Harmony Bench
Biographic Data
| ID | 1710295 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Harmony Bench |
| GIVEN NAMES | Harmony |
| FAMILY NAME | Bench |
| SIGNATURE | BENCH H |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0550-8124 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Radical accounting as method
This essay contributes to digital history by proposing ‘radical accounting’ as a method for gathering data from archives to support analysis of bodily practices at a scale that encompasses the transnational, intergenerational, and collective. Taking as our case study the Black-centered, multi-racial concert dance company Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater established in 1958, we manually curated data from over 30,000 print materials held by the A…
The Noise My Leaves Make
No abstract available
La danse n’est pas une image ». Repenser nos méthodologies à l’ère des réseaux sociaux. Entretien avec Harmony Bench
Harmony Bench, spécialiste des danses produites et diffusées sur Internet, discute des enjeux épistémologiques et méthodologiques que soulève leur étude. La chercheuse souligne l’importance des technologies et des médias dans la circulation des danses à l’échelle mondiale. Elle absorbe notamment les problématiques posées par les archives numériques et leur effacement, la distanciation sociale et l’appropriation culturelle. Cet entretien permet po…
Visceral Data for Dance Histories
Between 1947 and 1960, choreographer Katherine Dunham spent over 5,000 days in hundreds of cities on six continents. During that time, almost 200 dancers, drummers, and singers traveled with her, performing 166 repertory pieces. Dunham’s expansive work lends itself to digital approaches that illuminate the complex ways history is iterated across bodies, and how the specific questions raised by dance history underpin a visceral approach to the dig…
IJSD Volume 12 2021 This Is Where We Dance Now
No abstract available
Screendance Festivals and Online Audiences
No abstract available
Cinematography, choreography and cultural influence
Maya Deren opens the preface to her book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti with an admission of defeat. Armed with Guggenheim funding, she had gone to Haiti in 1947 with the express purpose of making a creative film ‘in which Haitian dance, as purely a dance form, would be combined (in montage principle) with various non-Haitian elements’.1 As described in her grant application, the film would juxtapose images of Haitian Voudoun with Bali…
Dance History and Digital Humanities Meet at the Archives
This interim project report addresses the ongoing work of Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry. The project centres choreographer Katherine Dunham's transnational circulation, and takes a critical mixed methods approach informed by feminist and anti-racist discussions in the digital humanities in order to explore the questions and problems that make data analysis and visualization meaningful for dance h…
Katherine Dunham's Global Method and the Embodied Politics of Dance's Everyday
In a 1950 letter, choreographer Katherine Dunham mentions trouble keeping dancers with her troupe “[i]n spite of the fact that we are the only non-subsidized professional group that has remained self-supporting over these years, and in spite of the fact that we are loved and respected all over the world and work more weeks out of the year than any other dance group in existence.” Although some of these claims would be challenging to validate empi…
Mapping Touring
This article introduces the digital humanities and dance studies project Mapping Touring , and employs it in an analysis of Denishawn's touring prior to and immediately following the company's 1925–26 tour to Asia. Situated within the archival turn in dance, Mapping Touring emphasizes the possibilities of spatial and comparative analysis for touring dance artists, with information about their location and repertory drawn from archival sources, ga…
Arranging (enchaînement)
This entry draws a parallel between digital research and the sequencing of steps known in ballet as enchaînement to argue for arranging as a method or practice of research in data analysis. Arranging is concerned with composing relationships of contingent interdependency. Shifting arrangements of data in datasets and data visualizations can reveal anomalies and open up new lines of inquiry.
Kiri Miller, Playable Bodies
IJSD Volume 7 2016 All This
The full issue of IJSD vol. 7 (2016).Please note: For the best offline reading experience, please print double-sided on 8.5x11 paper. Links to online sources are live in the PDF if read onscreen
Mapping Movement on the Move
A better understanding of the transnational networks of dance touring is critical to placing dance within larger theatrical and cultural systems. This essay demonstrates how digital research methods can work in tandem with more traditional scholarly methods to manage the scale and complexity of data truly necessary to account for what we call “movement on the move.” Drawing on the authors’ research on dance touring-namely, South American tours by…
Screendance
Over the years, screendance has generated flurries of interest within the scholarly dance community, only to watch that interest wane again and again with shifting academic trends. The past decade, however, has seen a slow-churning energy that may result in a more sustainable conversation around dance onscreen, much of which has been fueled by screendance artists and programmers themselves. A number of volumes of interest to academia have emerged…
Computational choreographies
In the fields of dance and performance studies, screen media are often eyed with suspicion by those who continue to find an ontological distinction between the presumed fixity of media documents and the ephemerality of ‘live’ performance. In this article I argue that some web-based dances re-configure the archive as a producer of performance rather than solely its conservator. They redefine choreography for computational environments, positioning…
Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions
Mapping Movement on the Move
A better understanding of the transnational networks of dance touring is critical to placing dance within larger theatrical and cultural systems. This essay demonstrates how digital research methods can work in tandem with more traditional scholarly methods to manage the scale and complexity of data truly necessary to account for what we call “movement on the move.” Drawing on the authors’ research on dance touring-namely, South American tours by…
Screendance
Over the years, screendance has generated flurries of interest within the scholarly dance community, only to watch that interest wane again and again with shifting academic trends. The past decade, however, has seen a slow-churning energy that may result in a more sustainable conversation around dance onscreen, much of which has been fueled by screendance artists and programmers themselves. A number of volumes of interest to academia have emerged…
Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions
Computational choreographies
In the fields of dance and performance studies, screen media are often eyed with suspicion by those who continue to find an ontological distinction between the presumed fixity of media documents and the ephemerality of ‘live’ performance. In this article I argue that some web-based dances re-configure the archive as a producer of performance rather than solely its conservator. They redefine choreography for computational environments, positioning…
Screendance
Over the years, screendance has generated flurries of interest within the scholarly dance community, only to watch that interest wane again and again with shifting academic trends. The past decade, however, has seen a slow-churning energy that may result in a more sustainable conversation around dance onscreen, much of which has been fueled by screendance artists and programmers themselves. A number of volumes of interest to academia have emerged…
IJSD Volume 7 2016 All This
The full issue of IJSD vol. 7 (2016).Please note: For the best offline reading experience, please print double-sided on 8.5x11 paper. Links to online sources are live in the PDF if read onscreen
Mapping Movement on the Move
A better understanding of the transnational networks of dance touring is critical to placing dance within larger theatrical and cultural systems. This essay demonstrates how digital research methods can work in tandem with more traditional scholarly methods to manage the scale and complexity of data truly necessary to account for what we call “movement on the move.” Drawing on the authors’ research on dance touring-namely, South American tours by…
Arranging (enchaînement)
This entry draws a parallel between digital research and the sequencing of steps known in ballet as enchaînement to argue for arranging as a method or practice of research in data analysis. Arranging is concerned with composing relationships of contingent interdependency. Shifting arrangements of data in datasets and data visualizations can reveal anomalies and open up new lines of inquiry.
Kiri Miller, Playable Bodies
Mapping Touring
This article introduces the digital humanities and dance studies project Mapping Touring , and employs it in an analysis of Denishawn's touring prior to and immediately following the company's 1925–26 tour to Asia. Situated within the archival turn in dance, Mapping Touring emphasizes the possibilities of spatial and comparative analysis for touring dance artists, with information about their location and repertory drawn from archival sources, ga…
Dance History and Digital Humanities Meet at the Archives
This interim project report addresses the ongoing work of Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry. The project centres choreographer Katherine Dunham's transnational circulation, and takes a critical mixed methods approach informed by feminist and anti-racist discussions in the digital humanities in order to explore the questions and problems that make data analysis and visualization meaningful for dance h…
Katherine Dunham's Global Method and the Embodied Politics of Dance's Everyday
In a 1950 letter, choreographer Katherine Dunham mentions trouble keeping dancers with her troupe “[i]n spite of the fact that we are the only non-subsidized professional group that has remained self-supporting over these years, and in spite of the fact that we are loved and respected all over the world and work more weeks out of the year than any other dance group in existence.” Although some of these claims would be challenging to validate empi…
IJSD Volume 12 2021 This Is Where We Dance Now
No abstract available
Screendance Festivals and Online Audiences
No abstract available
Cinematography, choreography and cultural influence
Maya Deren opens the preface to her book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti with an admission of defeat. Armed with Guggenheim funding, she had gone to Haiti in 1947 with the express purpose of making a creative film ‘in which Haitian dance, as purely a dance form, would be combined (in montage principle) with various non-Haitian elements’.1 As described in her grant application, the film would juxtapose images of Haitian Voudoun with Bali…
Visceral Data for Dance Histories
Between 1947 and 1960, choreographer Katherine Dunham spent over 5,000 days in hundreds of cities on six continents. During that time, almost 200 dancers, drummers, and singers traveled with her, performing 166 repertory pieces. Dunham’s expansive work lends itself to digital approaches that illuminate the complex ways history is iterated across bodies, and how the specific questions raised by dance history underpin a visceral approach to the dig…
La danse n’est pas une image ». Repenser nos méthodologies à l’ère des réseaux sociaux. Entretien avec Harmony Bench
Harmony Bench, spécialiste des danses produites et diffusées sur Internet, discute des enjeux épistémologiques et méthodologiques que soulève leur étude. La chercheuse souligne l’importance des technologies et des médias dans la circulation des danses à l’échelle mondiale. Elle absorbe notamment les problématiques posées par les archives numériques et leur effacement, la distanciation sociale et l’appropriation culturelle. Cet entretien permet po…
The Noise My Leaves Make
No abstract available
Radical accounting as method
This essay contributes to digital history by proposing ‘radical accounting’ as a method for gathering data from archives to support analysis of bodily practices at a scale that encompasses the transnational, intergenerational, and collective. Taking as our case study the Black-centered, multi-racial concert dance company Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater established in 1958, we manually curated data from over 30,000 print materials held by the A…
Art (12 works) · Dance (11 works) · Diversity and Impact of Dance (11 works) · Visual arts (10 works) · Art history (6 works) · Contemporary dance (5 works) · History (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (4 works) · Computer Science (4 works)