Sally Ann Ness, Dance
Ethnographic fieldwork on the sports of climbing and hiking conducted from 2005-2012 in Yosemite National Park supports a "choreographic" theory of cultural performance. This pragmatic symbolic theory posits movement as the ground of all meaning-making. It gives primary consideration to the performative force of embodied movements as they inspire, transmit, reproduce, coordinate, and publicly transform various kinds of meaningful self-world relationships. The choreographic theoretical framework advanced, in contrast to more widely employed semiotic analytics, foregrounds sign performance as opposed to sign information, sign movement rather than sign-object relations, and sign mediation rather than sign representation. In so doing, it recognizes new roles for movement in the development of conceptual processes, as well as in the cultural dynamics of group and solo performance practices, and in the analysis and pedagogical understanding of sonic and kinetic forms of meaning-making.
Sally Ann Ness is an incoming Professor and Chair of Dance at Temple University. She is author of Choreographies of Landscape (Berghahn Press, 2016), which was supported by a 2007 John S. Guggenheim award. Her book publications include Body, Movement, and Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), Where Asia Smiles (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), and Migrations of Gesture (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) co-edited with Carrie Noland. Her research has also been published in Semiotic Inquiry, American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Dance Research Journal, Journal of Asian Studies, The Drama Review, and Performance Research, among other journal publications.
Click here to view more information.