Anna Pakes
My research interests include various topics in aesthetics, particularly the philosophy of dance, which I taught for many years at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I focus mainly on analytic philosophical aesthetics in both teaching and research, though I also have interests in phenomenology and hermeneutics. I am also a French to English translator, specialising in philosophy and the arts. I have developing research interests also in translation studies, particularly translation technologies and cognitive translation studies. Most recently, I explored the philosophy of extended cognition / mind in relation to professional translators' use of neural machine translation (MA dissertation project at University of Surrey).
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Abstract: It is difficult to explain what makes some theatre dances boring, even if certain features seem to have a propensity to bore (excessive repetition or slowness, for example). A viewer’s cultural and psychological framework also play a crucial role: aesthetic preferences and thresholds of endurance shape reactions, including reactions to dance that deliberately tests both. Moreover, an initial bored reaction can be transfigured into interest if the experience of boredom itself reveals something important about time and our relationship to it. I explore the dynamics and limits of this shift, discussing the three levels of boredom identified by Martin Heidegger, the most profound of which (he argues) enables revelation of the fundamental nature of being. I argue both that the situative nature of boredom in the theatre militates against recasting its metaphysical significance in Heideggerian vein, and that residual anxiety about finitude may ground justified resistance to the sustained reflection on duration demanded by some theatre dance.
This essay won the American Society for Aesthetics' Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics, 2018.
Abstract: It is difficult to explain what makes some theatre dances boring, even if certain features seem to have a propensity to bore (excessive repetition or slowness, for example). A viewer’s cultural and psychological framework also play a crucial role: aesthetic preferences and thresholds of endurance shape reactions, including reactions to dance that deliberately tests both. Moreover, an initial bored reaction can be transfigured into interest if the experience of boredom itself reveals something important about time and our relationship to it. I explore the dynamics and limits of this shift, discussing the three levels of boredom identified by Martin Heidegger, the most profound of which (he argues) enables revelation of the fundamental nature of being. I argue both that the situative nature of boredom in the theatre militates against recasting its metaphysical significance in Heideggerian vein, and that residual anxiety about finitude may ground justified resistance to the sustained reflection on duration demanded by some theatre dance.
This essay won the American Society for Aesthetics' Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics, 2018.
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I also explore some of the philosophical puzzles presented by “lost” dance. What does it mean for a dance work to be lost? In calling it lost, am I making an epistemological or a metaphysical claim? How do dance revivals and reconstructions make lost or past dances present again, if indeed they do? A central contention here is that they do not do this by “imitating” or constructing “replicas” of original works, since that is both metaphysically and practically impossible. Works are not the sorts of things that can be copied, and nor are their first performances, given the problems of knowing how they looked. So it is not reasonable to expect revivals and reconstructions to hold up the mirror to the dance past and show us what it was.
The contemporary interest in re-enactment as distinct from reconstruction acknowledges the problems of an imitative approach to restaging. Promoters of re-enactment prefer strategies that generate new creative possibilities through recognizing the impossibility of fully re-embodying past dance. I am interested in the implications of pursuing such strategies, and of following through the logic of skepticism about the recoverability of the dance past. Do they render re-enactments or revivals capable only of reflecting contemporary concerns? And is there an ethical imperative to do more than this, and understand that past in its own terms, even if that can only ever be partially achieved? I argue the importance and interest of recognizing the dance past’s otherness, of passing through the looking glass to discover a strange and wonderful world beyond, rather than simply seeing the reflection of our own present in its surface.