I have just accepted tutoring an MA dissertation on how the new digital media conditions the task of the dancer and choreographer. What is an (English) Literature teacher doing supervising this? Let me retrace the steps.

Since I have always been interested in the process of film adaptation, having published many articles about it, and since I have taught English Theatre a few times, I was invited by my colleagues in the Catalan Department to teach part of the course ‘Theatre Arts and Other Arts’ within their MA in Theatre Studies. I chose to teach a 12-hour seminar on ‘Shakespeare on the Screen’, based on a previous BA elective (see the materials at http://gent.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/content/teaching-0).

I met in class my new tutoree, Toni, who had been, by the way, already my student in my UOC ‘Introduction to English Literature’. Yes, I am offering some kind of insidious critique against online teaching by saying I have ‘met’ someone I already knew as a student. But I digress. Toni is a retired contemporary dancer with a long career, currently a teacher at the Institut del Teatre. He wrote for my course, following my suggestion, a great paper on Scottish dancer Michael Clark’s performance as a totally silent Caliban in Peter Greenaway’s atmospheric film adaptation of The Tempest, Prospero’s Books. I gave a lecture within my course on how technology has impacted the evolution of theatre (I wrote about this here, see my post for May 11, of this year). Toni put two and two together and decided that I might be interested in seeing how digital media impact dance today. I certainly am but, believe me, I did agonize about whether I was doing Toni a favour by accepting his supervision. He seems to be far more certain than I am. But, then, as a colleague told me, he brings the knowledge, I contribute the know-how (to write a dissertation).

Discussing all this with my UAB colleague Teresa López Pellisa, she explained to me her work on theatre and cyberculture, which I ignored (this happens all the time–we don’t know what the neighbour next door is doing but we’re familiar with the last advances in, say, Toronto). I met Teresa when she organized in 2008 the ‘I Congreso Internacional de Literatura Fantástica y Ciencia Ficción’, so far with no second edition. We share also, apart from a love of CF, a course in another master’s degree, so I know about her interest in the post-human and Latin-American CF, but I didn’t know, as I say, about her work on new stage technologies. At one point, she mentioned working on a play with no text whatsoever and vented her doubts about how that fits the department she works for, the Spanish Department (within the area of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, to be precise). Can you do research on wordless ‘texts’ from a language and Literature department? Can I supervise an MA dissertation on dance?

Obviously, it is clear to Teresa and myself that there should be no watertight compartments dividing academic work. The academic field should look, precisely, like a vast field with academics tending gardens in many different pretty nooks into which other academics might stroll and be welcome. Instead, it often seems to be a suburb composed of fiercely guarded small plots, with walled-in houses into which no neighbour is invited. Even worse, many of the houses are old crumbling mansions and construction stopped many decades ago–new architectural styles are just anathema. Just imagine: in Spain there are no Cultural Studies, no Film Studies, no Theatre Studies, etc, etc, either as degrees or Departments. This is why we find ourselves going out of our way so often. It is either that or Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf for ever.

I believe all my colleagues would tell you that we have internalized the fierce inquisitorial image of a tribunal member checking on us all the time, telling us off for straying off the path. In my case it goes something like this: ‘isn’t it enough for you,’ this inquisitor tells me, ‘to waste your time doing research on popular trash, now you want to go into territory that belongs to other specialists? Why don’t you stick to Shakespeare?’ Well, if you recall this is all Shakespeare’s fault, in the first place, for giving Caliban a physicality so manifest that only a dancer as wonderful as Michael Clark can make sense of… Will this do? As for the ‘trash’, um, as I wrote, the delicious SF movie Forbidden Planet is also an adaptation of The Tempest, at least in plot and subject matter, if not in textuality.

This anxiety that you’re occupying someone else’s territory or living perilously outside the boundaries of your own territory is the true source of much waste of time. Nobody is asking me at this point whether I should be supervising the MA dissertation on dance and I’m sure that my colleagues will find it thrilling (oh, here goes Sara again…). Yet, my internal tribunal member, a distillation of the tribunals I have actually faced, is here to remind me that this will look odd in my CV. I wonder! It might even lend some respectability to a CV full of ‘trash’.

This waste of time I have mentioned, and of energy, results in, as you can see, a constant need to justify yourself, as I’m doing here. In civilized countries you announce who you want to be by means of your doctoral dissertation, then you proceed to teaching courses that fit your academic interests and start a consistent line of publications. Here, it doesn’t work like that. I did announce my intentions with my own dissertation on monstrosity but it all seems geared to make you struggle to find a niche–teaching is restricted by absurd legislation that gives the Government (the Government!!) custody over our syllabus, you cannot invent elective courses, research assessment is based on the conservative suburban layout I have described. I may be protesting too much, since, after all, here I am a tenured teacher with a 24-year-long career. Yet, the insecurity about being judged negatively never vanishes.

Let me clear the unwholesome air and go back to dance and digital technologies. A couple of weeks ago I found myself in a Barcelona cinema watching the live transmission of the Romantic ballet Giselle performed by Moscow’s Bolshoi company. This was the first time I attended an event of this kind, even though there have been already several seasons, including opera and, a novelty this year I think, the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was a weird experience, as, first, I could not help feeling it was a film and not a live performance; second, I felt a little like a voyeur in relation to the audience cheering in Moscow. There were even people eating popcorn in my local theatre and nobody clapped, confused by their role as spectators. Anyway: what I didn’t expect was the intense aesthetic emotion generated by the loving detail with which dancers’ faces and bodies were shown. This is something I would have missed in a theatre.

So, you see?, there is no way you can put, as we say in Spanish, gates in the (academic) field. A ballet one Sunday afternoon in my free time turns out to be the reason why, in the end, I accepted tutoring Toni’s MA dissertation for, after seeing the Russian dancers I got home promising myself to learn more about dance. Toni’s petition for me to supervise his work came only two days later…

Yes, I am so privileged… and, yes, some days academic life is beautiful.

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