Hybridity
Hybridity refers to mixture. It implies an action of combining two or more different elements together and come up with on one unit, a fusion. In Katherine Profeta’s book hybridity is used in the realm of dance style formation out of distinct varieties. Its production comes through a process of recursive translation.
Katherine recounts an experience from one workshop in which people built hybrid dance vocabularies. Her colleague Ralph imitated West African dancers’ movements, and then in turn his movements were imitated by West African dancers. This body motion conversation turns out producing something a little bit different from the original movements. It is a shared language between Ralph and the West African dancers. Something interactive and new has been born out of this dialogue.
I find this hybridity an interesting concept because it captures an essence of dance as a unique art form. Dance is not simply an output of message from a single dancer or a group of performers—it is an exchange with others. This exchange can be energy, emotion, thoughts, idea, story, history, culture, and so much more. When, through recursive translation, different styles of dances transform into a hybridity, the process of exchange reaches a consummation. It is like when two strangers come together to talk. At the beginning, there is no connection between them. But after back and forth communication, eventually they reach some mutual understanding and form some kind of bond. Thus, in the sense of communication, hybridity of dance itself is an exemplification of how movement can create meaning.
Hi Julie,
Two writing notes. First: when you introduce a person into your essay (Ralph) the naive reader doesn’t know who you are referring to. And he is a real person. So when you first mention him you need to write the full name: RALPH LEMON. Then on successive mentions you need to refer to him by his last and not his first name. The second note is: when you repeat a phrase you read in a book that is not instantly comprehensible (maybe because it is a term of art of the particular discipline you are reading about) then you have to “unpack” the word, meaning give it an explanation. It’s not clear to me in this essay that you know what Katherine Profeta means by the term “recursive translation” – so restate the concept in your own words.
Now to the idea expressed in the essay. Yes – the wonderful thing about dance is that when choreography and particular interpretations of those moves are expressed by bodies with specific cultural training, the exchange between bodies who are interpreting each other using the specific dance vocabularies they have been trained in can invent something “new” — where you can see glimpses or references of the other styles in the work, but also a choreography that has a unique quality of its own. It only happens through a dialogic exchange of seeing and repeating, over and over. And the best is that there is a joy and an energy exchange in the dialogue.