Fieldwork recordings and visual dance: questioning methodologies for analysing the process of local dancing

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What we ‘see’ in a dance depends on who we are, but is this reflected in how we analyse the visual recording? When such video data is of a social activity, then the ‘context’ and ‘people’ are frequently part of anthropology papers, but dance is also about the moving. We regularly attempt to classify the product of this moving as dances which are placed in convenient categories of types, notated by exactness of position, analysed in terms of the resulting structure. I consider the case for Romanian local dance, and I question whether this relates well to the process of dancing from the perspective of a social dancing community?

Green, Nick (2016). “Fieldwork recordings and visual dance: questioning methodologies for analysing the process of local dancing.” Liz Mellish, Ivanka Vlaeva, Lozanka Peycheva, Nick Green, Ventsislav Dimov (editors), Music and Dance in Southeastern Europe : Myth, Ritual, Post-1989, Audiovisual Ethnographies, Fifth Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Music and Dance in Southeastern Europe 2016 South-West University “Neofit Rilski”:271–279. Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria: University Publishing House “Neofit Rilski”. ISBN 978-954-00-0123-4.