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NZC Visiting Fellow Dr. Rose Martin Gives Lecture at Peking University
13/11/2019 — Senior Lecterer Rose Martin visits Peking University as a visiting fellow from the Faculty of Creative Arts and Industries at the University of Auckland. She was hosted by Associate Professor Bryan Minghui Bi at Department of Music, School of Arts.
From the 3rd to the 13th of November, Dr. Rose Martin visited Beijing supported by the New Zealand Centre Advisory Board Fellowship programme. She was warmly welcomed and generously hosted by Associate Professor Bryan Minghui Bi at Department of Music, School of Arts. During her visit, she presented a lecture to PKU undergraduate students and delivered a seminar to postgraduate students.
Dr. Rose Martin presenting her lecture
On the 8thof November, she presented her lecture entitled “Hip hop to Little Apple: The poetics and politics of dance and music” to students from the school of Arts at Peking University. Coming from a background of Dance Studies, Dr. Martin explained how dance and music are entities that are greatly influenced by other spheres, such as wider social, political, economic, and global discourses, as well as having an effect on them in their own right. By using three examples, the first being hip hop; social media and the ‘global’ and online landscape, Dr. Martin discussed how dance and music are implicitly and intrinsically linked together, especially in terms of viral music videos with strong associations to certain dance choreographies that can permeate across the globe. She also discussed the question of whether it is possible to steal a dance move, despite dance being highly ephemeral. The appropriation of dance moves and whether plagiarism is involved makes copyrighting dance a difficult question.
Poster for Dr. Martin’s presentation
On the 11thof November, Dr. Martin presented a seminar “Talking Dance: A Globalized Improvisational Ethnography” to the postgraduate students at the School of Arts.
Dr. Martin and students during the seminar
In this presentation, Dr. Martin shared some of the key methodological findings and reflections from her book project entitled Talking Dance. Through the Talking Dance project, the notion of ethnographic fieldwork being improvisatory in nature has emerged (Cerwonka & Malkki, 2008). Like improvisation in dance, it could be considered that improvisation in ethnography means that there is a structure, task or idea motivating actions, it is not entirely random, but within the frame created there are many possibilities about how events might unfold. This presentation seeks to disentangle some of the improvisational encounters.
The Talking Dance books seek to explore the unique narrative of individuals and wider cultural concerns, in all their messy, confusing, exciting chaos. According to Dr. Martin, there is the opportunity to actively unpack and critically reflect on the intersection between improvisation and methodology, through this presentation of methodological reflections.
Poster for Dr. Martin’s presentation |
