{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0256053437239076, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0016699137211244085, 'mean_word_length': 5.2504347826086954, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Chicago Forum on Performance Ephemeral Evidence: A Conversation on Dance, Documentation and Research (University of Chicago, April 13, 2002)

A new opportunity for scholarly exchange within the Chicago dance community emerged last spring in the form of a workshop entitled "Ephemeral Evidence: A Conversation on Dance, Documentation and Research," sponsored by the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. The day-long event attracted an unusual combination of local performers, university professors, archivists, and independent dance historians. This first gathering of the Chicago Forum on Performance was organized by Terri Francis, a University of Chicago doctoral candidate in English, and by Esther Palmer, a Chicago dancer and filmmaker. The purpose of the Forum is to promote dialogue between performers and those who document and interpret performance. As seasoned conference-goers know, one of the ways such conversations break down is through the lack of a shared vocabulary and methodology. The resulting confusion can appear to invalidate dance as a subject for scholarly inquiry, while strengthening the idea that scholarly languages are remote from the practice of dance. To address this problem in Chicago, Francis and Palmer began the day with a series of movement improvisations for all participants, called "Moving into Theory." Molly Shanahan, Artistic Director of Mad Shak Dance Company, conducted this session, asking us to do such things as "respond to the linear elements of the space." (The space, a nicely carpeted room of the Franke Institute, was interrupted by several large white columns.) Shanahan also called attention to the relation between language and dance, between her verbal instructions and our improvisations. Not surprisingly, most of the professors in attendance remained in their chairs when invited to join these improvisations. But a few of us ventured out into the performing area, along with a contingent of local dancers and graduate students. We began safely enough, flat on our backs, as Shanahan advised us to find our "roots." But then we began to explore successive spatial levels, changes in dynamics, and the effect of our movements on those around us. In between improvisations, we discussed the action from spectator as well as performer points of view. For the less experienced performers, an overriding issue was how to become comfortable moving without a routine before an audience of strangers. This was the "task" underlying all other tasks. As if to emphasize the vulnerability of performers, Shanahan brought up a time-honored idea about what writers should do when interpreting dance: become more poetic. Poetry, she said, shares the resistance of dance to the "definitive." This idea was abandoned, revived, and restated several times during the course of "Ephemeral Evidence." In practice, the two speakers who followed Shanahan—dance historians John Mueller and Susan Manning—deliberately aimed for the definitive in their careful demonstrations of how archival research and critical theory may enhance dance scholarship. But then David Levin and Tom Gunning, from Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, seemed to refuse the definitive in their closing commentary on the day's events. They alluded to a "surplus of meaning in material evidence" to which no one has total access, whether in dance or in any other social practice. The advantages and limitations of material evidence in dance research were amusingly apparent in Professor Mueller's lecture,