Marshall McLuhan’s theories will be applied to explore the impact of mediatized environments on the human body in performance. I will draw upon different types of movement performances to ground my insights and assertions. While most of my examples will come from the discipline of dance, I will also include references to popular entertainments to contextualize my thoughts and provide points of comparison for my arguments. For example, the idea that movement either creative or non-verbal originates from the human body as the visible embodiment of consciousness and unconscious expression, crosses many disciplines and cultures. From a communications media perspective, evidence for this statement can be found in McLuhan’s belief that the human body as a medium intersects with all of communications media (McLuhan, 1994) and his assertion that communication is an extension of man (human body), thought, consciousness and perception (McLuhan, 1994).
If we look more deeply into McLuhan’s belief that media is an extension of man, then how the progression of evolutionary time is experienced comes into focus. University of Pittsburgh Professor Bruce McConachie (2010) discusses mediated environments from the perspective of human development and history in the following quote:
“…imagine a juggling act in which the performer is handling four sticks of wood, keeping three aloft at any one moment. Now place that juggler in front of a tribal campfire 50,000 years ago, in a Chinese court about 1,000 years ago, on a European theatrical stage in front of an elite audience about 200 years ago, in an Australian circus ring about 100 years ago surrounded by cheering workers and families, on the Ed Sullivan television show watched by millions of U.S. citizens 50 years ago, and on a computer screen for MySpace.com, looked at yesterday by thousands around the world. (McConachie, 2010 p. 28)
This example, demonstrates the shifts from the human body in performance through various mediated environments. Before I continue with my thoughts I want to develop a working conceptual definition to explain how I am using the word mediatization throughout this essay. Authors Doveling, Harju and Sommer (2018) describe mediatization as a way to explore the mutual shaping of media and social life and how new media technologies influence and infiltrate social practices and cultural life. The Wikipedia version describes mediatization as a concept for capturing how processes of communication transform society. Researchers Anne Kaun and Karin Fast describe mediatization as a “process of change in the media landscape over time” (2014, p. 12).
These definitions inform my usage of the term. I am using the word mediatization to explore how media has become embedded within the creative process and to understand how it is changing or reshaping how dancers and choreographers experience and communicate the embodiment of movement, creation of creative human movement and performance of movement across live and mediated environments. These environments have varying levels of media involvement that uses audio, video, computers and media technology to produce performances that are viewed in live, virtual or blended formats. Another aspect of this definition that will come into view when I discuss different dance projects is their attention to emphasizing the lived experience of the human body while commenting on current events and the cultural politics of the individual, community and society.
The interrelationship between media being an extension of man and internationalization of media use in society (global village concept) is suggested throughout the examples I will describe later on in this essay. McLuhan understood and reflected upon the dynamic influence of media innovations on the past, present and future social, cultural and political movements of humankind. He was often criticized for his ideas based on not being scholarly enough or not providing evidence for his claims through research studies. Some of the rejection of his ideas was amplified by his celebrity that was cultivated by the spread of TV, however in my attempt to be provocative and step out on a limb, I perceive that McLuhan considered himself the medium and was exploring his message through probes, risk taking, embodiment and experimentation. My claim is demonstrated through the publication of the Medium is the massage in 1967. McLuhan approached his ideations in this seminal book, as an artist would conceptualize a creative project.
The human body in dynamic motion directly encountering another body or its own embodied self is grounded in the present moment. Athletes like Lebron James or Michael Jordan has referred this space as getting into the Zone. The body in performance is grounded in experiencing a particular time and space. It assumes that all aspects of our spiritual, cognitive, proprioceptive being is present in the moment of now. If I take Professor McConachie’s approach and substitute the juggling act for dance, then I would imagine a gradual shift in the presence, time and space of the community of people. The journey begins by dancing as part of a tribal ritual thousands of years ago in nature, then 500 years ago in Italian court ballets for the monarchy, then enslaved Africans being “danced” on ships as a way to keep the human body in shape under threats of beatings as they travel from the coast lines of Africa to the Americas during the middle passage, then on theatrical stages separating the audience from the performer creating spectacle, then in film and screen reproducing images of the human body on motion pictures dancing to music giving rise to stars like Gene Kelly, Ginger Rodgers, Fred Astaire, Shirley Temple, and Sammy Davis Jr., then break dancing on city streets to the new hip-hop music being created, then dancing in music videos on MTV backing up entertainers such as Michael Jackson and Madonna, then watching your favorite dance company on VHS tape or a DVD recording in the library or at home, then on the computer screen using YouTube or another platform at home or the library, then being able to call up an dance style or event at any time I want on the mobile phone through social media from anywhere in the world.
In this mental exercise, the idea of presence shifts from the lived experience in an ancient local community to a virtual co-constructed mediated global community. It seems that another motivating factor emerging through writing this essay is to examine from a media and communications perspective how dancers are experiencing the shifts from live embodied presence to mediatization in performance; and whether they feel that this has led to a perceived depreciation with the live presence and interaction of the human body in performance.
Harold Innis has felt that technological revolution would influence social, cultural and political institutions (1951). McLuhan predicted that man’s symbiotic relationship to his technology would be transformed through innovations in communications media. He warned that the complex relationship between humans, their technological extensions, information and social space would produce unique tensions in the global village. I would say that evolutionary transformation of humans and their perception of space, communication and boundaries has been occurring in varying degrees over thousands of years and exponentially progressing over the past 100 years.
According to McLuhan, the environment of the television and the internet has the ability to reach vast populations, but has strange effects on the dynamics of para-social interaction between the viewer and the perceived image on the screen. The image is present, edited and nuanced, but it is absent a body; and has the ability to control and reach large masses of people. His lived bodily experience of celebrity informed his perception. Our present experience brings into reality McLuhan’s (1994) concept of the Global Village and how mediatization is reflected in how we view the human body in performance. For example televised programs such as So you think you can dance, America’s Got Talent, and Dancing with the Stars, are popular shows built around live choreographed dance or entertainment driven performances. There is a studio audience present, but the program is reproduced and broadcast to millions of people around the world. The human body is viewed and experienced through instantaneous editing and multicamera shots.
Although Innis and McLuhan acknowledge the human body as being central to communications media as a site of the senses, disembodiment and alienation still exists through association with virtual over live physical experience (McLuhan, 1994; Innis, 1951). As technology progresses and further extends the human body, social and cultural institutions will be impacted and continue to disrupt the quality of communication between human beings. Modern media and communication practices that removes the body from direct communicative interactions with their social network and the world, diminishes the centralization of the human body as a medium. When the body is not present depersonalization or disembodiment occurs. Let us consider the modern day spectacle of how people watch a large screen projecting aspects of a live event, when they are actually present at the live event; or how they may prefer to view the live event through their camera phones as they are recording it. Now the live event itself is altered by the effects of the mediatized environment. Innovations in media, communications, and technology has transformed how, what and where human beings communicate to each other. Drawing upon my years of experience as a dancer I believe the human body, when engaged in performing creative human movement, resist disembodied modes of communication. Dance writer, theorist and contact improvisation teacher Ann Cooper Albright (2017) says that it is ‘through our bodies that perception (altered from media) meets up with politics…”(p.223). I argue that a way to combat the social, cultural and institutional alienation is through re-grounding our senses, communicative expressions, relations and technological innovations in the physical and transcendent experience (the Zone) of our bodies.
The ecology of learning creative human movement is changing socially, professionally and in cultural institutions of learning. McLuhan stated “the interplay between the old and the new environments creates many problems and confusions” (McLuhan, 1967;1996 p. 68). This is my current experience in the dance field as I enter my thirtieth year of meaningful engagement. My roots are in the old environment but my teaching and desire to maintain relevancy as a professional artist requires crossing into new environments that are continually shaped and dominated by media and innovations in communications technology. For example, last summer I taught an online leadership seminar course to graduate students enrolled in the MFA in Dance program at Rutgers University. The process of distance education allowed me to be at a physical distance from the students I was teaching in the course. All of our communications with each other occurred through computer-mediated environments. This shift in environment, space and time is revolutionizing the institution of education throughout the world and who has access to it. With this comes challenges and future problems to solve.
Dancers are being asked to work collaboratively and be in dialogue with filmmakers, computer scientists, videographers, sound designers, dramaturges, researchers and costume designers. Performances are being shaped by mediatization and taking place in mediatized interactive environments. The core of what dancers do in the dance studio involves fostering an intensive, intimate, perceptual and highly physical body-to-body communicative exchange. This exchange is happening in greater frequencies in virtual spaces and through the process of distance education. Now the choreographer might be in Seattle, while the dancers are learning the movement in New Jersey from the projected image onscreen or through a mobile device. The time spent in the studio interacting with each other body to body is critical to the creative process, but access to a global audience of viewers and sharers has generated an evolving dialectic of cultural movement sharing which contemporizes McLuhan’s concept of the Global Village.
References
Albright, A.C. (2017).The oxford handbook of dance and politics. R. Kowal, G. Siegmund & R. Martin (Eds.) The politics of perception (pp.223-243). New York, NY. Oxford University Press.
Doveling, K, Harju, A. and Sommer, D. (2018). From mediatized emotion to digital affect cultures: New technologies and global flows of emotion. Social Media and Society, SAGE, Jan-March, 1-11.
Innis, Harold Adams. (1951). The bias of communication. With an introduction by Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Kaun, Anne and Fast, K. (2014). Mediatization of culture and everyday life. Karlstad University Studies.
McConachie, Bruce. (2010) An evolutionary perspective on live and mediated popular performance. Popular Entertainment Studies, Vo1.1, 26-43.
McGuigan, Jim. (2005). The cultural public sphere. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 8(4) 427-443.
McLuhan, Marshall. (1964, 1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press Edition.
McLuhan, M. & Fiore, Q. (1967, 1996) The medium is the message: An inventory of effects. Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press. (Original work published 1967).