion in front of the mirror. Literature in psychoanalysis (Lacan 1977) and phenomenology (Fuchs 2005) support both ethnographic (Spradley 1979) and autoethnographic (Chang 2008; Foley 2013) analyses to better comprehend a relationship that is very much defined by the convergence of the two histories – that of the artefact (the mirror) and that of the dance practice (Danza Española). Building upon the historical resources, through literature review and ethnographic interviews, this thesis illustrates how modern Danza Española as inculcated throughout the conservatory system and professional industry in Spain foments a reliance on mirror use during dance transmission and assimilation. Accordingly, in developing the interdisciplinary approach outlined above, I examine and evaluate the resulting dependency on the mirror image that this practice might instil. Within the discipline of ethnochoreology, the body is considered a vehicle of embodiment and expression of sociocultural significance (Foley 2013; Wulff 1998). Additionally, the body in psychoanalysis is considered a vehicle of expression for the unconscious (Dolto 2010; Freud 1953; Winnicott 1971). Significantly, the mirror is thus regarded as a central formative component in the configuration of one’s identifying with the body during infancy (Lacan 1977; Merleau-Ponty 2007). Using ethnographic and autoethnographic research, I examine the same formative experience of body identity as revisited within the Danza Española genre, where the creation and perpetuation of the professional dancing body is conducted predominantly in front of the mirror. Complementarily, the body in motion is defined within phenomenology as an empathetic mediator between subject and the world, projecting a virtual “as-if” structure of the corporeal schema that pre-empts corporeal events (Fuchs 2005). Likewise, as an insider practitioner to the field, I explore through autoethnographic research a dancing body in motion as conditioned by how an individual self-perception of the reflected body image aligns (or rather, almost) with a broader cultural projection of that same body in dance in its ideal form. Correspondingly, I illustrate how this ideal specular image “as-if” structure in action must be simulated by the dancer, resulting in the dancing body potentially becoming more mirror than flesh, sustained by the dancer’s gaze. Ultimately, my research findings conclude that the sight of the mirror image, wherein a Danza Española dancer’s identity can be formed and whereto that dancer’s motion may tend, might be the very site of fundamental aspects of body identity and body motion for some Danza Española dancers.