Choreographies of Landscape. Sally Ann Ness
4 benefited greatly, if indirectly, from a “slow read” of Joseph Ransdell’s work that took place on the Peirce listserver after Ransdell’s death in 2010. Sincere thanks are due to Jon Awbrey, Jerry Chandler, Gary Fuhrman, Eugene Halton, Gary Richmond, and Benjamin Udell, among many others, for the roles they played in that read. I am also grateful to the individuals solicited by Berghahn Press to review the manuscript. Their comments and suggestions were very much appreciated and useful.
Finally, on a personal note, I would like to acknowledge five colleagues, who are also the dearest of friends: J. Lowell Lewis, Carrie Noland, Christina Schwenkel, Eberle Umbach, and Carla Walters. Their support for this research and their faith in my abilities, in sickness and health, have been essential to this book’s completion. I owe them more than I can ever name or repay. Likewise, I am indebted to my husband, Erich Reck, and to my daughter, Anna, who have borne with me through the many years and strains of research and writing. Their patience, loyalty, love, and compassion have meant the world to me. Words fall very far short of the mark in expressing my gratitude to both.
This research was made possible in part by grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2007) and the Huntington Library (2006) and by the continuous support of the University of California, Riverside. It should, perhaps, be mentioned that the study was undertaken without any financial or material support having been sought or received from either the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) or Yosemite’s concessionaire at the time, Delaware North Companies. The NPS did issue a permit for the field research process that allowed entry into the park for research purposes. However, the views presented here are in no way sponsored or otherwise associated with either entity.
Part I
Approach
Landscape Performance Theory, an Introduction
No matter how sophisticated you may be, a huge granite mountain cannot be denied—it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.
—Ansel Adams, Yosemite and the High Sierra
But is it possible to conceive the nervous system as living apart from the organism that nourishes it, from the atmosphere in which the organism breathes, from the earth which that atmosphere envelopes, from the sun round which the earth revolves?
—Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
The formations of the choreographic are many, expanding beyond the field of the aesthetic.
—André Lepecki, Dance and Politics
Introduction
This book is about Yosemite National Park, the oldest preservation area in the United States, the original inspiration for the American conservation movement, and the template for the U.S. National Park Service as a whole. It is also a book about performance, both broadly and strictly speaking. It is a book about athletic performance and touristic performance, about human and nonhuman performance. Most especially, it is a book about cultural performance and choreographic forms of it in particular.
Yosemite is not a small place. It inspires thinking on a relatively grand scale. In this regard, I seek in the chapters that follow to address in rather ambitious terms the very large issue of Yosemite’s cultural significance. I do so, however, in a way that compels attention to the very smallest details of the landscape’s character, through the standard ethnographic method of participant observation of visitor performances, including my own.
The chapters gathered together in this volume illustrate certain kinds of visitor performance that I observed to be occurring regularly in Yosemite National Park during a series of twenty-two visits I made into it beginning in 2004 and ending in 2012.1 They are performances that differ somewhat in character from the kinds of cultural performance typically studied by ethnographers. They tend to be relatively informal, individualistic, and improvisational—more like jokes than like operas, to borrow Richard Bauman’s sociolinguistic terms (1977). In some cases, they push at the boundaries of what “performance” as a concept might best reference, as they often occur without any conventional sort of rehearsal process and without any human audience other than the visitors performing themselves. However, as with any cultural performance, whether it be something as spectacular as a masked Karneval parade in Upper Swabia or a god-dancing Cutalaimatan festival in Madras, or as rich in virtual meaning as a Balinese cockfight, Yosemite’s performances involve public displays of symbols popularly understood to be emblematic of given ways of life.2 They are enactments by means of which people—“visitors” in the park’s conventional discourse—express “what they believe themselves to be,” to borrow Lloyd Warner’s original phrasing (Warner 1959: 107; cited in Singer 1984: 110). They express it passionately, ethically, imaginatively, and spiritually, as well as ideologically.
I studied Yosemite National Park as a stage for the enactments of what anthropologist Milton Singer termed the “great and little traditions” of cultural performance (Singer 1984: 165). I became interested in the littlest of the littler of these, as well as in the most energetic and newly minted, although I partook of as wide a variety as possible. It was with the performance of minor, often coincidental or unintended movements and gestures that I became the most concerned. These were acts as small as tripping over a tree root, flicking a pine needle off of a camper’s tent, or slamming shut the door of a bear-proof storage box that wouldn’t latch any other way. They were the kinds of small, but densely layered, ubiquitous facts of visitor experience that might have become the raw material of a work of choreography about Yosemite’s visitors had that been the project at hand. Indeed, they literally did come to serve that purpose, although not in any conventional sense of the term.
Whether great or small, cultural performances provide the park’s visitors with what the pioneering anthropologist of performance Edward Schieffelin once identified as “cultural scenarios” (2005 [1976]: 3). They constitute culturally salient patterns of activity in which visitors may come to terms not only with who they have been meant to be, symbolically speaking, but also with who they, in point of undeniable fact, actually are—with the “stuff” of which they are made, as living organisms and as forms of human life.3 Perhaps most significantly, however, these performances enable visitors to encounter who (and with whom), they may be becoming as well, as far as their futures, both more and less vivid, are concerned. In this latter regard, Yosemite also serves as a stage—in both the spatial and the temporal sense of the term—for performance processes that, in their emergent, transformative character, bear a vague family resemblance to those that anthropologist James Peacock, in his landmark study of the ludruk “rites of modernization” of mid-twentieth-century Surabaya, Java, observed and documented as well (1968). They also relate even more closely, however, to the incipient “events-in-the-making” created initially in 2006 for the Technologies of Lived Abstraction Series at the University of Montreal, Canada, and collaboratively “folded into” theoretical writing by Erin Manning (2009: 1–3).
Figure 0.1. Visitor Anna Reck choreographing a “small fact” of visitor experience inside a living oak tree in Yosemite Valley, 4 July 2005. Photo by Erich Reck.
I have termed the particular type of performance I studied in Yosemite National Park “landscape performance.” It is admittedly an awkward phrase. However, it is so in part because it is designed to forge a new kind of connection between ideas that are normally kept apart. So, it vexes. On the one hand, the phrase can be understood as similar in meaning to “landscape painting” or “landscape architecture.” Landscape performance, in this sense, references kinds of performance that may take landscape as their primary subject matter. This sense