Constructing dance knowledge in the field: bridging the gap between realisation
and concept 1
Georgiana Gore 2 and Egil Bakka
Apologia
EB and GG: Our presentation arises from
discussions during the last two years concerning
appropriate methods for constructing dance
knowledge.
EB: These include methods in fieldwork for
accessing the kind of knowledge from which
dancing springs, the knowledge of dancing people,
GG: as well as the appropriate methods for
constructing academically based dance knowledge as
a result of our fieldwork.
EB: I am coming to our discussions from traditional
dance or folk dance. I see dance as intangible
cultural heritage, and accordingly dancing as a part
of the world’s diversity, as in biological diversity. I
believe that movement diversity is equally
important. For me dances and dancing matter.
GG: For me too, Egil. But, as an academic anthropo-
logist and one-time choreographer, I’m less directly
engaged in promoting dance diversity and more
concerned with understanding how diversity is
promoted, the decision-making processes involved
and the network of relations constructed to do so,
which involve actors such as yourself.
EB: Our discussions also emerge from my pre-
occupations as an ethnochoreologist with differences
in approach, especially when I compare my own to
those used by anthropologists like you, Georgiana.
It seems to me that anthropologists have come to
privilege interviews and discussions with dancers.
They almost seem to have discarded observation,
filming and analysis of actual dancing, and
consequently the basis for analytical work with
dance movement.
On the other hand, researcher colleagues, such as
Desmond (1994: 58) and Farnell (1999: 157) have
argued that we need to develop skills for analysing
movement, to become movement literate, that we
need to be able to write and read movement texts, for
example Labanotation scores, and develop other
such tools in our field.
GG: Methodological and epistemological issues
have been one of my ongoing preoccupations; and
while Egil’s have often been related directly to
concerns about methods for maintaining,
transmitting and revitalising dance traditions, my
own have been connected to an early realisation that
what you study and the results obtained are
configured by the research methods and theoretical
perspectives that you use. As I said last year in Cluj,
Romania : ‘You can’t crack a nut with a steam roller
and hope to eat it’ (Gore, 2006).
EB and GG: And we both agree on this point
although our perspectives are evidently different.
The plot
GG: So now we’ve reached the plot. It’s true that
anthropologists now engage in more dialogical
modes of knowledge construction. They have
rejected traditional observational techniques on the
grounds that these are overly positivist; that they
only enable documentation of the dancers’ behaviour
from an external point of view, the researcher’s
perspective. They therefore cannot account for the
meaning attributed to action unless through the
researcher’s inferences. Nor can observation render
the agents’ perceptions and experiences, that is their
subjective or “insiders’” point of view. This is why
anthropologists have come to rely increasingly on
generating verbalisations from a variety of interview
techniques, without, I add, entirely abandoning
participant observation.
EB: I cannot see that observational techniques are
overly positivist as such, and I do not argue that they
should stand on their own. Certainly these tech-
niques alone will not sufficiently take into account
the perspectives of the agents; but, as part of a
research strategy, I think they are underestimated. In
my mind, dance knowledge is not only about the
meanings of the agents, but also about the actual
skills and movement patterns which carry and even
create meaning. Therefore, movement patterns need
to be documented through observation, filming and
analysis as part of the construction of academic
dance knowledge.
Presenting the characters
EB: We need to present our characters now, the
concepts we wish to put into play. For me, there are

two dimensions of dance through which we can
access dance knowledge.
One dimension is the realisation of dance – the
fact that somebody is dancing. It is through this
dimension that dance is experienced as such.
The other dimension is the skills and knowledge
which a dancer has accumulated, and which enable
him or her to dance a specific dance. This includes,
of course, the meaning the dance has for him or her.
I suggest calling this the dance concept. Accordingly
we could say that when I dance or realise a certain
dance, it springs from my dance concept. So in order
to understand a certain dance I think it is a definite
advantage to access both dimensions, both
realisation and concept.
GG: I think I may want to react here to something
which is, perhaps, part of the basis for our
disagreement. I’m uncomfortable with the idea that
we “access” dance knowledge, if the knowledge is
assumed to pre-exist our intervention in the field. I
don’t mean that dancers don’t have ideas about what
they do, your dance concept. But it seems to me that
the researcher plays an active role in producing the
knowledge, not only through his involvement in the
field (‘the observer is himself part of his
observation’ (italics in original) as Lévi-Strauss
(1999: xxvii) posited as early as 1950), but because
the dance knowledge is always constructed in the
interaction between researcher and dancer. It’s really
a question of cognitive transaction and co-
construction of knowledge.
EB: I think we need to distinguish between two
kinds of dance knowledge. First: The skills trans-
mitted and norms negotiated in a “dance society”,
that is in a group which shares the practice of a
dance. Second: The results of interaction and
negotiation about this first kind of knowledge, when
a researcher wants to fix it in some way as academic
dance knowledge.
Maybe, we should rather refer to the dance
knowledge of dancing people as the dance concept.
The concept enables dancing people to dance a
dance according to norms, to recognise it when other
dancers do it, and, to some degree, to talk about it
and describe it.
GG: Let me bring our third concept, tacit knowledge
to the stage for discussion.
So, is the dance concept the same as tacit know-
ledge? And if so, isn’t it then sufficient to gain
access to that knowledge through provoking verbal-
isation?
EB: I think about a dance concept as having
knowledge at several levels, some tacit, some not.
Some aspects of a concept are available for us to
verbalise directly, particularly if the dance has been
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Gore & Bakka
instructed to us in words. Example: Which hand do
you use when you shake hands with someone? This
is hardly tacit knowledge to us here. Some tacit
knowledge is not conscious, but is straightforward,
and we can easily verbalise it just by observing
ourselves. Example: Which hand do you use to open
the door? I have found out that most people do not
know before they try, but after trying, they know and
can tell me.
Some tacit knowledge, however, is of a complex
nature and we cannot easily verbalise it even if we
practice the knowledge every day. Example: Can
you please instruct my daughter who broke her leg,
how to ride a bike, so that she can do it when she is
well again without prior practice?
GG: The question of how to elicit tacit knowledge,
or knowledge concerning action (goal directed
action) has produced a number of answers. Many of
these come from research done in cognitive and/or
phenomenological psychology. A common techni-
que is stimulated recall from video film of the initial
action. The dancer comments a video film of his/her
dancing, and the verbalisations are recorded. This
reveals much about the dancer’s experience and
thought processes, but also about how the researcher
conducted the interview and how this configured the
verbalisations on the action. A more phenomeno-
logically based technique uses no external artefact to
stimulate verbalisations. This is the explicitation
interview 3 developed by Pierre Vermersch (1994)
and colleagues, in which the agent is replaced in the
lived situation which is the object of the interview,
under the controlled guidance of the researcher.
Through remembering or reminiscing on this
original situation, verbalisation concerning the
subjective experience, including its affective and
cognitive dimensions, becomes possible. It aims to
avoid a situation of post-rationalisation, in which the
interviewee talks around the experience and not of
the experience. This kind of interview might well
yield the kind of information about how you balance
on a bike for your daughter to understand what’s at
stake.
Action
EB: We shall now show you a filmed extract of a
Norwegian dance, the “gangar from Setesdal”, and
try to demonstrate how each of us would interrogate
the material using our respective methodologies in
order to bridge the gap between realisation and
concept.
EB: Documenting traditional dance is a standard
procedure at my institution 3 we film each couple
doing the same dance several times. Then we

Birgit Austad and Aslak Austad from Setesdal are dancing
gangar during a filming session in 1970 Photo: Gunvor Bakka
Rff-sentret.
transcribe each realisation, and compare tran-
scriptions. In this way improvised patterns stand out,
that is, as differences between different realisations.
This dance material is well known to us in its
conventional taught forms, but this kind of analysis
of the models and of the pioneers of teaching enables
us to discover hitherto hidden patterns.
When we analysed the film you saw, we
discovered that norms for improvisation seemed to
be different between dancers on the film and
younger dancers.
Younger people saw it as a norm for the man
and the woman in a couple to coordinate their steps,
like this. They considered this – where we do not
coordinate our steps – to be wrong. (EB and GG do
the simple step version together in coordination and
then EB changes his pattern so that they are not
coordinated.)
GG: This norm appears not to have existed among
the older couples. The man and woman quite often
danced without coordination, and did not seem even
to try to coordinate their steps. (GG then leaves EB
who, alone, continues dancing the more complex,
version.)
We also discovered a variation in step technique
among some older dancers, which no younger
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Gore & Bakka
dancers knew existed. Both older and younger
people performed the step like this. ( EB shows the
step on his own.)
But the older people had this alternative to the
step, which no younger dancers therefore used. (EB
shows the alternative step.)
So the repertoire of steps and how these are
deployed is part of the dance concept?
Egil’s exposé
EB: Yes, but for me these step patterns are good
examples of the very deep layers of tacit knowledge.
These kinds of patterns could probably only be
discovered through the dimension of realisation.
They would probably not be discovered without
sophisticated analytical tools applied to filmed
material. In other words, I think that the patterns are
a layer of the dance concept which the dancers
themselves could not verbalise without being given
the analytical tools of the researcher and being
trained for it.
As to the coordination of the steps between man
and woman, the older dancers might easily adopt the
conventional opinion that the steps ought to be
coordinated. They may claim this when we elicit
their dance concept verbally, and have probably been
doing so even in demonstrations and teaching.
GG: This seems to mean that you don’t have any
confidence in the verbalisations, because the dancers
tend to give only idealised understandings and
nothing from their own experience and knowledge.
But, perhaps this is underestimating their capacity
for reflexive analysis, and what is needed are the
appropriate methods. I think it might be possible to
provoke verbalisations of experience and complex
tacit knowledge, and thus to train the dancers to
analyse their experience through the techniques that
I mentioned earlier.
EB: Interview techniques are definitely interesting. I
have also tested what I called ‘dialogue in
movement’ (Bakka, 2002), researching through the
shared experience of dancing, the other approach I
defend, but which we finally don’t have time to go
into now.
Georgiana’s exposé
GG: Let’s go back to the “gangar”. From what you
say, the step variants you demonstrated and which
emerge as improvised in the dance, are as important
as the improvisations between the man and woman.
It’s now too late to use the explicitation interview
technique with the dancers on film, but it would be
possible to do so with the younger dancers in order
to understand, for example, their choice of step at a

given moment in the dance. Maybe there’s even a
pattern to the improvised choices.
The idea of this kind of interview, as I indicated
earlier, is to put the interviewee in touch with his/her
experience during a very precise moment of action,
and to request that he/she describe or narrate the
actions undertaken, their sequence, the feelings and
thoughts associated with the specific actions. The
focus has to be on the specific task as undertaken.
For example: ‘At the moment, Egil, when you placed
your weight on your left foot, what were you
thinking about?’ Because of its relation to lived
experience, it is evident that the interview must
ideally be done as close in time to the action or
dancing in question. So Egil, do you agree that we
should now begin an interview so that I can better
understand what the differences are between the
alternatives that you just demonstrated?
Resolving the plot
EB : No, I don’t think we have time for it now. I
think we should start resolving the plot. Is there an
obvious conflict between the two of us? Did our
concepts clarify, or did they play dirty tricks on us?
Do you as a dance anthropologist really discard the
analysis of realisations or look at them as being of
little relevance for constructing our academic dance
knowledge for the future?
For my own part, as an ethnochoreologist, I
certainly see the value of advanced dialogue or
interview techniques to elicit verbalisation of the
dance concept. I’ve done my share of fieldwork
interviewing, and also shown dancers films of
themselves. I felt it was really hard to get beyond
conventional opinions and expressions. Maybe it’s
because traditional participatory dance of the kind
we saw, in my opinion, lacks intentionality at its
detailed level. The ultimate flow experience, which a
dancer is searching for, takes over, when he or she
can let go of all preoccupations concerning what the
body ought to do, and just let it happen without
reflection. The ultimate experience for me is the
harmony with my partner, with musicians and with
context. The question is then, is this a repetition of
conventional sayings or is it really my lived
experience?
For me, my tools for analysing realisations seem
a lot sharper than the tools I have for interview and
dialogue, but I would certainly like to learn more
about the explicitation interview.
GG: We could go on discussing for a lot longer, but
I think we should begin winding up. Let me now
reveal my hand: of course participant observation is
necessary, as are filming and analysis, but it all boils
down for me as to how you use them, how you treat
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Gore & Bakka
the material generated. One example of an effort to
couple more phenomenologically based approaches
with observationally based movement description is
of course Deirdre Sklar’s work (1999, 2005); though
dare I suggest – in case she’s here in the room – that
her descriptions of dance experience don’t access the
same level of experience that the explicitation
interviews do?
EB: A plot is also about understanding relationships
between characters, so let me try to look at the
relationship between the realisation and the concept.
It seems to me the results you get from approaching
dance through the two can never be harmonised or
can never totally match.
GG: I would go so far as to say that the gap between
concept and realisation will always remain, as this is
necessarily an asymptotic relationship.
EB: As I understand it, an asymptotic relationship is
like when you see a railway track on a large plain,
the two rails seem to get closer due to perspective,
but they actually never meet, or, only theoretically in
infinity.
Yes, I agree, but for me to work with both rails
or both dimensions at the same time enhances the
knowledge of both of them, and in some sense
diminishes the gap between them.
Epilogue
EB: You have witnessed a dialogue across differ-
ences.
GG: We agree to disagree,
EB and GG: and so the audience like in any good
play becomes the judge, taking sides with one
character or another, or as in a Brechtian play
maintaining distance on action and appreciating the
play of concept-characters.
Copyright 2007, Georgiana Gore and Egil Bakka
Endnotes
1
Structured like a drama and presented as a choreographed
dialogue between ourselves and with PowerPoint, this
paper was the result of a close collaboration, each of us
contributing to the overall structure and to each other’s
spoken parts. The presentation included a brief DVD
extract of a traditional Norwegian dance, and short dance
demonstrations by the presenters. We have retained the
dialogic structure, which formally enacts some of the
content, the letters EB and GG therefore indicating the
passages delivered respectively by Egil Bakka and
Georgiana Gore. The headings refer to the PowerPoint as
well as highlighting the dramatic structure. The oral
presentation’s syntactical and grammatical “errors” have
been left, unless they render the meaning obscure or
ambiguous.
2
Georgiana Gore presented, at the conference, under her
French professional name, Georgiana Wierre-Gore.
 Gore & Bakka

3
For further information on this technique consult:
http://www.expliciter.net/.
4
Rff-sentret - The Norwegian Centre for Traditional Music
and Dance.

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