The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity 9780199754281, 0199754284

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

DA N C E A N D E T H N IC I T Y

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

DANCE AND ETHNICITY Edited by

ANTHONY SHAY and

BARBARA SELLERS-​YOUNG

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data The Oxford Handbook of dance and ethnicity / Edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young pages cm. — (Oxford handbooks) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–975428–1 (hardback) 1.  Dance—Anthropological aspects.  2.  Dance—Social aspects. 3.  Ethnicity.  I.  Shay, Anthony, 1936–  II.  Sellers-Young, Barbara. GV1588.6.O84 2015 306.4′84—dc23 2015020047 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan, USA

This book is dedicated in gratitude to Laurie Cameron—​artist, colleague, mentor, and friend.

Table of Contents

Preface  Acknowledgments  List of Contributors  Dance and Ethnicity: Introduction  Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-​Young

xi xiii xv 1

PA RT  I   C HOR E O G R A P H I N G E T H N IC I T Y: DA N C E I N T H E C ON S T RU C T ION OF E T H N IC I DE N T I T Y  1. “And I Make My Own”: Class Performance, Black Urban Identity, and Depression-​Era Harlem’s Physical Culture  Christopher J. Wells

17

2 “Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?” Creativity and Irish Step Dance in the Work of Jean Butler and Colin Dunne  Aoife McGrath

41

3. Dancing Jews and Jewesses: Jewishness, Ethnicity, and Exoticism in American Dance  Rebecca Rossen

66

4. Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco: Is There an Enduring Gay Ethnic Dance?  Darren Patrick Blaney

91

5. Dancing Multiple Identities: Preserving and Revitalizing Dances of the Skolt Sámi  Petri Hoppu 6. To Call Dance Japanese: Nihon Buyô as Ethnic Dance  Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall

114 131

viii   Contents

7. Diasporic Ethnicity, Gender, and Dance: Muslim Macedonian Roma in New York  160 Carol Silverman

PA RT  I I   C HOR E O G R A P H I N G T H E NAT ION : DA N C E A S A DI SP L AY OF E T H N IC I T Y A N D NAT IONA L I SM  8. “An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics”: Ted Shawn, American Dance, and the Discourses of Sex, Race, and Ethnicity  Paul A. Scolieri

185

9. Dancing Angels and Princesses: The Invention of an Ideal Female National Dancer in Twentieth-​Century Iran  Ida Meftahi

210

10. The Spectacularization of Soviet/​Russian Folk Dance: Igor Moiseyev and the Invented Tradition of Staged Folk Dance  236 Anthony Shay 11. LADO, the State Ensemble of Croatian Folk Dances and Songs: Icon of Croatian Identity  Anthony Shay

256

12. Authenticity and Ethnicity: Folk Dance, Americanization, and the Immigrant Body in the Early Twentieth Century  Jessica Ray Herzogenrath

279

13. A Folklorist’s View of “Folk” and “Ethnic” Dance: Three Ukrainian Examples  298 Andriy Nahachewsky 14. The Jarabe Tapatío: Imagining Race, Nation, Class, and Gender in 1920s Mexico  Gabriela Mendoza-​Garcia

319

15. Perception, Connections, and Performed Identities in American Ghanaian Dance Encounters  Jennifer Fisher

344

Contents   ix

PA RT  I I I   P E R F OR M I N G E T H N IC I T Y: C R E AT I N G N E W I DE N T I T I E S T H ROU G H T H E DA N C E S OF T H E “OT H E R” 16. Orientalism and the American Belly Dancer: Multiplicity, Authenticity, Identity  Andrea Deagon 17. Black Erased: The Tango de Negros in Spain’s Romantic Age  Kathy M. Milazzo 18. English-​Canadian Ethnocentricity: The Case Study of Boris Volkoff at the 1936 Nazi Olympics  Allana C. Lindgren 19. La Meri: Purveyor of the Dancing Other  Nancy Lee Ruyter

367 391

412 438

20. Choreographing Interculturalism: International Dance Performance at the American Museum of Natural History, 1943–​1952  454 Rebekah J. Kowal 21. “ Hot” Latin Dance: Ethnic Identity and Stereotype  Juliet McMains 22. From Salsa to Salzonto: Rhythmic Identities and Inventive Dance Traditions in Ghana  Christey Carwile 23. Spectacles of Ethnicities: The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival  Miriam Phillips

480

501 528

PA RT  I V   DA N C E A S A F OR M OF E T H N IC R E SI S TA N C E  24. Dancecapes of Dionysus: From Kali Vrisi (Northern Greece) to the Olympics  Christos Papakostas

563

x   Contents

25. Ballet and Whiteness: Will Ballet Forever Be the Kingdom of the Pale?  Jennifer Fisher 26. Men and the Happiness Dance  Barbara Sellers-​Young

585 598

27. From Powwow to Stomp Dance: Parallel Dance Traditions in Oklahoma  613 Paula J. Conlon 28. Beyond Colonization, Commodification, and Reclamation: Hula and Hawaiian Identity  Christine Emi Chan

636

29. Crossing the Seas of Southeast Asia: Indigenous Diasporic Islam and Performances of Women’s Igal  Rachmi Diyah Larasati

664

30. San Miguel the Arcángel, Capitan of Many Troops: An Ethno-​ Iconographic Study of Danza de Migueles  Ana Patricia Farfán

683

31. Black Dance after Race  Thomas F. DeFrantz

706

Index 

725

Preface

Since the opening of the first doctoral programs in North America and other parts of the Anglophone world over the past quarter century, studies of what is called “world,” “ traditional,” “ethnic,” and “folk” dance have greatly increased to meet the ever-​increasing demand for materials to teach courses in dance ethnography, ethnomusicology, and anthropology, as the chapters in this volume and the many monographs in the volume’s bibliography demonstrate. Most of these studies have focused on single ethnicities or nationalities and their dances. Thus, it became clear that a volume devoted to the many ways in which dance and ethnicity intersect would greatly enhance and enrich the field. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity is, in part, an answer to this need, as well as a summation of how much work has been done in the field until this scholarly moment. This volume is not intended to be an encyclopedic or in any way a complete response to the demand, but rather suggestive of future directions of research that students of dance can undertake in this dynamic area of dance studies. It provides an intense look into the variety of ways in which humans and dance engage and intersect and the deeper meanings that dance performances produce as a mode of human behavior within specific cultural parameters. As nonverbal behavior, dance and movement provide a unique lens with which one can view human behavior, for humans consciously decide to dance, which for the most part lies outside of everyday motor activity, and it is for the dance researcher and scholar to determine and interpret the multiple ways in which dance provides meaning for its performers and viewers. The authors of the chapters in this volume engage with a wide variety of theoretical and conceptual approaches to this nexus of dance and ethnicity as well as a wide and diverse assortment of ethnic groups and how dance and movement inform the construction and maintenance of ethnic identities throughout a rich diversity of cultures and societies. In some cases authors (Nahachewsky and Papakostas in this volume) specifically suggest new and fruitful ways that researchers and students can conceptualize and theorize dance practices, while in other cases the methodologies and frameworks that scholars utilize provide models for such engagement. As dancers, many of the authors have embodied the traditions about which they write, adding an important layer of authority. Thus, it is the hope of the contributors to this volume that their research will spur future studies, with new insights and conceptual frameworks in the important intersection of dance and ethnicity and what that intersection reveals of human behavior.

Acknowledgments

This is the section in which I can express my indebtedness, both scholarly and personal, to the many individuals who helped to bring about the publication of this volume. My first debt as editor is to the contributors to the volume. Their contributions have enriched my knowledge and given me hope for the future of dance scholarship. I cannot express fully enough my awe of and gratefulness to Norman Hirschy, my editor at Oxford University Press, for his calm, generosity, and kindness in answering my many queries and demands. I also extend thanks to Molly Davis, editor at Oxford, for her prompt assistance in the technical matters of assembling a volume of this scope. Pomona College, which provides the ideal intellectual environment for a scholar, permitted me to take leave and provided me with financial support in the form of grants and fellowships to work on this project. I especially thank Assistant Dean Jonathan Wright, who guided me through the process, and Sandra Fenton, grants and fellowship administrator, for processing them. My colleagues in the Theatre and Dance Department, who helped and guided me through the tenure process, have been very generous in their support: in dance, Laurie Cameron, the program director, Meg Jolley, Vicky Koenig, and John Pennington; and in theater, James Taylor, chair of the department, Betty Bernhard, Art Horowitz, Thomas Leabhart, Sherry Linnell, Joyce Lu, and Leonard Pronko. Cathy Seaman, program administrator of theater and dance; Mary Rosier; and Myrna Cogley provided invaluable logistical assistance. My thanks also to librarians Gale Burrow, Char Booth, and Alex Chappell for their unflagging kindness in locating reference materials. In the technical services area, I owe a debt to Mary McMahon and Jason Smith. I especially thank my students, whose out-​of-​the-​box, critical thinking and writing inspire me daily. The hundreds of members of the Aman Folk Ensemble and the AVAZ International Dance Theatre placed bodies, voices, and musical instruments in my hands that allowed me to be a creative artist and my beginnings as a dance scholar. The dazzling AMAN fiftieth reunion in October 2011 reminded me why I had begun my life’s journey as dancer, choreographer, and scholar in the first place. My deepest gratitude goes to Susie Burke, who oversaw the ambitious reunion, and to Louise Weiler and Mitzi Eisner, among others who directed the life-​changing event. I sincerely thank my dear friends Jonathan Hall and Philip Nix for their support. Above all, I thank my spouse, Jamal (Khosrow Jamali), for his many kindnesses, unending patience and support, and gourmet meals.

List of Contributors

Darren Patrick Blaney, PhD, is a lecturer in the Theatre Arts Department at the University of Miami, Florida. He has contributed essays to Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, The New England Theatre Journal, and the Gay and Lesbian Review, Worldwide. He previously taught at Pomona College, University of California, Davis, and University of California, Santa Cruz, and his plays have been presented at numerous venues, including the San Francisco Fringe Festival, Highways Performance Space, and Works San Jose. Christey Carwile is professor of anthropology and global studies at Warren Wilson College. She has published work on women and religion in Nigeria and popular dance and pan-​African identity in West Africa. Her current research examines the pedagogical role of music and movement in resolving conflict and addressing issues of social justice. Christine Emi Chan is currently living in Hawaii and studying at the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine. She graduated from Pomona College with a major in religious studies and a minor in dance. She has studied hula for many years. Paula Conlon, associate professor of musicology, teaches Native American and world music at the University of Oklahoma’s School of Music. Recent publications include chapters on the native flute revival (The Oxford Handbook of Music Revivals, 2014), the native flute and courtship (Music, Dance and the Art of Seduction, 2014), activism through powwow music and dance (Sounds of Resistance:  The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, 2013), and native entries in The Grove Dictionary of American Music (2nd ed., 2013). Andrea Deagon received her PhD in classical studies from Duke University in 1984 and currently coordinates the classical studies program at University of North Carolina–​ Wilmington, as well as teaching in the women’s studies program. Since 1975 she has studied, taught, and performed Middle Eastern dance. She writes on the Western reception of Middle Eastern dance for both dance and academic publications; her most recent article, “The Golden Mask: Tipping the Belly Dancer in America,” appears in Feminist Studies 39, no. 1 (Spring 2013). Thomas F. DeFrantz is professor of dance and African and African American studies at Duke University, and president of the Society of Dance History Scholars, an international organization that advances the field of dance studies through research, publication, performance, and outreach to audiences across the arts, humanities, and social

xvi   List of Contributors sciences. He is also the director of SLIPPAGE:  Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. His books include the edited volume Dancing Many Drums:  Excavations in African American Dance (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), winner of the CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Publication and the Errol Hill Award presented by the American Society for Theater Research, and Dancing Revelations Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2004), winner of the de la Torre Bueno Prize for Outstanding Publication in Dance. Ana Patricia Farfán holds an MFA in dance from the University of Maryland in linguistics and Spanish literature, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Concert Dance, and Academia de la Danza Mexicana, National Institute of Fine Arts. She is the founder and current editor of the Mexican dance research journal Centrífuga. She was awarded a Fulbright fellow award for her research (2011–​2013). Jennifer Fisher is an associate professor in the dance department of the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Nutcracker Nation: How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in the New World (Yale University Press, 2003), which won the Special Citation of the De La Torre Bueno Prize given by the Society of Dance History Scholars. She coedited with Anthony Shay When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders (Oxford University Press, 2009). As a ballet coroner, she recently held an inquest into the death of Giselle at the San Francisco Ballet. Jonathan M.  Hall is an assistant professor of media studies at Ponoma College. His research focuses on critical and psychoanalytic theories, avant-​garde and experimental literature and film, queer theory, and cultural studies in popular cinema and media, from experimental film, to video, to animation, as well as the unfolding directions of new media. He is especially interested in the intersections of desire, expression, and politics, with special concern for filmic, literary, and new media texts from East and Southeast Asia. His first book project, “Geographies of Unbelievable Latitude,” addresses media theory, social histories of perversion, and the midcentury Japanese film underground. Jessica Ray Herzogenrath a PhD candidate in history at Texas A&M University and dissertation fellow at Texas A&M in Qatar, explores the circulation of folk dance practices through women in education in her dissertation in progress, “Thinking American, Working American, Playing American:  Folk Dance in Chicago, 1890–​ 1940.” Her research interests include American popular dance; American identity; and the intersections of gender, ethnicity, race, and class in the early twentieth century. Petri Hoppu is PhD and adjunct professor in dance studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. His areas of expertise include theory and methodology in dance anthropology as well as research into Nordic vernacular and folk dances. He has coedited (with Karen Vedel) Nordic Dance Spaces: Practicing and Imagining a Region (Ashgate, 2014). Rebekah J. Kowal is an associate professor of dance at the University of Iowa, where she teaches dance studies. Her first book, How to Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in

List of Contributors    xvii Postwar America (Wesleyan University Press, 2010), received the Congress on Research in Dance Outstanding Publication Award in 2012. Currently she is coediting the Oxford Handbook on Dance and Politics and working on her second book about the politics of international dance performance in the United States in the mid-​twentieth century. Rachmi Diyah Larasati is the author of The Dance That Makes You Vanish (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). She is associate professor in the Department of Theater Arts and Dance and gender, women and sexualities studies, University of Minnesota. She also serves as visiting professor at the Madrasah of Critical Global Humanities at the Islamic University (UIN) Yogyakarta. Allana C.  Lindgren is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. She has published articles in a variety of journals, including Dance Chronicle, American Journal of Dance Therapy, and Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices. She is also the coeditor of Renegade Bodies: Canadian Dance in the 1970s. Aoife McGrath PhD, is a lecturer in the School of Creative Arts, Queen’s University, Belfast, where she researches and teaches dance and theater. She is also a dancer and choreographer and is co-​convener of the Choreography and Corporeality Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Aoife has published several articles and book chapters on dance, and her recently published monograph, Dance Theatre in Ireland: Revolutionary Moves (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), provides the first critical and contextual study of contemporary and historical dance theater practice in Ireland. Juliet McMains PhD, is an associate professor in the Dance Program at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her first book, Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry (Wesleyan, 2006), won the 2008 CORD Outstanding Publication Award. Her second book, Spinning Mambo into Salsa:  Caribbean Dance in Global Commerce, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Ida Meftahi is a cultural historian whose research transcends the studies of gender, dance, theater, cinema, and political economy of public entertainment who offers a novel narrative of corporeality in twentieth-​century Iran. She has a PhD from the University of Toronto’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations and is a 2013–​2014 postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Pennsylvania State University. Gabriela Mendoza-​Garcia director, choreographer, and dance scholar, is passionate about teaching and researching Mexican folkloric dance. She is the director of the Gabriela Mendoza-​Garcia Ballet Folklorico in Laredo, Texas. Currently she is writing on the role of gender in Mexican folkloric dance and is choreographing dances that incorporate her investigation of the Jarabe Tapatío in 1920s Mexico. Kathy M. Milazzo received her PhD in dance studies from the University of Surrey. Her recent publications include a chapter on the puellae Gaditanae, the ancient Spanish

xviii   List of Contributors dancers, in Michelle Hefner Hayes’s forthcoming edited work for Macmillan, and a piece on the history of jazz and tap dance in Judith Bennahum’s newly revised textbook, The Living Dance. Milazzo has been a dance studies lecturer at the University of Surrey and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and is currently working at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History. Andriy Nahachewsky is a professor, director of the Kule Folklore Centre, and Huculak Chair of Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography at the University of Alberta. His research interests include folklore, dance, and ethnic identity. His most recent monograph is Ukrainian Dance: A Cross-​Cultural Approach (McFarland, 2012). Christos Papakostas PhD, is a lecturer in at the University of Athens in Physical Education and Sport Science. Last year he published ‘Saha isi varo ni nai’ (Romani dance and music identities in Macedonia). Miriam Phillips is assistant professor in the School of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland. She is a dance ethnologist, Laban movement analyst, and dancer whose primary research focuses on the kinesthetic and aesthetic comparisons between North Indian kathak and Spanish flamenco dance, with a recent article appearing in Ethnomusicology 57, no. 3 (Fall 2013). A newer research area explores performance as embodied cultural memory and the cross-​pollination process between dance in rural communities in Guinea, West Africa, and their counterparts in nationalized staged versions, with a forthcoming chapter in the multidisciplinary collaborative publication Dancing with D’mba:  Icon of Beauty and Power in West Africa (Yale University Press, forthcoming). Leonard Pronko is a professor of theater and expert on kabuki at Pomona College. Since 1965 he has directed some twenty kabuki productions in English at the college and elsewhere. In 1970 he was the first non-​Japanese to study at the Kabuki Training Program at the National Theatre of Japan. He has studied kabuki dance with a number of eminent dance teachers in both the United States and Japan. In 1972 Pronko received a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for his kabuki productions. In 1986 he received the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Third Degree, from the government of Japan in recognition of his achievements in introducing kabuki to the West. In 1997 he received the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Award for Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education. Rebecca Rossen is assistant professor in the Performance as Public Practice Program at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches courses in dance history and performance studies. She is the author of Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance (Oxford University Press, 2014), and has also published articles in Feminist Studies, TDR: The Drama Review, and Theatre Journal. Nancy Lee Ruyter PhD, is a professor of dance at University of California, Irvine. Her publications include Reformers and Visionaries: The Americanization of the Art of Dance (1979), The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-​Century American Delsartism

List of Contributors    xix (1999), and numerous articles on dance and theater in Spain and Latin America and dance in the Balkan regions. Paul A. Scolieri is associate professor of dance at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of Dancing the New World: Aztecs, Spaniards, and the Choreography of Conquest (2013), the inaugural book in the University of Texas Press’s Latin American & Caribbean Performance Series, sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He is currently writing a biography of the father of American dance, Ted Shawn, for Oxford University Press. Barbara Sellers-​Young is a professor in the Department of Dance at York University in Toronto. She has published five books, of which three have focused on ethnicity and identity. They include a book on Japanese dance, Teaching Personality with Gracefulness, and two coedited volumes, Belly Dance:  Orientalism, Transnationalism and Harem Fantasy, with Anthony Shay, and Belly Dance Around the World:  New Communities, Performance and Identity, with Caitlin McDonald. Anthony Shay is associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance, Pomona College, in Claremont, California. He is the author of four monographs and four edited volumes. His newest book is The Dangerous Lives of Public Performers: Dancing, Sex, and Entertainment in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Carol Silverman professor of cultural anthropology and folklore at the University of Oregon, has done research with Roma in the Balkans, Western Europe, and the United States, exploring the intersection of politics, music, human rights, gender, and state policy with a focus on issues of representation; she is also a performer and teacher of Balkan music and works with the NGO Voice of Roma. Her recent publications include Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2012), which received the Merriam Book Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology, and “Global Balkan Gypsy Music: Issues of Migration, Appropriation, and Representation,” in The Globalization of Musics in Transit:  Musical Migration and Tourism (edited by S. Krüger and R. Trandafoiu, Routledge, 2014). Christopher J. Wells is assistant professor of musicology at Arizona State University. He has contributed entries on social and popular dance topics, tap dancers, and African American musicians to the African American National Biography and The Twenties in America.

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

DA N C E A N D E T H N IC I T Y

Dance and Et h ni c i t y  Introduction Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-​Y oung

Ethnic groups have been defined as people who share a common ethos based on ancestry, nation, language, and other identity markers. Ethnicity is a discursive term that social anthropologist Fredrik Barth conceptualized in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969) to consider the boundaries and borders of ethnic communities, with specific reference to how they maintain, revise, or challenge these boundaries. His primary goal was to dispute a common assumption in anthropology that ethnic groups existed as enclosed communities without extensive interaction with other groups. Dance research in the area of ethnic identity and later ethnicity began when dance studies followed the nineteenth-​century folklore studies’ imperative of the collection and description of dances most often referred to as folk dance. Dance studies, however, has evolved in its analysis of ethnicity throughout the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries to incorporate conceptions of dance performance developed from a combination of anthropological, critical, and cultural studies. Nineteenth-​century dance researchers went into the field and observed dancing, especially village and community dances referred to as “folk” dance; collected it; and recorded it. Early examples are Cecil Sharp in England (Georges and Jones 1995, 79–​81), who collected English folk dances; the Janković sisters of Serbia (Shay 2008b, 24); and such folk dance teachers as Elizabeth Burchenal in the United States (2008a, 79–​82). In these early studies, descriptions of the dances were more important than the context or the performers, as Sharp and the others intended the dances to be revived and performed (see Georges and Jones 1995, 79–​81; Buckland 2010). As Georges and Jones note: “The dances that Sharp was the first to document and describe in print are regularly performed in England today; and they have, as Sharp had hoped, indeed come to be regarded as a fundamental part of England’s national culture” (1995, 81). This movement to preserve dances was supported by UNESCO through the formation of the International Council of Traditional Music, which in the 1970s initiated the interdisciplinary Study Group on Ethnochoreology and expanded its remit from

2    Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young rescuing folkloric to considering the cultural dimensions of dance and music, with the objectives to promote research, document the interdisciplinary study of dance, provide a forum for collaboration and publication, and contribute to the societal understanding of humanity through the lens of dance. Through its biennial symposia and annual global conferences with the International Council for Traditional Music, the Study Group on Ethnochoreology provided a forum for a transnational dialogue on dance and ethnicity that included scholars from around the globe. Concurrently, early dance anthropologists Gertrude Kurath (1960), Adrienne Kaeppler (1972, 1983), and Joann Kealiinohomoku (1969–​1970) influenced the direction of dance research through a focus on the movement vocabulary and physical structure of the dance within its social role, related cultural function, and associated mythos. Their in-​depth studies of Native American (Kurath), Tongan (Kaeppler), and Hopi (Kealiinohomoku) dance communities provided a set of data that could be examined cross-​culturally to reveal the linguistic, economic, social, cultural, and political processes that influence the history of a dance form within a specific community. Reviewing past dance research and dance department curriculums, which divided dance into folk/​ethnic, modern, and ballet (sometimes referred to as art dance), dance anthropologist Joann Kealiinohomoku noted: “An Anthropologist looks at Ballet as a form of Ethnic Dance” (1969–​1970). Influenced by the cultural debates of the 1960s and 1970s, Kealiinohomoku noted the tendency by scholars to combine the performance styles of diverse people within the same region as, for example, African dance, which ultimately negated the complex matrix of distinct culturally embedded dance forms. She advocated an approach that considered all dance forms as a revelation of the social, cultural, and aesthetic values and ideals of a community. In the process of her argument, she moved ballet from its political and economic hierarchical status in dance studies to a form of ethnic dance that in its history and contemporaneity represented an elite community. As such, she created a counternarrative that put designations for dance such as social, ethnic, folk, staged, aesthetic, and classical in discourse with each other. The discussion on dance anthropology was further expanded by Anya Peterson Royce’s The Anthropology of Dance (1977), which combined a cross-​cultural perspective with a discussion of the role of participant observation and such techniques for studying and recording dance as notation and film. This integrated approach to ethnographic research was followed by Judith Lynne Hanna in To Dance Is Human: A Theory of Nonverbal Communication (1987). Using a combination of communication theory and a cross-​cultural perspective, Hanna argued that dance is an embodied thought and feeling that is organized into physical movement language that is situated within a social organization. Kurath, Kaeppler, Kealiinohomoku, Royce, and Hanna adapted the methodological tools from anthropology, linguistics, and communication studies to provide an approach to dance studies that was distinctive from the historical approach, which had focused on the history of noted dancers and related modern and ballet companies. Research in dance ethnography was increasingly challenged in the 1970s and 1980s by cultural critics such as Bob Scholte, who contended that ethnography as praxis was

Dance and Ethnicity    3 culturally mediated, contextually situated, and relative (1976, 431). In the 1980s George Marcus and others continued this discussion of self-​reflexive ethnography, which Marcus summarizes in Ethnography through Thick and Thin (1998). Marcus points out that ethnography evolved out of the travel writing of the nineteenth century, and as such initially contained assumptions about the primacy of Western notions of knowledge. His writing and that of other critics led to a reconsideration of ethnography’s methods and modes of interpretation. As he noted: “The value of rhetorical self-​awareness is in drawing our attention to the constrictions through which, as professionals, we have learned partly to read but which still mask many difficult and misleading assumptions about the purpose and politics of our work” (1988, 622). Dance ethnographers responded by positioning their personal history as a means of identifying personal characteristics such as ethnicity, race, class, or national origin that might influence their approach to an ethnographic project. This self-​reflective stance shifted the focus from specific dance contexts to “the body” and conceptions of corporeality and embodiment in what came to be called “the dancing body” in unique cultural and historical settings (Thomas 2003, 1). As dance and performance studies scholar André Lepecki ironically notes: “Historically, neither ‘presence’ nor ‘body’ have been central to Western choreographic imagination. Mark Franko suggests the history of this attitude in stating that in Renaissance dance manuals ‘the body is suspiciously absent’ ” (2004, 2). This shift took place within the cautions offered by dance ethnographer Theresa J.  Buckland:  “Eurocentric assumptions about ‘the body’ as singular and transcultural limit fuller understanding of dance as world view and impoverish our understanding of dance as cultural practice” (2010, 339; emphasis in original). Buckland further observes: “All movement systems are viewed as socially produced by people in specific temporal-​cultural circumstances; the people’s conceptualizations, values and practices … form the principal focus of inquiry” of dance ethnography” (2010, 30). Influenced by cultural and critical studies, dance historians and ethnographers in the late 1980s and the 1990s, such as Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Ann Cooper Albright, Cynthia Cohen Bull, Susan Leigh Foster, and Amy Koritz, began an intensive investigation of the interrelationship between dance and the cultural body with considerations of ethnicity, race, nation, gender, and identity. Jane Desmond brought together the writings of these and other dance scholars in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance (Post-​Contemporary Interventions) (1997). The essays in this text were an acknowledgment of a critical shift in dance research and the engagement of the theoretical lens of such social/​cultural theorists as Judith Butler, Edward Said, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault. The essays also acknowledged the link between the vocabulary of performance and representation. From this standpoint, dance is not only a physical technique; as Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull points out: “Dance finely tunes sensibilities, helping to shape the practices, behaviors, beliefs, and ideas of people’s lives” (1997, 270). Bull suggested that in the case of contact improvisation, there is an increased embodiment of touch; in Ghanaian dance one’s aural sense; and in ballet, with its ever-​present mirror, vision. Thus, the representational mode of a dance and its related systems of

4    Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young values is embedded in the interrelationship of the vocabulary of the form and the individual’s senses. Cumulatively, the essays placed a reflective lens on dance and its context to examine, as Desmond notes, the role of dance as performed as an “act of presentation and representation that literally embodies political, historical, and epistemological, conditioning its possibility” (1997, 19). The essays in Meaning in Motion did not address ethnicity directly as a topic. The shift in the conversation did, however, provide new theoretical frameworks and analytical tools and thus the conceptual impetus for new considerations of ethnic as an identity marker and ethnicity as a representative performance of that identity. This volume brings together scholars from across the globe, who have incorporated perspectives from critical and cultural studies in an investigation of what it means to define oneself in an ethnic category and how this category is performed and represented as an ethnicity. It is important to note that, given the wide range of theoretical, methodological, and conceptual viewpoints represented in the volume, the essays are not meant to provide encyclopedic or reference coverage of the topics. Rather, the authors have composed new and thoughtful argument pieces on the topics at hand, in which they provide a sense of current scholarly conversation and also try out new ideas and theories. Their studies reflect a number of methodologies—​archival research, field studies, and participant-​observer roles—​and thereby acknowledge that changes have taken place in dance research from the twentieth to the twenty-​first centuries. An underlying question throughout the essays is how a dance form comes to represent through performance the ethnicity of a community. What are the structures of that representation of ethnicity in the context of performance, including the location of performance, relationships among the performers, relationships between the performers and the audience, the movement vocabulary, the musical accompaniment, and the clothing and/​or costumes? What are the ideological forces that influence any of the latter? From this set of questions regarding representation the researchers ask: What role do these elements of a dance performance play in the construction and representation of ethnic identity? What is the role of race in the evolution of an ethnic identity? What is the difference between an outsider’s assumptions about identity from signifiers he or she may misinterpret and one’s understanding/​expression of his or her own representation? How does dance help/​hinder/​manifest/​obscure the relationship one feels to one’s nation-​state? How do we know race and ethnic identity through dance in a way we do not know it any other form of performance? Can one create a new identity through dance forms perceived as ethnic? Can dance resist stereotypical definitions of ethnic groups, and by extension, race? These questions are considered and reflected upon through four themes: “Choreographing Ethnicity: Dance in the Construction of Ethnic Identity and Values”; “Choreographing the Nation: Dance as a Display of Ethnicity and Nationalism”; “Performing Ethnicity: Creating New Identities through the Dances of Others”; and “Dance as a Form of Resistance.” Throughout this volume, some essays are focused on specific ethnic communities, and others consider the framing of ethnicity by Western concert dance. In bringing

Dance and Ethnicity    5 modern dance and ballet into the conversation alongside forms more often considered ethnic, the essays ask the reader to further contemplate Joann Kealiinohomoku’s argument in “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance.” Thus the volume begins with Christopher J. Wells’s review of the evolution of social dance during the Harlem Renaissance as a discussion of the role of race in the creation of a danced ethnicity and ends with Thomas DeFrantz’s “Black Dance after Race,” a discussion of twenty-​first-​century black concert dance as beyond racial identifications. Although arranged thematically, the essays speak across the divides of geography, nation, historical period, race, and gender to explore the act of dancing and its relationship to choreography as a means of outlining the markers of an ethnicity. From this standpoint, the essays follow the challenge Fredrik Barth set in motion with Ethinc Groups and Boundaries: to consider how dance maintains, challenges, resists, or in some cases evolves new forms of identity based on prior ethnic categories. Ultimately, the goal of the essays is not to create the definitive conception on the relationship between dance and ethnicity. Instead, it is to acknowledge the depth of research that has been undertaken and to promote continued research and conceptualization of dance and its role in the creation of ethnicity.

Choreographing Ethnicity: Dance in the Construction of Ethnic Identity and Values Some scholars consider ethnicity and ethnic groups a social construct. Literary scholar Werner Sollors states: “The forces of modern life embodied by such terms as ‘ethnicity,’ ‘nationalism,’ or ‘race’ can indeed be discussed as ‘inventions’: collective fictions that are continually reinvented” (1989, xi). Steve Fenton cautions: “But the fashion for imaginings, constructions and inventions may have gone too far” (2003, 4) and “people march under banners, form associations, kill one another, dress up and dance and sing” (2003, 3). Many people participate in these activities precisely because of their ethnic identity and a need to display their ethnic markers and boundaries of difference. This is frequently the case among immigrant groups in the United States and Europe. To be an Indian in India or Japanese in Japan is not a problem; these ethnicities constitute the default mode in those countries and societies. However, many Indian (O’Shea 2007) and Japanese immigrants (Sellers-​Young 1993) turn to dance as a vehicle for creating and negotiating their identities in a transnational context in which ethnicity is no longer taken for granted. The authors in part 1 examine how dance contributes to the constructed identity and the representation of communities within different historical periods and nations. Chris Wells analyzes dance culture in 1920s and 1930s Harlem and charts the trajectory of the Savoy Ballroom from its original mission as an upscale, dignified dance palace into an incubator for the lindy hop and Harlem’s other athletic, “wild” popular dance

6    Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young innovations. Through his discussion he revises the definition of being a member of the Harlem community and suggests that ethnicity is a function of group dynamics and collective identity, and that black popular dance in this period was an embodied resistance to prior conceptions of identity and ethnicity. Aoife McGrath compares two separate moments in Irish dance history, the founding of the Irish Dancing Commission in 1930 and the creation of the spectacular, world-​ famous Riverdance in 1994. In the discussion she acknowledges the relationship between ethnic identity and history, the first point being Ireland’s position with regard to its past and to the United Kingdom, and the second the modernity of Ireland in the 1990s as the economic Celtic Tiger, the symbol of which was the billions of dollars that the Irish dance company, Riverdance, brought to the Irish economy. Rebecca Rossen explores the lives of two Jewish dancers of the period 1925–​1940, Belle Didjah and Dvora Lapson, who attempted to bridge the divide between a Jewish and an American identity through fusions of the newly developing modern dance and various forms of Jewish ethnic dance. Dance critics, even Jewish ones, were frequently harsh in their critiques of the dancers’ performances as being “too ethnic” and insufficiently “modern” to qualify as art. These critics charged that Didjah and Lapson simply put authentic dances on the stage, and that their dances qualified as ethnic folk dances rather than high art. Rossen points out that Anna Sokolow and Helen Tamaris, because they eschewed the use of Jewish themes, enjoyed more success as mainstream dance artists during a time in which blatant anti-​Semitism could be expressed in the public media. Darren Patrick Blaney characterizes the gay and lesbian communities as ethnic communities, or proto-​ethnic communities, in his study of the use of dance for the construction of gay identity. Long after disco faded away in overall American society as a popular dance fad, it continues to be popular on the gay “circuit” (Weems 2008) as an expression of gay and lesbian identity. His essay is evidence that trends in dance retain their identity markers for some groups even as they are replaced by other popular culture markers for other groups. The Skolt Sámi constitutes a small ethnic enclave of Sámi (Laplanders) within the Finnish state. In “Dancing Multiple Identities: Preserving and Revitalizing Dances of the Skolt Sámi,” Petri Hoppu describes and analyzes the ways in which the Sami, by using dances mostly of Russian origin, protect and celebrate their ethnic uniqueness in the face of modernity and Finnish ethnic hegemony. In their study of Nihonbuyo, Leonard Pronko and Jonathan Hall note: “The Japanese are conservative: they never let a performing art disappear.” They demonstrate the ways in which the Japanese performing arts, such as the Nihonbuyo, an amalgam of several past dance practices, both classical and folk, display the aesthetic elements that Japanese value:  an unbalanced harmony in the form of asymmetry and a simple elegance in expression that has been embraced by the Japanese American community. Carol Silverman looks at ways in which the Macedonian Roma in New York City convey the closeness of their community through the performances of two dance genres—​the horo line dances and the čoček, a solo improvised dance—​mostly, but not

Dance and Ethnicity    7 exclusively performed by women. The performances of these dances in the diaspora mark the Macedonian Roma’s identity and project their ethnic values of family, relatedness, and conviviality, in a context in which to dance constitutes a demonstration of the warmth and supportive attitudes of the Roma community and a continuation of their former existence in Macedonia.

Choreographing the Nation: Dance as a Display of Ethnicity and Nationalism Ethnicity is about identity, both individual and group; it is a we/​they or us/​them consciousness au fond. Studied in the light of history, dance is a vehicle for the expression of ethnicity that is often identified with the state, such as the way in which the Ataturk regime appropriated dance for construction of the Turkish state and Turkish ethnicity (Cefkin 1993; Öztürkmen 1992; Shay 2006). Similarly, in Greece, the Philippines, and Mexico, specific dances are designated as “national” and form part of the school curriculum in order to create a national, as opposed or in addition to, a local ethnic identity. These decisions to adopt certain dances to represent the nation are frequently made by powerful figures in ministries of education or culture and are distinct from the term “national” as it is used in ballet to indicate Polish, Hungarian, or Spanish variation and are shown through the costume, rather than any authentic dance movements (Shay 2006). Through the presentation of colorful dancing peasants in large-​scale festivals and the founding of state-​sponsored national folk dance companies, various nation-​states have utilized dance as a means of displaying ethnic diversity and a spectacularized symbol for suggesting they have the political support of the masses. On an individual level, choreographers like Ted Shawn wanted to display the power of white American manhood and identity through the vehicle of dance. The essays in this section provide insight into what Benedict Anderson referred to as imagined communities (1991) and what Eric Hobsbawm (1992) articulates as the invention of a tradition that is part of the formation of twentieth-​century nation-​states. Paul Scolieri describes and analyzes the ways in which a founder of American modern dance, Ted Shawn, attempted to create dances for an American ethnic identity by incorporating the science of eugenics into his definition of American male identity. Scolieri notes that “[t]‌he eugenic creed of ‘race betterment’ resonated with Shawn’s artistic conviction that dancing is ‘the supreme method for becoming identified with cosmic forces and through that identity being able to shape those forces towards the benefits of one’s own tribe and self ’ (Shawn 1937, 11–​12)”. Ida Meftahi analyzes the ways in which the Iranian government attempted to integrate a population of diverse linguistic and religious origins through the dancing female

8    Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young body as a means of creating strong feelings of Iranian nationalism. The government supported this image through dance companies that created new genres of dance based on a fusion of classical ballet’s character dance with the superficial use of elements of Iranian solo improvised dance and regional folk dances. In 1937 Igor Moiseyev was given the task of creating a dance company to represent the peoples of the Soviet Union, but primarily the Russian ethnic group as the model of being a Soviet. Anthony Shay addresses the ways in which Igor Moiseyev created a new folk-​like dance genre, an invented tradition in Hobsbawm and Ranger’s terms (1983), based on classical ballet character dance, to aid in this ethnic construction (Olson 2004, 251, n109). So successful were Moiseyev’s efforts that even today many Russians look upon his oeuvre as authentic Russian folk dance. The Moiseyev Company was also the model for the state-​supported folk dance companies that dominated world stages for the second half of the twentieth century. In his history of the performances of Croatia’s professional folk dance ensemble, Lado, Anthony Shay offers the Croatian response to the domination of the Moiseyev choreographic approach. The founding artistic director, Zvonimir Ljevaković, in reaction to Igor Moiseyev’s use of lavish spectacle, consciously developed a particular practice of antispectacular choreography that preserved minute authentic elements of dance, music, and costume in performances of the ensemble in order to honor the Croatian peasantry and their aesthetic values. In a very different, almost paradoxical fashion, Jessica Ray Herzogenrath articulates the ways in which European folk dance was used to Americanize immigrants. The teachers of these dances, middle-​and upper-​class Anglo-​American women, sought to discipline and control immigrant bodies through the use of European folk dances. Their chief goal was to wean immigrant women from the lures of American popular dances of the period, which were danced in what these early teachers conceived of as an inappropriate and unhealthy movement style. Andriy Nahachewsky approaches his study of Ukrainian dance by integrating important questions of terminology in the field of dance ethnology—​What do terms like “ethnic dance,” “folk dance,” and “vernacular dance” mean?—​and also asks how useful these categories are in scholarly research. He illustrates his categories by looking at three different instances of dance in the Ukraine and in the large Ukrainian diaspora in Canada. Several nations, such as the Philippines and Greece, have utilized specific folk dances to represent an entire nation. In “The Jarabe Tapatío: Imagining Race, Nation, Class, and Gender in 1920s Mexico,” Gabriela Mendoza-​Garcia demonstrates how by adopting the Jarabe Tapatío, the Mexican Ministry of Education hoped to inculcate a sense of Mexican identity, rather than regional identities, through the teaching of this iconic dance (known as the Mexican hat dance) in a multicultural, multilingual environment. Jennifer Fisher visited the Ghanaian National Dance Company to review its role in negotiating differences in ethnic identity and forging an overarching national Ghanaian identity. In “Perception, Connections, and Performed Identities in American-​Ghanaian Dance Encounters,” she describes and analyzes the ways in which dance is the focal point for ethnicity, nation, and identity.

Dance and Ethnicity    9

Performing Ethnicity: Creating New Identities through the Dances of the “Other” The appropriation of dances from other parts of the world, often deemed exotic and erotic, has occurred at least since the turn of the twentieth century, when elite Parisians appropriated the Argentine tango. Throughout the twentieth century Latin American dances, belly dance, and folk dances from many countries became part of the global discourse in dance, with variations of inclusion that were related to the specificity of the local context (Savigliano 1995; McMains 2006; Shay 2008a). The essays in this section illustrate how dancers, nations, and communities involved created new identities from these ethnic appropriations, erased portions of dances and associated ethnicities, theatricalized identities to benefit a particular version of national identity on the international stage, and created community history through the reformulation of dances of ethnic groups. Andrea Deagon characterizes belly dance as a form of orientalism in which “[t]‌he thoroughness as well as the variety of appropriation in American belly dance has made it problematic as an ethnic art.” Deagon tempers this statement by demonstrating the myriad ways in which American dancers engage with Arab identity through their dancing, which ranges from ignoring the Arab origins of the dance tradition to attempting to embody the aesthetics of the solo improvisational form. In “Black Erased: The Tango de Negros in Spain’s Romantic Age,” Kathy M. Milazzo describes the ways in which cultural appropriation can occur, but can also impact the erasure of the original sources. In the specific case of the Tango de Negros, the Afro-​ Cuban movements and rhythms that inform this palo or flamenco form have been erased and forgotten. Milazzo addresses the ways in which strong feelings of Spanish nationalism caused writers to deny any influence in flamenco other than “pure” Spanish ones, in the national quest to “transform dances into icons of national identity,” thus denying the Africanist roots of the dance that became known as the tango flamenco. Allana Lindgren’s chapter explores the exoticizing gesture by Boris Volkoff, and by implication the Canadian government, to represent indigenous Canadians at the Olympic Games through the creation and performance of dances that were “highly theatricalized and only tangentially related to the First Nations and Inuit cultures.” This essay describes a clash between English Canadian and Native American ethnicities that is similar to the one described by Andrea Deagon between Euro-​American and Arab culture, in which orientalism and exoticism serve as a vehicle for a display of what Lindgren describes as “primitivist ethos.” This places an unequal emphasis between the two groups, in which members of the dominant ethnicity display what dance scholar Marta Savigliano describes as “a practice of representation through which identities are frivolously allocated … an act of indiscriminately combining fragments, crumbs of knowledge and fantasy, in disrespectful, sweeping gestures” (1995, 169).

10    Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young Nancy Lee Ruyter and Rebekah Kowal address issues of growing concerns surrounding cultural appropriation and authenticity through Ruyter charting the career of La Meri (Russell Meriwether Hughes 1898–​1988) and Kowal the international dance programming at the New  York Museum of Art in “Choreographing Interculturalism:  International Dance Performance at the American Museum of Natural History, 1943–​1952”. A performer at the museum, La Meri increasingly infused her performances with authentic elements of costume, dance movement, and music, which she studied in situ during her early touring career. Her career straddled the gap between interpretive dancing as practiced by Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis and the rise of serious concerns surrounding authenticity and appropriation. Kowal lays out the details of the bridge between how ethnic groups self presented through dance and how the Americans of various ethnicities participated in international folk dance festivals and concerts for the next fifty years. Juliet McMains explores the century-​long Anglo-​American search for an erotic identity through stereotypes created around Latin identity. McMains notes: “Common assumptions about ‘hot’ Latin dance are based on stereotypes of Latin Americans as passion-​driven sex vixens, whose physical and emotional impulses overpower their implicitly weaker and less developed rational intellectual reasoning.” Christey Carwile demonstrates the way in which Ghanaians, through the appropriation of salsa and reformatting the dance as salzonto, are creating a new pan-​African identity. This would not have been possible with the available dance repertoire in Ghana, since those dances are identified with specific regions and tribal groups; they are ethnically specific. Thus, salzonto as a new choreographic form permits equal access to all ethnic groups for the formation of this new identity. In the last chapter in this section, Miriam Phillips examines the appropriation and consumption of the dances of San Francisco Bay area communities through the way in which they become used as ethno-​identity dances for the public in the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival. As a former curator of the annual festival, she questions decisions that were made about the choice of participants and issues of representation as well as whether the festival directors valued spectacle and professional packaging over authenticity and tradition.

Dance as a Form of Resistance Among some scholars (Yntema 2009; Roosens 1989; and others), ethnicity is viewed as a political choice. They suggest that ethnic groups band together for political, economic, and material advantage. This is the so-​called instrumental view of ethnicity. As Yntema argues, “It is, however a mistake to believe that ethnic terms and labels are used lightly according to the circumstances and purely for convenience. In many cases they appear to have deep roots indeed” (2009, 146). And while such instances of individuals cleaving to ethnic identity for economic or political gain have been documented (Roosens

Dance and Ethnicity    11 1989), for many other individuals and groups, especially smaller ethnic groups such as Armenians, Jews, Koreans, and Kurds, ethnicity is a passionate and primary identity category for many of its members. Alkis Raftis, the president of the Dora Stratou Greek Dances Theatre, the state-​supported folk dance ensemble of Greece, has noted: “Greek identity must be understood in terms of the fortress mentality in which this small nation feels the urge to protect its boundaries, material and ethnic” (interview with author, February 16, 2000; see Papacostas in this volume). For many such groups, which view themselves as potentially endangered, ethnically charged symbols such as dance, with its embodiments and colorfully costumed performers, have the potential to become primary markers of national and ethnic identity (Maners 2008). Dance as a form of resistance ranges from the establishment of the Ghost Dance among a variety of Native American tribes to resist the encroachment of white settlement to the resistance of whites against African Americans entering ballet. In addition to forms of group resistance, resistance can occur on an individual level. For example, Ibrahim (Bobby) Farah, a Lebanese American, resisted cultural assimilation to American society and the idea of belly dance as an exclusively female dance form by his performance and promotion of belly dance, which he considered an important legacy of his Lebanese identity. After the forcible transfer of populations between Greece and Turkey following World War I, the Greek nation-​state attempted to erase all forms of non-​Greek ethnic manifestation and impose a strict Greek identity on the entire population. Christos Papacostas analyzes the ways in which the members of a Slavophone village resisted the Greek government’s attempts to stigmatize them through the appropriation of local symbols, specifically the use of a Dionysian ritual, and to appear as a national symbol during the closing celebrations of the Olympic Games held in Athens. To theorize his data, Papacostas has developed a new analytical tool that he calls “dancescapes,” to serve as a lens for his study of dance as a form of resistance and potentially to make the model available to other dance researchers. Jennifer Fisher documents the attempts of white dancers and choreographers to resist the entrance of nonwhites, especially African Americans, into the white bastion of classical ballet. In “Ballet and Whiteness: Will Ballet Forever Be the Kingdom of the Pale”,” she enters the historical discourse on the suitability of the black dancing body to ballet. Currently the discourse is covert, but nevertheless, as Fisher points out, ballet continues to be populated overwhelmingly with white dancers and choreographers. In “Men and the Happiness Dance,” Barbara Sellers-​Young describes and analyzes the ways in which Ibrahim “Bobby” Farah and other male dancers engaged the popular discourse of belly dance. They include Farah’s resistance to assimilating into American society and assumptions that the form was inherently female. Other dancers from Egypt, Mahmoud Reda, and Californian John Compton take different journeys of resistance that encompass their specific community and national identity. Paula Conlon, in her study of pan-​tribal powwows and other Native American dance genres, engages the attempts by the American government to forcibly assimilate Native Americans into American society by removing their children and educating them in

12    Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young the “white man’s ways” in boarding schools. She describes the ways in which these same children used the vehicle of dance to resist assimilation, to retain their original identities and uphold their dignity. Christine Emi Chan considers the highly contested contexts within which Hawaiian identity is negotiated in and around the hula. Chan addresses the various discourses surrounding the centrality of the hula in tourist, religious, ritual, and celebratory environments and how this centrality has resulted in hula raising ethnic conflict, by being prohibited by Anglo clerics and through the continuing vitality of this dance genre in new contexts such as reconstituting Hawaiian identity. Many individuals participating in the renaissance of the hula construct new mythologies, and histories of Hawaiian identity are being woven around the origins and meaning of the hula and who has the right to perform it. Rachmi Diyah Larasati analyzes the ways in which the Sama and Bajau ocean people, Islamic ethnic minority groups within three modern states—​Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines—​utilize dance as a form of aesthetic and political capital in order to maintain their ethnic distinctiveness. Larasati employs dance as a lens to show the nesting layers of minority statuses—​as female performers and as boat people—​that the Sama and Bajau female dancers cross and crisscross over national, international, and global borders and environments in order to preserve their identities. In a nation-​state like Mexico, which has for decades attempted to entice and coerce Native American ethnic groups, who struggle to maintain local and ethnic identities, these groups use several cultural vehicles and symbols to resist incorporation into the overarching Mexican identity. Ana Patricia Farfán describes the ways in which the Native American population uses Spanish baroque imagery and regional dances to resist the pressure to adopt a new Mexican identity. In the concluding essay of this volume, Thomas DeFrantz provides some final thoughts about what it might be like to delink the categories of dance, ethnicity, and race. What happens when race ceases to be a primary marker of identity used to categorize experience transformed into art making? What might “postblack” dance convey? This essay explores the inevitably radical capacities of black dance in a speculative future when race matters differently than it does in 2015. The essay includes discussion of recent offerings of black concert dance performance that imagined an “outside” to racial identification (Alonzo King, Kyle Abraham), alongside assessment of contemporary performance that seeks to align and elude racial labeling (Trajal Harrell, Ralph Lemon). The chapter suggests the limiting strictures of language and categorization in defining dance along lines of race.

Final Thoughts The chapters in this volume engage the four themes of identity construction, local and transnational politics, appropriation and related exotification, and resistance, which are part of the ongoing discourse in the evolution of the relationship between dance and

Dance and Ethnicity    13 ethnicity, to reveal the complex structures of history, social cultural politics, economics, and personal desires that are part of the matrix of ethnicity in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. The essays reveal that dance is a vehicle in the construction and exploration of danced ethnicity as specific embodiment of heritage, a form to explore new constructions of ethnicity, a choreographic framework for creating national unity through a shared experience of moving bodies, a space of resistance within the act of dancing to the imposition of social cultural forces, and a space in which to engage in dialogue about the meaning of race, gender, and lifestyle and their relationship to ethnic identity. Cumulatively, in their research approach and methodology the essays document the change that has taken place in dance studies, from the ethnic as an easily identified category based on biology and geography to ethnicity as a fluid concept and dance as an active contributor to the creation and negotiation of it.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities:  Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: VESCO. Barth, Fredrik. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc. Buckland, Theresa Jill. 2010. “Shifting Perspectives on Dance Ethnography. In Dance Studies Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Alexandra Carter and Janet O’Shea, 335–​343. London: Routledge. Bull, Cynthia Jean Cohen. “Sense, Meaning and Perception.” In Meaning in Motion, edited by Jane Desmond, 269–​287. New York: Duke University Press. Cefkin, Melissa. 1993. “Choreographing Culture: Dance, Folklore, and the Politics of Identity in Turkey.” PhD diss., Rice University. DeFrantz, Thomas F. 2002. “African American Dance: A Complex History.” In Dancing Many Drums:  Excavations in African American Dance, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz, 3–​35. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Desmond, Jane C. 1997. “Embodying Differences: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies.” In Meaning in Motion, edited by Jane C. Desmond, 29–​54. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Fenton, Steve. 2003. Ethnicity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Georges, Robert, and Michael Owen Jones. 1995. Folkloristics:  An Introduction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hall, Jonathan M. 1997. Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1992. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terrence Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Canto Classics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kaeppler, Adrienne L. 1983. Polynesian Dance with a Selection for Contemporary Performances. Honolulu, HI: Alpha Delta Kappa. Kaeppler, Adrienne L. 1972. “Method and Theory in Analyzing Dance Structure with an Analysis of Tongan Dance.” Ethnomusicology 16, no. 2: 173–​217. Kealiinohomoku, Joann. 1969–​1970. “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance.” Impulse: 24–​33.

14    Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young Kurath, Gertrude. 1960. “Panorama of Dance Ethnology.” Current Anthropology 1, no. 3: 233–​254. Lepecki, André. 2004. “Presence and Body in Dance and Performance Theory.” In Of the Presence of the Body: Essay on Dance and Performance Theory, edited by André Lepecki, 1–​9. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Maners, Lynn. 2008. “Clapping for Serbs:  Nationalism and Performance in Bosnia and Hercegovina.” In Balkan Dance: Essays on Characteristics, Performance and Teaching, edited by Anthony Shay, 145–​160. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and & Company. Marcus, George. 1998. Ethnography Through Thick and Thin. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press. McMains, Juliet. 2006. Glamour Addiction:  Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Olson, Laura J. 2004. Performing Russia:  Folk Revival and Russian Identity. New  York and London: RoutledgeCurzon. O’Shea, Janet. 2007. At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Öztürkmen, Arzu. 1992. “Folk Dance and Nationalism in Turkey.” In Proceedings [of the] 17th Symposium of the Study Group on Ethnochoreology, 83–​86. Nafplion, Greece, July 2–​10. Roosens, Eugeen E. 1989. Creating Ethnicity:  The Process of Ethnogenesis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Royce, Anya Peterson. 1977. The Anthropology of Dance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Savigliano, Marta E. 1995. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Scholte, Bob. 1974. “Toward a Reflexive and Critical Anthropology.” In Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Del Hymes, 430–​457. New York: Random. Sellers-​Young, Barbara. 1993. Teaching Personality with Gracefulness:  The Transmission of Japanese Cultural Values through Japanese Dance Theatre. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Shawn, Ted. 1937. Fundamentals of Dance Education. Girard, KS: Haldeman-​Julius. Shay, Anthony. 2006. Choreographing Identities: Folk Dance, Ethnicity and Festival in the United States and Canada. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Shay, Anthony. 2008a. Dancing Across Borders: The American Fascination with Exotic Dance Forms. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Shay, Anthony. 2008b. “Introduction:  Choreographing the Balkans.” Balkan Dance:  Essays on Characteristics, Performance and Teaching. Edited by Anthony Shay. Jefferson, 12–​33. NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. Sollors, Werner, ed. 1989. The Invention of Ethnicity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Thomas, Helen. 2003. Introduction to The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory, edited by Helen Thomas, 1–​5. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Weems, Mickey. 2008. The Fierce Tribe:  Masculine Identity and Performance in the Circuit. Logan: Utah State University Press. Yntema, Douwe. 2009. “Material Culture and Plural Identity in Early Roman Southern Italy.” In Ethnic Constructs in Antiquity: The Role of Power and Tradition, edited by Ton Derks and Nico Roymans, 145–​166. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Pa rt  I

C HOR E O G R A P H I N G E T H N IC I T Y Dance in the Construction of Ethnic Identity

Chapter 1

“ And I M ake My Ow n”  Class Performance, Black Urban Identity, and Depression-​Era Harlem’s Physical Culture Christopher J. Wells

“I’m gonna dance. I ain’ no kid, y’ know, Gram. I know what it’s all about. I’m twenty. And I make my own. I sweat all day downtown over dresses for other girls to dance in. When my turn comes, I’ gonna have it. I can take care o’ myself ”—​Tillie. In Rudolph Fisher’s short story “The Lindy Hop,” Tillie, a young seamstress, asserts her intention to dance in a contest at the Arcadia Ballroom in defiance of her grandmother’s wishes (2008, 255.) In the story we learn that Tillie is parentless and lives with her grandmother, who makes ends meet by caring for eight boarders in their cramped tenement building. A dressmaker, Tillie’s wage would have been substantially below what white seamstresses earned, and she would be lucky to have any job once the Great Depression thrust a wave of white workers into formerly “black” service industry occupations. She and her grandmother would be paying vastly inflated rent due to the segregated housing policies that limited options and raised costs for black New Yorkers.1 Facing such conditions, Tillie’s claim that it is now “her turn” forcefully asserts her right to participate in the public social culture she labors to create for others. Representing those Harlemites who came of age in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Tillie’s insistence on going out dancing creates space for self-​definition within a neighborhood shaped by a convergence of diverse external and internal forces. The youth of her generation found themselves struggling to craft coherent identities amid a sea of conflicting expectations that policed their opportunities and senses of self. Through dance, Harlem youth inserted their bodies into the construction of narratives and counternarratives as their kinesthetic engagement negotiated circumstances of unequal power through cultures of participation and pleasure. I open this chapter with Tillie’s assertion of her corporeal presence in a Harlem ballroom to emphasize the connections between embodied practices and physical locations

18   Christopher J. Wells that collapse distinctions between dance as content and place as context. This porous, unstable boundary, rooted in African diasporic cultural practices, can be accessed through discourses of spatial practice theory that have reshaped our understanding of the relationships between communities, individuals, and physical spaces. I thus interrogate the role of dance in Harlem nightlife through the social-​spatial lens offered by Helen Ligett and David C. Perry, who argue that conventional categories of space, of symbolic meaning, and of practical use are not just the purview of academic speculation, nor are they discreet areas of inquiry; they are active components of ongoing political play and struggles to define and enforce social realities. (2008, 5)

Within the literature on African American social culture, this concept resonates with Guthrie Ramsey’s (2003) “cultural theatres” and Katrina Hazzard-​Gordon’s (1992) “jook continuum.” Hazzard-​Gordon (1992) offers the jook continuum as an entry point into the fluidity of African American social spaces along the axes of public/​private, official/​ underground, celebrated/​subversive, and high class/​low down. Her continuum emphasizes the contextual, contingent nature of these classifications as African Americans constructed and reconstructed social spaces through shifting and unstable articulations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. This chapter locates these competing discourses through three sites of embodied performance within Harlem’s nightclub and ballroom scene: the primitivist floor shows at the segregated Cotton Club, the elite formal balls at the Alhambra Ballroom, and the resistant individuality enacted through the lindy hop at the Savoy Ballroom. These three spatial-​temporal locations serve as grounding points for a broader explication of the competing systems of representation enacted through Harlem’s multiplicity of dancing bodies. As my argument navigates through Harlem’s social spaces, dancers’ movements place this chapter’s perspective within the neighborhood. Following Michel de Certeau’s metaphorical juxtaposition of the street and the skyscraper as analytical stances, tracing dancers’ movements through these sites grounds this work firmly on the street, “below the threshold at which visibility begins” ([1984] 2011, 93). From this viewpoint, de Certeau argues, we experience urban space not as a grandly designed, intentional plan but as a social text written through the movements and relations of individual bodies in motion. These individual bodies, in his words, “follow the thicks and thins of an urban text they write themselves without being able to read it” ([1984] 2011, 93). This is, however, where de Certeau and I  part company:  where he positions this urban text as only visible/​legible from a privileged, bird’s-​eye perspective, I contend that African Americans on the ground, in their neighborhoods, act with a highly self-​aware social literacy; they absolutely read this “urban text” as they write it. African Americans feel the impacts of shifting social and spatial formations more acutely than do those with more privilege and are thus always aware of the true stakes in battles waged through the politics of style. The dancing bodies within these three Harlem sites thus demonstrate that the sophisticated performance of style and affect can restructure physical and social

“And I Make My Own”    19 space in resistance to the external forces that marginalize and segregate black people; this may just be what happens when spatial practice theory butts up against the city’s “last hired, first fired” population. Within nightclubs and ballrooms, Harlem’s “physical culture” became a cultivated and nimble weapon through which diversely virtuosic bodies wrestled agency from the dominant culture, retaining authorship of their neighborhood’s urban text simply by going out and dancing.

Black Bodies, Negro Identity, and Problems with “Ethnicity” Blackness and ethnicity have a complicated relationship; they are both concepts that identify difference, yet their usage activates different discursive problems. Ethnicity evokes a kind of universally accessible, even egalitarian mode of difference, as everyone has an ethnic background. Blackness, however, exists in relation to the invisible, privileged construct of whiteness and through white desire for a dangerous yet transgressively attractive other. Dance exaggerates this complex politics, as Brenda Dixon Gottschild argues: [T]‌his phantom body, just like the phantom concept of a black or white race, has been effective in shaking and moving, shaping and reshaping, American (and now global) cultural production for centuries. It has been courted and scorned–​an object of criticism and ridicule as well as a subject of praise and envy. (2003, 9)

In this complex “dance of desire,” ethnicity has more recently grounded black dance in an Afrocentric rootedness within a coherent diasporic tradition. However, in the 1920s and 1930s the ethnicization of black identity was a tool of marginalization and oppression, which black Americans resisted by shifting away from the social logics of ethnicity and toward group identities built on race and class; this chapter argues that popular dance was an important site for this resistance. Waged on the dual planes of movement and discourse, this struggle between internal and external constructs of blackness affirms Thomas F. DeFrantz’s position that “in the local contexts of black communities, social dances function as essential agents of cultural expression, at once precious and freely available to those who engage their practice” (2012, 128). Dance in Depression-​era Harlem was a potent conduit for community and identity creation because of its ready accessibility to a black population choked off from the systems of official power that policed their access to both physical space and economic participation. Within Harlem, social dance became a workaround to segregation’s bottlenecking of black prosperity; it became a vehicle to construct a class hierarchy that projected racial progress by reproducing the dominant culture’s stratified social ordering. As a universally available means to enact identity formation, social dance transformed black bodies into sites of conflicting

20   Christopher J. Wells performative discourses that contested each other internally as they resisted white supremacy externally. Such formations resisted existing constructs of ethnic identity, because African diasporic ethnicities were, and still are, manipulated to serve systems of oppression and commodification. While cultural groups generally mark ethnicity through distinctive “origins,” the social and legal engines of slavery disrupted the intergenerational pathways of cultural memory through which coherent identifiers of ethnic origin are preserved and transmitted. Through legalized slavery, the US Constitution’s “three-​fifths” clause, and later the Supreme Court’s validation of Jim Crow segregation in 1896, “Negro” as a coherent, physically distinct racial identity became the fixed point of difference upon which America’s dyadic system of racial segregation was legally and socially constructed. At the same time, ethnicity was rewritten onto black bodies by the exaggerated primitivist tropes through which American popular culture, and specifically minstrelsy, reinforced the social distance between white and black; blackface makeup and gross stereotypes inscribed the cultural logics of America’s black/​white racial binary onto the popular imaginary. Within this construct, the spatial and social distance of African Americans’ otherness was built through ethnicized constructions of blackness; they weren’t just minstrels but Ethiopian minstrels. The articulation of foreign origin with primitive, subhuman status reinvigorated the consumer logics through which slave auctions marketed black bodies as exotic objects. In the slave markets of New Orleans, ethnicized identity activated tropes of geographic difference—​of “foreignness”—​to construct and maintain frameworks of racial subjugation. As this advertisement from a New Orleans daily demonstrates (see Figure 1.1), ethnic identity functioned as commercial branding, as a means of differentiating and advertising black bodies as consumer goods to be bought or sold. Black ethnicities were exotic markers to help plantation owners distinguish between products. As with wines or textiles, landowning whites were free to choose whether they preferred their chattel labor domestic or imported. While minstrelized ethnic discourse preserved the slave trade’s commodification of ethnicity, the twentieth century promised African American communities new opportunities to reclaim such identity categories as race, ethnicity, and social class. This newfound control yielded strategic formations of identity grounded in individual and community agency and resistant to external constructions. However, through these formations, African Americans reproduced marginalizing systems of hierarchy. I focus here on the role of African American popular dance in both crafting and disrupting the bonds between ethnicity and class, and Depression-​era Harlem is an ideal site to interrogate these bonds because of their particular instability. While social class is ostensibly produced by economic homogeneity within layers of the social strata, it is also, like ethnicity, enacted through a complex interweaving of signifiers and social networks: a contentious dance of “in group, out group” dynamics. Emphasizing financial resources thus masks the more delicate web of social behavior that creates and reproduces “class.” Within black communities, Benjamin Bowser (2008) argues, the black middle class had economic parity, roughly, with the white working and lower classes, and their

“And I Make My Own”    21

Figure 1.1  Advertisement from The Orleans Gazette and Commercial Advertiser, October 10, 1807, 3. “Brute Negro” slaves are advertized alongside other consumer goods, their ethnic origins displayed as markers of quality and variety, just like the “Madeira Wine” also on offer.

middle-​class identity was derived through a matrix of social comportment and cultural affiliations. Though such behavioral tropes stabilized class identities throughout Harlem, dance halls and ballrooms became venues for heterogeneous, slippery performances of social class. Through esoteric pastiches, younger Harlemites exposed distinct social classes as unstable normative constructs by extracting and repurposing their raw materials. Rather than simply rejecting social hierarchies, Harlemites from all walks of life repurposed these ideological constructions; they stripped down, reframed, and rebuilt them to create new mixes of identities that simultaneously reaffirmed dominant narratives and exposed their slippages, excesses, and cracks. Indeed, Harlemites’ diverse range of corporeally enacted identities amplifies Liggett and Perry’s assertion that “the active economies of signs are at the core of social life” (2008, 2). To situate the black dancing body within this economy of signs, I want to reactivate the term “physical culture,” which was in wide circulation within Harlem, and the entire United States, during this period. A precursor to modern bodybuilding, physical culture proposed that one had autonomy over one’s body and could reshape and transform it through effort and discipline. The concept held particular appeal for African Americans because it resisted the discourses of biological determinism that validated their marginalization (Whalan 2003). As Mark Whalan (2003) explains, discourses of physical

22   Christopher J. Wells culture “take on a very different status when appropriated by racial groups whose bodies had been overdetermined by white racist discourse, and this applied especially to African Americans”(604), because they “offered their consumers a particular agency over the constitution of their identity. Put in simpler terms, physical culture promised its customers that building the body built the man”(597). Expanding the term’s scope beyond its articulation to racial uplift, we can apply “physical culture” to those processes through which African Americans asserted control over their identities through rigorous corporeal performance. This practice extended beyond reproducing dignified, upper-​class European culture as Harlemites molded their bodies into virtuosic pastiches of social signifiers. Important in all these cases, however, is that physical culture made identity categories available and accessible to anyone willing to properly (or improperly) discipline their body to enact such assemblages. By democratizing access to social capital, physical culture “created a communal atmosphere that smoothed over social and racial divisions” as a trained pattern of movement “overwrites the racial markings of the body and in some circumstances makes it ‘racially illegible’ ” (Whalan 2003, 607). However, I argue that when associated with discourses of racial uplift and race pride, in Harlem physical culture did not make race illegible per se. Rather, Harlemites’ embodied practices overwrote the physical legibility of ethnicity with an enacted discourse of class. This struggle over representation and community definition as it expressed itself through dance echoes Marta Savigliano’s (1995) explication of tango’s globalizing “political economy of passion.” I contend that in interwar Harlem there was a competing “political economy of aspiration” that minimized the symbolic thrust of racial and ethnic division through emphasis on the performative politics of class. For African Americans wrestling with such a complex and fluid web of social dynamics and power relations, dance became a potent tool to reproduce, reshape, and resist the structures of identity that produce the politics of difference.

Ethnicized Blackness and White Consumption: The Cotton Club’s “Dynamos of High Yellow Flesh” Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s was a contested site, and the image of “Harlem” activated different aspirations for different groups. For many upper-​class whites, Harlem was an exotic ghetto and a titillating play space that offered cathartic respite from their more conservative entrapments downtown. This Harlem became a primary site of American exoticism and redirected the gaze of minstrelsy, with its constructions of the simple rural Negro, onto African Americans’ new cultural center in the North. Exemplified by Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926), this vision of Harlem promised extravagant, debaucherous nightlife that catered to white clientele and excluded Harlem residents.

“And I Make My Own”    23 As James F. Wilson described the phenomenon, “Harlem was perceived and advertised as a site that tempted visitors with possibilities of both social and sexual transgressions” that promised a “pornographic playground” where adventurous socialites could “publicly enact their private fantasies” (2011, 25–​26). As an economic force, this image and the industry it supported served to bring infusions of money into the neighborhood, particularly leveraging the clandestine bacchanalia brought on by the economic boom of the 1920s and the demand for extralegal social spaces spurred by Prohibition. In these spaces, black patrons were turned away by black bouncers to keep clear the distinction between white consumers and the black laborers who constructed and validated white desires through exotic floor shows, seductive music, and a plentiful supply of illegal liquor. As tap dancer James Berry recalled, segregated clubs were vigorously guarded to ensure that wealthy whites from downtown experienced the thrill of apparent danger while in fact receiving protection that kept them extremely safe: It was more protected than any place in New York. Everywhere you go the houses had parties. People had a ball. Luxurious furnished apartments, girls kept by rich men—​they entertained at home. People had money, fine clothes, jewelry; they made rent parties and kept it going around like that. They made money and gambled too. (Berry and Dehn n.d.-​b, 12).

The Harlem Berry describes was simultaneously seedy and respectable, a kind of thrilling “open secret” that validated its white clientele’s progressive and subversive hipness while maintaining the boundaries that affirmed their control and racial superiority. White patrons enacted these fantasies within the segregated performance spaces that lined Harlem’s main commercial thoroughfare on 125th Street. These clubs catered exclusively to white clients, offering them the experience of Negro entertainment and Harlem nightlife while maintaining the racial exclusivity they were accustomed to in downtown venues. The absence of black patrons maintained the border between consumer and consumed, casting “Harlem” as a cultural commodity built for white pleasure. In some segregated clubs, such as 125th Street’s Rose-​Danceland, visitors could touch as well as gaze. This venue, described in Variety as “the wooziest of creep joints” (quoted in Baltimore Afro-​American 1928, 7) did manage to distinguish itself through its late hours—​it was open until 3:00 a.m., whereas similar clubs closed at 1:00 a.m.—​and through its promise of attractive, black female “taxi dancers,” who charged a per-​dance fee to dance with the white male patrons. The Variety report described the taxi dancing as “a tariff dance idea of a dozen crawls for a dollar with an army of ‘hostesses’ on hand to entertain the visiting fleet” (quoted in Baltimore Afro-​American 1928, 7). The presence of taxi dancing facilitated mixed-​race social dancing without integrating the venue. Again, so long as black dancing bodies remained commodities to be rented for entertainment, this risqué, ostensibly dangerous, and subversive behavior posed no real threat to the social order. Black residents thus formed a system of cultural brokerage through which many profited from their roles in curating this fantasy space. White visitors booked local tour

24   Christopher J. Wells guides to give them a taste of “authentic” low culture while still maintaining the zoo-​like distance between consuming patrons and the objects of their gaze (Wilson 2011; Vogel 2009). Berry recalls this dynamic, claiming that “doormen, chauffeurs, guides used to get rich taking people around, mostly people from Europe. They were shown the spots and they came back all the time because they enjoyed themselves” (Berry and Dehn n.d.-​b, 12). Accommodating the demand for exoticism had a dehumanizing impact on those black Harlemites who maintained the fantasy, especially those dancers in the spotlight of the white male gaze. Columnist Ralph Matthews, who wrote for the Baltimore Afro-​American, lamented performers’ physically and socially exhausting grind through the Cotton Club’s primitivist spectacles: Harlem is synonymous with hotcha, Harlem is synonymous with torrid, tempestuous rhythm, uncontrolled levity—​and the public gives no quarter. The fact that the poor performer is dead on his feet means nothing at all to the gay night-​lifer, who has slept all day and crawls out of his cozy bed and comes to Harlem for a night of slumming and levity. The playboys want gaiety. They see before them only little dynamos of high yellow flesh, dancing, singing, prancing, trucking. From their vision, blurred with liquor, are hid the tired little eyes, the aching joints, the weary hearts that belong to these human puppets of the showman’s  world. (Matthews 1936, 10)

Matthews’s sharp critique explicates the spiritual toll exacted upon those women rendered through dance as a banquet of malleable flesh to be bought and sold. When pianist/​composer Fats Waller served up three Cotton Club chorus girls, all clad in black stockings, to perform a belly dance at a farewell party for Danish Baron Timme Rosenkrantz, his enticing proclamation crudely encapsulated this dehumanizing dynamic: “ ‘Timme,’ he announced, ‘ here’s the meat, I hope you’ve got the knives and forks” (as recalled by Rosenkrantz 2012, 92). Waller’s jape is a hauntingly literal anticipation of bell hooks’s (1992) framing of black ethnicity as an enlivening cultural spice enticing whites into “eating the other.” Chorus lines’ fictionally ethnicized performances tied ethnicity to degrading exotic and primitivist tropes. Nostalgia in these clubs moved beyond longing for the minstrelized plantation and reached deeper into an imagined African past. Black performers, whatever their ethnic background, were cast in scenes set in dark African jungles that increased their cultural distance from white patrons, rendering them consumable objects by emphasizing, or even whole-​cloth inventing, their ethnic difference. While sustaining the primitivism of “jungle” performance, the Cotton Club also emphasized its status as a “high-​class joint,” proudly advertising that its highly selective, elite chorus line contained exclusively “high yellow charmers to entice big Wall Streeters from the Broadway and 42nd street sector into Harlem” (Matthews 1933, 18). The term “high yellow” refers to one of the lightest, and most high-​status, gradations within an internal discourse of skin-​tone-​based social prestige that fostered, and continues to foster, tension and division in black communities.2 Furthermore, foreign

“And I Make My Own”    25 ethnicity could also confer prized status even on darker-​skinned blacks. While they faced their own forms of discrimination, Harlem’s growing West Indian population often received favored treatment from white-​owned businesses, which saw them as better educated and more cultured than descendants of recently emancipated southern slaves (Figure 1.2). While the Cotton Club was both the most famous and the most rigorously segregated club in Harlem, it emerged from a nightlife culture largely operated, controlled, and enjoyed by black Harlemites. Indeed, the Cotton Club was by no means the exclusive source for burlesque entertainment in Harlem. As Berry recalled, African Americans still had access to numerous clubs, whose entertainers made up for what the locales lacked in elegant décor: The real down-​to-​earth entertainment was in them Smoke Joints. They had better shows than the Cotton Club. The Cotton Club had glamour but dives had better dancers, singers, best chorus girls. The not yet famous people coming from carnivals and little cabarets were more profound. The chorus girls at the Cotton Club were pretty, but none of them could dance. (Berry and Dehn n.d.-​a., 16)

Figure  1.2  Maude Russel and her Ebony Steppers -​1929 Cotton Club Show “Just a Minute.” 1929. Photograph. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. The “high yellow” dancers from this Cotton Club show signified elitism with their skin tone, and salacious primitivism with their costumes.

26   Christopher J. Wells Berry’s framing of down-​to-​earth smoke joints as more “real” spaces contests segregation through a posture of ambivalence. He deflates the Cotton Club’s exclusion through a powerful authenticity discourse in which black Harlem residents possessed a valuable form of social capital: knowledge of those underground spaces where superior diversion could be found. Within these spaces, nightlife became a place for the performance of financial success. Berry describes well-​known club owner Baron Wilkins as “an ambassador of Harlem” who had transitioned into the business after having been employed by wealthy whites downtown and who freely displayed his sophistication and worldly charm (Berry and Dehn n.d.-​a, 15). Wilkins presented an air of success, yet his visible conspicuous consumption did not reflect his actual wealth. In Berry’s words, “He was not rich but he was what you consider ‘Negra’ rich. He could spend! His place was elegant: mirrors, chandeliers, carpets” (Berry and Dehn n.d.-​a, 15). Such performances of success clashed with the potentially dangerous intermingling of alcohol with poverty and racial tension: They kept fighting there all the time. Most people that drink, get loaded and they want to fight. An old Irish tradition—​only difference is the Irish fight with their fists but negroes flash a knife at you in a minute. Women fight too. Cut each other up in a wicked way. The fight would start—​everyone enjoying it unless someone would scream. Oh, he has a gun—​then everyone would cut out of there—​flee! (Berry and Dehn n.d.-​a, 15)

The excesses of this culture, whether expressed through fancy dress or violence, asserted claims of access to leisure and to spaces of recreation and play within one’s own community. Ironically, just as whites used Harlem’s nightlife as an escape from the conservative trappings of their own elite positions, so too did young black service workers use ballrooms and nightclubs to escape from their own week of trying labor maintaining those comforts that created their patrons’ restless dissatisfaction in the first place. For black domestic and service workers, Harlem thus served as both a space to assert and perform community values of success, hard work, and self sufficiency, and as a source of needed catharsis from the frustrations of their suffocating labor circumstances downtown. Mark Anthony Neal (1999) identifies this as a core generational shift reflecting the modernizing American working class’s entitled reframing of leisure as a right earned through the moral virtue of hard work. While most Harlem clubs resisted strict segregation, even ostensibly integrated spaces became dominated by the demands and desires of white patrons, making local residents feel like outsiders within their own neighborhoods. Then a medical student, novelist/​ physician Rudolph Fisher—​from whose pen Tillie sprang—​expressed his disillusionment with white “slummers” and their growing encroachment into Harlem’s nightlife. In “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” he reminisces nostalgically about black nightlife in the early 1920s, lamenting his sense of alienation, as now “I am actually stared at, I frequently feel uncomfortable and out of place, and when I go out on the floor to dance I am lost in a sea of white faces” (Fisher [1927] 1999, 65).

“And I Make My Own”    27

“Poise, Grace, and Beauty”: Aspirational Class Performance at the Alhambra Ballroom Many Harlem residents, however, saw their neighborhood as a model of conservative, middle-​class respectability and as an engine for black Americans’ upward mobility. Though deprived of needed public services, Harlemites took pride in building the social and economic infrastructure that marked thriving white communities:  hospitals, churches, schools, social and fraternal organizations, and successful businesses.3 Harlem became a national exemplar of “racial uplift,” an ideology that encouraged African Americans to create for themselves what the broader culture denied them and to project an image of hard work and high achievement. Due in part to their vulnerability, African American culture during this period was in some ways hyper-​American, projecting an equal or even superior position from which to obtain the emerging American dream. Participation in civic organizations, fashion, and respectable engagement with the fine arts and literature were vital to the performance of black middle-​ and upper-​class respectability. This Harlem rejected Van Vechten’s image of Nigger Heaven in favor of Alain Locke’s (1925) aspirational model of The New Negro. Harlem thus became a perpetual group performance of the middle-​and upper-​class aspirations held by a people striving to improve their conditions through hard work and forward motion. One could see this ethos expressed in the stretch of houses between 138th and 139th Streets populated by Harlem’s higher achieving residents, which was named “striver’s row” (Gill 2011). Within Harlem’s ballrooms, this model of cultural life expressed itself through formal balls and gatherings sponsored by a vast network of social clubs and fraternal organizations. These high society affairs emphasized black people’s unified identity as a race through rhetoric promoting racial uplift and race pride; a successful professional active in his church and in Harlem’s civic life was regarded as a good “race man.” This emphasis on race collapsed specific ethnic distinctions and emphasized black unity and community cohesiveness. While critics saw racial uplift as pandering to European ideals, this ideology rejected the links between culture and ethnicity insofar as they maintained ethnic hierarchies. As aristocratic clothing, precise elocution, and waltzing were signifiers of both European ethnicity and high-​class status, they created a system that blocked non-​Europeans from social and economic mobility. Where the Black Arts Movement’s Afrocentric approach in the 1960s and 1970s challenged this coupling of class and ethnicity by contesting Eurocentric privilege, racial uplift decoupled class signifiers from European ethnic identity, claiming that “high culture” was a universal ideal to which all striving peoples could aspire and obtain access. Without ethnic barriers, embodying high culture was a matter of effort, and many social climbing Harlemites disciplined their bodies to craft corporeal displays of their

28   Christopher J. Wells upward mobility. Harlem’s dance schools were filled with students of all ages learning recent popular and “show” dances alongside ballet, waltz, and other formal European dance vocabularies. A 1936 WPA report on Harlem dance schools noted that for most, this training was intensely rigorous yet still avocational: [O]‌wing to the fact that the chances for them to appear on the Stage and Screen are so limited, the majority of them take these courses simply to develop their physical culture, poise, grace and beauty, and most of all because they like it. Several of the girls and boys who attend these schools are students attending Elementary School, High School and College; and some of them are employed in some way or trying to make a livelihood. It is nothing unusual to see them coming straight from these institutions and work places to the Dancing Schools where they are trying to adapt themselves to this art with as much determination and satisfaction as if they were preparing for a professional career. (Bryan 1936)

While classical dance training may not have promised professional success, it did offer a path to a sense of belonging and the acquisition of prized social capital. Building one’s physical culture was necessary to participate fully in the dances held by social clubs, which typically called for formalwear, sometimes including a theme like black-​and-​white gowns or floral colors. Along with an evening of social dancing, the affairs often included a group sing-​a-​long of the club’s anthem and a grand march or waltz reserved for the club’s members to parade with their escorts before hundreds or thousands of guests. Clubs thus leveraged the aristocratic associations of European ballroom dancing to craft a public spectacle wholly different from the floor shows of Jungle Alley. As they held each other in the erect posture of the Viennese waltz, Harlem’s social climbers projected their own image of race pride, moving their properly adorned bodies as models of respectability and achievement. While some events were simply formal dances, others were gala festivals complete with variety pageants and elaborate decorations. In the early 1930s, many such affairs were staged at the Alhambra Ballroom, which reopened in 1929 as a dedicated venue for social club events (New York Amsterdam News 1929). At a 1930 dance given by the Debutante Club, “one of New York’s exclusive younger girls clubs,” invited guests wore formal evening gowns and members performed classical ballet and “clever dance specialty numbers” at intermission. Their midnight social affair was followed the next day by a special Sunday church service and afternoon tea reception (Chicago Defender 1930, 5). For their formal “dance and sip” event, the Phi Beta Sigma fraternity covered the Alhambra in streamers representing their club colors and “an avalanche of balloons—​Sigma colors also, and autographed by the frat, rained down on the dancers” (Jerry 1930, 7). The all-​male Alwyns Club, for their spring dance, brought in E. Ronald Eason, a decorator from Chicago, to elaborately transform the ballroom: The entire scheme of decoration was that of a beautiful English garden and was built around a beautiful fountain topped by a marble faun. A  profusion of palms and

“And I Make My Own”    29 shrubbery, with garden seats here and there, together with the aid of soft, shimmering lights, made the illusion complete. (New York Amsterdam News 1930, 6)

The illusion, however, was not truly complete without dance performances from the club’s membership and featured guests: Entertainment included an interpretive dance by Miss Dorothy Sanders entitled “Shadow of Romance,” and a group of children from the Ann Jones Dancing School, under the direction of Miss Jones, gave a delightfully beautiful dance interpretation of “Love’s Magic Spell.” (New York Amsterdam News 1930, 6)

These affairs’ emphasis on “poise, grace, and beauty” points to strong links between class status and the physical enactment of racial uplift through an aestheticized system of aspirational values. Within this framework, advancing or maintaining one’s class status meant more than either the acquisition or outward performance of wealth; it meant embodying the moral purity expected of upstanding black citizens. Discourses emphasizing such comportment’s significance traded on an emerging system that tied social class to affirmations of community values (Bowser 2008). As such, building disciplined physical culture was a means of resisting those “underworld” spaces that New Negro Harlemites believed resulted in—​rather than from—​conditions of poverty. Recalling his youth in his autobiography, Malcolm X took a cynical view of this phenomenon, claiming that African Americans refashioned their job titles to add layers of prestige beyond the reality of their circumstances and that such performance was tantamount to self-​delusion. He described the extreme false consciousness he observed in the early 1940s while living in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood: I’d guess that eight out of ten of the Hill Negroes of Roxbury, despite the impressive-​ sounding job titles they affected, actually worked as menials and servants. “He’s in banking,” or “He’s in securities.” It sounded as though they were discussing a Rockefeller or a Mellon—​and not some gray-​headed; dignity-​posturing bank janitor, or bond-​house messenger. “I’m with an old family” was the euphemism used to dignify the professions of white folks’ cooks and maids who talked so affectedly among their own kind in Roxbury that you couldn’t even understand them. I don’t know how many forty-​and fifty-​year-​old errand boys went down the Hill dressed like ambassadors in black suits and white collars, to downtown jobs “in government,” “in finance,” or “in law.” It has never ceased to amaze me how so many Negroes, then and now, could stand the indignity of that kind of self-​delusion. ([1967] 1999, 21)

This social performance concerned X largely because he thought it distracted African Americans from making the kinds of more radical pushes for equality that would make upward mobility more tangible and less cosmetic. While corporeal enactments of status may have shifted attention away from economic development and advocacy against inequality, these “cosmetic” signifiers still made social advancement more attainable. The move toward a values-​oriented class model was a shift away from a

30   Christopher J. Wells racial/​ethnic caste system in which mulatto and/​or foreign birth conferred social status (Bowser 2008). However, perhaps signifiers of high-​class comportment could never be truly stripped of their whiteness, and black fetishization of elite white culture created what Langston Hughes termed “the racial mountain,” as this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible…. The whisper of “I want to be white” runs silently through their minds. This young poet’s home is, I believe, a fairly typical home of the colored middle class. One sees immediately how difficult it would be for an artist born in such a home to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people. He is never taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not according to Caucasian patterns. For racial culture the home of a self-​styled “high-​class” Negro has nothing better to offer. ([1926] 2009, 254–​255)

Unlike Fisher, Hughes did not find himself “lost in a sea of white faces,” but in Harlem’s middle class, he saw black bodies lost in a sea of white culture.

The Savoy Ballroom and “a Need Not Met Elsewhere” It was out of independent striving for comparable conditions that the Savoy Ballroom was born in 1926. Like Fisher’s Arcadia, the Savoy stretched a full city block, between 140th and 141st Streets on Lenox Avenue, and it offered a vision of utopian integration where people of all races and circumstances were welcomed. Though owned by white entrepreneur Moe Gale, the Savoy was marketed as a dance palace that would rival the material and cultural trappings of elite, segregated ballrooms while providing universal accessibility. Early announcements in the New York Amsterdam News before the Savoy’s March 1926 opening emphasized that the architects behind downtown dance palaces were overseeing the new ballroom’s construction and décor and that “thousands of dollars have been expended in interior decorations” (Amsterdam News 1926a, 5). At the Savoy, black patrons would have the opportunity to “sit at one of the many tables behind the highly polished rail and be served refreshments furnished by the most up-​to-​date caterers” (New York Amsterdam News 1926a, 5). In its advertising, the Savoy emphasized that it would offer black patrons entertainment comparable to that in elite segregated venues: Thousands have found enjoyment at the Savoy since it has been opened, and to the credit of the management be it said that they have always tried to please and hold

“And I Make My Own”    31 their large patronage by offering things not to be found at any other place of its kind in the city catering to Negroes. (New York Amsterdam News 1926a, 5)

The Amsterdam News hoped the ballroom would “fill a long-​felt want and supply that something lacking elsewhere” (1926a, 5). Indeed, this “long-​felt” want was so strong that the paper encouraged its audiences to support the Savoy and its promise of an upscale integrated venue. When the Connie’s Inn Revue was to be featured at the Savoy for a special Easter celebration, the New York Amsterdam News noted: Many colored people have not had the opportunity to see this revue in its own habitat, for few of the better class care to risk being elbowed aside by the whites patronizing the Inn and making it plain that it is a place run almost exclusively for the entertainment of others than those in the neighborhood. The Savoy is being run for the entertainment of colored people until such time when they fail to come out in large enough numbers to warrant the management discontinuing the laudable policy with which they started. (1926c, 5)

The paper hoped the specter of the segregated Connie’s Inn would motivate Harlemites to validate the Savoy’s business model through their patronage. While Connie’s Inn remains famous as Harlem’s first major whites-​only cabaret and as the venue upon which the Cotton Club modeled its business, it launched in 1923 as an integrated venue; its advertisements in black papers emphasized in capital letters that “ALL ARE WELCOME.” However, these ads disappeared only four months after the club opened, and it ultimately found that segregation increased its appeal to free-​spending whites and strengthened its bottom line. The Savoy seemed a similarly risky venture; the ballroom charged the relatively low admittance fee of fifty cents yet still offered material trappings that signified wealth and elite achievement. Its décor was “laid out in a manner which holds good only in the most expensive places on Broadway” (New York Amsterdam News 1926b, 5), and it boasted “ornate French mirrors, varicolored electric lights, and a reception room with costly rugs” (Baltimore Afro-​American 1926, 4) in addition to a full staff of trained hostesses to entertain the crowds. While the Savoy’s hostesses fulfilled the same role as the Rose-​ Danceland’s consumable taxi dancers, their physical culture distinguished them from the objects of pleasure found in such “creep joints.” These hostesses, along with the rest of the Savoy’s all-​black staff, attended a twice-​weekly “School of Courtesy” to ensure that “patrons will find themselves in an environment of refinement as well as beauty second to none” (New York Amsterdam News 1926d, 5). From the outset, the Savoy played a significant role in Harlem’s community life as a venue for society gatherings and events. Churches, community centers, and civic unions used the grand ballroom for charity balls and other major functions. The ballroom’s manager, Charles Buchanan, sought to maintain a dignified atmosphere and encouraged bouncers to break up any couples dancing the Charleston or other exuberant,

32   Christopher J. Wells up-​tempo popular dances (Monaghan and Hubbard 2009). Responding to public criticism, Buchanan made a public statement articulating the Savoy’s philosophy: Some folks have gotten the idea that the Savoy is too strict. They say that because we won’t stand for a lot of necking, indecent mooch dancing and the like that you can’t have a good time here. We want to tell you right now that it’s a lot of applesauce. We know and so do you that the Savoy is not a fly-​by-​night venture, but is intended to remain here for many years to come. We just feel it’s a lot nicer to live in a clean house than a dirty one and we know and so do you, nothing that isn’t on the level can survive for long. You wouldn’t let your sister go to a place with indecent environment. You wouldn’t want your mother to know you go there. We realize how true that is, thus we conduct the Savoy along lines that will please your mother, your sister, and you. And believe us, you can have a mighty good time here. (quoted in Pittsburgh Courier 1929, A3)

In addition to emphasizing orderly comportment and upstanding citizenship, the Savoy boasted of its spending, claiming it paid each married male employee no less than $40 per week and that musicians averaged $75 per week, roughly three times the average salary for men in Harlem (Pittsburgh Courier 1929). The Savoy’s patrons, however, found means to resist and subvert the ballroom’s rigid policies. The Savoy’s most famous dancer in its early years, “Shorty” George Snowden, invented a traveling step to evade the ballroom’s bouncers when they gave chase. He claims he developed his renowned foot speed through these involuntary “dances” with the ballroom’s enforcers. Snowden’s innovative moves became so popular that, while initially Buchanan rejected him to preserve the Savoy’s “high-​class” ideals, he ultimately recognized Snowden’s enormous popularity and gave him a gilded lifetime pass to the ballroom (Stearns 1959). Despite the Savoy management’s initial reservations, the ballroom ultimately became a hub of popular dance and was central to the development of Harlem’s most popular social dance, the lindy hop. This dance form attracted young Harlem residents, who exaggerated the holds and conventions of more traditional ballroom dances, infusing them with athletic, improvisational movement. Several scholars have situated the lindy hop as an egalitarian form of catharsis. Monaghan and Hubbard describe it as “a comprehensive and rhythmically charged critique of the European partner-​dancing tradition, it articulated a new aesthetic of cultural equality” (2009, 132). DeFrantz highlights its emphasis on speed and agility “danced and played with a drive that confirmed the sense of unrest that accompanied civil rights movements” (2012, 131). Robert Crease (1995) notes that the dance’s circular figures and closed holds resisted the gaze of external observers. Gena Caponi-​Tabery writes that the lindy hop “allowed dancers to stylize, authorizing each version with innovation and personality. By endowing their dancing with personal style, lindy dancers managed to keep from being simply faces in the crowd” (2008, 65). The lindy hop was a corporeal statement of participation, agency, and self-​expression; it afforded Harlem youth otherwise marginalized within exploitative labor conditions or absorbed into essentialist constructions of their neighborhood a chance to be seen and heard in public space by their peers and on their own terms. Catering to a lindy hopping public ultimately became a financial necessity for ballrooms. As one unsympathetic

“And I Make My Own”    33 reporter noted, the dance “has developed into such a pest that some halls advertise No Lindy Hop allowed here. The result is a loss of business” (Young 1936) (Figure 1.3). Over time, the vibrancy of this emerging popular dance culture shifted the Savoy’s ethos away from its reproduction of downtown elitism. Russian choreographer/​scholar Mura Dehn (n.d.) observed this change firsthand: In the mid-​thirties, the ballroom was invaded by youth. Gone the evening gowns, the formal dress, the grown up sophistication. Jitterbugs made their debut. Thick-​ rimmed glasses, thick-​soled sneakers, sport jackets, sweaters. Girls in bobby socks, flaring skirts, skull caps with a long feather. Ballroom bubbling with energy.

Figure  1.3.  Unidentified couple, probably lindy hoppers, dancing at an unidentified night spot. 1930s. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. This lindy hopping couple’s “breakaway” position and the man’s “flying” footwork would have gotten them thrown off the Savoy’s dance floor in the 1920s. In the 1930s, however, it was the ballroom’s most popular dance.

34   Christopher J. Wells As the ballroom continued to grow in popularity, young Harlemites forged a sense of style that was neither the image of middle-​class upward mobility their parents wished for them nor the exotic stereotypes held by white slummers. Rather, they enacted an aesthetic that expressed their own experiences and desires while signifying on both these fantasies. Symbols of elite, upper-​class culture became repurposed as outlandish, individual fashion statements. Legendary Savoy lindy hopper Al Minns recalled his future collaborator Leon James’s outfit the night they met. At the time James was already a star, having recently performed in the Marx Brothers 1936 film A Day at the Races: This night Leon came in in champagne-​colored riding trousers with the full legs, high boots; champagne-​colored dress shirt shot with threads of iridescent burgundy color; wore a big blue ascot. Carried a riding crop, which he flicked casually…. He really made an entrance. If he never makes another one, he made one then. (quoted in Stearns 1960)

Al, by contrast, preferred starched collars and dark suits “like a businessman” (Stearns 1960). The physical comportment of respectability in public was transformed into “struttin’ ” or a more extroverted and highly stylized public performance of smoothness and excellence. Dehn (n.d.) articulates this juxtaposition in Alfred Liegens’s dancing in the early 1930s: He danced triumphantly erect, always ready, in case the English King should visit The Track: “My posture is perfect: I don’t have to alter a step, just bend my head in greeting.” And suddenly he would break into a slide-​sweep—​the body down to his knees and up in a cascade of rhythms and African arm movements like ribbons in the air.

Within this space, Harlem youth like Liegens aestheticized and reclaimed expectations of social conformity, rerouting them through their own expressive creativity. Ballrooms also became spaces for working-​class blacks, especially those employed in industrial and domestic labor, to experience the social opportunities enjoyed by those they served. Among the Savoy’s most popular functions was its Thursday evening “Kitchen Mechanics Night,” which catered to the domestic laborers, most of them female, who spent their weekends working downtown in white homes. For them, Thursday night was a time for release before a weekend of staid servitude and their one night for high-​class leisure and recreation. So popular was this Thursday evening dance that the Savoy’s management had to quickly restore it after attempting to shift their Thursday night programming, because the “Kitchen Mechanics Night” crowd would simply show up en masse and claim the space (Monaghan and Hubbard 2009). Like Tillie the dressmaker, these Harlemites staked a claim for self-​definition and ownership of community spaces and culture. Just as Savoy patrons expressed a wide range of class identities, the ballroom structured its weekly schedule to cater to Harlem’s diverse population and to Harlemites’ divergent reasons for going dancing:

“And I Make My Own”    35 Monday, a bad evening for business, became a free night for ladies. Men were charged forty cents for admission. In time it became the most popular night. Tuesday was established as the 400 club night, when a group of dance lovers who attend regularly, receive rebate on admissions. This serves also as a meeting night for the club at which dance contests are held and new members are ceremoniously inducted. Wednesday has been reserved for social and fraternal affairs of Harlem’s upper class. Thursdays attracts the domestic workers who are usually at liberty on this night. Friday is also a night for social and fraternal organizations. Saturdays and Sundays attract the most cosmopolitan groups, catering largely to the visitors from other parts of the country. (Cary 1936)

Within Harlem’s mutable class structure, one could enjoy the “low-​down” partying on Thursday and then waltz at an upscale fraternal social on Friday. One’s class performance could thus be malleable, creating opportunities for a thoroughly heterogeneous presentation of social class not only within groups, but also within individual dancers. Over time, clear demarcations of class and class performance merged and blended, and just as Liegens brought a regal bearing to the Savoy’s more populist evenings, the Savoy’s society parties opened up as well into free spaces where dancers could enjoy more autonomy and fluidity in their physical culture. In 1935 the Comus Club held its 11th Anniversary Christmas Formal at the Savoy, and New York Amsterdam News noted that while “society turned out in full fashion” for the event, they welcomed more stylistic diversity on their dance cards: Never before had so many guests been bidden to this formal event; never before have the attendants had such freedom in their choice of dances. Yes, the current rage of truckin’ was almost as much in evidence as the Lindy Hop, waltz and two-​step–​and everybody liked that freedom. (1936, 1)

Conclusion Catharsis within the public ballroom was a product of black cultural urbanization. Hazzard-​Gordon (1992) identifies this public turn as an extension of the informal, subversive spaces that had long been vital to black identity construction in the rural South; the new northern metropolises yielded a dynamic new public, cosmopolitan leisure culture to which black migrants wanted access. Furthermore, the specific constraints of segregation forced black residents to live in such cramped and confined residences that formerly private, informal social culture burst onto the streets and into public venues (Hazzard-​Gordon 1992). Neal (1999) has identified spaces like the Savoy as vital to the formation of the urban, postemancipation black public sphere, because they functioned as sites of resistance to the narratives of black aspiration espoused by churches and civic institutions.

36   Christopher J. Wells Thus, for Tillie the dressmaker, “going out” was her only means of accessing shared cultural space, of claiming her place in the modern American culture for which previous generations had relocated northward, and of defining that access on her own terms. Articulating the web of signification Harlemites negotiated, Wilson offers a valuable analytical lens: Yet examining [Harlem] as a contested space of racial images, weighing the varying notions of a unified definition of “African American,” and sifting through the differing claims of a “real” Harlem, one exposes the fluid nature of an identity, presumed to be fixed, that is nonetheless elusive, deceptive, and fantastically mutable. (2011, 78)

Through exaggeration and signifying play, young black Harlemites forged performative spaces to leverage this “fantastically mutable” landscape and weave coherent identities from a pastiche of contradictions. Social dance thus yielded free spaces for joissance and for African American youth to control and contest the tropes and expectations that swirled around them within Harlem and to shape it into the one small slice of the massive modern world they could claim was theirs. My argument thus reinforces Bowser’s (2008) claim that class culture in black communities is tied to comportment and performance rather than income and that dance, therefore, became a vital tool of resisting external constructions of blackness that fuel cycles of social oppression and cultural consumption. It stops short, however, of Malcolm X’s ([1967] 1999) assertions of delusion and false consciousness. Rather, this dynamic fits within a long-​standing African American practice of “making a way from no way,” of finding alternative paths to fulfill those dreams deferred and denied through the sociopolitical systems of white supremacy. Rather than succumbing to some kind of mass delusion, Harlemites employed social dances and ballroom culture to sever the ostensibly fundamental yet arguably unnecessary links between material wealth and the pleasures of luxury, claiming ownership of identity signifiers as elaborate as silk equestrian outfits and riding crops or as simple as slight shifts in posture and knee flexion. If we accept that ethnicity results from systems of coercive social interaction, externally assigned identities, or inevitable historical forces, we must then interpret black popular culture during this time as dance resisting ethnicity. The worlds of mimicry and cathartic play enacted through dancing bodies in Harlem ballrooms fundamentally disoriented such coercive normativities, exposing them as mis-​mapped constructs imported to a cultural space where they didn’t really fit. However, such cultural performance did not fundamentally disrupt or destabilize blackness as a coherent identity. Quite the contrary; it was, in Neal’s (1999) words, vital to the initial formation of a “black public sphere” in America. Clearly, dance did not injure ethnicity; it actually built a firmer foundation for a coherent and distinct understanding of “blackness.” To reconcile this dilemma, I propose that considering dance demands a model of ethnicity that includes space for agency and processes of self-​definition. Such a model would

“And I Make My Own”    37 reflect Jack D. Forbes’s premise that identity “is really a series of concentric circles, with many layers of importance. No single level can adequately describe or encompass identity” (1990, 42). Seeking to decouple identity categories from their colonial legacies, Forbes asks us “to recognize multiple approaches to ethnic identity and to recognize that all ethnic groups and units (including families) can change genes, while yet remaining whole and retaining their identity” (1990, 48). Harlem’s social dancers built through their bodies such a system of identity formation as it deployed corporeal performance to enact what Forbes calls “the human right of self-​identification.” Functioning as a critique, dance’s assertion of an active body moving with intention demands that even concepts such as class and ethnicity, which foreground the dynamics of group identity, make space for agency and individual choice. Re-​energizing the term from Harlem’s socialite scene, dance in Harlem served to create and develop a new “physical culture” that opened up space for a range of expressions of blackness, from the social clubs’ grand waltzes to the whirling leg kicks of exuberant jitterbugs. This heterogeneity of embodied performance actively structured and restructured Harlem’s diverse social spaces. For Fisher’s Tillie, an orphaned twentysomething in a cramped tenement apartment who spends her days making dresses for fine ladies downtown, a trip to the ballroom is a chance to put HER dress on. Moving through the ballroom, her body creates a physical culture that defies the racialized binaries that limit her access to better housing and employment and that asserts agency in the face of the white male gaze’s ethnicized exotic constructs of blackness. As she slips into a world where comportment creates identity, her only limitations are the dress her hands can sew and ways her body can move.

Notes 1. I make these extrapolations from Greenburg’s (1991) empirically driven account of circumstances for black residents at the time. 2. This social system and its impact has been an object of significant social scientific inquiry for over fifty years. For a rigorous, roughly contemporaneous breakdown of this vernacular classification scheme, see Parrish (1946). For both original data and a thorough literature review of this concept’s ongoing cultural circulation as the “bleaching syndrome,” see Hall (2007). 3. For a thorough look at the dynamic shifts in population and growth of local institutions in Harlem during the 1920s and an analysis of the circumstances that led to its growth as a black neighborhood, see Gill (2011).

References Baltimore Afro-​American. 1926. “Largest Ballroom to Open Saturday.” March 13, 5. Baltimore Afro-​American. 1928. “Webb’s Orchestra Is Mainstay of Rose-​ Danceland.” January 7, 7. Baltimore Afro-​American. 1930. “New York.” January 25, 5.

38   Christopher J. Wells Berry, James, and Mura Dehn. n.d.-​a]. “Harlem Clubs.” Unpublished manuscript, Mura Dehn Papers on Afro American Social Dance, Box 2, Folder 20, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Berry, James, and Mura Dehn. n.d.-​b. “Speakeasys.” Unpublished manuscript, Mura Dehn Papers on Afro American Social Dance, Box 2, Folder 20, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Bowser, Benjamin P. 2008. The Black Middle Class:  Social Mobility and Vulnerability. London: Lynne Rienner. Bryan, Louis B. 1936. “The Theatrical Schools of the Negro in New York: Their History and Development.” Report for WPA Writer’s Project, Writers Program, New York City. Negroes of New  York Collection, Reel 2.  Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. Caponi-​Tabery, Gena. 2008. Jump for Joy:  Jazz, Basketball, and Black Culture in the 1930s. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Cary, Arthur. 1936. “Savoy Ballroom.” Report for WPA Writers’ Project, Writers Program, New York City. Negroes of New York Collection, Reel 2, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. Chicago Defender. 1930. “Tid-​Bits of New York Society.” January 18, 5. Crease, Robert P. 1995. “Divine Frivolity:  Hollywood Representations of the Lindy Hop 1937–​1942.” In Representing Jazz, edited by Krin Gabbard, 207–​228. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press. De Certeau, Michel. (1984) 2011. The Practice of Everday Life. Translated by Steven F. Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press. DeFrantz, Thomas F. 2012. “Unchecked Popularity:  Neoliberal Circulations of Black Social Dance.” In Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations, edited by Lara D. Nielsen and Patricia Ybarra, 128–​142. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dehn, Mura. n.d. “Jazz Dance.” Unpublished manuscript, Mura Dehn Papers on Afro-​ American Social Dance Box 1, Folder 5, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. 2003. The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fisher, Rudolph. (1927) 1999. “The Caucasian Storms Harlem (1927).” In Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, edited by Robert Walser, 60–​65. New York: Oxford University Press. Fisher, Rudolph. “The Lindy Hop.” 2008. In The City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher, edited by John McClusky Jr., 253–​265. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. From unpublished materials dated 1932–​1933. Forbes, Jack. 1990. “The Manipulation of Race, Class, and Identity:  Classifying Afro-​ Americans, Native Americans, and Red-​Black People.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 17, no. 4: 1–​51. Gill, Jonathan. 2011. Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America. New York: Grove Press. Greenburg, Cheryl Lynn. 1991. “Or Does it Explode?”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression. New York: Oxford University Press. Hall, Ronald E. 2007. “The Bleaching Syndrome:  Implications of Light Skin for African American Women.” African American Review 41, no. 3: 487–​506. Hazzard-​Gordon, Katrina. 1992. Jookin’:  The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

“And I Make My Own”    39 hooks, bell. 1992. “Eating the Other:  Desire and Resistance.” In Black Looks:  Race and Representation, 21–​39. Boston: South End Press. Hughes, Langston. (1926) 2009. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In Let Nobody Turn Us Around: An African American Anthology, 2nd ed., edited by Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, 253–​257. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Jerry [pseud.] 1930. “The Social Whirl.” Baltimore Afro-​American, May 3, 7. Liggett, Helen, and David C. Perry, eds. 2008. Spatial Practices: Critical Explorations in Social and Spatial Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Locke, Alain. 1925. The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: A. and C. Boni. Matthews, Ralph. 1933. “Love Laughs at Life in Harlem” Baltimore Afro-​American, March 11, 18. Matthews, Ralph. 1936. “Looking at the Stars” Baltimore Afro-​American, May 2, 10. Monaghan, Terry, and Karen Hubbard. 2009. “Negotiating Compromise on a Burnished Wood Floor: Social Dancing at the Savoy.” In Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, edited by Julie Malnig, 126–​145. Urbana, IL:  University of Chicago Press. Neal, Mark Anthony. 1999. What the Music Said:  Popular Music and Black Public Culture. New York: Routledge. New York Amsterdam News. 1926a. “New Savoy Throws Open Its Doors to Public in March.” February 24, 5. New York Amsterdam News. 1926b. “Thousands Storm New Savoy at Big Opening Friday Night, March 12.” March 17, 5. New York Amsterdam News. 1926c. “Easter to Be Fittingly Celebrated at the Savoy. March 31, 5. New  York Amsterdam News. 1926d. “Savoy Ballroom Now Has School of Courtesy for its Employees.” May 26, 5. New York Amsterdam News. 1929. “Savoy Management Takes Over Alhambra Ballroom.” July 24, 13. New  York Amsterdam News. 1930. “Alwyns Club Sponsors Dance:  E.R. Eason Supervises Unique Decoration of Ballroom.” April 30, 6. New York Amsterdam News. 1936. “Comus Club Gives Eleventh Christmas Formal at Savoy.” January 4, 6. Parrish, Charles H. 1946. “Color Names and Color Notions.” Journal of Negro Education 15, no. 1: 13–​20. Pittsburgh Courier. 1929. “Savoy Takes Over New Alhambra Ballroom.” September 14, A3. Ramsey, Guthrie P. 2003. Race Music:  Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-​ Hop. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rosenkrantz, Timme. 2012. Harlem Jazz Adventures: A European Baron’s Memoir 1934–​1969. Adapted and edited by Fradley Hamilton Garner. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Adapted from Dus med Jazzen mine Jazzmemoirer: En Bog om Jazz–​Og Andet Godtfolk, 1969. Savigliano, Marta. 1995. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder, CO: Westview. Stearns, Marshall. 1959. Notes from interview with George “Shorty” Snowden, December 17. Marshall Winslow Stearns Collection Box 7, Folder 22, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University Libraries. Stearns, Marshall. 1960. Notes from interview with Al Minns. Marshall Winslow Stearns Collection Box 7, Folder 3, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University Libraries. Van Vechten, Carl. 1926. Nigger Heaven. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Vogel, Shane. 2009. The Scene of the Harlem Cabaret:  Race, Sexuality, Performance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

40   Christopher J. Wells Whalan, Mark. 2003. “ ‘Taking Myself in Hand:  Jean Toomer and Physical Culture.” Modernism/​Modernity 10, no. 4: 597–​615. Wilson, James F. 2011. Boondaggles, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies:  Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. X, Malcolm, with Alex Haley. (1967) 1999. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Ballantine Books. Young, Wilbur. [1936?]. “Dances Originating in Harlem.” Unpublished manuscript, Writers Program, New York City. Negroes of New York Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.

Chapter 2

“ D o You Want to Se e My Hornpipe? ” C re at i v i t y an d Irish Step Da nc e i n the Work of Jea n Bu t l e r and C olin  Du nne Aoife McGrath

Traditional dance forms are often connected to the performance of ethnic and national identity.1 Indeed, it has been argued that following the emergence of cultural nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “dance has come to assume pride of place in the construction of such identities” (Reed 2010, 5). This assertion is particularly relevant in Ireland in the context of step dancing, which was renamed “Irish” dancing during the Gaelic revival movement at the end of the nineteenth century and continues to function as a symbol of Irish culture today. This tethering of Irish step dancing to the performance of ethnicity has effected transformations in the dance form stemming from its connection with the creation of national identity, the exhibitionism required by the competitive dance form, and the spectacularization of commercialized theatrical formats (e.g., Riverdance). These transformations can be seen most clearly in the strictly regulated competitive step-​dancing style, resulting in this technique not usually being considered a creative dance form in a theatrical context. This chapter considers recent exciting developments in Irish step dancing that, through the loosening of ties with the performance of ethnic and national identity and the subtraction of links with exhibitionism and spectacularization, are challenging perceptions of the creative potential of the form. Declan Kiberd argues that the English, in their project of colonization, helped invent a notion of Ireland. He notes that “through many centuries, Ireland was pressed into service as a foil to set off English virtues, as a laboratory in which to conduct experiments, and as a fantasy-​land in which to meet fairies and monsters” (Kiberd 1996, 1

42   Aoife McGrath abstract). One of the effects produced by this shaping of Ireland by its colonizer was the positioning of the Irish as the feminine foil to English masculinity. The dualism created by the forging of an oppositional Irish identity by the English created a need for those involved in the nationalist cause to stress masculine qualities. Although this project of renovation was mostly concentrated on demonstrating superiority in literary matters,2 the corporeal was not ignored. In an attempt to redress the indignity of a feminine identity—​for to be feminine at the end of the nineteenth century was to be the negative to a masculine positive3—​nationalists founded the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1884 with the intention of “purg[ing] themselves of their degrading femininity by a disciplined programme of physical-​contact sports” (Kiberd 1996, 25). This disciplining of an “Irish” body is also evident in the attention paid by the Gaelic League to traditional Irish dancing. Established in 1893, the league’s primary interest was in a revival of the Irish language. However, the organization quickly became a powerful influence in the movement toward defining a “native” Irish dance form that was free from “alien” influences. Unsurprisingly, debates about the standardizing rule that in competitive step dancing the arms must be held immobile at the side of the body were also prevalent at that time; the corporeal was being straitjacketed (Brennan 1999). Sociologist Barbara O’Connor (2013) links the promotion of céilí dance by the Gaelic League to the desire for a dance form that would reflect the body politic’s need for both ethnic and sexual purity in the invention of a sovereign national identity. This molding of an exclusionary “Irish” body by nationalist organizations shows that the body was viewed as a potentially problematic and subversive site that, through practices deemed to be ideologically unsound, might pollute the nationalist and ethnic purity of an individual’s mind and soul. Considering the history of competitive Irish step dancing in the twentieth century, Frank Hall identifies what he terms “two watershed events” that changed the course of the dance form’s development (2008, 113): the founding of the Coimisiún le Rincí Gaelacha (the Irish Dancing Commission) in 1930 and the creation of the Irish dance spectacular genre with the advent of Riverdance in 1994. In this chapter I examine certain twenty-​first-​century developments in the form, which, I propose, have the potential to be just as influential for the future of traditional Irish dance. In 2008 the first annual Dublin Dance Festival, which advertised itself as “a celebration of international dance, the only festival solely dedicated to promoting contemporary dance in Ireland,”4 included in its program two original solo works by choreographers experimenting with traditional Irish step dance. This inclusion of choreographers working in an indigenous dance form was an exciting and, at first glance, a rather surprising departure for the festival. Although there have been several attempts by various choreographers in recent years to bridge a perceived divide between traditional Irish dance and contemporary dance (an example being the experiments of the National Folk Theatre, Siamsa Tíre, discussed below), the communities of dancers working in these forms continue to operate in separate spheres and with such different methods and aesthetics that the two styles would still be considered unlikely bedfellows. Adding a further level of interest to the programming, in addition to being champion Irish step dancers, the choreographers of the two works, Jean Butler and Colin Dunne, had both performed as soloists in the Irish

“Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?”    43 dance spectacular Riverdance (1994). However, in Butler’s Does She Take Sugar? (2007) and Dunne’s Out of Time (2008), the competitive Irish dancing style is presented within the framework of contemporary postmodern dance, separating it from both the exhibitionism required by the competitive form and the spectacularization created by the commercialized theatrical format. In these two works, which are both solo pieces performed by the choreographers themselves, the traditional form undergoes a critical interrogation in which the performers attempt to depart from the determinacy of the traditional technique and its links with the performance of ethnic and national identity, while simultaneously acknowledging its formation of their corporealities. In Does She Take Sugar? and Out of Time, the dancers are striving to disobey the impulses created by years of training in a particular dance discipline so that they can playfully move in ways that have not yet been named; the Irish step-​dance technique becomes a springboard for creative experimentation. To consider the importance of the creative potential revealed by these works, it is first necessary to contextualize them within the dance background from which they emerged. To do this, I first take a look at the restrictions that are imposed on dancers by the competitive aesthetic of Irish step dance and the difficulties inherent in discussing competitive step dancing as a creative art form. Moving on to more recent developments, I then examine “modernized” Irish step dancing, seen in shows such as Riverdance, and also look at the contemporary/​folk crossover experiments of the National Folk Theatre of Ireland, Siamsa Tíre. Finally, I return to Butler and Dunne’s works to examine their ability to create space for playful, “unfixed” movements with Irish step dance.

Introducing the Works Does She Take Sugar? Following encouragement from her mother, who was born in County Mayo, Jean Butler began her training in Irish step with renowned teacher Donald Golden in New York at the age of six. After winning several world championship titles, she then performed as a solo dancer with Irish music groups and solo musicians, including Donal Lunny, Solas, and Kila, and toured for six years with The Chieftains. In 1994 Moya Doherty invited her to take part in the Eurovision5 song contest interval act, Riverdance, and Butler went on to become a co-​choreographer and originator of the female lead for the ensuing stage show version. After leaving Riverdance, Butler co-​choreographed another Irish dance spectacular, Dancing on Dangerous Ground (1999), with Colin Dunne before taking up a two-​year dance residency at Limerick University in 2003, where she pursued a master’s in dance performance, graduating in 2005. During her tenure as artist in residence in Limerick, Butler received an Irish Arts Council grant to develop a solo piece and began working on the project with dramaturge Steve Valk. After three years in development,

44   Aoife McGrath Does She Take Sugar? premiered at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin in 2007; following an invitation from Dublin Dance Festival director Laurie Uprichard, it was revived at the same venue (this time under the mentorship of choreographer Jodi Melnick) in 2008.6 The annual international critics’ survey of dancers, choreography, and productions conducted by the Ballet-​Tanz magazine named Does She Take Sugar? its “Most Innovative Work” of 2007; a notable choice in the context of this discussion, as this commendation is most often given to works created within ballet or contemporary/​dance theater genres, rather than a traditional dance form. In this intimate, autobiographical work, Butler stages the explorative process of her choreographic development away from the confines of the competitive Irish step-​dance vocabulary. As her movement progresses slowly beyond the restrictions of the traditional form during the piece, it becomes clear that the years of training in one idiom have left an ineradicable patterning of impulses in her body that must be questioned for every new move to appear. By tracing and erasing drawings and diagrams of her progress in chalk on a large blackboard and showing a film of her daily journey through New York to the dance studio where she practices, she brings the audience inside her rehearsal process and her personal life, exposing and altering a notation of the cartography of her corporeality. Butler enters the stage space to begin her solo in a manner that is dramatic precisely because it underplays the dramatic. Dressed in plain, black practice clothes and white sports socks, wearing no makeup, and with her long, red hair tied back in a simple ponytail, her costume for the piece is the antithesis of the costumes that she wore while performing in Riverdance. The set design for the work is also stripped back to essentials, consisting of the blackboard and a chair, on which she sits to watch two short films, catch her breath, adjust her costume, take a sip of water, and towel herself down. In this work, it is as if Butler brings the spectator into the practice studio to observe a process of metamorphosis. The concept of transformation is clearly communicated throughout the piece, beginning with Butler’s staging of her rehearsal process for the performance of a dance choreographed to Vivaldi’s Spring. This section starts with Butler writing a list of tasks on the blackboard:  “1:  mark through and clean, 2:  play breathe, 3: Spring!” Putting on the earphones of an mp3 player, she then proceeds to methodically follow this rehearsal schedule, first conducting a walk-​through of the spatial pattern, then repeating certain sections, then focusing on breathing patterns, before finally taking off the mp3 player to run through the dance to an external (and finally audible for the audience) playing of the music.7 Although the resulting performance is a seemingly conventional soft-​shoe dance with intricate footwork, high jumps, and rhythms dictated by Vivaldi’s score, the exposing of the repetitive and sweaty process that went into its preparation changes the audience’s perception of the dance. While Butler is rehearsing in “silent disco” fashion to the music in her earphones, the audience only hears the sounds of her working body and often laboring breath; the Irish dancing body is presented without frills in isolation from the rhythms that are dictating its movements. Due to this, the struggle for perfection of form is highlighted, with the strenuous exertion that underlies the seemingly effortless leaps and intricate steps being made apparent. A further metamorphosis can be read in the shedding of Butler’s

“Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?”    45 warm-​up clothes as the piece progresses, until she is finally wearing a plain, sleek black dress and is barefoot. In the latter sections, the difficulty encountered in her struggle for physical transformation is brought clearly into focus as she tries to perform movement phrases in a more contemporary style (although still connected to the step-​dance technique) to an accompanying sound track of garbled language and sounds from John Cage’s Roaratorio: An Irish circus on Finnegan’s Wake. Butler tries to escape the strictly upright posture of Irish dance by bending and curving her upper body, but the resulting movements seem somewhat stiff rather than fluid. In the final section of the piece, she abandons the vertical posture of the traditional technique altogether and performs a phrase of floor work. Aesthetically, this is perhaps the least convincing section of the work, yet conceptually it is the most enlightening. The conditioning of Butler’s body through the step-​dance form has trained it to always resist rather than give into gravity, and the difficulty of this final section reveals Butler’s willingness to bravely abandon aesthetic precepts and expectations to playfully explore new ways of moving. In the Irish step-​dance technique, dancers try to land from jumps on legs held as straight as possible to assist the illusion of a continual physical state of “upness” (as discussed below, in the context of a danced embodiment of ethnic and national identity, this could be read as connecting Irish dance with an aspirational moral “uprightness”). This contrasts with many dance techniques in which it is usual to bend the knees on landing in order to lessen the impact on the knee joint and to facilitate a smooth transition to the next move (in ballet this bend is called a plié). Perhaps unsurprisingly, when Butler began trying to introduce such bends into her technique, her muscles found the unpracticed mode of movement difficult to perform, and it is this physical strain placed on her body by the transformative process that Butler candidly shows in this work.8 In the program she explains that the piece is “essentially about the inside of something butting up against the outside of the same thing; the juxtaposition of the interior and exterior life of a dancer; my world inside and out.”9 Does She Take Sugar? demonstrates that the seemingly fixed outer shell of technique can be made malleable through the playful intervention of a curious and independent inner subjectivity.

Out of Time Like Butler, Dunne began to be molded by the step-​dance technique at an early age. When he was three years old, his Irish parents took him to his first Irish dance lesson in Birmingham, England. He won his first world championship title at age nine, and when he retired from competition at age twenty-​two, he had won a total of nine world titles in addition to eleven in Great Britain, nine All Ireland, and eight All England titles. After studying economics and graduating as a chartered accountant, Dunne toured as a solo dancer from 1992 to 1995 with De Dannan and The Chieftains (where he met Jean Butler), before joining Riverdance in 1995. Following the departure of the original male lead, Michael Flatley, Dunne took over his role and also went on to co-​ choreograph several numbers for the show. Dunne left Riverdance in 1998 to work on

46   Aoife McGrath Dancing on Dangerous Ground with Butler, and in 2001 he became dancer in residence at the University of Limerick, graduating with a master’s in contemporary dance performance from the same university in 2002. During his time in Limerick, Dunne began choreographing solo pieces, which, as he explains, “interrogat[ed] the space between [my] traditional dance roots and contemporary arts practice.”10 A short work choreographed for part of his master’s degree was featured in choreographer Yoshiko Chuma’s 10,000 Steps production for Daghda Dance Company, which premiered at the inaugural International Dance Festival Ireland in 2002. Dunne again collaborated with Chuma in 2003 on her Yellow Room project, and in 2005 he joined Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre for their production, The Bull, choreographed by Michael Keegan-​Dolan, for which Dunne was nominated by the UK Critic’s Circle for a National Dance Award in the category of best male dancer. Dunne has also choreographed for various theater productions, including the Abbey Theatre’s 2004 production of Dion Boucicault’s The Shaughran, directed by Martin Drury, and more recently Tom Kilroy’s Christ Deliver Us, directed by Wayne Jordan in 2010. Out of Time, which premiered at the Glór festival in Ennis, County Clare, is Dunne’s first full-​length solo work. Choreographed by Dunne and directed by former Irish dancer Sinéad Rushe, the piece also features film design by Seán Westgate, sound design by Fionán de Barra, and a score by Ian McDonnell. Dunne was nominated for an Olivier Award in the category of “Outstanding Achievements in Dance” for Out of Time in 2010. The title of this work already hints at the irreverent and playful approach that Dunne takes to his competitive step-​dance technique, as Irish dancers must never be out of time with their accompanying music. It can also be seen to refer to the dialogue that Dunne engages in between the traditions and corporealities of the past and his own present dancing, and the space that he creates for his dance outside of the dictates of time-​keeping rhythm and the restrictions of form. With microphones taped to his feet, he uses live digital recording technology to dance to the looped, remixed, and layered sounds of his own, echoed movements. He also dances with archive footage (projected onto an ever-​shifting formation of two white boxes, which he moves around the stage) of the Hayes brothers, Áine Ní Thuaghaigh, and Paddy Ban O’Broin, as they were recorded dancing in 1935, 1955, and 1972, respectively.11 Throughout the work, examples of competition and exhibitionism in the traditional form are questioned through a verbal accompaniment that comments on the performance as it is danced. At the beginning of the piece, Dunne dances barefoot to a sound track of percussive sounds and recorded audience applause interjected with the words “lovely,” “thanks,” “beautiful,” and “cheers,” spoken in a rather sardonic tone. His movements are all based on step-​ dance technique, but he inserts pauses and knee bends, plays with releasing the weight of an extended leg into the ground, and adds expansive arm movements that stem from the impetus created by his lower body. Stepping up onto a small podium, he then looks directly at the audience and asks with a knowing look, “Do you want to see my hornpipe?”12 This tongue-​in-​cheek approach is undercut throughout the work with sections that are more melancholy in tone. One such shift in mood occurs when a film is played of Dunne’s performance on the children’s show Blue Peter when he was ten years old.13

“Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?”    47 Due to the critical framework in which the piece analyzes the competitive and exhibitionistic aspects of step dance, the footage of Dunne as a child champion is both endearing and disquieting. Dunne himself has ambiguous feelings about it, and says of how he finds it difficult to watch the film during the performance: It’s kind of sweet and funny to see the 10-​year-​old version of me there. But I always saw that as quite a dark piece of footage. Just because of the ridiculousness of a 10-​ year-​old being in the position of a world champion. Where do you go after that? […] [T]‌hose early years were so formative and it is such a judgmental form: it’s all about, did you do it right? And therefore are you going to win? It takes a long time to get out of it. (Crawley 2009)

Throughout the piece, reflective sections such as this film are often a curious mixture of homage to the form and a concurrent, pointed critique of it. Another example of this intermixture is found in a later section, in which the white boxes are upended to create lecterns from which Dunne delivers a kind of summation of his thoughts on Irish dance, which he accompanies with the repetition of a simple, grid-​like walking pattern: “OK. This whole dance tradition in Ireland is a virtuoso affair. Its purpose is to amaze, to intrigue, to invite wonder and respect. In a word, it is exhibitionistic. Even in informal situations there is an underlying element of competition” (Dunne, 2008). Dunne also shows himself to be acutely aware of his hybrid identity as an Irish dancer born in England, drawing attention to the cultural anxiety that arises though his own experimentation with the step-​dance form, the globalization of Irish dance, and its adoption by nondiaspora communities in countries such as Russia and China. Toward the end of the piece he creates a jig on the subject: “What will they do? What will we do?” (Dunne 2008). These sections are interspersed with pure dance segments in which the multilayered soundscape created by Dunne’s movements is powerfully evocative, sometimes bringing to mind howling winds or ghostly voices and rhythms of dances from long ago. In both Dunne’s Out of Time and Butler’s Does She Take Sugar? the dancing body is consciously presented as doubled, with the usually strictly controlled movements of the objective and disciplined body trained in the step-​dance technique being resisted and creatively explored through a foregrounding of the choreographers’ own subjective experience. It could be argued that in both of these works, we see instances of the dancer being shown to be clearly distinguishable from the dance, which in its haunting of the dancers’ corporealities takes on a simultaneously nostalgic and controlling role. When considering how the works of Butler and Dunne function to subtract and unfix the ties of Irish step dance to the performance of ethnic and national identity (and the resultant need for competition and exhibitionism), it is interesting to note, as mentioned previously, that neither of these choreographers was born in Ireland; Butler is from New York and Dunne is from Birmingham, England. As Barbara O’Connor notes, Irish step dance has always “played an important role in expressing and reproducing ethnic identity in the multi-​ethnic societies for the Irish diaspora” (2013, 144). Arguably then, there was an increased emphasis placed on the ethnicity-​confirming function of Irish dance for these

48   Aoife McGrath two choreographers during their early dance training and performing careers, making their current creative experimentations even more radical. To differing degrees, both choreographers draw attention in their works to the cultural anxiety that arises through their experimentation with the form, the globalization of Irish dance, and its adoption by non-​diaspora communities. The fact that it is choreographers from the Irish diaspora who are at the forefront of these new developments in Irish step dance contributes to a destabilization of the connection between Irish dancing and the performance of ethnicity and nationalist ideology.

“In a World of Our Own”: Competition versus Creativity in Irish Step Dance The Irish dance form in which Butler and Dunne were both trained, and which serves as the main focus of this chapter, is the competitive solo step-​dancing style. This is distinct from sean-​nós dance (Gaelic for “old-​style” dance), the Munnix style practiced by the Siamsa Tíre dancers (discussed below), and the social forms of set dancing and céilí dancing.14 A radical element of both Butler and Dunne’s choreographies in these works is their creative choreographic approach to competitive step dancing. But why is the notion of pairing artistic creativity and Irish step dancing so unexpected? A possible answer to this question lies in the often-​noted difficulty inherent in considering competitive Irish step dance as a creative art form.15 As outlined in the introduction, the modern competitive aesthetic of step dancing16 is inextricably linked with its nomination during the Gaelic revival movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as being representative of “Irishness”; step dancing became an expression and performance of ethnic and national identity. The founding of the Gaelic League in 1893 saw the renaming of step dancing as “Irish dancing” and the eventual overt politicization of this organization in support of the nationalist cause,17 resulting in the league’s promoted version of step dancing, along with its related social form, céilí dancing, taking on the mantle of being the only two officially sanctioned danced expressions of national identity and morality. Helen Brennan proposes that the arguments at the turn of the twentieth century about what constituted Irish dance and what did not were “in essence, a cultural civil war with dance as the arena of combat” (1999, 31). The intention of the nationalists, as described by a letter to the Gaelic League’s newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis (The sword of light) in 1906, was to be rid of “baneful, suggestive foreign dances such as the polka, the waltz, the Welsh Dance, the Cat Walk, the Cake Walk and all foreign monstrosities” (Brennan 1999, 36). Only the league’s own brand of step dancing and céilí dancing was considered “safe,” so the Irish dancing was regulated and restricted in its co-​optation by the nationalist cause. Not only was céilí dancing, with its strict geometrical patterns and minimal body contact between partners, promoted as the most appropriate social-​dance form, but all other forms of social dance were denounced as

“Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?”    49 “dubious” and linked with images of fiery evildoing on the “hobs of hell” or depraved immorality in the “fleshpots of Egypt.”18 The attempted control of Irish dancing extended well beyond the establishment of the free state in 1922 and became a legislative matter with the notorious Dance Halls Act of 1935,19 which sought to regulate social dancing and which was praised and policed with a fervent vigilance by certain Catholic clergy in rural communities.20 One of the methods used by the Gaelic League to promote preferred expressions of Irish culture was the sponsorship of competitions. The use of competition in the promotion of Irish dance inevitably led to the necessity of narrowly defining the form so that it could be adjudicated. In 1927 the Gaelic League set up An Coimisiún le Rincí Gaelacha (The Commission for Irish Dance), which in 1930 became a centralized organization with regulatory authority that continues today in its role of creating and enforcing rules of competition and examination, both in Ireland and internationally.21 In 1969 tensions between teaching members and nondance Gaelic League members caused a split in the commission that led to the founding of the rival body, Comhdháil Muinteoirí na Rincí Gaelacha (Congress of Irish Dance Teachers). Another significant division occurred when Belfast-​based Patricia Mulholland decided to set up her own organization after the commission imposed a six-​month suspension on her teaching in 1951, after it was discovered that she had participated in a dance performance at which the British national anthem was played.22 However, neither of these splits caused a move away from a competitive aesthetic, which remained intact in both splinter groups.23 The strict regulation of the form by the commission and its rival organizations has undoubtedly contributed to the often breathtaking level of skill that is achieved by modern step dancers. Considering what further positive effects this structuring of a dance form around a competitive process might have for its practitioners, Hall suggests that there is a belief that this system has educative benefits in preparing children for the “ ‘real world’ [of a] society and culture with a competition-​based economy […] that produces winners and losers from a material perspective” (2008, 45).24 However, this competitive structure and the ideological link with nationalism can also be seen to have severely limited any scope for creative expression within the form. Although variations in weight changes, rhythmic stress, and movement through space are allowed in competitive step dancing, any introduction of new movements or any significant elaborations of existing movements are strictly policed by the Coimisiún. Hall notes: “Creativity in Irish dancing is guided by selections of movements which emphasize values already inherent in the form. Movements that bring out verticality and ‘up-​ness’ or gestures and paths in the forward direction instantiate these values” (2008, 104–​105). Creative elaborations on allowable steps can result in a considerable degree of controversy, as they are seen to pose a potential threat to the stability of the Irish dancing system as a representation of national identity. This results in creative elaborations deemed unacceptable being greeted with the damning response, “that’s not Irish dancing.” A knock-​on effect of this need for corporeal control can be found in the constraints placed on the musical accompaniment for competition. Brennan notes that although the repertoire of the modern step dancers continues to be founded on the traditional tunes, there is concern

50   Aoife McGrath that the technical development of step dancing movements has resulted in an alteration of the musical accompaniment. Competition dance requires what is known as “strict tempo,” and traditional musician Willie Clancy observes that “[m]‌usicians will say that the music for these dances is non-​creative and restricted to a small set of tunes which are [in turn] restricted to the bare essentials. There is no spontaneity and no opportunity for a musician to develop” (quoted in Brennan 1999, 153). The creative energies that are muted in the dancing and music have arguably found an outlet in the area of costuming and grooming for competition. Dresses for feiseanna (competition meetings)25, which can cost anything from 400 to more than 1,500 euros, come in every imaginable color, and the designs of the complex embroidered patterns that decorate them have recently moved away from recognizably “Irish” symbols to more abstract designs (flashier examples can be embellished with rhinestones or even Swarovski crystals). For feiseanna, pale legs are considered undesirable, so dancers get themselves spray tanned before competitions.26 One enterprising company in the United States has developed a spray tan business that caters especially for competing Irish dancers. As the website claims, going “bronze for the gold,” will “reduce the mess, reduce the stress, guarantee your success.”27 Brennan lists accessories required for a feis performance as including “the specialised shoes, the embroidered tiaras, plaited hair bands, satin pants, dress covers, half covers, smocks, aprons, magic wand curlers, caps and Kangol berets to go over the hair curlers, Tara brooches, ‘poodle’ socks, ‘banana clip’ hair pieces, headbands, crowns, scrunchies and finally, wigs” (Brennan 1999, 157). However, the realm of appearance is not wholly free from the controlling gaze of the commission. Skirt length is an area of strict regulation, and recent rulings have banned overly bejeweled tiaras and “bubble heel” shoes.28 There is also speculation in the Irish dance community that the oversized curly wigs, whose bounce during the dancers’ jumped movements is thought to emphasize the required quality of “up-​ness” and “lift,” will also soon come under the scrutiny of the commission.29 Colin Dunne, reflecting on how these developments in the competitive community have perhaps inevitably led to a stifling of artistic creativity in the step-​dance form, proposes: Irish dancing is quite silent as a creative, artistic or even cultural force in this country [Ireland]. We have placed ourselves in a world of our own. The competitive scene is quite exclusive, uninviting, and alarming even, to those on the outside. Whether we are in that world or out of it, all we seem to talk about are wigs and costumes. The important thing—​the dance itself—​gets snowed underneath all the baggage. (Quoted in Mulrooney 2006, 237)

Riverdance: Commodifying Danced Ethnicity A potential opening up of this previously closed-​off dance world came with the emergence of the Irish dance spectacular genre, originated by Riverdance. In 1994, the same year as the baptism of Ireland’s now extinct “Celtic Tiger” economy boom, the

“Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?”    51 convergence of a newfound fiscal confidence and national pride seemed to be embodied perfectly in a spectacular, seven-​minute showcase of Irish culture broadcast from Dublin to millions of television viewers during the interval of the Eurovision song contest. During the opening song by the Irish national choir, Anúna, a mysterious figure shrouded in a large cape, slowly entered from upstage through the singers. On reaching center stage and dramatically opening the cape (which had long sticks inserted into the sleeves, giving the appearance on opening of enormous wings), the figure was revealed to be Jean Butler, wearing a distinctly untraditional outfit of a short, black, velvet dress and sheer black tights. Although the majority of Butler’s soft-​shoe dance held to the traditional steps and posture, she added a rather coquettish hair-​flick in the opening bars and again at the end, signaling the further changes that were to come. After Butler’s exit, the time signature changed from 9/​8 (slip jig) to a fast paced 4/​4 (reel), and to the accompaniment of four drummers, Michael Flatley burst onto the stage in very fast-​paced, leaping diagonal, covering the entire breadth of the stage in just two bars. His hard-​shoe dance involved several of the nontraditional, bombastic arm gestures that he would later become famous for (e.g., poses borrowed from flamenco and a position known from the ballet Le Corsaire, in which the right hand is placed on the right shoulder, and the left arm extends outward and upward diagonally), and a use of crowd-​pleasing “tricks,” such as a complex rhythmic phrase that traveled backward. After his solo, Butler returned in hard shoes to join him in a duet, which memorably began with her performing a stepped circle around Flatley with her arm trailing around his waist, while they gazed into each other’s eyes. Following the duet, first six and then eighteen more dancers joined the pair, and the entire group famously formed one long line of twenty-​five perfectly synchronized step dancers to end the performance in a thunderous chorus line. The audience responded with whoops, whistles, rapturous applause, and a lengthy standing ovation. Following the success of this original version of Riverdance, producer Moya Doherty, director John McColgan, and composer Bill Whelan put together a full-​length commercial show, which premiered in Dublin’s Point Theatre in 1995. The show is essentially an assemblage of dance and musical numbers structured around a very loose narrative of emigration and homecoming. The first act is a collection of dance and musical numbers celebrating a mythic, ancient Ireland, and is triumphantly concluded with the original Eurovision piece and its signature chorus line. As the second half opens, a famine is forcing the Irish to emigrate to America, and this act features a section in which American tap dancers, a Spanish flamenco dancer, and Russian folk dancers perform separate dance numbers (bringing to mind orientalized world dances such as the “Kingdom of the Sweets” variations in the Nutcracker ballet), and ends with a finale in which all the dancers from the show, including those from other dance disciplines, come together to execute an Irish step-​dance sequence. As Aoife Monks suggests, this expanded reprisal of the first-​act chorus line suggests a collapsing of ethnic difference in which traditional Irish dance acts—​rather problematically—​as a common denominator for a “generalized sense of global identity” (a voice-​over at the beginning of this section states, “We are one kind. We are one people now, our voices blended, our music a great world in which we can feel everywhere at home”) (Monks 2007). It is estimated that since its premiere, the

52   Aoife McGrath production has been seen live by twenty-​one million people worldwide and has grossed well over $1 billion.30 The phenomenon of Riverdance has been the cause of much debate, with some praising its perceived “revitalization” of Irish step dancing and creation of employment for Irish dancers, and others connecting it to an “ongoing campaign to sell Ireland abroad and to ourselves as a bucolic idyll peopled with happy-​clappy bodhrán rapping riverdancing rustics” (Liam Fay in Ferriter 2005, 743). Riverdance is often credited with having successfully added arm movements to the step-​dance vocabulary. However, it could just as easily be argued that these additions were at best superficial and at worst physically and visually awkward. Explaining and confirming their problematic nature, Dunne states: In Riverdance we started to decorate [the dance] with some arm movements, but these really didn’t come from any impulses in the feet. They were essentially just stuck on top, to put it a little bit crudely. In certain performances I began to feel that I was on the outside of the performance experience looking in. The actual dance form physically in me felt useless and not at all fulfilling. (Quoted in Mulrooney 2006, 234)

A further innovation credited to Riverdance is the addition of “sexiness” to Irish dance. However, as with the arm movements, this claim is also disputed. As Monks proposes, the sexually codified gestures normally found in Broadway musicals have merely been “pasted on” to the Riverdance choreography. Conducting an analysis of the dancers’ facial expressions, Monks highlights an uneasy tension between the traditional form and this musical-​esque style, proposing that the [d]‌ancers’ faces lurched between the fixed grins of Broadway—​an introduction of Flatley’s—​and the abstracted solemnity of the traditional performance style, in which the dancer’s face appears to convey the sense that there is something unfortunate taking place “down there,” which might be unavoidable, but is certainly not to be acknowledged. (2007, 13)

Monks argues convincingly that in this attempt to loosen the rules imposed by the Coimisiún (itself a Victorian simulation of ethnic “authenticity”), the supposed restoration of a more “authentic,” pre-​Victorian expression of sexuality into the traditional form in Riverdance was ironically a reiteration of “the Revivalists’ focus on innovation in the name of authenticity, and internationalism in the name of the specifically Irish” (2007, 13). However, although Riverdance may not have succeeded in loosening the restrictive nature of the competitive technique to any significant degree, it was arguably much more successful in its attempt to link a traditional dance form with a display of newly acquired cultural and economic confidence and in presenting a glossy (if unconvincing) demonstration of Ireland’s supposed modernity and cosmopolitanism. In an examination of the attraction of the show for the Irish diaspora in the United States, Natasha Casey highlights the tensions in Riverdance between its ability to appeal to a consumer hungry for a connection with the past—​albeit a mythic past—​through an experience of what is perceived to be an authentic folk tradition, and the show’s simultaneous desire to

“Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?”    53 represent modern Irish culture. Referencing an article about the show in the New York Times that appeared in 1996 under the headline “Ireland Without Clichés,” Casey argues that Riverdance was being promoted as embodying, “a new respectable Irishness, neoteric and traditional, spiritual rather than religious, sanitized—​devoid of both political signifiers and […] stage leprechauns” (2002, 12). Casey provides an insightful analysis of how the sanitized and commercialized Irishness at work in Riverdance is consumed; however, I argue further that a choreo-​ political31 reading of certain elements of the show troubles an understanding of the piece as depoliticized. Moya Doherty states that her intention in Riverdance was to show an Ireland that is “modern and in step” (quoted in Casey 2002, 12). The step dancers in the piece are perhaps no longer overtly performing a dance of exclusionary nationalism, but their demonstration of synchronization advertises their ability to be economically “in step” with the global market. The chorus line scenes in the show can be read as spectacular displays of corporeal conformity and the subjugation of the body to an external force. In order to aid the illusion of perfect synchronization, the steps in these chorus lines have been simplified, and the tapping sounds of the dancers in the live performance are supplemented by a prerecorded sound track, which is intended to help cover up any irregularities caused by dancers misstepping.32 Reminiscent of the precision dances of the Tiller Girls, a chorus-​line dance troupe founded in 1890 by John Tiller in Manchester, England,33 the chorus line of dancers in Riverdance can be viewed as an example of a living commodity that is trapped in a site that allows for no indeterminacy, obediently embodying both the technology and ideological machinery of its creation and the product itself. In Siegfried Kracauer’s essay on the Berlin Tiller Girls in The Mass Ornament (2005), he compares the precise regulation of the dancers in the chorus line to the workers on an assembly line dictated by the efficiency principles of Taylorism. For Kracauer the machine-​like movements of the Tiller Girls function as a “surface manifestation” and “sign” of the capitalist economic and social systems in which they exist: “The structure of the mass ornament reflects that of the entire contemporary situation […] [it] is the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires” (Kracauer 2005, 78–​79).34 Similarly, I argue that the chorus line in Riverdance, using the technique of competitive step dance, can be read as an example of an aestheticization and advertisement of a late capitalist Irish labor force that is young, dynamic, mobile, and always striving to move upward and forward “in step.” Perhaps then, following Kracauer’s mode of analysis, it is not merely a coincidence that the current “farewell tours” of the Riverdance troupes are synchronous with the global economic recession and the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy that provided the underlying system for their origin. As Monks observes, the promotional material for Riverdance is overwhelmingly oriented toward discussion of its economic success rather than its aesthetic value, and she proposes that the “stories of quantities, percentages and money [that] circulate around the show […] offer a site for aspiration and desire in Irish culture” (2007, 10). This precedent set by Riverdance can also be found in the promotional material of the subsequent Irish dance spectaculars, with the Gaelforce (1998)

54   Aoife McGrath show, for example, advertising itself as “the Ferrari of Irish dance.”35 However, the prize for the most excessive bombast must go to Michael Flatley’s description of his 2005 Celtic Tiger extravaganza, for which he announced, “I’ve got the biggest TV screen in the world—​72 tons, […] the best dance troupe on earth, a lighting show that rivals Pink Floyd, $3 million worth of costumes, the best sound effects and a musical score […] that’s like an Irish rock concert” (quoted in Seaver 2008, 11).36 Discussion of Flatley himself, who is also a world champion step dancer and a co-​choreographer and original male soloist of Riverdance, is similarly surrounded with numerical superlatives: he is the highest paid dancer in the world, earning $50 million per annum, and his legs are insured for $40 million.37 As Ananya Chatterjea argues, “postindustrial society [is] marked by the commodification of ethnicities” (2004, 123), and in this spectacularized format of Irish step dance, the most visible site of competition has arguably been relocated from the performance of dancing figures to the performance of numerical figures.

The Collaborative Aproach: Siamsa Tíre and the rEvolution Project Consideration of step dance as a creative art form in a theatrical context is often thought to have begun with the advent of Irish dance spectaculars such as Riverdance. Yet outside of these commercial shows, there have been several instances in Ireland of theater dance works that have either included sections of step dance—​a recent example being Dunne’s choreography of step-​dance routines in Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre’s The Bull (2005)—​or have attempted a merging of contemporary dance or other dance forms with traditional Irish dance. A good example of the latter is the experiments of the National Folk Theatre of Ireland, Siamsa Tíre, which has a long tradition of incorporating the Munnix style of step dance into productions combining Irish music, song, and dance. As pointed out previously, the Munnix style practiced by Siamsa is a different form than the competitive style of the commission. Jonathan Kelliher, former dance master and current artistic director, asserts that the Munnix style “is untouched by competition Irish dancing” and considers it to be more “natural” due to a comparatively relaxed carriage of the upper body (quoted in Mulrooney 2006, 248). As with the sean nós style, in the Munnix tradition the upper body and arms are allowed to “flow” with the momentum of a step; however, although there is certainly a less restrictive approach to the movement of the torso and arms than in the competitive form, the vertical carriage of the upper body remains the same, and the focus is fixed on the movement of the feet and legs in their creation of rhythms. Originating in North Kerry, the style is named after a dancing master, Jeremiah Molyneux (1883–​1967), also known as Jerry Munnix, who developed a freer way of moving the lower body that included ankle swivels and pendulum swings from the hip.38 The style began to be documented and preserved in the late 1970s when Father

“Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?”    55 Pat Ahern filmed older dancers of the Kerry tradition. In 1974 Ahern founded Siamsa Tíre, whose website describes its main aims as being to “foster the development of Irish folk culture,” and to show “the appeal of a way of life from times past.”39 With a theater and gallery based in the Tralee headquarters, Siamsa also has two training centers (in Carraig and Finuge), which educate children from the age of seven in Irish music, dance, drama, and song; if successful in an audition process, students can then potentially progress toward joining the Siamsa Tíre professional company, which consists of a core group of five full-​time performers and a much larger group of part-​time “community cast” performers who augment the core company for performances in the annual summer season. The company understands itself as functioning in a custodial capacity to protect folk culture of music, song, and dance for future generations. In the area of dance, Kelliher explains that the company’s remit is “to portray our traditions. We are trying to keep our traditions […] [and to] keep our traditional dance as it is. We haven’t strayed and gone with the modernisation of the Irish dance. We’ve kept it and developed it in its own way” (quoted in Mulrooney 2006, 252). Although the company’s distancing of itself from the “modernization” of the competitive form, coupled with its aim of protecting and promoting “Irish heritage and traditions,” might cause it to appear quite conservative, Siamsa also understands the importance of combating possible charges of retrogression through a continual process of questioning and development. As former artistic director Oliver Hurley explains, tradition is approached as “a living tradition and not seen as a piece of treasure that remains stagnant in a museum” (quoted in Brady 2005, 67). Following this ethos, the company has been bringing in contemporary choreographers to work with its performers for more than twenty years.40 Early experiments in “mixing contemporary and traditional” did not result in public showings, but several of these collaborations have resulted in staged productions that have had considerable success. Examples of these are Anne Courtenay’s choreography for Between Worlds (1989) and Ding Dong Dederó—​Forging the Dance, which opened the new theater building in 1991; in 1992 the company collaborated with future Riverdance composer Bill Whelan and future Riverdance dancer Maria Pages for the Seville Suite, a production featuring a combination of Irish music, Irish dance, and Spanish flamenco that was brought to the Seville Expo. In 1999 Mary Nunan’s choreography for The Children of Lir introduced upper body movement, which allowed the dancers to imitate the movement of swans, and in 2003 Cindy Cummings, a choreographer from the United States who is now based in Ireland, was recruited to help choreograph Oileán, a celebration of life on the Blasket Islands. In 2004 Cummings was brought back again to work with Siamsa on perhaps its most experimental project to date, rEvolution (2004, 2005). Building on the success of previous interactions between the company and exhibiting visual artists at the Siamsa center in Tralee, in which live performance had been stimulated in response to works on display in the gallery, the rEvolution project was an eight-​week, process-​oriented collaboration among Cummings; visual artist Andrew Duggan; contemporary dancer Rebecca Walters; and core Siamsa company members Jonathan Kelliher, Joanne Barry, Honor

56   Aoife McGrath Hurley, and Anne O’Donnell. Hurley explains that the main motivation behind the project was [b]‌reaking down the barriers between traditional dance and contemporary dance as well as the barriers between arts disciplines […] all the while being mindful of the context of the exploration of Irish identity within a globalised cultural environment. (Quoted in Brady 2005, 70)

Building from a questioning of the word folk, the project attempted a three-​way dialogue among contemporary dance (with its inherent engagement with postmodern discourse); the Munnix style of the Siamsa performers; and the installation and video work of Duggan, who aims in his work to “investigate the space between tradition (fact, folk/​lore etc.) and contemporary space and time, [playing] with cultural representations and perceptions.”41 Speaking of difficulties encountered while working on the project, Cummings points to her awareness of being an “outsider” collaborating with a well-​established institution that had its own highly developed systems of practice and communication.42 As strange as the Siamsa dancers’ practice and ways of communicating were to Cummings, so was her process-​based approach an alien concept for the usually product-​oriented and deadline-​driven work methods of the Siamsa company. Cummings also found that her questioning of Siamsa’s relation to a concept of “folk” required careful negotiation, explaining that [a]‌lthough agreed to as a theme by everyone involved, [it] was sometimes very difficult to deconstruct and examine objectively. The lines between personal identity, professional entity and cultural commentary are indistinct. For me, the question of how do I question a tradition and culture which is not my own and create something contemporary with the imagery/​icons/​structures without disrespecting the tradition itself, was one that I continually struggled with. (Quoted in Brady 2005, 74)

Within the framework of this project, Cummings can be viewed as being an “outsider” due to her nationality and dance background. However, her works prior to this project had also established her as a critic of Irish culture due to their provocative and sometimes controversial challenges to the status quo. As Cummings explains, “my natural inclination [is] to poke fun at images and ideas held sacred and untouchable by society […]. When I take on aspects of Irish culture this can at times cause offence” (quoted in Brady 2005, 73–​74).43 Yet despite these differences in choreographic methods, communication, and approach to the project’s concept, the Siamsa performers and Cummings developed a relationship of trust, which allowed their work together to yield some interesting results.44 An intriguing section of the rEvolution project involved the reversal of a traditional step sequence known as “the blackbird,” which is used by the performers as a warm-​ up step before performances.45 Although the theater dance framework of Siamsa Tíre would seem to be largely removed from the competitive ethos of Irish dance, traces of the pressure for rhythmic and gestural perfection are nevertheless to be found in the

“Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?”    57 example of this warm-​up ritual. Before curtain-​up, the cast had to assemble in a line across the stage and perform “the blackbird” for Father Ahern, who would patrol up and down the line of dancers giving corrections to those out of step. Cummings was intrigued by the frisson of anxiety that the memory of this ritual elicited from the dancers and decided that it would provide a good base for experimenting with the normally fixed rules of the Munnix steps’ rhythms and formations. Together, she and the dancers spent many hours painstakingly dismantling the sequence of movements that belonged to the step so that it could be performed with (relative) ease in reverse. Andrew Duggan then filmed a performance of the reversed step and edited the film so that, in turn, it was played backward, giving the effect of forward motion.46 The result of this experiment can be read as a version of “the blackbird” that was simultaneously correct/​ original/​authentic, as all the steps still occurred in the right sequence, and incorrect/​ new/​experimental, as the inevitable differences in the work of gravity on the dancers’ bodies meant that weight shifts were radically altered. This wonderfully mischievous “backward-​forward” concept employed by Cummings highlights the potential for playful creativity that exists even within the seemingly rigid parameters of tradition and repetition. It also brings to mind Tyson Lewis’s observation that ‘[i]‌n the act of dancing playfully, actions can be reversed or redone precisely, opening up a space that is distinct from the actual world of politics, wherein the stakes are too high and the costs too great for such “rehearsals”‘ (2007, 63–​64). The rEvolution project resulted in two public performances: a site-​specific version close to the Siamsa headquarters and a production in Dublin’s Mansion House as part of the 2005 Fringe festival. Amid their sensitive negotiations of the word folk, Cummings, Duggan, and the Siamsa performers would seem to have successfully found a space wherein the performance of ethnic and national identity preserved in the carefully maintained traditional steps could at once be both respectfully celebrated and approached playfully.47

In Conclusion: Embracing the “Unfixed” in the Search for a Liberated Aesthetic What separates Butler’s Does She Take Sugar? and Dunne’s Out of Time from the work of other choreographers experimenting with Irish dance is the absence of an encompassing framework of “Irish dance plus X,” or the necessity of having a choreographer who works in a contemporary or postmodern aesthetic applying his or her concepts from a position outside the traditional form. Butler has stated, “I have no interest in trying to cross-​fertilise Irish dancing and contemporary dancing”48 and in contrast to the experiments of Siamsa Tíre, both of these works have emerged from within the competitive form, through a process of exploration initiated by the dancers themselves. Both Butler and Dunne are operating outside both the competitive and the commercial

58   Aoife McGrath spheres of solo step dance, and their respective approaches to the choreography of Irish dancing are distinctly antispectacular. Interestingly, however, the beginning of their journeys toward a form of Irish dance free of exhibitionism and competition originated in an attempt to reform the commercial show format. Following their time together as the solo pair in Riverdance, they collaborated on their own Irish dance spectacular, Dancing on Dangerous Ground (1999), which attempted to add dramatic narrative to the variety-​show structure of Riverdance. Based on the legend of Diarmaid and Gráinne, seeds of their current experimentations are perhaps to be found in certain humorously self-​reflexive moments in this show, which included, for example, a scene in which the Fianna soldiers wake up after being drugged to discover that their arms are pinned to their sides—​an allusion to the stiff upper body posture required for step dancing. Speaking of the work, Butler suggests that it was based on “a sympathy for the fundamental technique that makes up the lexicon of Irish dancing. […] It was certainly a time of questions, of experimenting. What emerged was a predilection to the extension of the natural boundaries of the technique. Feet became overcrossed, knees were allowed to bend, weight shifted, a lunge was achieved” (quoted in Mulrooney 2006, 239). However, the title of the show turned out to be unfortunately predictive, and the production proved unpopular with critics in London, where it premiered. Although it achieved more favorable reviews after revisions were made for a transfer to New York in 2000, its run there was cut short, and the show was an economic failure.49 Luckily, although Dancing on Dangerous Ground was to be their last collaboration, this early disappointment did not deter either choreographer from independently pursuing his or her experimentations with the form further. Their experience with this work seems to have made them both aware of a need to develop a way of articulating and analyzing their movement experiments. Looking back on his experience with the production, Dunne notes: That show was the beginning of me really kind of questioning the form and trying to break the form apart. I just don’t think I had the skills or the know-​how to make it work. […] Something was going on, but I didn’t have the vocabulary or the language. (Quoted in Crawley 2009)

Similarly, in Butler’s reflection on the production, she explains that the experimental aspects of the work occurred, “all by accident, in a way. When I say by accident, I mean more by intuition. I did not have the vocabulary that I do now. I would not have been able to describe what I was doing in a ‘dance literate’ sense” (quoted in Mulrooney 2006, 239). Both choreographers then went on to pursue (separately) a master’s degree in contemporary dance performance at the University of Limerick, and the exposure to different working processes that they encountered during their time in this course can be seen to have had a profound effect on how they approached their solo works. Butler says of her process: “By examining my traditional kinetic make-​up through a lens of contemporary aesthetics, a new vocabulary has emerged that constantly references Irish dance, albeit in a foreign and sometimes unrecognizable context. To

“Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?”    59 achieve this I had to deconstruct my physical self and put it together again.”50 Colin Dunne also speaks of how his exposure to other dance techniques has caused a fundamental shift in the way he approaches his movement: “Whereas before my style was very muscular and lifting out of the floor, now it’s more released into the floor. It’s like thinking of the body hanging down as opposed to being held up. It’s a subtle difference to look at, but a huge shift to find physically” (quoted in Seaver 2008, 11). Yet although both choreographers acknowledge the influence of contemporary choreographic practices, they are always keen to emphasize the central and basic position of step dance in their choreography. Butler explains that “[o]‌ver time it has become obvious that everything that I do comes very specifically from this place of ‘stepping’. What is this ‘step’ dance I’ve been doing all my life? The ‘step’ affects everything I do, from the way I approach music to the way I step with my hands or arms” (quoted in Seaver 2007). Similarly, Dunne refutes any suggestion that he is attempting to “remake” himself as a contemporary dancer and highlights the intrinsic nature of the traditional technique in his work, stating simply that “traditional dance is part of my DNA” (quoted in Crawley 2009). In addition to the fact that their experiments are initiated from within the competitive step-​dance technique, it is these choreographers’ staging of a step-​dancing body undergoing a process of change that is of particular interest. Butler’s use of the blackboard, on which she draws and erases notation of her movements, highlights the unfixed state of her corporeality. In struggling against the impulses of her step-​dancing technique in search of new ways of moving, she resists the dictation of outwardly imposed rules and creates a space in which her body can create as-​yet-​unnamed movements. Importantly, she does not present any definitive answers to her corporeal questions, but shows instead her movement-​thought process as something constantly in flux. Dunne’s Out of Time also plays with ways in which the normally strictly determined step-​dancing body can move in an unconstrained space. In his use of digitally delayed recording technology, Dunne is able to extend the rhythm produced by his movements beyond the confines of his body. Uncoupling the rhythm from its point of origin, Dunne can then play with moving alongside, through, or against the disembodied rhythms created by earlier movements, which now seem to exist independently of him. Rhythm, usually a dictating principle for Irish dancers, suddenly becomes something malleable and spatially unfixed. This playful approach to the dictates and fixities of time and rhythm is further explored when Dunne dances with documentary footage of step dancers from 1935, 1955, and 1972. In some of this footage, overdubbed sounds of foot percussion are not always in synch with the dancers’ movements, and at one point Dunne dances to an accompanying sound track from an edited film made from spliced excerpts of this footage and an excerpt from his appearance on Blue Peter as a ten-​year-​old. However, in creating the percussive sounds, his body does not repeat the traditional technique used by the dancers in the film. Showing that the stepping sounds can be re-​created precisely when subtracted from the technique that originally produced them generates a space in which a dancer can playfully move outside of the social and political restraints that formed his or her corporeality.

60   Aoife McGrath In both Dunne’s and Butler’s work, it is the dancers’ ability to restrain their own obedience to an impulse that allows them to move in an unconstrained capacity outside of sociopolitical precepts. In the example of these works, dance can then be viewed as a disobedience to the impulse to conform, as the dancers are always in a process of subtracting their movements from preexisting movements that are fixed and determined. This subtraction and unfixing allows the dancers to challenge Irish step dance’s historical links with nationalism, exhibitionism, and competition. Dunne and Butler’s liberated and radical movements are, of course, only read as such because of the dance background from which they have emerged. It is the existence beyond and beneath their choreographies of strict rules of form that makes their “new,” unfixed movements so exciting. Perhaps inevitably, the introduction of this playful potentiality to traditional Irish step dancing has not always been well received. As Dunne has pointed out, for some spectators in the competitive dance world, his new work will always be a disappointment and possibly even a betrayal to those who expect another display of his virtuosic ability, and who protest that this experimental work is not “proper dancing” (see Crawley 2009). Jean Butler’s uncompromising fidelity to her process of unfixing her dancing body creates performances that demand a high level of patience and concentration from the spectator; an easily consumed spectacle is also not her goal. In the program for Does She Take Sugar? Butler cites Pina Bausch: “I come without make-​up or hairdo, or costume, or high heels. I have no idea, but I come anyway.”51 Paradoxically, if Butler and Dunne were ever to succeed in figuring out their as-​yet-​unfixed ideas and naming a new technique, their work might lose its exciting link to potentiality. Remaining focused on process rather than product in their staged experiments allows their work to create a space in which Irish step dancing can be encountered creatively and playfully.

Notes 1. “Do you want to see my hornpipe” is a quote from Colin Dunne’s work Out of Time (2008). An essay version of this chapter won the Irish Society for Theatre Research’s inaugural New Scholar’s Prize, and this chapter significantly expands and reworks sections of the essay that appear in my monograph Dance Theatre in Ireland: Revolutionary Moves (McGrath 2013). I am indebted to Brian Singleton for his feedback during the writing of this piece, and I  would also like to thank the members of the Choreography and Corporeality Working Group of the International Federation of Theatre Research for their helpful comments and advice. 2. To combat the charge of a backward Irish ineffectuality and irrationality opposed to a progressive, rational English logic, a demonstration of a mastery of the colonizer’s language was necessary. Bernadette Sweeney discusses the postcolonial relationship to language in Ireland with reference to a “repression of the body as dictated by the state-​sponsored identification with the Catholic Church” (2008, 3). 3. For a discussion of the patriarchal oppositional structuring of a masculine/​feminine dichotomy in which the feminine represents the negative to a masculine positive, see Hélène Cixous, “Sorties:  Out and Out:  Attacks/​Ways/​Forays,” in Cixous and Clément (1986).

“Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?”    61 4. Cited from the Dublin Dance Festival website:  [www.dublindancefestival.ie] (accessed February 25, 2010). The festival was founded as a biennial event—​named the International Dance Festival Ireland—​in 2002 and became an annual event in 2008. 5. The Eurovision song contest is an annual song competition for participating Europe Broadcasting Network countries. The show has been broadcast live on television since 1956 (and since 2000 on the Internet) in countries both within and outside of Europe. Recent television audiences for the show are estimated as being at least 100 million viewers and possibly as many as 200 million (see Karen Fricker, Elena Moreo, and Brian Singleton, “Part of the Show: Global networking of Irish Eurovision Song Contest Fans,” in Fricker and Lentin [2007, 140]). 6. The Dublin Dance Festival again served as a platform for Butler’s most recent work: the Abbey Theatre recently commissioned US choreographer Tere O’Connor to create a solo work for Butler and the resultant piece, Day, premiered in May 2010 in the Peacock Theatre, Dublin. 7. At times Butler hums along to the music, and the well-​known rhythm from Vivaldi’s Spring—​“Da dum, dum, dum, dada DUM_​_​_​!”—​is also added as a note on the blackboard. 8. In a postshow discussion as part of the Abbey Talks series at the Peacock Theatre in May 2010, Butler spoke of being in so much pain following her attempts to introduce more plié into her movement that she needed the help of a physiotherapist to continue working. 9. Jean Butler, quoted in the program for the performances of Does She Take Sugar at the Project Theatre in Dublin as part of the first annual Dublin Dance Festival, April 2008. 10. Colin Dunne, cited from the biography on his website, [http://​www.colindunne.com/​ biog.php ] (accessed September 26, 2015). 11. The 1935 footage is taken from the documentary film King of Spades, directed by Greville Squires. Shot at the Monard Mills in Cork, it shows dances by spadesmiths Jim Murphy and the brothers Willie, Jack, and Peter Hayes. The 1955 footage is of All Ireland Championship winner Áine Ní Thuaghaigh, and the film focuses on the action of her feet, leaving her head out of the frame. The 1972 footage is of the dancer Paddy Ban O’Broin performing the reel Lucky in Love and was recorded for the RTÉ (Irish national radio and television broadcaster) program Ag Déanamh Ceoil (Making music). See the program for the 2008 Dublin Dance Festival production of Out of Time for further details of this footage. 12. The hornpipe is a traditional hard-​shoe dance that is a staple category in Irish step-​dance competitions, and Dunne’s playful comment here infuses the dance’s name, and its link with the exhibition of rhythmical and technical prowess in competitions, with a degree of sexual innuendo. 13. Blue Peter is a highly popular and long-​established British children’s television show, which first aired on BBC 1 in 1958 (it now airs on the CBBC channel) and was placed sixth in the most recent British Film Institute poll of the “100 greatest British Television Programmes” (see the IMDB website:  [http://​www.imdb.com/​list/​ls000151593/​ ] (accessed September 26, 2015)). 14. Céilí dancing can be performed competitively, but is also practiced socially outside the competitive dance structure. 15. For example, Micheál Ó Súilleabháin proposes that, “competitive [dance] culture feels like it has been tarmacadamed” (quoted in Mulrooney [2006, 229]). 16. The intertwining of step dancing and competition stretches back to the earliest records of the form. See Brennan (1999) and Hall (2008).

62   Aoife McGrath 17. Although the founder of the Gaelic League, Douglas Hyde, had intended for the organization to be, “a neutral ground upon which all Irishmen [e.g., both Unionists and Nationalists] might meet,” a 1915 conference in Dundalk ended in Hyde’s resignation and his replacement at the helm of the League by Sinn Féin (nationalist) leaders (Hyde cited in Kiberd [1996, 153]). 18. See Ó’Hallmhuráin (2005), Brennan (1999), and Hall (2008). 19. After the passing of the Dance Halls Act, if a public dance was to be held legally, a license had to be obtained from the district court. The district justice decided whether applications would be approved or not, and only people considered to be reputable were given licenses, and then only under controlled conditions. 20. There are reports of parish priests bursting uninvited into house dances and chasing the dancers out onto the street with sticks. Parishioners caught dancing were also denounced from the pulpit. For a discussion of these stories and specific legal cases and prosecutions under the Dance Halls Act, see Brennan (1999, 121–​133). 21. See the commission’s website for a history of the organization (https://​www.clrg.ie/​about-​ us/​history-​of-​an-​coimisiún-​le-​rinc%C3%AD-​gaelacha.html). 22. After her break with the commission, Patricia Mulholland joined the Festival Association of Northern Ireland and set up the Irish Ballet, which attempted to blend Irish dancing and classical ballet. See Hall (2008, 39–​40). 23. As Frank Hall points out, the fact that an “agonistic model” survived in both of the breakaway organizations suggests that, “the emergence of the category ‘Irish dancing’ [is] wedded to nationalist ideology and competition” (Hall [2006, 40]). 24. My own first experience of Irish dancing was as a child within an educational context; I was taught Irish dancing as part of the physical education curriculum in primary school in Dublin in the 1980s. My research for this article led me back to Irish dance classes for the first time in many years after a career as a professional ballet and contemporary dancer in Germany and Ireland. 25. The Gaelic word feis (plural:  feiseanna) means cultural festival or gathering; it is used within the Irish dance community to denote a formal competition meeting. 26. A commission ruling now forbids makeup and fake tan for children competing in the beginning grades: “4.5.1 Make-​up will not be permitted for any dancer in the first two grades (Bungrád and Tusgrád or equivalent) up to and including the under 12 age group worldwide. 4.5.2 Make-​up (including false eyelashes and tanner on the face) is not permitted for dancers, in either solo or team competitions, up to and including the Under 10 age group.(Effective March 1, 2014)” (see An Comisiún le Rincí Gaelacha: Rules for Dancing Teachers and Adjudicators 2015, [https://​www.clrg.ie/​images/​CLRGRules4thSeptember.pdf], accessed September 26, 2015). 27. See [www.feistan.com] (accessed March 4, 2010). It is interesting to note that several recent developments in costuming and grooming for Irish dance competition, such as the “bubble heel” shoes, have originated in the United States. Perhaps this is due to a more relaxed—​or creative—​attitude in the United States toward commission regulations. 28. “Bubble heel” shoes are specially designed hard shoes with fiberglass heels that make a loud clicking sound when the dancers’ heels come together, aiding in the production of clearly audible rhythms during hard shoe dances.

“Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?”    63 29. Another often cited reason for the introduction of wigs is that they save time and also save children from the discomfort of having to wear hair curlers overnight. See Wulff (2007, 94). See also Brennan (1999, 158) and Hall (2008, 61–​64). 30. The official Riverdance website supplies a host of statistics related to the show. These include the number of Irish dancers who have performed in the show (1,500), their cumulative years of study in step dance (20,000), the number of costumes and dance shoes used by the cast (12,000 and 14,000, respectively), the number of CDs of the soundtrack and DVDs/​videos of the performance sold (over 3 million and over 10 million, respectively), the number of people globally who have watched the show on television (claimed to be over 2 billion), the number of miles traveled by the Riverdance troupes (over 563,000, “or to the moon and back!”), the number of performances (10,000), and the number of marriages between cast members (35) (see [www.riverdance.com], accessed April 12, 2010). 31. André Lepecki defines the choreo-​political as “all kinesthetically performed programs of subjectivation and counter-​subjectivation embedded in ideological structures of command or resistance” (2004, 48). 32. See Wulff (2007, 113). 33. John Tiller, who worked in the cotton industry, was a musical theater enthusiast. The original Tiller Girls troupe was made up of young, working-​class girls from Manchester whom Tiller recruited and trained. The precision achieved by Tiller’s methods (he is credited with the innovation of having the dancers hold each other by the waist to increase their synchronicity) proved extremely popular, and by the time of his death in 1925, Tiller Girls troupes were performing in London, New York, Paris, and Berlin. For a detailed discussion of Kracauer’s reading of the Tiller Girls, see Burt (1998, 84–​100). 34. Ramsay Burt argues that Kracauer’s reading of the Tiller Girls is “factually inaccurate,” because they “were not from ultra-​modern, industrialised America but from declining cotton spinning towns in the north of England” (2004, 99). Yet the essay continues to be of theoretical interest (as Burt also points out), and it is this aspect of The Mass Ornament, rather than its factual discussion of the Tiller Girls, that is of interest to this discussion. 35. See the Gaelforce website, [www.gaelforce-​dance.com]. Originally based in Australia, but now based in Ireland, Gaelforce is not currently touring. 36. Flatley has also choreographed, produced, and danced in Lord of the Dance (1996) and Feet of Flames (1998). 37. A  detailed biography of Michael Flatley can be found on his official website, [www. michaelflatley.com]. 38. See Oliver Hurley’s description of the Munnix style in Brady (2005, 73). 39. Cited from the history section of the Siamsa Tíre website, [www.siamsatire.com] (accessed February 20, 2010). 40. A choreographer who fairly recently worked with the company is Fearghus Ó Conchúir, who collaborated with the core company members as part of his Open Niche project. A work-​in-​progress showing took place on March 30, 2010. 41. See [www.location1.org/​andrew-​duggan/​] (accessed February 20, 2010). 42. To overcome the disparity in dance vocabularies, Cummings and the Siamsa performers devised a way of communicating through sung rhythms (related by Cummings in an interview with the author, Dublin, March 25, 2010). 43. Cummings mentions her production, Sheena Feena (1995), as an example of a work that caused offense: “I played with the image of the Virgin Mary, danced to a version of the [Irish] national anthem sung like Marilyn Monroe’s Happy Birthday Mr President while

64   Aoife McGrath wearing a muslin veil, and then used the veil to transform the image into a strip routine with a Bugs Bunny cartoon soundtrack. Many people walked out” (quoted in Brady [2005, 74]). 44. An important factor that led to the development of trust between the Siamsa company and Cummings seems to have been her willingness to learn the Munnix style. Oliver Hurley specifically mentions Cummings’s interest in learning Munnix steps as being a reason for inviting her to work on the rEvolution project. See Brady (2005, 69). 45. In the Munnix style (as in the Munster style), a “step” contains a sequence of movements (known as elements) that are performed to the right and then repeated to the left. 46. Cindy Cummings explained that her inspiration for this backward-​forward concept was a video directed by Spike Jonze for alternative hip-​hop group The Pharcyde’s 1995 single Drop (related in an interview with the author in Dublin, March 25, 2010). 47. In a continuation of this exploration, Siamsa presented What the Folk?, directed by Jo Mangan at the 2010 Dublin Fringe Festival. 48. Jean Butler, cited in Mulrooney (2006, 241). 49. See Judith Mackrell, “Celtic Cliché Overload,” Guardian, December 8, 1999, [http://​www. theguardian.com/​stage/​1999/​dec/​08/​dance]; and Anna Kisselgoff, “A Celtic Legend told through Feats of Footwork,” New York Times, March 10, 2000, [http://​www.nytimes.com/​ 2000/​03/​10/​movies/​dance-​review-​a-​celtic-​legend-​told-​through-​feats-​of-​footwork.html]. 50. Jean Butler, cited in the program notes for the 2008 production of Does She Take Sugar? at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin. 51. Butler, program notes for the 2008 production of Does She Take Sugar?

References Brady, Mary, ed. 2005. Choreographic Encounters. Vol. 2.  Cork, Ireland:  Institute for Choreography and Dance. Brennan, Helen. 1999. The Story of Irish Dance. Dingle, Ireland: Brandon. Burt, Ramsay. 1998. Alien Bodies:  Representations of Modernity,”Race” and Nation in Early Modern Dance. London: Routledge. Butler, Jean. 2007. Does She Take Sugar?, Project Arts Centre, Dublin. Casey, Natasha. 2002. “Riverdance: The Importance of Being Irish American.” New Hibernia Review 6, no. 4: 9–​25. Chatterjea, Ananya. 2004. Butting Out Reading Resistive Choreographies Through Works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Cixous, Hélène, and Clément, Catherine. 1986. The Newly Born Woman. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Crawley, Peter. 2009. “Reinventing the Reel.” Irish Times, January 31, [http://​www.irishtimes. com/​news/​reinventing-​the-​reel-​1.1238425]. Dunne, Colin. 2008. Out of Time, Theatre Upstairs, Project Arts Centre, Dublin. Ferriter, Diarmaid. 2005. The Transformation of Ireland 1900–​2000. London: Profile Books. Fricker, Karen, and Ronit Lentin, eds. 2007. Performing Global Networks. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Hall, Frank. 2008. Competitive Irish Dancing: Art, Sport, Duty. Madison WI: Macater Press. Kiberd, Declan. 1996. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation. London: Vintage.

“Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?”    65 Kracauer, Siegfried. 2005. “The Mass Ornament.” In The Mass Ornament:  Weimar Essays, edited and translated by Thomas Y. Levin, 75–​86. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lepecki, André. 2004. “Stumble Dance.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 14, no. 1: 47–​61. Lewis, Tyson. 2007. “Philosophy-​Aesthetics-​Education:  Reflections on Dance”, Journal of Aesthetic Education 41, no. 4: 53–​66. McGrath, Aoife. 2013. Dance Theatre in Ireland:  Revolutionary Moves. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Monks, Aoife. 2007. Comely Maidens and Celtic Tigers: Riverdance and Global Performance. Goldsmiths Performance Research Pamphlets, no. 1. Edited by Ben Levitas, John London and Deirdre Osborne. London: Goldsmiths University of London. Mulrooney, Deirdre. 2006. Irish Moves: An Illustrated History of Dance and Physical Theatre in Ireland. Dublin: The Liffey Press. Ó Conchúir, Fearghus. 2004. “Revolution: New identities in Folk Theatre.” In Choreographic Encounters, vol. 2, edited by Mary Brady, 67–​75. Cork, Ireland: Institute for Choreography and Dance. O’Connor, Barbara. 2013. The Irish Dancing: Cultural Politics and Identities, 1900–​2000. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press. Reed, Susan A. 2010. Dance and the Nation:  Performance, Ritual and Politics in Sri Lanka. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Seaver, Michael. 2007. “Stepping Out on Her Own.” The Irish Times, April 10, 2007, [http://​ www.irishtimes.com/​culture/​stepping-​out-​on-​her-​own-​1.1201076]. Seaver, Michael. 2008. “Stepping into Footprints:  Tradition and the Globalization of Irish Dance” In Dance in a World of Change: Reflections on Globalization and Cultural Difference, edited by Sherry B. Shapiro, 3–​15. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Sweeney, Bernadette. 2008. Performing the Body in Irish Theatre. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Wulff, Helena. 2007. Dancing at the Crossroads:  Memory and Mobility in Ireland. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Chapter 3

Dancin g J ews and Jew e s se s Jewishness, Ethnicity, and Exoticism in American Dance Rebecca Rossen

In March 1929, Belle Didjah, a young American dancer, issued a press statement to announce her professional debut at Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre. Rather than describing the works to be presented, the document instead chronicled how Didjah—​ performing under a pseudonym—​had defied her parents’ objections to dance by training secretly and how, now that they had gone on vacation, she was free to make a clandestine (albeit well-​publicized) premiere. Didjah’s parents were not tyrants who had locked their beautiful daughter in a tower (or, as it were, a tenement apartment). They were Jews: A lucky interval during which her parents are abroad will allow Belle Didjah to hold her first New York dance recital. … Belle Didjah is not Belle Didjah, for that is only a stage name which she has chosen to protect her true identity. Miss Didjah’s mother and father, who shall remain unnamed, have a strange prejudice against their daughter’s form of artistic expression. … In accordance with a superstition still current among conservative families, that a daughter engaging in a professional stage career was lost to her fold for all times, Miss Didjah’s parents forbade her, with extraordinary fervor, to follow her natural inclinations. This orthodox Jewish household could see honor and respectability in the event of their daughter becoming a schoolteacher or even in entering the business world as a stenographer or a typist. But a dancer—​that was inconceivable to their religious spirits. (Didjah, Programs)

The account continues to describe how, as a girl, she discovered a dance studio where a “golden-​haired” teacher, a “Greek goddess,” agreed to teach her to “use her body in this

Dancing Jews and Jewesses    67 beautiful new way.” Although she convinced her mother to give her a few pennies for lessons and keep her secret, the girl faced her father’s frightful “wrath” when she was discovered. In the end, the aspiring choreographer’s only hope was that “should her recital prove successful, it might dispel her family’s prejudice. Until the outcome is known she must remain incognito, for no word must reach her parents abroad which will in any way indicate her public appearance” (Didjah, Programs). In this urban fairy tale, the young heroine looked to dance as the key to escaping the Lower East Side for the lights of Broadway, as well as a means to free herself from an old-​ fashioned religion and, with the help of the “golden-​haired” teacher, the burden of her ethnicity. Despite Didjah’s disavowal of her heritage in this first press release, her repertory would come to include a number of dances on Jewish themes. Most prominent were Bar Mitzvah (Chassidic) (1929), a solo in which the young woman cross-​dressed as a boy celebrating his transformation into an adult, and Impressions of the Orient (1934), a suite of exotic, Oriental-​Jewish dances based on the choreographer’s travels to Palestine in 1932. The narrative presented in Didjah’s promotional materials mirrors the dramatic conflict that many American Jews struggled with during this period—​how to assimilate into American life while still maintaining cultural, religious, and ethnic specificity. Didjah was not the only Jewish-​American dancer in the 1930s to work out these seemingly opposing desires on the concert stage, nor was she unique in her ambition to earn acclaim in American modern dance while drawing consistently from her Jewish heritage. Indeed, during this same period, Dvora Lapson also made her debut in New York City in solo concerts that offered compelling portraits of Hasidic Jews and exotic Jewesses. In this chapter, I evaluate how Didjah and Lapson attempted to navigate the borders between Jewishness and Americanness, and between ethnic and modern dance, ultimately creating hybrid works that defied categorization. Didjah’s and Lapson’s approach to Jewish subjects differed significantly from other Jewish choreographers such as Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow, and Helen Tamiris, whose dances reflected the politics of Jewish leftists in the 1930s, but who did not create manifestly Jewish works until World War II or after, when their reputations as modern dancers had already been established (Rossen 2006). In contrast, Didjah and Lapson choreographed dances that critics, and sometimes the dancers themselves, classified as “Jewish.” In the early 1930s, the amorphous category of “Jewish dance” drifted between ethnic and modern dance, in the same way that American Jews found themselves stuck between outsider and insider, foreign and native born. Such uncertainty impacted the kinds of dances that Jewish choreographers made, how they marketed themselves, and how critics evaluated them. Although Didjah and Lapson intended to make a mark on American modern dance, they where ghettoized by their ethnicity and their dances’ overt Jewishness, and they were excluded from dance history. However, both choreographers not only identified with modern dance, but like many of their female peers, they reinvented cultural and religious traditions for the stage, and used the solo form to position the female dancer as a representative of humanity, thereby calling for expanded roles for women in American

68   Rebecca Rossen and Jewish spheres. At the same time, some of their dances emphasized Jewish difference over assimilation. During a period when American Jews aimed to fit in and not stand out, they moved between being the exotic and exoticizing others, making themselves vulnerable to confusion with their subjects. Their works supported certain stereotypes about the East and Eastern-​European Jews. Still, both sought to make a place for Jewish expression on the American concert stage, opening up possibilities for constructing modern, Jewish-​American identities through a mode of performance that was ethnic and modern.

Ethnic Dance, Jewish Dance, and Jewish Exotics By the late 1920s, modern dance had already emerged as a discipline in which female choreographers were making great strides by creating dances that portrayed women as autonomous subjects—​symbolic representatives of modernity and humanity. However, as Ellen Graff (1997) and Naomi Jackson (2000) have argued, the Americanist elements of modern dance, as defined by John Martin (the influential dance critic for the New York Times from 1927 to 1962) and other mainstream critics, masked an ideology that supported the work of “white Anglo-​Saxon choreographers” (Jackson, 9). Despite the plethora of Jewish choreographers and performers working in modern dance, none of the women considered to be the founders of American modern dance—​ Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham, and Doris Humphrey—​were Jewish. Resurrecting the works of artists left out of the canon demonstrates how race and ethnicity informed aesthetic categorization and resulted in incomplete, or biased, historical records. As Graff wrote, “Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, the canonical figures in the development of American modern dance, were American; they did not have to become American” (21). In recent years, dance historians have examined the ways in which American modern dancers drew upon the cultural expressions of various “others” in order to legitimize the white female body in performance (Desmond, 1991; Gottschild 1996; Manning 1998 and 2004; Srinivasan 2011). In fact, during the same period that modern dance was solidifying into a concrete genre, the American concert stage was inundated with theatrical dance performances, such as those by St. Denis and Ted Shawn, which were based on the cultural materials of nonwhite or nonwestern peoples. However, these performers were not all presented in the same way. Venues, critics, and sometimes the dancers themselves helped create a dichotomy between modern and ethnic dance. The ideology of modern dance suggested that (white) modern choreographers could portray the spirit of an ethnic or racial group and universalize this material for the theatrical stage, whereas (nonwhite) ethnic dance-​artists presented an unmodified, authentic representation of their heritage. The modern/​ethnic binary ultimately reinforced divisions between high and low, white and nonwhite, and American and other.

Dancing Jews and Jewesses    69 This dichotomy especially impeded the progress of African Americans. Still, Jews were not immune. Although American Jews have achieved whiteness today, in the first half of the 20th century they teetered between off-​white and white, East and West, foreigner and American. From the late 1900s through 1924, when the Johnson Reed Act curbed the influx of undesirable groups such as Jews, large numbers of Eastern-​European Jews immigrated to the United States. Speaking Yiddish and emerging primarily from shtetl communities, they not only threatened to disrupt the ethnic makeup of white America, but also to destabilize the still-​tentative status of Western European Jews, mostly German speaking, who had emigrated decades earlier. The exotic Easternness of these new immigrants stood in stark contrast to the modern Americanness of the more-​established Western Jews. These now middle-​class Americans wanted to distance themselves from their Yiddish-​speaking kin, whose Jewishness seemed excessive and inordinately visible. Representations of Jews were not only racialized but also rendered in specifically gendered terms (Hyman 1995; Prell 1999). The most ubiquitous symbols for Jewish difference were the “effeminate male Jew” and the “exotic Jewess.” As Sander Gilman (1991) and Daniel Boyarin(1997) have observed, the effeminate male Jew—​scholarly, passive, physically weak—​served as the primary trope for anti-​Semitic configurations of Jewishness. Jewish men, however, were not the only symbols of Jewish difference. In the 19th century, the exotic Jewess, or “belle Juive,” emerged in art, literature, and theater as an orientalized figure who united stereotypes about Jewish difference and degeneracy with Victorian fears about female sexuality. Dangerously attractive and kinesthetically adept, the exotic Jewess functioned as a foil to bourgeois notions of femininity (Dijkstra 1986; Erdman 1997; Gilman 1995; Ockman 1995).1 Such icons originated in anti-​Semitic European contexts, but they were frequently re-​produced in the United States. Harley Erdman (1997) observed that fin-​de-​siecle American theater was replete with images of the Jew as “oriental exotic,” representations that often conflated Eastern-​European Jews with Jews of Middle-​Eastern or North African descent.2“The immigrants,” he wrote, “were often constructed as exotic Others, foreigners living in the modern industrial West yet somehow not of it.” Moreover, he noted that these characters, produced and circulated by both Jews and non-​Jews, were “ocularly oriented”: “they appealed to the eye and represented a travelogue exoticism” (25–​26). Barbara Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett(1998) has discussed the display of “Jewish Dancing Girls” on the Midway at the 1893 Columbia Exposition whose lush dances were offered for the pleasure of Western eyes. German Jews subsequently developed alternative display tactics that emphasized Jewish contributions to Western civilization, because, as Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett noted, they were “fearful that their exotic brethren from the ‘Orient’—​and their visible Jewishness—​would erode the inroads they had made in American society” (1998, 105). By discursively distinguishing themselves from Jewish Others from the East, whether Eastern-​European or Middle Eastern, Jewish-​ Americans could more easily construct American identities for themselves. This is precisely what Naum Rosen (1934), a Jewish writer at the Dance Observer, seemed to suggest in his essay “The New Jewish Dance in America.” Rosen argued that,

70   Rebecca Rossen like the “open-​mouthed, spread-​fingered” Negro, or the earthy American Indian, “rattle in one hand, pine-​branch in the other,” the old Jew, “with flowing white beard and prayer shawl” represented one of the “oldest and most colorful strains in American life” (51). Rooting these intriguing figures in a primitive and imagined American past, Rosen concluded that they were ideal subjects for American dance. By racially aligning Jews with Negroes and American Indians, Rosen seemed to echo the anti-​Semitic viewpoint that Jews are not white, but, ironically, he succeeded in eradicating the taint of recent immigration by situating the Jew as a “native-​American” source. Rosen’s article is significant not only because it characterized Jewish dance as a legitimate mode of American performance but also because it reveals how American Jews sought to strategically revise understandings of what constituted Americanness. Rosen’s article also illustrates how Jewish-​American representations of Eastern-​ European Jews sometimes approximated Western depictions of the Orient. Just as Western intellectuals and artists borrowed Eastern philosophies, images, and styles as a tactic for rejuvenating the West, American Jews sometimes looked toward Hasidism as a symbolic locus for authentic Jewishness. In fact, the Hasid’s expressive mysticism ironically meshed with the expressionism of modern dance, making Hasidism (like African primitivism) an appealing source for modern creations (Buber 1958).3 Hasidism was connected with Eastern Europe, and not modern America. Yet the festivity, joy, and spirituality of this sect could replace depressing images of immigrants infesting squalid ghettos with a positive portrait of Judaism, as long as the Hasidic Jew remained a quaint symbol locked safely away in the distant past. According to Rosen, Jewish American dancers could embody the ancient Jew and maintain modern Americanness, but only if they occasionally made Jewish dances: “That no sincere American dancer can occupy herself with such material to the exclusion of all other is self-​evident” (1934, 51). Moreover, Rosen argued that it was critical for Jewish American dancers to take a “creative,” rather than authentic, approach to Jewish material. “The dancer who imitates,” he wrote, “creates nothing and always runs the danger of unfavorable comparison with the original. The creative dancer must delve deeper into people’s emotions and express them in a form of his own” (51). In certain ways, it is ironic that he designated the Hasid as an ideal representative of Jewish culture, because, as discussed earlier, the feminized male Jew has historically functioned for Jews as a symbol of their difference. However, when women cross-​dressed in their portrayals of Jews, they could more easily distinguish themselves from the “male” Hasid (Rossen 2011). Clearly, it did not matter to Rosen whether a man or woman performed the Hasid. Instead it was critical that Jewish dancers not be too convincing. Rosen named two Jewish choreographers, Lillian Shapero and Benjamin Zemach, both significant innovators in the field, who passed his test for universalizing Jewish content for the concert stage.4 In particular, he singled out Shapero, who had choreographed dances for the Yiddish Art Theater’s production of Yoshe Kalb (1932). Rosen gave two reasons why Shapero’s Jewish dances demonstrated “accessibility” and “adaptability”—​she was “American born” and a “member of Martha Graham’s concert group,” credentials that enabled her to address Jewish themes through the lens of American

Dancing Jews and Jewesses    71 modern dance. Rosen also named choreographers who, in his opinion, had dramatically failed in their approach to Jewish dance. One of these was Belle Didjah. Didjah, he wrote, seemed satisfied with “the authentic (in fact, traveling to Palestine as a reliable source),” and had simply “exhibited the material, rather than used it as a basis for creations” (1934, 51).5 Although Didjah journeyed to Palestine to seek inspiration for her (Oriental) Jewish dances, she aimed for creativity over authenticity. The fact that her dances seemed “authentic,” however, demonstrates how perilous it was for Jewish dancers to create work that was “too Jewish.”

America’s Belle (Juive) Belle Didjah, who was born around 1906, began her career in secret and ended it in obscurity.6 Such an unfortunate ending seems like an ironic postscript to the theatrical manner in which she made her debut and to the stage name she chose. According to Harley Erdman (1997), the “belle Juive” was a familiar stock character in 19th-​century European and American theater. Like the Wilis and Sylphs of the Romantic ballet, she was “an exotic and sometimes dangerous creature whose end is pathos and whose effect is frustrated desire” (40). Typically, the belle Juive had an overbearing, villainous father (think Shylock) who attempted to keep her from her true love (a Gentile). Inevitably, tragedy ensued. Didjah’s career was burdened by similar dramatic tensions. On the one hand, she attempted to break away from her background—​domineering orthodox parents, a restrictive religion, her ethnicity—​so that she could establish herself in American modern dance—​her true love. At the same, she relied on her Jewishness to demonstrate her authority on Jewish subjects. Her tragedy was her inability to have it both ways. Didjah issued a second press release for her premiere that further captures these contradictory desires. Titled “A New Yorker Interprets New York in the Dance,” the statement describes Didjah as an “American of Austrian descent” with a “sympathy with the modernists.” In this version of events, Didjah did not need to escape her Jewish family—​she needed to escape the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, where she had commenced her performing career. Shunning what she considered “pretty dance” that lacked ideas and proved “fatal to her individuality,” she proclaimed a desire to express herself in an American, rather than European, idiom. The announcement paradoxically concluded by highlighting her Jewishness, noting that “Miss Didjah, having been reared in an environment of the strictest Jewish orthodox principles, is uniquely fitted to present the major part of her program” (Didjah, Programs). Such incongruous promotional materials underscore the complex forces at play in Didjah’s concerts. For example, her first press release emphasized the respectable nature of her work at the Metropolitan Opera house (a job her conservative father reluctantly agreed to), yet a publicity photo from this period shows the partially nude performer clad only in glittery trunks with the caption, “specialty dancer and toe” [Figure 3.1]. In addition, although she aimed to be a modern dancer, she also characterized herself as a “character dancer and mime,” a mode

72   Rebecca Rossen

Figure 3.1  Belle Didjah, “Specialty Dancer and Toe.” Photographer and date unknown. Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

of dance associated with vaudeville, ballet, and ethnic performance. Advertising herself as an “American,” she nonetheless constructed an identity that hinged on the exotic mystique of her ethnic and religious difference. The Jewish works in her repertory were similarly ambiguous. Didjah composed dances for a Purim Festival at Madison Square Garden in March 1930 (a benefit for the Jewish National Workers’ Alliance) and joined a cast of thousands in A Romance of the People, a mass spectacle held at the Bronx Armory (for the benefit of German Jewish refugees) that depicted Jewish history throughout the ages. She presented her concerts, however, at Broadway theaters exclusively, offering a variety of solos

Dancing Jews and Jewesses    73 including abstract responses to urban and rural environments; depictions of New York personalities; and Russian, Spanish, and Jewish character dances, such as Bar Mitzvah (Chassidic). Bar Mitzvah premiered in 1929, as part of a suite called Hebrew Melodies. Thereafter, she offered the dance as a free-​standing work. Bar Mitzvah was a festive portrait of a Jewish boy on the verge of manhood. A program note provides a description aimed at non-​Jewish audience members who might be unfamiliar with this rite of passage: “At thirteen, a Jewish son is considered an adult, responsible for his own sins and virtues. He is now permitted to use the phylacteries while praying; a duty performed each morning by an orthodox Jew. He must give up play and become a serious-​minded follower of his faith” (Didjah, Programs). Although it is not possible to reconstruct the choreography, Maurice Goldberg’s portrait of Didjah in Bar Mitzvah provides a sense of the work’s tenor. Didjah is dressed in a tailored white suit, posing before an elaborate, modernist backdrop designed by Boris Aronson, a set designer trained in the avant-​ garde constructivist tradition [Figure 3.2].7 The bold, geometric set does not resemble the austere backdrops favored by modern dancers, but it is full of movement that effectively accentuates the dancer’s lines. In contrast to the serious nature of the program note, the starry-​eyed dancer stands with up-​stretched arms evoking joy, fingers midsnap. One can imagine a lively dance, composed of prayer-​based gestures, energetic rhythms, and folksy movements. The suited dancer is androgynous, but gently so. The performer wears dark lipstick, brow liner, and high-​heeled character shoes, which emphasize her well-​developed calves. However, the suit obscures her breasts and the three stripes sewn to the jacket flatten out her hips. Unlike the elderly bearded Hasid that Rosen described in his article, Didjah’s Jew exudes youth and light and does not look the least bit Hasidic. This is a modern Jew who can be acculturated. Although the image undoubtedly supports the stereotype of the feminized male Jew, its brightness and sexlessness offered a positive view of Jewish life that would have been palatable to non-​Jewish audiences and acceptable to Western Jews, like Didjah, who wanted to assimilate. Unfortunately, dances like Bar Mitzvah impeded her progress. Critics were generally appreciative of Didjah’s work, but nevertheless they relegated her solos to the “low-​art” realm of pantomime and ethnic dance. A writer for the New  York Herald-​Tribune praised her “unusual command of technique.” But, he classified her talent as a “gift for mimicry” (Didjah, Programs). Likewise, in a review titled “Belle Didjah, Dancer-​Mime” (1930) published in the New York Post, she is portrayed as an illustrator rather than an inventor, “She is more of a mime than a dancer. … She prunes away the non-​essentials and accents heavily—​not to clarify the action, but to fill the canvas.” As these reviews demonstrate, critics noted her facility with characterization, but dwelled on what they deemed to be her inability to be truly original. Gilman (1991) has observed that Jews were often considered capable of imitation but not genius. “It was the superficiality of the Jew,” he wrote, “the Jew’s mimicry of a world which he could never truly enter, which produced works which were felt to be creative but, in fact, were mere copies of the products of truly creative individuals” (129). Didjah seemed to fall into this category as well. Because she described herself as a “mime” she contributed to her exclusion from modern dance, which privileged abstraction

74   Rebecca Rossen

Figure 3.2  Belle Didjah in Bar Mitzvah Photo: Maurice Goldberg. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Courtesy of the Maurice Goldberg Estate.

and individual genius. Other writers were blatantly anti-​Semitic. A 1933 article in the National Dance Chautauqua News described Didjah as an expert in “grotesquerie” and an “intimate depicter of certain well-​known European characters” (Didjah, Programs). Erdman (1997) has stated that Jews who performed Jewish stock characters manufactured Jewishness through a repertory of “grotesque gestures” (2). Didjah’s intent may not have been to re-​inscribe stereotypes through bodily gesture, but that is the effect that her dances seemed to have had. Didjah’s body and body of work were irrevocably marked by her Jewishness. Susan Manning (2004) has argued that Euro-​American modern dancers whose ethnicity was

Dancing Jews and Jewesses    75 “unmarked,” were not only able to be abstract—​a privilege not available to dancers of color—​but were also afforded the opportunity to represent the other. Although Jewish choreographers such as Helen Tamiris were able to transcend their Jewishness by drawing upon African American sources in a process Manning termed “metaphorical minstrelsy,” Didjah was not able to make such a leap (10). Critic John Martin’s responses to her first three concerts reveal how he confined her to a creative ghetto delineated by Jewishness. Martin (1929b) gave her premiere at the Martin Beck Theatre a positive review. Despite the fact that program included only one Jewish dance, he deemed her style “richly Hebraic” (36). His reaction to her second concert at the John Golden Theatre in March 1930 is more revealing. For this recital, Didjah dispensed with sets and performed the majority of the show, including Bar Mitzvah, in a modernist uniform—​bare feet, black leotard, and tights. A press release explained her choice by asserting that dancers “too often use costumes as pegs upon which to hang ideas, which should be expressed through the lines of the body. In her recital at the John Golden Theatre … Belle Didjah will reject the use of all costumes. To embody her ideas, she will depend upon her skill in pantomime and her technique” (Didjah, Programs). In the article in which Martin announced Didjah’s debut, he also defined pantomime as a form of “drama,” not dance, which, for him, lacked artistry and “independent substance”(1929a, 138). Didjah, however, intended for her dances and pantomimes to capture the essence of particular figures and emotional states and convey that kinesthetically. She saw her work as evocative, expressive, and impressionistic, not literal or frivolous. Martin was not pleased with her experiment. In a review titled “Belle Didjah’s Recital: Dancer Ventures into a Nondescript Modernism,” he wrote that Didjah did not live up to her potential: “In a program of ‘mime and character dances’ she elected to appear throughout the greater part of the evening in a costume of black tights and jersey against a set of black drapes, a combination which would be questionable in a program of totally abstract compositions, but proved deadly to numbers which were actually not dances at all but inept pantomimes” (Martin 1930, 27). Didjah, in fact, did not alter her repertory (and Martin had not judged her inept the year before), but the critic would not allow her to redefine herself as a modernist. He slapped her back into her place by reminding us that she was at her best performing ethnic dances. He proclaimed that the concert, in fact, did not really begin until 10:15 p.m. when “Miss Didjah donned colorful costumes and performed two actual dances.” In his opinion, these pieces (both Spanish) better conveyed her talents and made “all the more regrettable her turning her back upon an ancient and honorable art to venture into a nondescript modernism for which she is no wise fitted”(1930, 27). She apparently learned her lesson—​returning to costuming in her next concert, Martin (1932) praised her “for the courage with which she abandoned a theory that has proved itself to be unsound. … Last Sunday’s program found her not only utilizing costume but showing very clearly that she enjoyed doing so” (11). It is tempting to view works like Bar Mitzvah as evidence of Didjah’s skill at an “ancient and honorable art”; her Jewish dance, however, was neither a straightforward, mimetic portrayal of a Jewish boy nor an authentic display of ethnic tradition. Indeed, Didjah was not a boy, and the dance radically countered Orthodox and Hasidic customs. Mordecai

76   Rebecca Rossen Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, revolutionized Judaic practices by introducing the bat mitzvah in 1922, just two years after women received the right to vote. As Deborah Dash Moore (2006) noted, “Kaplan provides a way for seeing women as much a part of Judaism as men, not as relegated to separate spheres but as equal contributors to Jewish community life” (175). Kaplan saw Judaism as an evolving civilization that should be continually revitalized, encouraged the creation of Jewish art and folklore, and promoted the reinterpretation of Jewish traditions in order to ensure Judaism’s longevity and adaptability in the United States. As Moore argued, the bat mitzvah represented Kaplan’s vision of Judaism as “an evolving religious civilization, flexible and creative, responsive to the living situation of Jews in each era. Since he was living in an age that recognized women’s equality, Judaism could respond to that imagination” (193). When Didjah premiered Bar Mitzvah in 1929, however, bat mitzvahs were still extremely rare. Only a third of Reform synagogues had adopted the practice by midcentury, and it is still an emergent practice in liberal Orthodox congregations and forbidden in Hasidic Judaism (Jewish Virtual Library). Didjah discovered early on that she could not express herself within the confines of Orthodox Jewry. This did not mean she desired to abandon her faith. By choosing a dance career, she made a dramatic break with a tradition that restricted women and their labor to the domestic sphere, or, in Didjah’s case, to teaching and secretarial work. It was premature for her to create a solo called Bat Mitzvah, yet her cross-​dressed bar mitzvah “boy” reached forward to a time when girls and women would have a more active role in Judaism and American society. Although Bar Mitzvah was a progressive solo, Didjah’s next Jewish dance presented Middle Eastern Jews as primitives who were unquestionably distinct from modern Jews. In 1932, she traveled to Palestine under the auspices of the Educational Committee of the Histadrut, Palestine’s chief labor organization, where she danced in settlements and in Tel-​Aviv and aimed to “study at first hand the dances of the Orient” (Didjah, Clippings). Didjah returned from her trip with a cycle of Jewish dances with a distinct Orientalist veneer. Impressions of the Orient premiered at New York’s Forrest Theatre on March 1934. The work included six segments, the majority of which featured Middle Eastern and Semitic characters. It began with two dances about women—​Bedouin Lady at Sunset and Arabian Café Dancer—​followed by two works about men—​Yemenite Chant and Arabian Dandy. The cycle ended with two Zionist dances—​In the Fields of Palestine and Hora. In a review titled “Recital at Forrest Theatre Includes New Cycle of Oriental Novelties,” Martin (1934) described the suite of dances as follows: In one of them a Bedouin lady “performs a sacred sword dance for her Lord and Master”; in another, quite the best of the group, an Arabian café dancer goes through her routine with completely professional preoccupation; in the third, an Arabian dandy takes his pet sheep for a walk. “Yemenite Chant” is a young student’s ecstatic reception of a rabbinical sermon. “The Pioneer” consists of two dances, one of the laborers in the fields, and another of a young girl dancing the hora after work. (21)

In Impressions of the Orient, Didjah merged “the Jew” with the “Oriental,” enacting Orientalism as Edward Said has defined it. Said (1978) argued that up until the mid-​20th

Dancing Jews and Jewesses    77 century and the formation of Israel, Orientalist discourse frequently combined the Arab and the Jew under the generic category “Semitic.” “Arabs,” he wrote, “are simply Jews on horseback, and all Orientals at heart” (234 and 102). In Said’s terms, the image of the Semite made manifest his physical, moral, and differences from the modern, Western Christian. Didjah’s fierce Bedouin lady (pictured in a New York Times photo on March 11, 1934) wielded a sword and a fierce expression, evoking the castrating biblical figures of Judith and Salomé, while her “completely professional” Arabian café dancer suggested sexual availability. Both of the “male” characters, performed in drag, were effeminate. She satirized the dandy’s inanity and foppishness, and her Yemenite Jew’s display of spiritual ecstasy referenced Ruth St. Denis’s seductive mysticism in dances like Radha. Working in an Orientalist mode, Didjah married Arab to Jew, and exotic Jewess to Jewish effete, ultimately presenting the Jew/​ess from a privileged distance that fixed this figure in the ancient past. Although Martin enjoyed the dance, other critics were less appreciative. Ben Wolf (1934) of the leftist (Jewish) periodical New Theatre objected to Impressions of the Orient and to Didjah’s style, which he dubbed “a new wave of exoticism in concert dance” (22). Didjah’s opulent portrayal of Oriental Jews, certainly contrasted the agitprop style in which (Jewish) leftist dancers depicted the everyday struggles of American workers, effectively diminishing Jewish difference by signaling the equality of all citizens. Mainstream critics also struggled with Didjah’s authenticity, but did not object to her exoticism. Dance Observer’s C. Adolph Glassgold (1934) wrote: “The dances of oriental inspiration alone exhibited a kind of certainty that derives from knowledge and understanding. (This certainty, however, referred back to its source and made one wish that native dancers were on stage giving the full flavor of authenticity.)” (20). Didjah was Jewish enough to be knowledgeable about Middle Eastern Jews, but Glassgold did not confuse her with one. Didjah was ambivalent about her relationship to Jewishness. Although she used her heritage as a means to authenticate her treatment of Jewish material, she also attempted to separate herself, an American of Austrian descent, from some of the Jewish types she presented. Impressions of the Orient clearly choreographed a progression from exotic Jewess to effeminate Jew to modern Zionist, grounding the former figures in the past and positioning the able-​bodied pioneer as emblematic of the present and future. In the early 1930s, Zionism began to move from the fringe to the mainstream of American Jewish life, aided by the distribution of Palestinian folk songs and dances, as well as propagandistic documentaries such as Dreams of My People (1934) and Land of Promise (1935), which presented Jewish settlers as cultivators of the land, leaders in industrial innovation, and champions of equality (Goren 1996). Such values, in the words of Mark Raider (1998), “resonated with Jewish ideals as well as the American myths of pioneering, progress, and self-​reliance” (44). Didjah’s dance travelogue offered American audiences a virtual tour of the Old World, where peculiar and exotic Orientals were clearly distinguishable from industrious and modern Jews. After 1940, Didjah abandoned her aspirations for making a name in modern dance and performed much less frequently, focusing more on contributing choreography

78   Rebecca Rossen to Yiddish theater productions and comedic reviews including Mickey Katz’s Borscht Capades (1951) and presenting concerts for the benefit of Jewish causes such as the Jewish National Fund. As her work and the venues at which she performed became more and more Jewish, she received less and less press coverage until she and her dances disappeared all together.

The Jewish Dance Mime In the mid-​1930s, Dvora Lapson(1907–​1996) circulated a promotional brochure that presented her and her work in a vastly different light than Belle Didjah’s press releases. Billing herself as a “Distinguished Jewish Dance Mime” and “exponent of the Jewish Dance,” Lapson offered potential booking agents and venues an expansive repertory of “Chassidic, Yemenite, Palestinian, Biblical, and Jewish Folk Motifs” performed by an artist who “has been hailed a vital force in Jewish cultural life”: As the only Jewish dance mime she creates exclusively in a field whose richness and depths have never been explored before. In her work, she recaptures the idyllic beauty of the ancient Hebrew, and gives new expression to the mysticism of the Kabbalist, the divine joyousness of the chassid, and the heroism of the modern Jew. Her work is enlivened by a fine sense of humor and a most charming personality. A gifted and sincere artist, Dvora Lapson has also been endowed with a beautiful body that gives meaning to her interesting original dance compositions. (Lapson, Programs)8

Born in New York City and raised in an observant home, Lapson had a religious upbringing that resembled Didjah’s. Unlike Didjah, however, Lapson proudly announced her exclusive dedication to making Jewish dances in which, aided by her creativity, sincerity, charm, and beauty, she “incarnates the rare poetic beauty and power of the Jewish soul” (Lapson, Programs).9 In order to represent “the richness and depths” of Jewish life, her repertory was intentionally diverse. Indeed, between 1931 and 1945 she choreographed over 50 solos on a large variety of Jewish themes. However, a closer look at this brochure, which highlights the word chassid in bold type, demonstrates that the Hasidic Jew and the Exotic Jewess also loomed large in her repertory. The brochure’s front cover displays a beautiful portrait of Lapson, while the inside includes three caricatures of the dancer in the guise of a Hasid, a veiled Oriental woman, and, in a new category, a Jewish mother. Saul Raskin’s drawing of Lapson as a Hasidic Jew emphasized androgyny through angularity and heightened the markers of Jewishness by covering the dancer’s hair with a yarmulke and adding a discernible hook to her nose. In contrast, Raskin’s depiction of Lapson as an iconic Jewish mother delivering the Sabbath blessing presents a softer, more feminine figure. The third drawing, by Ruth Light Braun, shows Lapson in dark robes carrying a jug on her shoulder; her face is obscured by a veil.10 These illustrations of dances in Lapson’s repertory—​Yeshiva Bachur

Dancing Jews and Jewesses    79 (1931/​32), Sabbath (1933), and Arabian Romance (1933)—​emphasize the dancer’s versatility and capacity to morph into a vibrant bouquet of Jewish types.11 Certainly these images reinforced some of the same stereotypes that Didjah evoked, particularly Arabian Romance, a dance Lapson presented at an April 1933 concert at the CCNY Auditorium (under the auspices of the Zionist HeHalutz Music Society) and countless times thereafter.12 Lapson had traveled to Palestine in 1929 (for her honeymoon), and, like Didjah, returned home with a number of ideas for dances. Although many of these works were portraits of able-​bodied pioneers that reflected the politics of Labor Zionism, Arabian Romance portrayed the alien mystique of the exotic Jewess. In a photograph of Lapson costumed for the solo she wears a long dress and is draped in scarves. Her “S”-​shaped pose emphasizes her curves, and is presentational and alluring (Figure 3.3). A program from a 1937 concert at the Textile High School Auditorium, produced by the Bureau of Jewish Education, provides more information about the solo: “The Jew, in spite of his long stay in the West, is touched by the quaintness of the East. The well, with its daily routine of water drawing, the oriental garb, and the weird songs and dances still have the same fascination for him as they did for his forefathers” (Lapson, Programs). It is unclear in this statement whether the Western Jew is fascinated by Lapson’s character, or whether Lapson represents a Western Jew who has been transformed by the “weird” ways of the East. In either case, Lapson embodied the sensual magnetism of the feminized East and situated spectators, in this case, a Jewish audience, as the bearers of a Western gaze. Whereas Arabian Romance was orientalist, Lapson’s methods, style, and objectives in her other works differed radically from Didjah’s. By embracing, rather than rebuffing, Jewishness, Lapson endeavored to invent a new mode of Jewish dance that she hoped would not only expand definitions of American dance but would also contribute to a culturally and ethnically plural America. As a choreographer, dancer, teacher, and writer, she believed that dance was an effective means to demystify Judaism for non-​ Jews, encourage American Jews to openly identify with their heritage, preserve traditions, and help invent new ones. An article by Maurice Hollander (1938), “A Dancer Mimes Her Race,” which appeared in Opinion: A Journal of Jewish Life and Letters, delineates some of these goals. In contrast to Naum Rosen, who warned Jewish-​American dancers to avoid producing solely in a Jewish mode, Lapson proposed the opposite. When the interviewer asked her to compare herself to dancers like Didjah, Pauline Koner, and Lillian Shapero, “whose interest in Jewish dancing is only occasionally manifest on their programs,” Lapson responded: “My interest cannot be occasional. It’s my life work … My devotion to the Jewish dance is so closely bound up in my belief in the historical importance of my race that I would feel it an evasion not to dance of and for the Jew.” In addition, she declared her intention to perform for both Jewish and non-​Jewish audiences, in order to “present to the world, to Gentile as well as Jew, the beautiful and profound poetry of her race.” By the mid-​1930s, American Jews, particularly leftists and Labor Zionists, were becoming increasingly concerned about rising Anti-​Semitism in Europe and the United States. In response, Lapson saw her work as propaganda—​a means to disseminate “knowledge

80   Rebecca Rossen

Figure 3.3  Dvora Lapson in Arabian Romance. Photographer and date unknown. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

of Jewish dances among the masses.” “If Jews knew more about the cultural side of their lives,” she stated, “they would respect their glorious heritage, and be themselves more respected by other nations.” Likewise, she hoped her programs would encourage Gentiles to be “more sympathetic and appreciative of my race” (Hollander). Lapson’s first solo concerts, presented in exclusively Jewish venues and contexts, demonstrate her dedication to Jewish audiences, as does her choreography for Jacob Weisberg’s opera The Pioneers (1934), staged at the Mecca Temple, and David Pinksi’s play The Power That Builds (1935), presented by the Yiddish Arts Theater. By 1936, however, she began to cultivate more diverse audiences, even as she continued to expand her work with Jewish organizations. Lapson toured the United States and Canada, where

Dancing Jews and Jewesses    81 she was presented at school auditoriums and Jewish community centers, and she gave concerts at Broadway theaters and even performed for congregants at Riverside Church in New York. She also extended her reach beyond the concert stage: she was named director of the dance department at the Bureau of Jewish Education in 1932, and wrote numerous reviews and articles in both dance publications and the Day, a Yiddish newspaper, for which she served as dance editor from 1934 to 1936. Given the educational and populist tenor of Lapson’s work, it is not surprising to find stark distinctions in how Jewish and regional audiences experienced her dances, and how New York critics defined and evaluated them. Lapson’s promotional materials are peppered with accolades from prominent American Jews such as Abba Hillel Silver and the playwright Pinksi, who wrote that she possessed “the vision and knowledge … to express choreographically the soul of the Jewish masses,” as well as quotations from Jewish newspapers that comment on her artistry and connection to (Jewish) audiences. A writer in Hadoar, a Hebrew-​language newspaper, named her the “Sholem Aleichem of the dance,” and remarked that her beauty, grace, and spirit “removed the veil which separates audience from artist.” Seeing no conflict between creativity and authenticity, the Jewish Morning Journal admired Lapson’s “rich imagination” while extolling her “authentic conception.” Critics outside New York City also characterized her dances as masterful, and often compared her to notable performers such as Aegna Enters, Agnes de Mille, Anna Pavlova, and Ruth Draper. Although Jewish organizations booked most of her presentations, her audiences were clearly mixed. A critic from the Winnipeg Free Press described her as a choreographer of Jewish dances “from a modern viewpoint,” noting that her “simple, effective and clear-​cut impersonations were accorded enthusiastic applause from Jew and non-​Jew alike.” Likewise, a critic from the Aurora Beacon News wrote that the dancer, who was “beautiful beyond anything conveyed in her pictures,” “brought even to the Christian members of the audience a comprehension. As to the Jewish people,—​the effect was complete delight.”13 Jewish and regional respondents may have been invested in distinguishing the responses of Christian and Jewish spectators, but they did not see the need to differentiate between “modern” and “Jewish dance.” New York critics also made observations about Lapson’s viewers, but their remarks had the effect of making a distinction between the knowledgeable and refined (non-​ Jewish) critic and the fervent and voluble (Jewish) audience. Because she was mostly known, as Joseph Arnold (1933) put it in The American Dancer, as a performer of “vaudeville character sketches in pantomime” with a “considerable reputation … among Jewish audiences” (9), critics sometimes announced her concerts, but most did not review them until January 1937 when she offered a solo program at the Adelphi Theater. Martin (1937) dubbed this concert her “formal debut,” disregarding multiple previous appearances on New York stages that had been produced by Jewish organizations. For this venue, Lapson presented 14 dances on biblical, Zionist, folk, Oriental-​Jewish, and Hasidic themes, including Arabian Romance, Sabbath, and two Hasidic dances—​Beth Midrash (House of Study) (an updated version of her 1931 Yeshiva Bachur) and a new work called The Jolly Hassid. Martin praised Lapson’s “excellent appearance” and “agreeable presence,” but he concluded that her “sketches” lacked knowledge “of that rich field

82   Rebecca Rossen of Jewish gesture and movement” which artists such as Benjamin Zemach had mastered (23). Echoing Martin’s criticism, Dance Observer’s Gervase Butler (1937) called the concert an “entertainment” that was “circumscribed by its subject matter,” and deemed the dances “naïve and obvious” (29). Such criticism reveals a distinct bias against choreography that primarily aimed to reach and represent marginalized groups. Leftist dancers had faced comparable responses from mainstream critics who disparaged them for making agitprop works with manifest messages that spoke to the “people” but were, as Ellen Graff (1997) has put it, “inconsistent with the goals of modernism” (9). By the late 1930s, leftist Jewish choreographers such as Maslow, Sokolow, and Tamiris had already begun to transition from the margins to the center of modern dance as they honed their ability to universalize and abstract material, even when representing Jews, African Americans, and other disenfranchised people. Lapson’s style and exclusively Jewish repertory clearly distinguished her from these choreographers, as did her method, which combined choreography with ethnography.14 In certain ways, Lapson’s work and the criticism she faced because of it placed her in a similar realm as that of Katherine Dunham and other African American choreographers like Asadata Dafora and Pearl Primus, whose hybrid dances presented multifaceted, diasporic identities. In fact, Dunham made her New York debut exactly six weeks after Lapson’s performance at the Adelphi in a shared “Negro Dance Evening” at the 92nd Street Y, where the audience would have been partially, if not heavily, Jewish. As Susan Manning (2004) and Vévé Clark (1994) have observed, white critics tended to demean African American choreographers for being derivative and inferior when working with modern or ballet vocabularies and expected them to present African and Negro dance in a pure or primitive style. Dunham’s choreography was particularly confusing to white critics because of what Manning terms an “intercultural fusion” of ballet and modern with Afro Caribbean and African American vernacular dance (55, 100), as well as Dunham’s unique “research-​to-​performance” methodology in which she reconfigured her fieldwork in the Caribbean into an archive of diasporic dance and memory (Clark 1994, 190). As Clark pointed out, such criticism was simplistic and hypocritical, not only because it demonstrated ignorance of the tradition of adaptation and transformation within the African Diaspora, but also because “stylization has been a tradition within American modern dance since its inception” (191). Lapson’s work was similarly misunderstood; thus it is not surprising that she identified Dunham as a peer and inspiration. In a 1940 essay in Dance Observer titled “The Dance and Intolerance,” Lapson argued that dance demonstrates how “each racial group enriches American life,” and can, therefore, “become one of the most effective means of combating the growing problem of intolerance in America” (113). After praising playwright Richard Wright, Lapson paid tribute to Dunham’s danced “propaganda” for doing its part to counter intolerance and neutralize chauvinism. Noting that both the Jew and the Negro have faced bigotry, she proclaimed that dances that proudly communicate “Here, this is the culture of my race; these are our beliefs, our traditions; this is what we are” are “invaluable weapons against prejudice” (113). Like Dunham, Lapson based her choreography on ethnographic research and viewed her work as a reservoir of

Dancing Jews and Jewesses    83 Jewish history and culture. Nonetheless, although her dances may have seemed authentic and uncomplicated to elite critics, they were stylized adaptations and re-​inventions of Jewish rituals and traditions into theatrical form. Naum Rosen had criticized Didjah for “travelling to Palestine as a reliable source” and then simply exhibiting “authentic” material. Although Lapson’s depictions of Oriental Jews resembled Didjah’s, her approach to Hasidic dance was radically different. She did not earn a doctorate like Dunham, but Lapson did complete an undergraduate degree in anthropology at Hunter College in 1928. In addition to researching Hasidism in Palestine in 1929, she went to Poland in 1937, where she conducted fieldwork in urban and rural Hasidic communities only two years before the Germans invaded, and three years before the Warsaw Ghetto was established, after which Poland’s Jewish population was virtually annihilated.15 Drawing from observation and experience, Lapson created a varied repertory of Hasidic dances that were not simple character sketches or straight-​ forward documentations of “authentic” dances, but rather, were rhythmically complex, expressive works that she felt captured the soul of the Jewish people. Following her return, Lapson published an essay in Dance Observer entitled “The Chassidic Dance,” which explains the history of Hasidism and chronicles the intricacies of Hasidic kinesthesia, improvisation, musicality, and compositional structure, as well as the contexts in which dancing occurred. Rather than reducing Hasidic dance to a uniform style, she observed differences between Hasidic Jews in Warsaw, where the dancing was “refined, usually pensive in mood,” and in Galicia, where dancers moved with “vigor, freedom, and abandon” (Lapson 1937, 110). Although she created a number of Hasidic dances based on her research in Palestine, including Yeshiva Bachur (1931) and Rebbe Elimelach (1933), a portrait of the dancer in costume for Beth Midrash (The House of Study) (1937) accompanies the Dance Observer essay (Figure 3.4). She appears in a black suit with a white shirt, her hair tucked into a yarmulke, save for the two curly peyes flanking her face, which is bathed in glowing light. Her arms extend upward toward the left edge of the picture frame, and her fingers (like Didjah’s) are poised to snap. It is a joyous image—​her Hasid is strong, happy, and spiritually and physically engaged. It is not possible to reconstruct Lapson’s solos, but her essay includes a vivid analysis of Hasidic movement that hint at the power and intricacy of her own dancing: The Chassidic dance usually follows the tempi of the Chassidic music. Often, however, the dance proceeds independently. … Generally the dance begins slowly, with a touch of sadness, expressive of yearning and mystery. It gradually assumes a faster rhythm, until it reaches a state of ecstasy. The movements are basically the characteristic Ghetto gestures and motions. At first the forearm is used in quick, choppy movements from the elbow out. This is the most classic of all so-​called Jewish gestures that have originated in the Ghetto. As the Chassid warms up to his dance, with his feet raising him high in quick, jerky jumps and leaps, the arms—​from fingers to shoulder—​begin to function very freely in expressive movements. His elbows, which cling close to his shrunken body in his daily life, are suddenly released and his arms are stretched upward in dramatic, meaningful gesticulations while his lowered head is raised and thrown back. (Lapson 1937, 109)

84   Rebecca Rossen

Figure 3.4  Dvora Lapson in Yeshiva Bachur. Date and photographer unknown. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Most likely, dances such as Beth Midrash and Yeshiva Bachur were correspondingly dynamic and intricate—​moving with and against the music, exploring a range of tempi, expressing a range of emotions from longing to bliss, and building from bound gestures to extended motions and ecstatic abandon.16 Discussing race and spectatorship in American dance, Manning has written that “spectators from different social locations may view the same dance event differently,” and moreover that “cross-​viewing has the potential to alter how publics read bodies

Dancing Jews and Jewesses    85 in motion and thus to effect social and artistic change” (2004, xvi). By actively seeking out opportunities for cross-​viewing and addressing diverse audiences, Lapson, her Jewish dancing body, and her corpus of Jewish works, aimed to impact spectators in different ways. For non-​Jewish audiences, she sought to counter bigotry, affirm the beauty of her culture, and promote a culturally plural America. Nonetheless, Lapson’s writing on Hasidic dance reveals a certain amount of anxiety about Jewish difference when she suggested that dance could normalize Jewish bodies: “Thanks to the new practices brought about by Chassidism,” she wrote, “the physique of the Jew, so shrunken and cramped as a result of generations of Ghetto life, became more robust and normal. Wide and free gestures, essential in producing the desired expressions of joyousness and exaltations, replaced those of the cringing type” (Lapson 1937, 109). Dancing, thus, could transform the weak ghetto dweller into a robust, “normal,” American citizen, without having to abandon his or her spirituality or ethnicity. Lapson’s grace, charm, and buoyantly beautiful body certainly offered powerful evidence to non-​Jewish spectators that Jews would enhance, rather than taint, American culture. But Lapson was not only interested in reaching non-​Jewish audiences; she was also determined to prove the value of Jewish dance to the modern dance community and to justify the use of ethnography as a valid choreographic method. Indeed, her writing demonstrates an attempt to show that Hasidic and modern dance were analogous in their basis in improvisation and their dedication to expressing the human spirit through motion: “So much of the ideology of the dancing Chassidim is similar to that of Isadora’s and even of our present-​day dancers,” she wrote, “that research into original sources proves a gratifying and rewarding activity.” Moreover, she declared that the “philosophy of Chassidism, based on the inherent nature of man to use rhythmic movement for emotional expression, deserves respect and admiration from the dance world” (Lapson 1937, 109–​110). Lapson never fully achieved this acknowledgment, although Jerome Robbins hired her as an expert dance consultant for Fiddler on the Roof in 1964. She continued to perform steadily in a variety of venues throughout the 1940s, but she found greatest success with Jewish and general audiences in primarily Jewish or ethnic dance settings such as the 1940 World’s Fair, where she performed on the American common, and the American Museum of Natural History’s Around the World Series and La Meri’s Ethnological Dance Center, where she presented her final concerts in 1949 and 1950, respectively. During a period when Jewish modern dancers such as Maslow, Sokolow, and Tamiris were liberating women with their powerful kinesthesia and situating the female dancer as a representative of social progress, dances such as Lapson’s Orientalist Arabian Romance and Sabbath, with its depiction of the iconic Jewish matriarch, were somewhat regressive. Yet, by theatricalizing Jewish rituals (such as the lighting of the Sabbath candles) and performing those traditions publicly, Lapson subtly critiqued a patriarchal religion that restricted women, and their contributions, to hearth and home. Her Hasidic dances went even further. Through her cross-​ dressed Hasid, she not only promoted the centrality of dance to Judaism, making

86   Rebecca Rossen her own contributions to the Jewish community more significant, but, as we have seen, she also carved out a space for herself—​a woman—​as both bearer and maker of Jewish tradition and culture. Didjah’s Bar Mitzvah “boy” expressed dissatisfaction with the confines of Orthodox Judaism, but her rejection of Jewishness for the sake of building a reputation in concert dance ultimately limited the impact of her critique. In contrast, Lapson situated Jewish dance as a critical site for the maintenance of Jewish collective memory and demonstrated the value of Jewish culture to American audiences, both Jewish and non-​Jewish. Moreover, she offered her dances as a solution for the preservation, continuity, and growth of Judaism in the United States, where Jews were rapidly acculturating and traditions were swiftly disappearing. Moving throughout time and across national borders, Lapson presented herself as a flesh-​and-​blood repository for Jewish history, a lifeline that stemmed from the past and moved through the present and into the future. Special Thanks to the Walter and Gina Ducloux Fine Arts Faculty Fellowship Endowment at the University of Texas.

Notes 1. On the European dance stage, Ida Rubenstein embodied the iconic exotic Jewess, particularly in works such as Oscar Wilde’s Salome (in Russia in 1908 and Paris in 1912) and the Ballets Russes’ Scheherazade (1910). See Lynn Garafola (2005, 148–​170). 2. When I use the term “Oriental Jew,” I acknowledge this conflation and utilize the term to comment on such representations. Jews with roots in the Middle East and North Africa (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Afghanistan, Morocco, Turkey, etc.) and are now referred to as Mizrahi Jews, which is Hebrew for “east.” Mizrahim are still distinguished from Ashkenazi Jews, a term that refers most broadly to Jews of European ancestry, although during the early-​20th century in the United States there were tensions between Ashkenazim from Western and Central Europe (Austria and Germany) and those from Eastern Europe (Russian and Poland). 3. Hasidism was a religious movement that emerged in Poland in the 18th century. With the influx of Eastern European Jews into the United States before World War I, numerous American Hasidic communities developed, particularly in and around New York City. Currently there are several branches of American Hasidim including the Bobover, Lubavitcher, and Satmar communities. In this essay, I  use “Hasid” (or its plural, Hasidim), “Hasidic,” and “Hasidism,” the spelling favored by contemporary scholars. In contrast, the dancers and critics I discuss tended to use “Chassidic,” which emphasizes the Hebrew pronunciation. For a historical account of Hasidism in the United States, also see Menachem Duam and Oren Rudavsky’s documentary A Life Apart: Hasidism in America. PBS’s website for this documentary includes a number of accessible articles: [http://​www.pbs.org/​alifeapart/​res_​essays.html] (accesed November 12, 2012). For an excellent analysis of dance in a Lubavitcher community in Crown Heights see Jill Gellerman (2011).

Dancing Jews and Jewesses    87 4. Benjamin Zemach was one of the first American dancers to be considered an innovator of Jewish or Hebraic dance, and his works bear further examination. For more on Zemach see Rossen, “Dancing Jewish,” and Naima Prevots, Dancing in the Sun. 5. Rosen also criticized dancer Pauline Koner. 6. Because Didjah performed under a stage name, I have been unable to discover her actual identity or the dates of her birth or death. An unpublished interview (Didjah, Clippings) notes that she graduated from Washington Irving High School with two degrees (commercial and general), one earned in 1924 and the other in 1926. If she was between 16 and 18 years old when she earned the first degree, she would have been born sometime between 1906 and 1908. She also discusses her marriage to a journalist in early press releases, which suggests she married prior to commencing her dance career. Still, I was unable to find “Belle Didjah” listed in programs from the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, so I infer that she performed at the Met either under her birth or married name. 7. Aronson was mentored by Alexandra Exter in Russia before immigrating to the United States in 1923. During the period that he created sets for Didjah, he also designed for the Yiddish Arts Theatre. In the 1930s he worked with Eliza Kazan and Clifford Odets at the Group Theater, and then, from 1940–​1970s, became acclaimed for his Broadway designs including Cabin in the Sky (1940), The Crucible (1953), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). See Rich (1987). 8. Emphasis in the original. I am unable to reproduce the brochure at this time, but it can be viewed in Lapson’s program file at the New York Public Library’s Dance Division. 9. This quotation is from a nearly identical promotional brochure. 10. Raskin was a Russian-​born illustrator, painter, and printmaker known for working with Jewish subject matter. Ruth Light Braun was born in Brooklyn and became a notable illustrator of Jewish life in New York City, particularly on the Lower East Side, as well as in Palestine. She also produced a number of drawings of Jewish performers. 11. Lapson dates Yeshiva Bachur as 1932 on a 1934 Guggenheim application, but I believe the dance was actually composed in 1931, the date of her November premiere at the 92nd Street Y, a benefit for the Zionist youth organization, Hashomar Hatzair (also mistakenly listed as 1932). 12. Lapson’s Guggenheim application lists 1934 as the premiere of Arabian Romance, but the dance was offered at her April 1933 concert at CCNY (Lapson, Guggenheim; Lapson, programs). 13. All quotations are taken from Lapson’s promotional materials and brochures (Lapson, programs). 14. Although Sokolow began her career-​long interest in Jewish subject matter in 1939, Maslow did not premiere her first Jewish dance, The Village I Knew, until 1950, and Tamiris ultimately made only one dance on a Jewish theme—​Memoir—​in 1959 (Rossen 2006). 15. Lapson applied for, but did not receive, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1934 to conduct this research. In the application, she proposed to study the “dances, motions, and gestures” of various Hasidic sects in Poland in order to “gather material” for original dances, to make the information available to the dance field, and to publish a book on Hasidic dance (Lapson, Guggenheim). 16. Lapson’s choreography and style does bear a certain resemblance to Zemach’s unique approach to Hebrew dance, and could also be compared to the work of Baruch Agadati, a Palestinian-​born choreographer who was known for creating original Hasidic and Yemenite dances. Lapson may have seen Agadati perform during her 1929 trip. For more on Agadati, see Judith Brin Ingber (2011).

88   Rebecca Rossen

Bibliography Arnold, Joseph. “Dance Events Reviewed.” The American Dancer 7 (May 1993): 9. “Belle Didjah, Dancer-​Mime.” New York Post. March 31, 1931. Boyarin, Daniel. Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1997. Buber, Martin. Hasidism and Modern Man, edited and translated by Maurice Feldman. New York: Harper and Row, 1958. Butler, Gervase. “Dvora Lapson.” Dance Observer 4(3) (March 1937): 29. Clark, Vévé. “Performing the Memory of Difference in Afro-​Caribbean Dance:  Katherine Dunham’s Choreography, 1938–​87.” In History and Memory in African-​American Culture, edited by Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally, 188–​204. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1994. Desmond, Jane. “Dancing out the Difference:  Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis’s ‘Radha’ of 1906.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17, 1 (Autumn 1991): 28–​49. Didjah, Belle. Clippings. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Didjah, Belle. Programs. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-​de-​Siècle Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. *Duam, Menachem and Oren Rudavsky. A Life Apart: Hasidism in America. New York: First Run/​Icarus Films, 1997. Erdman, Harley. Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860–​1920 New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Garafola, Lynn. Legacies of Twentieth Century Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. Gellerman, Jill. “Rehearsing for the Ultimate Joy Among Lubavitcher Hasidim: Simchas Bais Hasho’eva in Crown Heights.” In Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance, edited by Judith BrinIngber, 285–​312. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011. Gilman, Sander. The Jew’s Body. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Gilman, Sander. “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the ‘Modern Jewess’.” In The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, edited by Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, 97–​120. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995. Glassgold, C. Adolph. Dance Observer 1(2) (March, 1934): 20. Goren, Arthur Aryeh. “ ‘Anu ban artza’ in America: The Americanization of the Halutz Ideal.” In Envisioning Israel: The Changing Ideals and Images of North American Jews, edited by Allon Gal, 81–​113. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1996. Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Graff, Ellen. Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City (1928–​1942). Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997. Hollander, Maurice. “A Dancer Mimes Her Race.” Opinion: A Journal of Jewish Life and Letters (May 1938): 12–​14 Hyman, Paula. Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1995.

Dancing Jews and Jewesses    89 Ingber, Judith Brin. “Vilified or Glorified? Nazi Versus Zionist Views of the Jewish Body.” In Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance, edited by Judith Brin Ingber, 251–​277. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2011. Jackson, Naomi. 2000. Converging Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Jewish Virtual Library (The American-​Israeli Cooperative Enterprise). “The First American Bat Mitzvah.” [http://​www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/​jsource/​Judaism/​firstbat.html] (January 10, 2011). Kaplan, Mordecai. Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-​Jewish Life. New York: Macmillan, 1934. Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture:  Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998. Lapson, Dvora. Clippings. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Lapson, Dvora. 1934. Guggenheim Application. Courtesy of Beril Lapson. Lapson, Dvora. Programs. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Lapson, Dvora. “The Chassidic Dance” Dance Observer 4 (November 1937): 109–​110. Lapson, Dvora. “The Dance and Intolerance,” Dance Observer 7(8) (October 1940): 113–​114. Manning, Susan. “Black Voices, White Bodies: the Performance of Race and Gender in How Long Brethren.” American Quarterly 50 (1) (March 1998): 25–​48. Manning, Susan. Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Martin, John. “The Dance: an Art Form,” New York Times, March 24, 1929a: 138. Martin, John. “Belle Didjah Dances with Charm and Poise,” New  York Times, March 25, 1929b: 36. Martin, John. “Belle Didjah’s Recital. Dancer Ventures in a Nondescript Modernism.” New York Times, March 31, 1930: 27. Martin, John. “The Dance: Trio of Artists,” New York Times, March 13, 1932: 11. Martin, John. “Belle Didjah Back in Dance Program. Recital at Forrest Theatre Includes New Cycle of Oriental Novelties.” New York Times, 12 March 12, 1934: 21. Martin, John. “The Dance: Dvora Lapson Recital.” New York Times, January 25, 1937: 23. Moore, Deborah Dash. “Judaism as a Gendered Civilization: The Legacy of Mordecai Kaplan’s Magnum Opus.” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society. 12 (2) (Winter 2006): 172–​186. Ockman, Carol. “When a Star is Just a Star: Interpreting Images of Sarah Bernhardt.” In The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, edited by Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, 121–​139. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995. Prell, Riv-​Ellen. Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Prevots, Naima. Dancing in the Sun:  Hollywood Choreographers, 1915–​1937. Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1987. Raider, Mark. The Emergence of American Zionism. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Rich, Frank. The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1987. Rosen, Naum. “The New Jewish Dance in America.” Dance Observer 1, 5 (June–​July 1934): 51. Rossen, Rebecca. 2006. “Dancing Jewish:  Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance.” PhD dissertation, Northwestern University.

90   Rebecca Rossen Rossen, Rebecca. “Hasidic Drag:  Jewishness, Cross-​Dressing and Ethnic Ambiguity in the Modern Dances of Pauline Koner and Hadassah.” Feminist Studies 37 (2) (Summer 2011), 334–​364. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House 1978. Srinivasan, Priya. Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. Wolf, Ben. “Brief Dance Reviews.” New Theatre (April 1934): 22.

Chapter 4

Qu eering Et h ni c i t y and Shat terin g t h e  Di s c o Is There an Enduring Gay Ethnic Dance? Darren Patrick Blaney

We have always been a separate people, drifting together in parallel experience [ … ] A separate people coming together [ … ] we began to discover slowly … hesitantly … painfully … commonalities we share from the heterogeneous bloodlines that had discarded us … —​Harry Hay, early gay rights activist and co-​founder of the Mattachine Society (1987, 279) There was a moment when their faces blossomed into the sweetest happiness, however—​when everyone came together in a single lovely communion that was the reason they did all they did … when they took off their sweat-​soaked T-​shirts and screamed because Patty Joe had begun to sing: “Make me believe in you, show me that love can be true.” Now of all the bonds between homosexual friends, none was greater than that between the friends who danced together. The friend you danced with, when you had no lover, was the most important person in your life; and for people who went without lovers for years, that was all they had. It was a continuing bond. —​Andrew Holleran, author of “Dancer from the Dance” (1978, 39 & 111–​112)

Introduction West Hollywood, CA. Friday, July 2, 2010: 7:29PM. A text message from MJ’s party-​ promoter Anthony Lopez beeps its arrival to my cell phone screen: “MJ’s/​Happy 4th

92   Darren Patrick Blaney of July weekend. FRESH MEAT FRIDAYS all new go go meat SATURDAY dj PORN STAR. FOAM PARTY this SUNDAY! free w/​text.” Known in previous decades as Woody’s Hyperion, MJ’s is a gay dance bar in the Silver Lake district1 that attracts diverse crowds of mostly gay men2 who converge there from all corners of Los Angeles County and beyond to attend its weekly dance parties. Either drawn by text messages like the preceding one, or lured by the sexy images of Adonis-​like nearly naked male models visible on the mjsbar.com website, or perhaps merely out of force of habit, hundreds if not thousands of gay men attend MJ’s over the course of any given week in order to meet new people, join up with old friends, cruise, drink and dance together. Although I generally venture there less frequently than I did when I was single, as a former regular patron who signed onto their mailing list, I still receive promotional text messages from MJ’s every week. With the intent of doing some participant-observer research as midnight appro­ ached on the night of the fourth, I coaxed my partner to accompany me on a mission to observe the scene at MJ’s. My comments in this essay and the thick description of this particular event are informed by the hundreds of times I’ve attended gay dance bars over the past 25+ years. Since the age of 19 when I first entered Portland Oregon’s City Nightclub—the first nonalcoholic gay dance club for young people in the United States—I have attended gay dance bars in larger metropolitan areas that attract international crowds, as well as local clubs with a more provincial feel in many smaller cities and towns in North America and Europe. Most of them could be described with words similar to the ones I’m offering below about MJ’s. After a short wait in line, we flashed the bouncer my cell-​phone invitation that promised free entry. He informed us that we should have arrived before 11 p.m. to avoid paying the requisite $10 cover charge. Smiling, the doorman split the difference with us, allowing us both to enter for half price. Penetrating the dance bar after an absence of several months, I was immediately struck by a scene visually and aurally almost exactly the same as it had been the last time I’d gone there to dance with my gay brethren. Although with its “go go meat,” “porn star”-​vibe, and “foam,” it may have more of an L.A./​Hollywood-​feel than gay dance bars in smaller urban areas, walking into MJ’s, the sensory stimulus that greeted me was very similar to that at nearly every gay dance bar I’ve entered in my quarter century of life as an out gay man.3 The large, cavernous space is rather dark if not forgivingly shadowy; the room lit mostly with red and lavender neon tubes and colorful phosphorescent strobes that highlight the dance floor. Sporting muscular tight bodies, handsome chiseled faces, ample packages, and wads of green bills that bulge from their jock straps, several male go-​go dancers—​some young, smooth, and lithe; some older, scruffier, and more stiffly butch—​are strategically placed on spot-​lit platforms flanking the dance floor. Suntanned-​to-​swarthy-​perfection bare-​ chested bartenders—​who are probably collectively strong enough to lift and overturn the bar counter if they felt the urge—​flash the smiles and sneers that reveal their dual statuses in the gay pecking order (server/​object of desire) as they serve 8-​oz glasses containing cold cocktails or frothy tap beer to eager customers who fish in their pockets for tips to show their appreciation for the bartenders’ studly service. Cruising patrons

Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco    93 in tight T-​shirts line the walls, some chatting, some ogling groups of euphoric dancers who bounce, gyrate, shimmy, strut, sway, and shake to the pumping, pulsating syncopations that without doubt must claim disco as their ancestral thumping rhythmic origin. Attracted by the music, the men, the jubilation, the promise of endorphins, seeking a release from the worries of the day, we join the mass of dancers. On the floor, it feels as if the music and the frenzy of the group take possession of our bodies. We allow this, and the ensuing emotion catapults us into laughter. The dancers smile through flashes of momentary eye contact, they flirt and touch, attract and coyly rebuff. Twisting wrists flutter into sharp claps; foot stomps transform into jumps and playful kicks. Pansexual grinding movements (aka “twerking”) morph into stiff masculine poses with downward fist pumps, which then dissolve into expressivity as hands and Adonis arms crest overhead, exposing armpits reminiscent of Madonna circa “Into the Groove.” We keep dancing until a song comes on that everyone knows. Then there is this feeling of mutual recognition and delight: we are all here together, and our movements ripple, swell, crescendo, collide, crash, then resurrect like anthropomorphic ocean waves. Palpitating drums command like an omnipresent heartbeat. The cyclic energy perpetuates itself, and there is a feeling of connection that transcends individual identity. Joined together through the music, the dance acts like an ejaculatory catalyst, consolidating our connection. As on most weekend nights at gay dance bars around the globe, the crowd at MJ’s ebbs and flows as the night progresses. The ubiquitous dance pulse, lubricating effects of alcohol, and arousing lure of the crowd of rowdy revelers dancing hip-​to-​hip draws more men into the frolic, which begins to foam as promised a few hours before the post-​ witching-​hour cries of “Last call!” What interested me about the scene at MJ’s in 2010 were its similarities to the world that Andrew Holleran described in his 1978 novel, as quoted at the opening of this chapter. Although it’s likely that none of the attendees of the MJ’s fourth of July disco party would describe themselves as having participated in an “ethnic event,” or thought of themselves as having performed a ritual that is a hallmark of their “ethnic” culture or identity, I would argue that the performative scene described here contains artistic forms, cultural codes, individual gestures, and social choreographies which has roots that can be traced historically and linked to what I am positing to be an “ethnic-​like” formation of gay culture and identity. Although the term disco might sound antiquated to a contemporary queer audience, many of whom were likely born long after the alleged demise of disco, for the purposes of this essay, I am using the term disco to describe not only a place, a type of music, and an improvised dance choreography but also a concept4 whose performative symbolisms and social meanings are still prevalent in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) community. As an example, consider that one of the images on MJ’s website that advertised the holiday weekend’s lineup of events featured a photograph of a beefcake beauty whose crotch was coyly obscured by a mirrored disco ball. Though pronounced dead in the pop world by the late 1970s,5 as a progenitor of many subsequent forms of underground dance music (including house, deep house, electronic, garage, hi-​NRG, rave, techno, trance, tribal, etc.), the infectious rhythms, funky steady

94   Darren Patrick Blaney beats, and lingering tawdry afterglow of the disco era can still be experienced, perhaps nowhere more than in gay dance clubs, even in this second decade of the 21st century. Over the past 45+ years since the infamous 1969 Stonewall riots, improvised social dancing inspired by disco and its trendier offspring have played an important role in the lives of millions of gay men and women worldwide.6 Although I’m certainly not proposing that “gay dance music” or disco culture has a universal relevance in GLBTQ life (for instance, the scene at MJ’s described earlier might have little appeal for some who may shun disco in favor of country and western music, the opera, or punk rock), I would argue that the influence of disco in gay culture has at least as much significance for GLBTQ people as traditional Irish stepdancing, klezmer, salsa, or tarantella do for their cultures of origin, and thus disco suggests a part of what constructs a gay ethnicity. In the same way that only a fragment of the people in Japan might be trained in Butoh, or a limited percentage of U.S. residents might have attended a bluegrass concert, yet these cultural forms are still emblematic of the ethnicities/​nations from which they spring, so, too, is disco a hallmark of gay culture.7 As much as bagpipes invoke Scotland, pasta conjures Italy, or hula-​dancing connotes Hawaii, disco suggests gay ethnicity. This essay explores the ontological politics of disco, and articulates the use of improvised social dancing in the formation of an “alternative ethnicity,” or “ethnic-​like” identity, among gay people since long before the rise of disco in the early 1970s.

A Gay Ethnicity? An ethnic group is defined here as a collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their people-hood. [ … ] A necessary accompaniment is some consciousness of kind among members of the group. —Richard Schermerhorn, social theorist (1996, 17)

Consider Schermerhorn’s definition of ethnic group above, which includes the phrases “putative common ancestry,” “shared historical past,” “cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their people-​hood,” “collectivity,” and “consciousness of kind among members of the group.” As a gay studies scholar with an admitted academic and sociopolitical agenda, I am arguing that the GLBTQ community is an ethnic-​like social configuration that shares these traits with other ethnic groups. As a gay people, we do share a historical past, as well as a focus on numerous symbolic and performative elements that give meaning to our lives, including our relationships to various cultural forms including art, music, literature, and dance. Even in terms of the “putative common ancestry” and/​or presumed biological similarity that might be the most commonly accepted ethnic determinants, scientific studies of the past 25 years have concluded that there are likely genetic, neuroendocrinological, or other biological factors that link gay people to one another, giving credence to the “essentialist” side of the essentialist versus constructionist debate.8 Whether future studies from the hard

Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco    95 sciences confirm this, from the points of view of psychology, the social sciences, and the humanities (fields which tend to view ethnicity as a social construct), the claim of the existence of a distinctive gay ethnicity is nearly irrefutable. Indeed, academics in the field of gay studies such as Dennis Altman, Michael Bronski, and John D’Emilio have written about the existence of gay culture, gay sensibility, the homosexual minority, and gay community since at least 1982. (Altman 1982; Bronski 1984; D’Emilio 1983) Indeed, an even earlier academic theory promoting the notion of a “gay ethnicity” was penned by sociologist Stephen O. Murray in 1979. Referring to the gay neighborhood in Toronto, Murray wrote that the gay community had begun to delineate itself territorially, conceptually, and politically in ways that mimicked that of other ethnic groups in urban areas, rendering it a “quasi-​ethnicity.”9 Murray noted that by the end of the 1970s, the gay community in Toronto had already achieved a sense of “institutional completeness” through its development of periodicals, yellow pages, churches, and charities all catering exclusively to the needs of gay individuals. (Murray 1979) In a 1987 essay which drew on the previous work of Altman, Bronski, and D’Emilio, Steve Epstein also referred to the existence of a gay ethnicity. Epstein’s essay exploded the “constructionist vs. essentialist” debate by demonstrating how these opposing theories made little sense in light of the ways that the gay community organizes itself in practice. Epstein argued that despite the fact that a sense of ethnic identity is not usually transferred to a gay individual from a biological family of origin as with other ethnic identities, the gay subject in contemporary life is nevertheless able to adopt an ethnic-​like sense of identity through a process of interrelating and identifying with a minority community (in a way that distinguishes it from the dominant culture, which, in turn, also views it as “other”) that parallels the formation of traditional ethnic identities. (Epstein 1992) Epstein’s essay was followed by political theorist Mark Blasius’ “An Ethos of Lesbian and Gay Existence” which argued that lesbian and gay existence should be conceived as an ethos rather than as a sexual preference or orientation, as a life-​style, or primarily in collectivist terms, as a subculture, or even as a community. While lesbian and gay existence may include some elements of these conceptualizations, “ethos” is a more encompassing formulation, better suited for understanding lesbian and gay existence politically. (1992, 642)

In his theory, Blasius attributed the formation of the gay ethos to a lifelong process of coming out that gay individuals collectively experience. Blasius characterized this process as a never-​ending initiation that subsequently affiliates the gay subject with a community through sustained interrelation within the group. Viewing itself as “apart from” the mainstream heterosexual culture, gay ethos is created and sustained through the sharing of customs and political action, the passing on of historical memory and oral traditions, and sometimes, as in the “gay ghettoes” (a phrase which appropriates and ascribes a sense of ethnicity) or the more recent “gayborhoods,” even territorially through actual spatial proximity. Adopting a dogmatic constructionist stance, Blasius viewed gayness/​gay identity as a political performance that demands a continual

96   Darren Patrick Blaney participation in gay culture/​politics and a lifelong process of becoming rather than a mode of being in which one defines oneself according to a sexual preference. (1992) Although a case could be made that due to the lack of consanguine kinship relations or lines of descent/​inheritance, no “common ancestry” per se exists among gay people, consider that many of the rituals that the GLBTQ community has instituted over the past four decades are intended to invoke a mass remembrance of our shared historical past. From our annual Gay Pride celebrations that mark the anniversary of Stonewall and the beginning of gay liberation; to displays of the AIDS Quilt; to annual fund-​raising events such as AIDS-​walk which memorialize lost loved ones even as they combat the disease; to the rise of “queer solo shows” in the 1990s, which often featured coming-​ out narratives intended to appeal to a collective gay memory; to the weekend ritual of dancing en masse embraced by some in the community; to the belief that “fan dancers” exalted and invoked the spirits of the dead through their ecstatic trance dancing in the 1990s (Buckland 2002, 160, 169–​183); many of the rituals that have structured our sense of community have involved elements of remembering our collective history and common ancestry. To understand the purpose and/​or consequences of embracing an ethnic model for the GLBTQ community, it seems helpful to unpack the notion of ethnicity itself.10 Over the past few decades, among scholars in the fields of cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology, ethnicity has been a prominent yet contentious term. Although I don’t presume to offer an original definition of the word, what interests me vis-​à-​vis the discussion of gayness as an ethnicity is the way in which social scientists generally agree that ethnic construction most often occurs as a means of mobilizing collective political action. In his posthumously published Economy and Society, Max Weber described ethnicity as a socially constructed “presumed identity.” (1998, 21) Writing that ethnicity is a subjective belief rather than an inherent biological characteristic, Weber called attention to the way in which politics more than genetics determines ethnicity. Theorizing that ethnic identifications generally arise at the sites of sociopolitical conflicts, Weber articulated that belief in group affinity, similar customs, shared memories, and political community create ethnic groups, more than actual kinship or blood affiliation. “Conversely, it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists.” (1998, 21) Weber also implies that ethnic membership originates at the site of the individual’s self-​conception and self-​identification because it is a subjective belief about who I am and who my people are that determines a subject’s ethnic identity. What interests Weber about ethnic configurations is that they catalyze group political action, not that they provide individual subjects with a common identity. For Weber, the sociopolitical rather than the psychological ramifications of ethnicity are salient. Although members of a particular ethnic group might be aware of commonly shared ancestries or physical traits attributed to genetics, today most social scientists accept Weber’s view that ethnicity is largely a social construction in which both the group members themselves and those outside the group define ethnic boundaries and group membership. This is accomplished through the privileging of cultural practices (such

Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco    97 as religion, politics, language, ritual, custom, dance, etc.) over genetics. Explaining the constructionist view of ethnicity, Joana Nagel writes that: According to the constructionist view, the origin, content, and form of ethnicity reflect the creative choices of individuals and groups as they define themselves and others in ethnic ways. Through the actions and designations of ethnic groups, their antagonisms, political authorities, and economic interest groups, ethnic boundaries are erected dividing some populations and unifying others. [ … ] Ethnicity is constructed out of the material of language, religion, culture, appearance, ancestry, or regionality. The location and meaning of particular ethnic boundaries are continuously negotiated, revised, and revitalized, both by ethnic group members themselves as well as by outside observers. (1998, 237)

Here, Nagel highlights the fluid, ephemeral nature of ethnicity. As in Weber’s theory, Nagel states that social actions (such as group performances based on politics or economics) and cultural forms play a large role in defining what constitutes ethnicity. One need only consider the ethnic conflicts that have existed historically in both the Middle East and in Ireland to see that often, genetic similarity has little to do with ethnic group affiliation. Both of these examples, rather, illustrate the notion that ethnicity is often determined by cultural practice, political ideology, or shared belief rather than by genetic similarity. Thus, although ethnicity is not exactly synonymous with culture, performative cultural practices such as dance do play a significant role in the social understanding of what constitutes an ethnic group. Considering the frequent pairing of the words ethnic and dance in common parlance (by this, I am referring to both the offhand comments that people make in everyday life about dances enacted as part of various cultural events, as well as the midcentury designation of some forms of concert dance as “ethnic dance”), the predominant role of dance in the creation and perpetuation of ethnicity could perhaps be said to be a point from which dance scholarship should depart rather than an end point to which one might hope to argue. Yet, when pondering the question of whether terms like gay or queer can be described as valid markers of ethnicity in and of themselves, or if these adjectives provide a means of constructing an ethnic-​like personal or group identity, examining the importance of dance in gay culture and gay life feels necessary. For the purpose of this essay, I would like to call the reader’s attention to Rogers Brubaker’s definition of ethnicity, because of the way that his theory articulates various performative aspects of ethnic identification. Brubaker writes Ethnicity [ … ] should be conceptualized not as substances or things or entities or organisms or collective individuals—​as the imagery of discrete, concrete, tangible, bounded, and enduring “groups” encourages us to do—​but rather in relational, processual, dynamic, eventful, and disaggregated terms. This means thinking of ethnicity [ … ] not in terms of substantial groups or entities but in terms of practical categories, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, discursive frames, organizational routines, institutional forms, political projects, and contingent events. It means thinking of

98   Darren Patrick Blaney ethnicization[ … ] as (a) political, social, cultural, and psychological process [ … ]. And it means taking as a basic analytical category not the “group” as an entity but groupness as a contextually fluctuating conceptual variable. (2004, 53–​54)

Brubaker’s use of the words discursive frame, cultural idiom, relational, processual, routine, form, dynamic, and event to describe ethnicity feels particularly pertinent to the discussion of dance’s role in the formation of ethnicity, perhaps because dance is always already a performative process that not only expresses world views and cultural values, but also creates and perpetuates them. For gay people, improvised social dance is more than merely a cultural practice with relevance only in the aesthetic realm. Historically, perhaps especially in a gay context, dance has also worked to instigate other cultural practices (including sexual practices), perpetuate belief structures, recall ethnic memories, and fortify political ideologies at the same time that it suggests a specific aesthetic. One need only observe West Hollywood’s annual Gay Pride Parades over the past few years to notice that, even in an era in which many politically vocal queer people seem to be eschewing radical liberationist gay culture in an assimilationist mode as they have fought to secure equal marriage rights, the improvised social dancing that disco music’s progeny catalyzes continues to provide a backdrop against which and through which queer people express both their personal and collective identity. Perhaps reflective of a more recent, 21st-Century, “equality-focused” zeitgeist that has tended to want to minimize/obscure the general public’s view of the bar/nightclub scene in order to emphasize our similarity to the general population, syndicate columnist and sometime gay activist Dan Savage somewhat famously wrote in 2005: “I regard gay bars the same way most American Jews regard Israel: I’m happy to have a homeland, but I’m not all that anxious to live there.” However, whether one likes it or not, disco and its perhaps more unmelodic and unirhythmic descendents immediately evoke gay culture for almost everyone who has ever shook one’s groove thing, even if alone in the privacy of one’s own living room. Regardless of whether one finds aesthetic affiliation with the art of disco dancing per se, it would be counterproductive to deny that dance and gay seem to flow together conceptually as smoothly and harmoniously as Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire did in their fabulously gender-​role-​skewing cheek-​to-​cheek and pelvis-​to-​pelvis duet, “The Babbitt and the Bromide” in the 1946 classic Vincent Minelli film, Ziegfeld Follies. In the scene, which represents a relationship between two (arguably “closeted”) men that spans 30 years and ends with their triumphant danced reunification as harpplucking angels in a heavenly utopia, synchronized dance and coded camp talk prove to be the vehicles through which these two “publicly heterosexual” men are able to shed their inhibitions and play with both masculinity and femininity in a way that solidifies their somatic and emotional connection to one another. Much as it happens on the screen in this vintage synchronized dance sequence, I am arguing that disco has played and continues to play a similar social/cultural function in the gay ethos more broadly. In the following, I will explain how historically, improvised social dance among gay people has worked in a way that is similar, though perhaps more transparent, open, and profoundly liberating, to the bond one recognizes immediately in the infamous Kelly/Astaire duet.

Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco    99

A Brief History of Improvised Social Dancing in Gay Life Arguably, dance has served as a medium through which gay men have interacted with one another since the era of the English “molly houses” in the early 18th century. (Norton 1992, 55; Weems 2008, 82–​83) In the late 19th century urban United States, improvised social dancing had already become a predominant social activity in the lives of many gay men and women who sought the public company of others like themselves. In his scrupulously researched history of gay New  York, George Chauncey makes numerous references to the dance halls throughout lower Manhattan, Harlem, and Brooklyn where gay people gathered to dance with one another, flagrantly defying legal authorities who often raided these places and sought to shut them permanently. (1994, 33, 41, 43, 58, 173, 248, 279) By 1899, there were “at least six such ‘resorts’ (saloons or dance halls) on the Bowery alone.” (Chauncey 1994, 33) Dance halls continued to be spaces in which gay men and women met one another, often illicitly, throughout the early decades of the 20th century, perhaps especially visible during the Pansy Craze of the 1920s, as well as at underground “drag balls” in several American cities. (Chauncey 1994, 1–​7; Weems 2008, 86–​89) By calling attention to the way it helped create a sense of kinship, Chauncey’s description of the social function of the dance hall in gay life in the early decades of the 1900s implies the notion of an alternative gay ethnicity: Such loosely constituted clubs and other gay social networks fostered and sustained a distinctive gay culture in a variety of ways. In addition to organizing dances and other social activities, the men who gathered at saloons and dance halls shared topical information about developments affecting them, ranging from police activity to upcoming cultural events. They assimilated into the gay world men just beginning to identify themselves as fairies, teaching them the subcultural styles of dress, speech, and behavior. The clubs also strengthened the sense of kinship such men felt toward one another, which they expressed by calling themselves “sisters.” Perhaps most important, (the dance halls) provided support to men ostracized by much of society, helping their members reject some of the harsh judgments rendered against them by many of their contemporaries. (1994, 43)

Chauncey’s use of the phrases social networks, distinctive culture, cultural events, kinship, dress, speech, and behavior, identify as, and assimilated into the gay world11 to analyze the social function of the dance hall clearly gestures to an emerging gay ethnicity shared by the patrons of these spaces. Dance continued to play a role in the underground public life of gay people long after the Pansy Craze was quashed with the passage of New York State’s 1927 Padlock Law, which attempted to erase gayness from the public sphere by forbidding theaters from depicting homosexuality on stage. Esther Newton’s award-​winning ethnographic

100   Darren Patrick Blaney historiography describes the significance of dance in Fire Island’s emerging gay community in the 1930s. Newton explains how some restaurant owners turned a blind eye to gay couples dancing during off-​hours: The limitation which most frustrated Grovers was that on gay couple dancing. Neither Edward Duffy nor Pat Stephani objected personally, and they seem to have permitted gay dancing after Labor Day. So intense was the gay longing to dance together that Fred Koester remembered the post-​season dancing as “the big thing to look forward to.” As early as the 1930s, the hotel had tacitly allowed gay dancing late at night after the last ferry had left, and that tradition continued [ … ] after Duffy and his wife retired. (1993, 72)

Despite the prohibition against gay couples dancing during daylight hours, Newton states that “Grovers created ways to express their gay sensibility through dance nonetheless.” (1993, 72) By the mid-​20th century, although police harassment of dance halls and bars had resulted in numerous closures and arrests, gay men and women continued to congregate both in public commercial spaces and private homes, often using dance as a means to achieve personal intimacy and communal identity. Moreover, as in the Astaire-Kelly scene described above, dance on the silver screen in the Golden Age of Hollywood provided a coded language through which gay men and women could recognize each other even through the confines of the closet. Post-​WWII underground gay pulp novels such as Harrison Dowd’s The Night Air from 1950 and Michael De Forrest’s The Gay Year from 1949 confirm the significance of dance in the lives of gay men, as these novels include references to dancing in bars or private homes. Indeed, some of the characters in these novels were described as professional dancers. (Bronski 2003, 38, 136) In the 1950s, because they were not allowed to dance together in traditional ballroom pairs, Newton argues that gay dancers at Cherry Grove created line-​dances like the Madison, in which groups could dance together without touching, in order to circumvent the prohibition against same-​gender couples dancing: It seems quite likely that the Madison, a line dance which became popular in America and Europe, was invented by Grovers in the mid-​to late fifties to get around the “no dancing together” rule. The Duffys allowed the Madison as long as there were one or two women among the male dancers. (1993, 72)

The Madison was represented by early gay playwrights as well. Perhaps the only truly happy, utopian moment in Mart Crowley’s 1968 play The Boys in the Band includes a scene in which the hip African American librarian Bernard, the “out” commercial artist Larry, and the flamboyantly witty Emory inspire their fellow partiers to dance the Madison in a moment of utopian nostalgia and revelry that enlivens an otherwise depressing gathering:

Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco    101 Bernard starts to snap his fingers and move in time with the music. [ … ] Larry: (Goes to Left table.) Hey Bernhard, you remember that thing we used to do on Fire Island? (Larry starts to do a kind of “Madison.”) Bernard: (Rises and crosses in.) That was “in” so far back I think I’ve forgotten. Emory:  I remember. (Goes to Larry and starts doing the steps. Larry and Bernard start to follow. [ … ] The Dancers continue, turning and slapping their knees and heels and laughing with abandon …) (1968, 30–​32)

That Crowley’s gay play, the first of its kind to achieve commercial success off-​Broadway, includes references to black and white gay men dancing the Madison together on Fire Island in an earlier era perhaps strengthens Newton’s hypothesis that gays may have played a role in developing this form.12 Whether the Madison originated in the emerging gay culture on Fire Island, or in African American culture, the embrace of this dance form by the gay community is significant because of the way it foreshadows 1970s disco. As with free-​form disco dance, the Madison limited the emphasis on the traditional dancing couple, in favor of a more communal dance experience. As Tim Wall explains, “Rather than individual display and partner interaction, the Madison is built on a communal activity in which the group shaping across the entire floor produces a sense of participation and belonging.” (2009, 193–​194) Whether gays invented the form as Newton surmises or they appropriated it, this sense of “participation and belonging” would certainly have appealed to gay people who longed to dance together yet were often forbidden to do so throughout the 1950s and 1960s. That African Americans and gays mutually embraced this form foreshadows the alliance between these communities that 1970s disco perpetuated on the dance floor. Improvised social dance continued to appeal to gay people who sought connection with one another well into the 1960s. In his ethnographic historiography Stonewall, Martin Duberman writes of the significance of dance in the lives of gay men before the infamous 1969 riots. Duberman explains that the Stonewall itself, a Greenwich Village bar where gay men and trans-​folks congregated regularly throughout the 1960s, included a large dance floor where improvised social dancing would often occur, until the police raids would put an end to the frivolity: Behind the bar some pulsating gel lights went on and off—​later exaggeratedly claimed by some to be the precursor of the innovative light shows at the Sanctuary and other gay discos that followed. [ … ] Straight ahead, beyond the bar, was a spacious dancing area, at one point in the bar’s history lit only with black lights. [ … ] Should the police [ … ] or a suspected plainclothes-​man unexpectedly arrive, white bulbs instantly came on in the dance area, signaling everyone to stop dancing or touching. (1993, 187–​188)

This quotation illustrates how, in the 1960s predisco era, improvised social dancing continued to provide an outlet through which gay people expressed their identities and

102   Darren Patrick Blaney desires collectively. It also demonstrates that some thought the discos of the 1970s Gay Lib era were descendents of the gay dance bar culture that predated them. In other words, some gay disco dancers saw themselves as carrying out a tradition of improvised social dance that previous generations of gay men and women had practiced. Their reflection back on earlier decades is evidence of their knowledge of a shared history, which supports the notion of dance’s role in the perpetuation of a distinctive gay ethnicity.

The Liberated 1970s: The Birth of the Gay Disco Dance historian Tim Lawrence has written that “Contemporary disco dancing emerged out of the dual context of African American social dance and the rise of the discotheque and was propelled forward by the sudden influx of gay men into these social dance spaces at the beginning of the 1970s.” (Lawrence 2009, 201) Kai Fikentscher also highlights the importance of disco for the gay community: In an environment reflecting an increasing fragmentation [ … ] of American society overall, one of the prime social institutions for the emerging “gay community” became the discotheque. [ … ] discotheques were ideally suited to the needs of the emerging gay community, and [ … ] they played a significant role in shaping a new sociocultural platform: a public, yet safe forum for gays to assemble, mingle, and socialize on their own terms. (2000, 96)

The origins of the gay disco phenomenon can be attributed to several nearly concurrent historical events. The mayor of New York didn’t repeal the laws that banned gay men from dance halls and cabarets until October 1971. Yet in 1970, on the first Valentine’s Day after the Stonewall riots, two dance clubs opened in New York City that allowed gay men to take to the dance floor together: the Loft and the Sanctuary (Lawrence 2009, 201). Describing the abandonment of couples dancing, Lawrence suggests that the disco dancing that emerged in downtown Manhattan was not a lonely form of solo dance but, rather, a dance form in which the dancer could “groove with multiple partners” simultaneously: The experience of dancing with scores of other dancers helped generate the notion of the dancing crowd as a unified and powerful organism. By moving to the rhythm of the DJ and the gyrating bodies that surrounded them, gay men realized they were part of a collective movement. The idea of dancing with a partner did not so much implode as expand. (Lawrence 2009, 202)

Lawrence interprets the disco dance-​floor as not a space of “foreplay” that anticipated sex but, rather, a space of spiritual communion wherein dispossessed and disenfranchised groups—​especially gay men, women, and blacks—​could collectively celebrate the total sensuality of the body (the body that historically had been controlled, owned, arrested, beaten, expelled, or abused by straight white men), as well as release the individual ego in

Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco    103 order to be swept away in a mass movement of liberation and group catharsis. (Lawrence 2009, 202–​208) Theorizing about the significance of improvised social dance to the lesbian feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, B.J. Wray writes, Social dance quickly became a critical component in lesbian feminist organizing strategies. The “dance” not only provided a much-​needed meeting place to consolidate newly claimed lesbian identities, it also gave shape to those identities through a movement style that challenged predetermined, partnered forms of dance. Social dance furthered the creation of a distinct lesbian community. (2000, 39)

Perhaps Jane Dudley’s words about the revolutionary power of mass dancing can be anachronistically applied to lesbian and gay disco dancing in this context as well: The mass dance [ … ] can be put to revolutionary uses [ … ] Large groups of lay dancers, even at times the most superficially trained people can, by careful direction, set simple but clear patterns of group movement into a form that presents our revolutionary ideas movingly and meaningfully. The dancer learns to move communally, to express with others a simple class-​conscious idea. (1934)

For gays and lesbians in the early 1970s, the disco movement was revolutionary because it simultaneously celebrated somatic, psychic, and sexual freedom as well as lionized the collectivity of mass gay congregation after decades of physical persecution and enforced alienation. “Riding on the back of gay liberation, feminism, and civil rights, the core dancers of the disco era were also engaging in the development of new social forms and cultural expressions.” (Lawrence 2009, 208) For a previously repressed group experiencing the freedom to dance together without fear for the first time, the free-​form style of disco offered an ideal choreography for gay people to articulate an emerging sense of their ethnicity. As Lawrence suggests, disco inspired a collective movement. It celebrated the sensuality of the entire body in motion rather than fetishizing specific isolated parts; it enabled one to dance in a group context and find a feeling of solidarity with one’s queer family without the restraint of being locked into the paradigm of the heterosexual couple; its call and response format wherein the DJ responded to the dancers and vice versa offered a sense of improvised freedom and group catharsis; and, because the dances often lasted for hours, disco dancing provided an outlet for complete somatic awareness and ecstasy through which the dancers felt a transcendence of their individual identities and a merging with a higher collective consciousness of the group with whom they danced as one. (Lawrence 2009, 202–​208) Taking a more pragmatic view by linking the gay male disco movement to the “commercial scene” in his groundbreaking 1982 book The Homosexualization of America, Dennis Altman articulated the role of the disco in creating a sense of kinship and ethnicity among gay men throughout the 1970s: … discos also represent for many gay men an important way of expressing both a sense of solidarity and a celebration of their sexuality; at their best, discos generate a communal eroticism that is very powerful. [ … ] For homosexuals, bars and discos

104   Darren Patrick Blaney play the role performed for other groups by family and church. [ … ] It is here that most homosexuals first meet others like themselves and are able to express themselves in ways denied to them in other areas of their lives. If there are some unhappy consequences, most particularly a high rate of alcoholism, it is also true that the commercial scene provides a sense of identity and even community that only a relatively small number of homosexuals find in alternative institutions. (1982, 19–​21)

Although Altman’s analysis might seem outdated in a contemporary world where many gay people find a sense of community and mutual belonging in social settings other than clubs and bars (for example, actual churches, 12-​step support groups, online communities, arts organizations, political advocacy agencies, or other recreational activity groups), most striking about this quotation is Altman’s highlighting of the social function of the disco space itself. By likening the disco to more traditional social spaces like church and family/​home (social spaces in which ethnicity is often expressed in both ritualized and perfunctory ways), Altman’s statement suggests that gay people align themselves with one another in similar ways as traditional ethnic groups do: through kinship structures (solidarity, community, etc.), rituals, and shared value systems (celebration of sexuality, communal eroticism, etc.) Published in 1978, Andrew Holleran’s seminal work of gay fiction Dancer from the Dance encapsulates the cultural experience of the gay male disco scene in New York in the 1970s. I quote from it because I believe Holleran’s “fictional” text describes this world in a way that complements and supports my own ethnographic observations. In speaking about this “tiny society,” Holleran’s narrator describes the way that dance acted as a kind of common denominator and cultural glue for this group: They all knew each other without ever having been introduced. They formed a group of people who had danced with each other over the years, gone to the same parties, the same beaches on the same trains, yet, in some cases, never even nodded at each other. They were bound together by a common love of a certain kind of music, physical beauty, and style [ … ] They were never home, it seemed, but lived only in the ceaseless flow of this tiny society’s movements. They seldom looked happy. They passed one another without a word in the elevator, like silent shades in hell, hell-​bent on their next look from a handsome stranger. Their next rush from a popper. The next song that turned their bones to jelly and left them all on the dance floor with heads back, eyes nearly closed, in the ecstasy of saints receiving the stigmata. (1978, 38)

What I enjoy most about this nostalgic and poetic yet realistic passage is the way that it uses dialectical imagery to describe the disco scene without romanticizing it: to experience disco is to feel social yet lonely, native yet homeless, unhappy yet ecstatic, free and loose yet hungry, in both heaven and hell, simultaneously. Interestingly, Holleran uses language of sacrifice, martyrdom, and religion to explain the prominent role of movement in this disco subculture, where intense group expenditure is the norm. The communal joy, pain, and love felt by gay men dancing together at a disco evokes parallels with other ethnic, religious, and performative experiences in which ecstatic tribal expenditure works to solidify the boundaries of ethnicity.

Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco    105 Interviews that I conducted while writing this essay confirm and reiterate the sentiments articulated in both Altman’s essay and Holleran’s novel, albeit perhaps with more glee and a less alienated perspective. Consider this testimony from Brian Frank, a 59 year old music therapist and regular patron of MJ’s in Silver Lake, who has danced at gay discos since he was 17 years old: Going to a gay disco for the first time felt like entering the Xanadu that I had been looking for … it wasn’t about having pickup skills (I had those already), but it was more about the feeling of being an equal with these people in a strange way. The first gay disco I went to was called The Hippopotamus in Baltimore MD, right after it opened in 1972. Believe it or not, the same bartenders are still working there! They are 64 now. I was in 12th grade. It was fabulous … they were playing Barry White. There was a disco ball and flashing lights, and I fell in love with dancing and that freedom on the floor and the sacredness of that space, where anything goes. My sexuality was kind of “blurry” in those days. I was figuring things out. Then when I moved to NYC in 1977, Studio 54 had just opened. I was at the right place at the right time with the right look and the right sexuality, and I got right in! The same thing was happening all over the country. I was having a blast! To this day it’s my joy and ultimate release: to get out there to become one with the music and the people, to get that feeling of freedom and community, there’s no words. You’re not using words: your intellect isn’t being exercised. No one knows what your IQ or education is on the dance floor. Everybody’s on an equal footing, you’re all there for the same reason. It’s from the soul, and you feel it come up from the soles of your feet, like duende. The potential for sex is exciting, of course, but what’s more joyous is when you’re in this mass, and you’re all in that quasi-mystical state together, smiling and moving your body. Music and dance are primal. Even before there was language, don’t you think there was music and dance? […] When I was growing up, being gay was something you weren’t supposed to be. It’s not like gay people invented dance, but there seems to be a reason why gay people enjoy it. You get rid of any feeling of judgment or shame that might be put on you from outside that space, and you start to feel group allegiance, and you start to feel authentic and uninhibited and free. You can’t feel uptight or insecure while you’re dancing. Maybe gay people coming together in a group are able to shed their skin and expose themselves, and be the “organic me that I want to be,” without my suit and tie and my religion and my family and everything else. It’s like a porthole into our freedom that’s inexplicable. At the end of the day, a certain kind of person seeks out a dance club. I know people who have never been to a dance club in their lives. They don’t care, they’re not interested. I have been going out since 1972, and now it’s 2015: that’s a long time! I even feel it to this day when I go to Akbar. I’ll drive there, I’ll arrive, I hear the music, I get closer to it, and I feel it calling me, and I know that it’s going to be ok, that the people there are going to be the cool people who want to dance. And I don’t think it’s ever been articulated exactly, but if you look at the words to dance music, it’s all there: “If you’re thinking you’re too good to boogie, oh boy have I got news for you, everyone here tonight MUST boogie, and you are no exception to the rule!” That’s one of my favorite disco quotes: everyone here tonight MUST boogie. Not can, not should, not would, not will: MUST! If you’re here, baby you better get out on the dance floor! There is an aspect of it where you lose your individual identity… you give up something, especially if you’re by yourself, to become part of something bigger. I

106   Darren Patrick Blaney was never with a partner when I went dancing. I’d always go out by myself. You don’t go there to judge. You can’t think: “oh, I’m going to be the best dancer in the world.” That’s not going to work out. You have to find a way to drop something, and become part of the greater good. There is reassurance in that: you feel like you belong with these people, and you all create this feeling. Sometimes I worry that this won’t happen, but when people come together to dance, it’s inevitable. It’s a combination of the endorphins and the kind of power that occurs when people are together in church or at a football game: your emotions get on the same page as everyone else, and it feels joyous! If you’re on the dance floor, you can fly high all night! (2015)

Conclusion: Gay Dancing Today and Tomorrow As Frank’s testimony corroborates, although disco may have been pronounced dead by some in the late 1970s, improvised social dancing in gay dance clubs continues to structure and enhance the social lives of many GLBTQ people today. Scholars in the past few decades have also speculated about this at length. Referring to the disco legacy manifested by 1990s House music, Brian Currid writes: House is a celebration of a continuous history of gay community identity [ … ] Built around the reconfiguration of the sounds and styles of disco, House serves as a site where queers create historical narratives of community across time and space. (1995, 173)

In their respective studies of more recent underground gay dance scenes, scholars Fiona Buckland and Mickey Weems explore the powerful sentiments, modes of interrelating, and cultural codes of behavior and spirituality that have been passed down to subsequent generations of gay dancers, regardless of whether the term disco is still in use (Buckland 2002; Weems 2008). Buckland’s rich ethnographic study describes the prolific gay/​ queer nightlife in New York City in the 1990s. Rather than characterizing the subjects of her study in terms of ethnicity, Buckland uses the phrase “queer lifeworlds” in order to describe the practices, worldviews, customs, and relationships that I am referring to here in terms of ethnogenesis. Articulating the ability of dance to evoke the shared historical memory that characterizes and reflects what I am referring to as a gay ethnicity, Buckland posits dance as a means of storytelling that helps construct these “queer lifeworlds”: Participants on the dance floor used their experiences of dancing with others to understand, embody, and perform themselves as queer, balancing individuality with commonality. What was the connection between theaters of memory and improvised social dancing? The nature of improvisation was both an act of fresh creation and a performance of memory. [ … ] Improvised movement in performance revealed layered patterns of cultural history, which were textured in meaning for the improviser. [ … ] Improvisation on the dance floor may [ … ] be seen as a conversation, not only with the other participants, but also with the past. I would also argue

Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco    107 that improvisation was always a conversation with the future [ … ] performed in the moment to moment production of movement. (2002, 34–​35)

In his fascinating study of the gay male international circuit culture of the late 20th and early 21st century, Mickey Weems confirms that traditions from the disco era have survived. Echoing Buckland’s description of the commemorative aspect of fan dancing at the Body Positive T-​Dances of the 1990s (Buckland 2002, 169–​173), Weems links the movement practice of flagging at 21st-​century gay circuit parties to disco:  “Flaggers learn their craft from more seasoned practitioners, thus continuing a tradition that goes back to the fan dancing performed in the early Manhattan-​Fire Island Circuit of the 1970s.” (2008, 51) By articulating his own personal history of gay dance clubbing, another informant that I interviewed echoed Buckland and Weems’ shared hypothesis that the discos of today carry with them a sense of history and culture. Gerry Mullins, an actor in his 50s, spoke about how a recent trip to a gay dance club in Los Angeles, as well as a depiction of dance party in the 2015 HBO drama Looking that he’d recently seen, both reminded him of experiences he’d had in previous eras: On a recent Saturday night jaunt to Oil Can Harry’s, the “disco that time forgot”, I found myself becoming nostalgic. Disco came about at that amazing time when the gay rights movement and personal development were reaching their zenith in the late 70s here in America. We found community on the dance floor and “our people.” Some of us found long term love; others found love for the evening. I recently watched the new season premiere of Looking on HBO. A scene of a dance party in the woods up in Guerneville, CA marks a rite of passage for this group of friends. Dancing together gave them a connection to the past decades of men and women who fled north from San Francisco to escape for a weekend of dance and communion with nature and other homosexuals, to a place where they could be their true and authentic selves. I remember experiencing that feeling with my friends from the Performing Arts High School in Louisville. The City Disco, it was the fall of 1979, and we got in because our friend James was dating the owner. (I believe he had just turned 18!) Once again, we just danced and communed with people like ourselves. In college, it was The Warehouse 28 in Nashville. It’s where I socialized, made friends and raised money for a newly formed AIDS support group called Nashville Cares. The world has changed so much for our community in the past 30 years. I’m sorry that a younger generation is so tethered to their phones. Look up, look up and meet your next best friend/lover/partner on the dance floor! (2015)

Significantly, Mullins’ testimony underscores the way that dance clubs in the 1980s often functioned as both party site and venue for fund-raising for AIDS service agencies. Although scholars like Buckland, Weems, and Christopher Carrington (Carrington 2007) take a relatively nonjudgmental position about the negative/​dystopian13 aspects of queer club/​gay circuit culture in favor of championing the positive psychological experiences that many gay/​queer people feel when dancing en masse with their people, what interests me is the way that disco culture continues to be passed from one generation to

108   Darren Patrick Blaney the next. Although a younger crowd at a queer dance club might have little interest or knowledge of their “gay ancestors” (as anecdotal evidence of this, a colleague recently told me of meeting a young gay man who had “never heard of pioneering gay rights activist Harry Hay, but who loved to go out dancing at gay bars”), they are carrying on a tradition of improvised social dance that has been a hallmark of gay life for decades if not centuries. Consider another 28 year old informant’s experience. David Zaret is Miami-based gay activist, who has dedicated countless hours to the political fight for bringing equal marriage rights to Florida. His experience of release on the dance floor demonstrates the way that this culture is still relevant for young gay people today: On the dance floor, there is a feeling of solidarity and common identity, a feeling of liberation. Freedom to move, express myself, and let the music take control. When I’m on the dance floor with other gay people, I feel I can be me. I recall a tea dance, which for me is as close as I’ll ever get to Studio 54. As ABBA pulsed from the speakers, I was surrounded by men with their hands in the air. Dancing, and moving to the music, some waving colorful flags to the beat. When “gay anthems” (author’s note: the use of this phrase itself can be seen as further evidence that the disco milieu is often thought of in terms that evoke a sense of ethnicization) play and the crowd goes wild, the energy surges through my body. It’s as if it was choreographed: we all jump, and move together, almost as if we’re in a trance! We’re possessed by the music, and the feeling of being in like company. It’s a wonderful feeling. (2015)

In this essay, it has been my intention to draw attention to the way that improvised social dance has been instrumental in not only the structuring of numerous generations of gay individuals’ social lives but, more importantly, in the formation of a distinctive gay ethnicity that potentially transcends racial and/​or national categorization.14 In conclusion, I’d like to draw attention to a famous quotation by Arthur Bell, an early Gay Activists Alliance leader, who remarked that we cannot “dance our way to liberation.” (Gorton 2010) I might counter that in the early 21st century, when liberated sexuality has become a marketing tool for corporate America, and the gay community has been known to set its political focus on (1) the right to openly participate in American imperialist military operations with the cessation of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and (2) the right to enter a societal institution that has historically been used to disempower women, ensure the perpetuation of future generations of heterosexuals, and facilitate gender inequity and capitalist production; perhaps improvised social dance might be the only human activity available through which our gay/​queer people could possibly achieve true liberation, if only for a few hours on a Saturday night after one pays the cover charge. Even if it isn’t, we can certainly continue to dance together on our way there.

Note 1. Since writing this thick description in 2010, MJ’s has since closed. The last dance party it hosted occurred on March 29, 2014. Some former patrons of MJ’s now dance together at venues such as Akbar in Silver Lake, or other clubs in West Hollywood or the greater

Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco    109 Los Angeles area. However, the closing of MJ’s after this writing has without doubt had an impact on the local gay residents, as it was one of the most popular venues for dancing in the Silver Lake neighborhood for decades. 2. Though the “disco concept” I am discussing in this chapter might occupy a less central space in the construction of lesbian identity than it does in gay male culture (the radical feminist “queercore” punk scene centered in San Francisco and Portland, OR and/​or the Michigan Womyn’s festival of folk music are examples of cultural forms that may play a more central role in some lesbians’ identity formation than “disco” per se), my observations over the past two decades indicate to me that it does serve a comparable social function. For example, I spent a few months in 1992 working as a bouncer at the North Star, a lesbian dance bar in Northampton, a small college town in rural Massachusetts. Though the scene there was perhaps less flashy and somewhat earthier than the scene at MJ’s I am describing here, the room was similarly dimly and colorfully lit, the attractive bartenders were quite busy serving alcoholic beverages to thirsty patrons seeking a sense of camaraderie and release from the heteronormative culture beyond the walls of the club, and the dance floor was comparably crowded with intermingling groups of dancers. The space also often featured a scantily-​ clad muscular female go-​go dancer atop a platform who attracted lustful attention from the mostly lesbian patrons. The East Village’s infamous 1990s multicultural lesbian club Meow Mix and West Hollywood’s The Palms are other lesbian bars I’ve attended in my extensive fieldwork. Notably, for security reasons, female or male bouncers sometimes refuse entry to men (both straight and gay) at these establishments, depending on their look, company, and presumed intention when entering the bar. 3. Although clubs do often cater to specific subgroups within the GLBTQ community, it is notable that many superficial and social aspects of the scene at The Roxy in New York City in 1995 were remarkably similar to that at Club Universe in San Francisco in 2000 or The Manor in Fort Lauderdale in 2012. Similarly, The Brig in Portland Oregon in 1991 shared many common elements with David’s in Springfield Massachusetts in 2006 or a gay dance club I attended in Malmo Sweden in 2004. Gay dance bars in smaller towns also share commonalities with these larger urban establishments. To understand the important role of gay dance bars for the GLBTQ communities in smaller towns in the southern United States, see the documentary film Small Town Gay Bar directed by Malcolm Ingram. (2007) The spaces portrayed in this film have quite a few things in common with gay dance bars in larger cities, including that they feature spaces for socializing and dancing, go-​go dancers, drag performances, and the ominpresent disco-​influenced underground dance music pumping over the loudspeakers. 4. To define the disco concept, I would like to borrow the definition offered by Kai Fikentscher, which reads as follows: “disco will not refer to the amalgam of sociocultural phenomena comprising music, dance, and style that are often associated with the disco boom or disco fever of the mid-​to-​late 1970s. [ … ] Here, I am concerned with disco as a concept denoting a particular performance environment in which technologically mediated music is responded to via dance by bodies on the dance floor. I call this concept the disco concept.” (2000, 22) 5. In the late 1970s, the punk movement joined other factions in promoting slogans like Kill disco! and Disco sucks! By 1980, even people who enjoyed the music had stopped referring to it with the term disco. The antidisco movement can be attributed in part to its association with marginalized African-​American and gay communities. Because of this, the music had limited appeal to a straight white male audience after its brief mainstream crossover success. For a detailed discussion of the antigay backlash against disco in 1979, see “Discophobia: Antigay Prejudice and the 1979 Backlash against Disco.” (Gillian 2007)

110   Darren Patrick Blaney 6. A recognizable “global queer culture” can be found on many continents, especially in the Americas, Australia, and Europe. Recently, this culture has begun to reach tourist destinations in Asia as well. For a discussion of the emerging queer community in cities such as Jakarta, Padang, and Singapore, see “Glocalqueering in New Asia: The Politics of Performing Gay in Singapore.” (Lim 2005) and “Transnational Discourses and Circuits of Queer Knowledge in Indonesia” (Blackwood 2008). 7. Although the musical form known as disco originated in African American culture (Fikentscher 2000, 23–​26) and can trace its tonal and rhythmic roots to African American and Latin musical forms (Brewster 1999, 127–​128), disco as a concept and lifestyle was arguably born at the intersection of African-​American, gay, and Latino cultures. (Lawrence 2003; Lawrence 2009, 201; Brewster 1999, 124–​164) (Fikentscher 2000, 23–​29) Disco music was embraced by gay culture in the late 1960s/​early 1970s and has served as a mode of cultural (and I would argue “ethnic”) expression in gay life ever since. The appropriations, disidentifications, and/​or erasures that may or may not occur when white gay men identify with African American female singers while listening to disco lyrics raise questions that I do not have the space to address in this essay, except to briefly note that the 1970s gay liberation movement was deeply indebted to and modeled after the black civil rights movement of the 1960s. As such, there are numerous possible points of historical intersection and/​or rupture between these communities that could be analyzed in detail in another forum. For a deconstruction of some of these issues as they are played out on the dance floor, see Brian Currid’s “ ‘We Are Family’: House Music and Queer Performativity.” 8. For detailed summaries, these recent developments in biological science as well as a discussion of their potentially dangerous flaws, see: Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene (Brookley 2002). 9. Dereka Rushbrook also wrote about the ethnicization of gay neighborhoods in terms of marketing and tourism in her 2002 essay (Rushbrook 2002). 10. For detailed discussions of the limitations of embracing an ethnic model in gay politics, see Cathy Cohen’s “Straight Gay Politics: The Limits of an Ethnic Model of Inclusion” (1997) and Steven Seidman’s “Identity and Politics in a ‘Postmodern’ Gay Culture.” (1993) Both articles explain how the exclusion of subgroups within gay/​queer culture that are marginalized (via their class, gender, or race) renders the monolithic ethnic model problematic in gay politics. Also see Buckland (2002, 5, 9, 87–​89). For a thorough deconstruction of the intersection of race and sexual orientation specifically with regard to underground gay and African American dance communities, see Brian Currid’s “ ‘We are Family’: House Music and Queer Performativity.” (1995) With my discussion of gay ethnicity, I do not intend to ignore earlier critiques of gay/​queer culture that focus on the intersections between gay/​ queer identity and race, class, gender, or other ethnic disidentifications. (Muñoz 1999) I do, however, intend to move beyond some of the identity politics that have fractured our community. For me, the diversity within gay/​queer culture in terms of race, class, gender, age, and so on has always been one of its positive attributes about which I have felt the most gay pride. Indeed, one salient observation regarding my first trip to a gay dance bar in Greenwich Village in 1989 involved its diversity in terms of race and class. I remember thinking that this space in particular was a space in which social mixing and personal intimacy between diverse races, classes, ages, and ethnicities seemed to occur with more frequency than in most other public spaces. Entering this “queer lifeworld” (Buckland, 2002, 2–​6) for the first time after coming out, it occurred to me that I now shared a mark of identity with men of other races, classes, and ages in a way that could facilitate a sense of kinship and commonality with them beyond the obvious fact that we were all human beings. I am

Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco    111 here referring to that mark of identity as a sense of gay ethnicity. In the same way that many people in the United States in particular might feel that they straddle several traditional ethnic identities (for example, one might say one is Puerto Rican-​Irish, Jewish-​Italian, or Mexican-​Polish), like the multi-ethnic concept of “American-ness” itself, an identification as "gay" in no way would preclude other ethnic identifications. 11. Used by Chauncey here to describe the shadowy passage into gayness, it is interesting to note that the verb assimilate has been commonly employed to describe the process by which an ethnic group encounters and eventually becomes submerged by a more dominant culture. Used in relation to the transformation and/​or erasure of ethnicities in the United States, assimilation is generally thought of as the process wherein an ethnic group shifts from their ethnic identification to a more general sense of nationalist identity. That the word assimilationist has been used among gay activists for decades to describe (and often frown upon) certain political stances evidences that we see our own community as being a separate culture that is on the fringe of a larger culture that excludes us. It also demonstrates our belief that the dominant heterosexual culture sees our community as something culturally distinct and foreign to it—​in other words, a type of ethnic other. Even in an age in which we are increasingly securing same-​sex marriage rights, the fact that some GLBTQ activists might continue to describe equality-​focused political stances as assimilationist lends credence to the notion that our community resembles other ethnic groups in terms of our self-​categorization and feeling of cultural distinctness from the broader society. 12. Tim Wall perhaps unwittingly refutes Newton’s claim that the Madison originated in the gay community on Fire Island. Wall states that the Madison originated in African American culture and then crossed over to white culture in the 1960s. He explains the crossover of African American dance styles like the Madison and the Twist, a “noncontact couples’ dance,” not only in relation to television shows like American Bandstand, but more specifically in relation to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that declared the unconstitutionality of educational segregation. (2009, 188–​191) 13. For example, the repetitive mechanical monotonous beats that perhaps evoke capitalist industrial production, the ubiquitous body fascism, the predilection for drug and alcohol abuse, the rigid caste system and pecking order based on sexual attractiveness and other superficial attributes, the classism and/​or racism, and so forth. 14. Please see footnote 10.

acknowledgments ** I would like to acknowledge and thank my partner Laurence M. Re for contributing many ideas and stylistic flourishes that have shaped this essay. I would also like to thank Brian Frank, Gerry Mullins, and David Zaret, for generously sharing their personal testimonies with me, and for allowing me to quote them above. Thanks also to my colleague Colleen Quinn, MA for her invaluable insights that have influenced my thinking; Nicole Schlosser, MFA for the time she spent copyediting this manuscript; Professor Anthony Shay for generously suggesting this topic and trusting me to write about it; Norman Hirschy for his patience and advice, Professor Barbara Sellers-Young for her scholarly inspiration and editorial eye, and Professor Leonard Pronko for his kind encouragement.

112   Darren Patrick Blaney

Bibliography Altman, Dennis. “The Birth of a Gay Culture” In The Homosexualization of America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1982, 146–​171. Blackwood, Evelyn. “Transnational Discourses and Circuits of Queer Knowledge in Indonesia.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 4 (2008): 481–​507. Blasius, Mark. “An Ethos of Lesbian and Gay Existence.” Political Theory 20 no. 4: (1992): 642–​671. Brewster, Bill and Frank Broughton. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey New York: Grover Press, 1999. Bronski, Michael. Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility. Boston: South End Press, 1984. Bronski, Michael, ed. Pulp Friction. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003. Brookley, Robert Alan. Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002. Brubaker, Rogers. “Ethnicity without Groups.” In Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Minority Rights, edited by Stephen May, Tariq Modood, and Judith Squires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 50–​77. Buckland, Fiona. Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-​Making. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. Carrington, Christopher. “Circuit Culture: Ethnographic Reflections on Inequality, Sexuality, and Life on the Gay Party Circuit.” In Sexual Inequalities and Social Justice, edited by Teunis, Niels and Gilbert Herdt. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2007, 123–​147. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-​1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Cohen, Cathy J. “Straight Gay Politics:  The Limits of an Ethnic Model of Inclusion.” In Ethnicity and Group Rights, edited by Shapiro, Ian and Will Kymlicka. New  York and London: New York University Press, 1997, 572–​616. Crowley, Mart. The Boys in the Band. New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1968. Currid, Brian. “ ‘We Are Family’:  House Music and Queer Performativity.” In Cruising the Performative:  Interventions into the Representation of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Sexuality (Unnatural Acts), edited by Philip Brett, Sue-​Ellen Case, and Susan Leigh Foster. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, 165–​196. D’Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-​1970. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. Duberman, Martin. Stonewall. New York, Dutton: Penguin Books, 1993. Dudley, Jane. “The Mass Dance.” in New Theatre (December 1934): 17. Epstein, Steve. “Gay Politics, Ethnic Identity: The Limits of Social Constructionism.” In Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, edited by Edward Stein. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Originally published in Socialist Review 93/​ 94 (May-​August 1987): 9–​54. Fikentscher, Kai. “You Better Work!” Underground Dance Music in New York City. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Frank, Brian. Interview with the author, 11 January 2015. Gillian, Frank. “Discophobia: Antigay Prejudice and the 1979 Backlash against Disco.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15, no. 2 (May 2007): 276–​306. Gorton, Don. “On the Origins of ‘Gay Pride’.” The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide: (July-​ August 2010): 5.

Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco    113 Hay, Harry. “A Separate People Whose Time Has Come.” In Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning, edited by Mark Thompson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987, 279–​291. Holleran, Andrew. Dancer from the Dance. New York: William and Morrow and Company, Inc., 1978. Lawrence, Tim. “Beyond the Hustle:  1970s Social Dancing, Discotheque Culture, and the Emergence of the Contemporary Club Dancer.” In Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake:  A  Social Dance Popular Reader, edited by Jule Malnig. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009, 199–​216. Lawrence, Tim. Love Saves the Day: A history of American dance music culture, 1970-​1979. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Lim, Eng-​Beng. “Glocalqueering in New Asia: The Politics of Performing Gay in Singapore.” Theatre Journal , no. 57 3 (October 2005): 383–​405. Miller, Neil. “Sex and Music in the Seventies.” In Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present. New York: Alyson Books, 2006, 392–​400. Mullins, Gerry. Personal correspondence with the author, 13 January 2015. Muñoz, José. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Murray, Stephen O. “The Institutional Elaboration of a Quasi-​ ethnic Community.” International Review of Modern Sociology 9 (July 1979): 165–​177. Nagel, Joane. “Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture.” In New Tribalisms: The Resurgence of Race and Ethnicity, edited by Michael W. Hughey. New York: New York University Press, 1998, 237–​272. Newton, Esther. Fire Island:  Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Norton, Rictor. Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700-​1830. East Haven, CT: GMP, 1992. Rushbrook, Dereka. “Cities, Queer Space, and the Cosmopolitan Tourist.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, no. 1-​2 (2002): 183–​206. Savage, Dan. The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family. New York: Dutton, 2005. Schermerhorn, Richard. “Ethnicity and Minority Groups.” In Ethnicity, edited by J. Hutchinson. and Anthony D. Smith. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 17–​18. Seidman, Steven. “Identity and Politics in a ‘Postmodern’ Gay Culture.” In Fear of a Queer Planet:  Queer Politics and Social Theory, edited by Michael Warner. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, 105-​142. Small Town Gay Bar Directed by Malcolm Ingram. New York: Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD. Wall, Tim. “Rocking Around the Clock: Teenage Dance Fads from 1955 to 1965.” In Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake:  A  Social Dance Popular Reader, edited by Jule Malnig. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009, 182–​198. Weber, Max. “Ethnic Groups.” In New Tribalisms:  The Resurgence of Race and Ethnicity, edited by Michael W. Hughey. New York: New York University Press, 1998, 17–​30. Weems, Mickey. The Fierce Tribe: Masculine Identity and Performance in the Circuit. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2008. Wray, B. J. “Choreographing Queer:  Nationalism, Citizenship, and Lesbian Dance Clubs.” In Dancing Bodies, Living Histories, edited by Lisa Doolittle and Anne Flynn. Alberta, Canada: The Banff Center Press, 2000, 22–​47. Zaret, David. Personal correspondence with the author, 13 January 2015.

Chapter 5

Dancing M u lt i pl e Ident i t i e s  Preserving and Revitalizing Dances of the Skolt Sámi Petri Hoppu

This chapter examines the role of the traditional dance of the Skolt Sámi in Finland in constructing and producing identity. The Skolt Sámi, or sä’mmlaž as they call themselves, are a small but culturally and linguistically distinct group of the Eastern Sámi. Originally their lands spanned a wide area, from Lake Inari in Finland eastward to the Russian city of Murmansk by Kola Bay. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, Skolt households would move with their reindeer along ancient migration routes from winter villages to spring, summer, and autumn residences within their indigenous-​ controlled communities, called siida. Today most of the Skolts live near Lake Inari in Finnish Lapland. They were relocated there when Finland lost their homelands in the Pechenga region to the Soviet Union after World War II. The relocated Skolts settled in the villages of Sevettijärvi, Näätämö, Keväjärvi, and Nellim, where they continue to maintain their traditional practices and keep the Skolt language alive, although all of them speak Finnish as well. Most of the remaining 700 Skolts live in the Finnish municipality of Inari, as well as elsewhere in Finland, some on the Norwegian side of the border, and only a few Skolts remain in Russia. The Skolts together with other Sámi have experienced a cultural renaissance since the 1970s; as a result, they have achieved recognized status as a minority group. In a way, all the Sámi have succeeded in creating a new, positive identity, which they can be proud of, whereas it was common as late as the early 1970s that young Skolts, for example, tried to hide their identity when they were in contact with other ethnic groups (Ingold 1976, 183–​185). However, the question of identity is far from self-​evident. Identity can be seen as both a separate quality as an object and as an appraisal of the object relative to other objects. An individual’s identity is consequently also pluralistic and multiple; it is attained and maintained by constant self-​definition and self-​estimation, and it expresses

Dancing Multiple Identities    115 one’s ego, which is attained through social development. Ethnic identity is a part of social identity, stressing language, culture, and worldview as the true manifestation of identity (Graff 2005, 38; Pentikäinen 1995, 22). The modern view of Sámi and Skolt identities can be seen as an ongoing process. Identity is in certain ways created all the time, changing through time and history. Sámi researcher Rauna Kuokkanen points out that identities are migrating (Lehtola 2002, 86). Similarly, Stuart Hall (1996) emphasizes people’s routes, the different points by which they have come to be now, while examining their identities. These routes hold people in places, but not in the same place. According to Hall, identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language, and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not who we are, but rather what we might become, how we have been represented, and how that affects the ways in which we might represent ourselves: “Identities are therefore constituted within, not outside representation. They relate to the invention of tradition as much as to tradition itself, which they oblige us to read not as an endless reiteration but as ‘the changing same’: not the so-​called return to roots but a coming-​to-​ terms-​with our ‘routes’ ” (1996, 4). The contemporary Skolts’ identities can be seen as a process that reflects upon the historical and cultural routes of this people. There is and has not been one Skolt identity; rather, the Skolts’ identities are meeting points where subjective and collective histories and experiences mingle. Today the multiple identities of the Skolts are actualized in many ways—​including in language, music, and clothing—​but perhaps most distinctively in their dancing. Their dancing traditions separate them to some extent from other Sámi in Finland and simultaneously connect them to Northern Russian culture. Dancing and dances belong to the routes of the Skolts’ culture, and today dancing provides new possibilities for them to construct their ethnic identity.

The Sámi The Sámi people are one of the indigenous peoples of Northern Europe. Until the second half of the twentieth century they were usually called Lapps, but today the indigenous term Sámi is used. The Sámi languages are Uralic languages and are closest to the Baltic-​Finnic languages (Finnish, Estonian). The Sámi can today be divided into nine languages: South Sámi, Ume Sámi, Pite Sámi, Lule Sámi, North Sámi (the strongest one), Aanaar Sámi, Skolt Sámi, Kildin Sámi, and Ter Sámi. The last four belong to the Eastern Sámi language group (Pentikäinen 1995, 75–​79). Moreover, there were at least two more Eastern Sámi languages, which have disappeared: Kemi Sámi in the nineteenth century and Akkala Sámi at the beginning of the twenty-​first century (Pentikäinen 1995, 75; Rantala 2011, 189–​191). Many of the existing Sámi languages are endangered: in 2010 only two people spoke Ter Sámi, approximately ten Ume Sámi, and twenty Pite Sámi as their native language (Nilsen 2010).

116   Petri Hoppu The Sámi are the only ethnic group in the European Union to be recognized as an aboriginal people. They are a minority living in four countries. The estimated population of Sámi people is between 60,000 and 100,000 depending on who is included, which is not self-​ evident. More than half of the Sámi actually speak Sámi languages, which are so distinct that speakers of different Sámi languages usually cannot understand each other. The region where the Sámi have lived in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia is called Sápmi (see Figure 5.1). The Sámi identity is often defined through their livelihood, which is typically connected to reindeer herding by non-Sámi (see Lehtola 2002, 27). The reindeer have indeed played a significant role in Sámi economy and culture for thousands of years, but not all Sámi are or have been reindeer herders (Lehtola 2002, 10). Today reindeer herding has become a characteristic feature of the Sámi (Lehtola 2002, 27). According to Tim Ingold, taming reindeer has taken place since unidentified antiquity, when the Sámi were hunters and fishermen. Tamed reindeer were originally used as beasts of burden, providers of milk, and decoys in hunting other reindeer (Ingold 1976, 17). Intensive reindeer keeping emerged first in

Figure 5.1  Sápmi and the distribution of current Sámi languages at the beginning of the twentieth century: 1 South, 2 Ume, 3 Pite, 4 Lule, 5 North, 6 Aanaar, 7 Skolt, 8 Kildin, 9 Ter. http://​ en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​File:Corrected_​sami_​map_​4.PNG

Dancing Multiple Identities    117 the mountains of Sweden, probably in the fifteenth century: small groups of reindeer were herded, reindeer milk was used, and calving was controlled (Lehtola 2002, 26). The period of intensive reindeer herding was one of transition between the ancient Sámi culture and the modern capitalist incarnation that has produced the extensive model of reindeer herding so prevalent today (Munves n.d.). The extensive system of reindeer herding has developed since the seventeenth century, as the number of tamed reindeer started to grow. Extensive reindeer herding reached its apex in the 1960s, when the Sámi both confronted the destruction of reindeer pastureland and were influenced by new technologies that would drastically change reindeer herding. The three most important factors in this development were the deterioration of pastures, the adoption of the snowmobile, and the growth of the commercial market for reindeer products (Ingold 1976, 29). Reindeer herding still has both symbolic and economical significance for the Sámi, but today, for example, in Finland not more than one in every five Sámi owns reindeer, and even fewer get their main income from reindeer herding (Lehtola 2002, 10). The traditional livelihoods—​herding, fishing, and hunting—​no longer have a dominant position; the Sámi have to a great extent an economic structure similar to those of the majority of the populations in their respective countries. Furthermore, the Sámi no longer live only in Sápmi, and it has been said that the biggest Sámi villages today are Oslo, Helsinki, and Stockholm, the capitals of Norway, Finland, and Sweden (Lehtola 2002, 86). It is clear that under these circumstances, the traditional economy and livelihood cannot be considered the only source of identity, but expressions of Sámi identity most often take place in different forums. The Sámi are willing to maintain their identity, even if they no longer lived in their homeland. Their culture has expanded in modern Nordic society, reaching new forums and forms, for example in popular music and visual arts. (Jouste 2006, 304–307; Hautala-Hirvioja 2013). Interestingly, dance very seldom plays any significant role in contemporary Sámi culture, and it is often claimed that the Sámi, referring to Western Sámi, have not had traditional dance culture. Even if historical evidence clearly prove this is not correct (e.g. Whitelocke 1777, 385–386), dancing has not become a visible manifestation of Sámi identity. Yet the Skolt Sámi make a distinct exception in this respect.

Skolt History The Skolts represent a special case in Sámi culture, since their homeland was situated between Western and Eastern cultures in Northern Europe. From the sixteenth century until 1920 a great majority of Skolts were under Russian rule, which is clearly visible in their culture, essentially in dancing. The first Orthodox monastery was founded in the heart of the Skolts’ region in the mid-​1500s, and although it was destroyed by the Finns at the end of that century, the Orthodox religion and church became an integral part of Skolt society and culture (Linkola and Sammallahti 1995, 47–​48). The Skolts’ original homeland consisted of seven siidas, which were situated mostly in present-​day Russia but partly also in Norway and Finland. They were the indigenous

118   Petri Hoppu population of the area. Over the course of several centuries, other people moved into the area: Russians, Karelians, other Sámi from Norway, Finns, and even some Komi from the East. These immigrant groups impacted the living conditions of the indigenous inhabitants and constituted a hindrance to their lifestyle, which was based on a yearly migration pattern. This migration cycle was determined by fishing opportunities, and reindeer herding was adjusted to their fishing activities (“From Petsamo to Inari” 2003). Since there were no established borders in Sápmi until the eighteenth century, the Skolts could migrate freely among their family areas for centuries. However, in 1852 the border between Norway and Russia was closed, leaving one of the Skolts’ siidas on the Norwegian side of the border and severing relations between them and other Skolts (Linkola and Sammallahti 1995, 48–​51). The next dramatic change took place in 1920, when the Peace Treaty of Tartu between Finland and Soviet Russia was signed. According to the treaty, the border was drawn as a straight line through the Skolts’ homeland: three siidas came mainly under Finnish jurisdiction and three under Soviet rule. After 1920 only the Skolts of the Suonjel (Finnish: Suonikylä) siida could follow the migration pattern and move among their traditional family areas—​the winter, spring, summer, and autumn residences—​even if the village lost part of its native lands. Suonjel had a special status in Finland between the world wars, and it was protected against agricultural colonization. The inhabitants of Suonjel could continue reindeer husbandry, hunting and fishing as the source of their livelihood (see Figure 5.2). Two other Skolt villages on the Finnish side of the border, Paaccjokk (Paatsjoki) and Peäccam (Petsamo), were not protected, which meant that the traditional livelihood broke down and the inhabitants had to adapt to the values

Figure 5.2  Men of Suenjel with their sleds and reindeers ready to transport cargo. Photo: Karl Nickul 1936. Finland's National Board of Antiquities, Helsinki.

Dancing Multiple Identities    119 and customs of a new society (Lehtola 2002, 66). In the Soviet Union the collectivization process destroyed the traditional society of the Skolts when all the Soviet Sámi were relocated in eleven kolkhozy together with other inhabitants of the area (Mustonen and Mustonen 2011, 88). Finally, World War II devastated the Finnish Skolts’ lives as well. The outbreak of the Finnish Winter War in 1939 forced the Sámi of the Pechenga area to flee in the first evacuation. In 1944, during the next phase of the war in Finland—​the Continuation War—​ all the Sámi of the Petsamo area were evacuated to Ostrobothnia in Central Finland. The Skolts were able to return to the north in 1945 and 1946 (“From Petsamo to Inari” 2003). According to the peace treaties in Moscow (1944) and Paris (1947), the Skolt homelands were ceded to the Soviet Union. After a few years’ planning, the Skolts were settled in the eastern parts of the municipality of Inari in the Nellim, Keväjärvi, and Sevettijärvi-​ Näätämö areas. They got their first new permanent homesteads in the late 1940s. In their new settlement areas they could not continue their traditional annual migration, which resulted in a dramatic change in the Skolts’ livelihood from that practiced in Pechenga. Similarly, many of the Skolt Sámi traditions started to break down when the old homelands were lost. In Inari, the Skolt Sámi newcomers suffered from discrimination by the Finnish population but also other Sámi groups, Aanaar and North Sámi, living in the area. Typically young people wanted to hide their ethnic origin and give up all its external signs, such as the traditional Skolt Sámi costume or Skolt language (Lehtola 2002, 66–​67). Skolt Sámi spirit and ethnic pride began to strengthen in the 1970s, when the Skolt Sámi orthography was created, language lessons were organized, and books in the Skolt language were printed. Skolt Sámi traditions, like handicraft, dances, and music, were taught and passed on to the younger generation. Finally, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, contacts with the Sámi on the Kola Peninsula were reinstated after seventy years of separation (“Skolt Sámi Today” 2003/​2009). Today the Skolt youth relate to the Skolt culture as a natural part of their ethnic identity, and more and more of them want to learn the language (Lehtola 2002, 67). Still, there are problems related to the changing society and economy, as many young people move away from their home villages. It has become a major challenge in the Skolt community to figure out how to maintain contacts with those Skolts living elsewhere in Finland (“Skolt Sámi Today” 2003/​2009). Traditional dances, mainly the quadrille, have proved to be an effective way to increase emigrated Skolts’ interest towards their identity, and therefore, the Skolts’ have begun to teach the quadrille as far as in Helsinki (Moshnikoff 2014).

Religion and Culture As previously noted, the Skolts, like most other Eastern Sámi, are Eastern Orthodox, and one can find a strong Russian influence in their culture, although they have also preserved ancient traditions, especially in their music. The Orthodox religion has been

120   Petri Hoppu a unifying factor in Skolt culture. The festivities celebrating the tradition of the patron saint Trifon have brought residents together, which has had a great significance in maintaining Skolt culture since the war. In August a pilgrimage ceremony is held in Näätämö and Sevettijärvi, where the main Christmas celebrations are also conducted. In February ceremonies are held in Nellim. The Orthodox Church there has chosen to use the Skolt language (Lehtola 2002, 67). What characterizes the present Skolt culture, in addition to the language, are Skolts’ leu’dd singing, which is different from the more famous Northern Sámi jojk singing; traditional group and couple dances dating back to the late nineteenth century; and traditional clothing. The Skolts preserved these traditions as they were evacuated to the West in the 1940s, and although they were endangered during the decades after the war, today they are widely appreciated, both inside and outside the Skolts community, as the Skolts attempt to maintain their unique ethnic identity. The Skolts have a rich musical tradition, which consists of ancient le’udds and laments, which are called reäkk, as well as other songs that exhibit influences from various areas, particularly Russia but also Finland, Norway, and Karelia. As noted, the le’udds are the most distinctive part of the Skolts’ musical tradition. Le’udds are epic songs that describe the events of a certain person’s life. Typically these events are highlights such as proposing or getting married. Although le’udds are often performed in the first person, they seldom refer to the actual singer’s experiences. Le’udds are strongly collective, and most often they deal with stories or persons who are communally known (Jouste 2006, 295–​297). The most typical feature in performing the le’udds is variation, which is so extensive that it is difficult to speak about le’udd melodies: every performance is, in a way, unique, but in the background there is a melodic model that characterizes each le’udd. Rhythm is sometimes regular, sometimes irregular, and the length of the verses is free. The performance of le’udds is always a creative event (Laitinen 1981, 196–​197). Although the le’udds belong to ancient tradition, they were connected to dance culture in the late nineteenth century, and they could be used as accompaniment for dancing; for example, le’udd texts could be connected to quadrille melodies. However, if there was someone with an accordion or mouth organ at a dance event, instrumental accompaniment was preferred. Accordions, mouth organs, and gramophones were common among the Skolts before World War II. In addition to le’udds, other dance songs have survived, for example as a part of popular singing games (Jouste 2006, 301).

Traditional Dances and Games Unlike most other Sámi groups, the Skolts have danced popular couple and group social and ballroom dances since the second half of the nineteenth century. According to many descriptions, dancing was a very important form of entertainment for them when they lived in their winter villages in their original homeland. The Skolts’ dance

Dancing Multiple Identities    121 culture has a great many features in common with Karelian and Northern Russian dance cultures, and to some extent even with the Northern Finns. It is obvious, however, that most of their traditional dances, if not all, have come from Russian Karelia and Russia. Similar dances have been known among other Sámi in Kola Peninsula as well. Among all of them the Russian influence has been remarkable due to the Orthodox religion and Russian military service before 1917, as well as numerous contacts with Russian merchants. Dancing has strongly characterized the Skolts’ embodied culture and multiple ethnic identities, and it is still one of the most visible and vital forms of Skolt culture. Despite many descriptions from the early twentieth century, it was not until the late 1970s that the Skolts’ traditional dances were documented in detail. A  Finnish folklorist and folk dance researcher, Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa; her husband, physical education teacher Esko Rausmaa; and etnomusicologist Heikki Laitinen recorded Skolts’ dances in their home villages as well as at the folk music festival in Kaustinen in 1978 and 1979 (KRA Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa 1978/​1979). The documented dances can be roughly divided into four groups:  square dances, couple dances, circle dances, and singing games. The quadrille is the best known of the Skolts’ square dances, and it was extremely popular until World War II. After the war it was danced to some extent until the 1950s (Niemeläinen 1982, 35). The quadrille has its origins in French contredanses, and it became extremely popular in European courts, also in Saint Petersburg, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century, the quadrille spread among different social classes and ethnic groups in Russia and finally it reached the Skolts in the north as well. Perhaps more than any other dance the Skolts perform, the quadrille has become emblematic of their ethnic identity. Like many Russian and Karelian quadrilles (Malmi 1993, 15), the Skolts’ quadrille has six figures, and it is danced by four couples. The head couples facing each other always start each figure, and the side couples repeat the same after them. In the first figure couples cross over and back, then swing with a ballroom hold, and finally the ladies cross over and back. The second figure begins with the gentlemen crossing over and back, after which ladies cross over and back. In the third figure the opposite gentlemen turn counterclockwise, holding left hands, and then they take their ladies with them and continue in the same direction, retreating with their ladies to the opposite places and then crossing over to their own places. This same figure is repeated, but this time the ladies begin the figure. The fourth figure is danced by each couple in turn. The couple swings around and raises joined hands, and the opposite gentleman goes under an arch around the couple back to his partner. The opposite couples swing in place. The fifth figure begins with everyone swinging in place, after which the dancers make a circle with the gentlemen facing out. The circle moves counterclockwise and clockwise so that everybody stays on the opposite side. The couples cross over to their places and swing. The same figure is repeated. In the last figure the couples cross over with a ballroom hold, swing in place, and then return and swing. The gentlemen cross over and swing with the opposite lady, cross over with a ballroom hold with her, swing, return, and swing. The gentlemen cross over and swing with their own partners, after which the ladies cross

122   Petri Hoppu over and back. The dance ends with the couples swinging in place (KRA Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa 1978/​1979, 111–​119).1 Sestjorkka is also a dance in a square, but it is quite different from the quadrille. At the beginning there are four dancers standing in a square. They start moving in a figure eight as in a reel. Every time they come back to their own places, they ask someone to join the dance hand in hand. In the course of the dance there will be four lines moving around continuously (KRA Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa 1978/​1979, 120).2 In his description of a Skolt dance event, Samuli Paulaharju (2009, 51) also mentions a square dance called “ristisiirre,” but there is no further information about this dance.3 The documented couple dances originate from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like the quadrille, these dances originate from Russia, and they were known in Finland and Karelia as well. The structure of these dances is very similar. They consist of two to three parts ending with turning in couples or just moving forward in a circle. Kerenski is a two-​step, which begins with four side steps in a ballroom hold counterclockwise and four side steps back.4 After that couples stand hand in hand facing each other, take two step swings and turn around each other, and then repeat the figure. Couples take both hands and move with four walking steps to the center of the circle and repeat the figure by taking four steps back. Finally, the couples turn around with two steps in a ballroom hold (KRA Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa 1978/​1979, 124). Patespa is a waltz beginning with four side steps in a ballroom hold counterclockwise, after which the dancers release the hold and move back, turning around with four waltz steps.5 The same figure is repeated. The couples take two slow walking steps hand in hand counterclockwise, simultaneously turning their backs toward their partners, after which they move sideways, taking a waltz step back and keeping the same position. The couples take two slow walking steps counterclockwise, turning finally toward each other, and take two side steps back. They then take a ballroom hold and dance waltz (KRA Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa 1978/​1979, 125). Interestingly, another dance in 2/​4 meter, Korobushka (Russian: a little basket), has almost an identical structure. However, in addition to the meter, the main difference is that there is no turning at the end of the dance (KRA Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa1978/​1979, 130). The Figure 5.3 shows a Skolt folk dance group dancing Korobushka in the village of Nellim in 1983. Vintjorkka begins with couples holding right hands in hand and facing each other. They cross over with running steps and move their left toes across the right foot, to the left side, and join the feet. The same is repeated. After that, the gentlemen move counterclockwise with slow walking steps, while the ladies swing clockwise with chasse steps (KRA Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa 1978/​1979, 127). A dance that is similar in form is Oira, in which couples dance all the time with a shoulder hold and begin with moving their left and right toes twice diagonally forward and back. After that, they move forward with polka steps (KRA Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa 1978/​1979, 126). The documented couple dances include two polka dances:  Krakoviak and Kuu loistaa (“The Moon Is Shining”). In the former, couples dance first with step swings and

Dancing Multiple Identities    123

Figure 5.3  Skolts dancing Korobushka in the village of Nellim. Photo: Urho Pietilä 1983.

walking steps hand in hand, whereas the latter begins with a set of claps in one’s own and the partner’s hands. Both dances end with polka turning (KRA Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa 1978/​1979, 128–​129). Typically the lyrics of the Skolts’ singing games have been in Russian, since the Russian influence has been strong on Skolts’ music traditions (Jouste 2006, 300). The best known of their singing games is Ay nam ladan (Sowing of buckwheat). Antti Hämäläinen described it in Koltta-​Lappia sanoin ja kuvin (Skolt-​Lapland in words and pictures) as early as in 1938: On the one side of the room as many men as possible made a row. They were almost twenty! Likewise, even women gathered together on the opposite side. When the rows were ready, the men rushed in as a tight front hands in hand towards the women, stamping strongly with their feet. As an accompaniment everybody in the room—​ even those not taking part in the game—​men and women in turn, sang a monotonic song, and many of them had no clue either about the words or the melody. Men [sang] stamping their feet:  ‘We shall sow a buckwheat field.’ And while retreating, they repeated the verse. Women rushed towards the men hand in hand, as well:  ‘We shall trample the sowing.’ Men intended to catch the evildoers, while women intended to redeem them.

124   Petri Hoppu [Men:]  “How are you going to pay for them? [Women:]  With gold and silver. [Men:]  We don’t care for gold, silver. [Women:]  What shall we leave as a pledge?” Then the men threatened to take—​the most beautiful one—​as a pledge! Having heard this, women ran hands in hand as a chain behind the men’s line. (…) The last two men lifted their hands as a gate through which the whole group of women had to go.—​Then in front of the last woman the gate was closed, so the problem [of the pledge] was solved. Women—​with one less—​made a new row by their wall, and the whole group of men began their rush from the beginning. The game was repeated as long as the last “most beautiful one” was taken as a pledge. (1938, 106–​110; see also KRA Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa 1978/​1979, 119–​120)6

Okkolduuna is a singing game, which begins with one female dancer. In her hand she has a handkerchief, which she waves in the air while dancing. After a while she asks anothe person to dance with her, and this one asks a third one, and so forth, until there is a long chain moving in a circle on the floor. The first dancer begins to go through gates of other dancers so that finally everybody’s hands are crossed. Then she does the same in the opposite direction, and the hands are straightened. In the end the chain moves in a circle and dancers leave it one at a time. The lyrics are in Russian in this game as well (KRA Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa 1978/​1979, 121). Obsikruugi is a circle dance that ends in a lengthwise formation (gentlemen and ladies in two opposite lines). The dance begins with a circle with polka steps clockwise and counterclockwise. Couples swing in place in a ballroom hold with polka steps clockwise, in a grand chain until one reaches one’s own partner, then swing in place counterclockwise. The whole set is repeated, but with the dancers moving in opposite directions. Then the same figures are danced again, but instead of a grand chain, dancers perform an elbow swing with each other, moving forward in the circle until one reaches one’s own partner. After this a circle is performed once again the same as at the beginning, but ending in a lengthwise formation. In this formation dancers dance four side steps to the gentleman’s right and back. The couples take both hands in hand and starting from one end of the formation, they begin to dance forward and back with polka steps moving up and down in the formation. The side steps and moving in the formation are repeated, but with the latter figure beginning from the other end. In the last part of the dance, couples dance first with side steps as previously, then join hands making an arch, under which they dance one after the other. The side steps and arch are repeated, but the arch is made in the opposite direction (KRA Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa 1978/​1979, 131–​133).7 In sum, it can be stated that the Skolts’ dances and singing games represented cultural plurality, in which foreign influences were integrated to local habits. Dances and dance music existed alongside ancient le’udds and laments, and they can be seen as having

Dancing Multiple Identities    125 equally constructed Skolts’ ethnic identity. New steps and movements did not destroy traditional culture but cultivated and modified it.

From Villages to Festivals Until World War II the period spent in winter villages was a time of lively entertainment. Samuli Paulaharju visited Skolts’ villages in 1914 and described how during the winter months the young people arranged dance events almost every night, gathering in each others’ houses and dancing until the small hours. The most joyful time was the week just before Lent: dancing, drinking, singing, and riding in reindeer sleds continued day and night (Paulaharju 2009, 51). During the Lenten season, as in so many locations in Eastern Europe, dancing was not permitted, and soon after Easter the Skolts left for their spring and summer residences. Thus the period for dancing during a year was not long, but whenever it was possible, it was done with huge enthusiasm, as one can see in this description of the quadrille among the Skolts by Antti Hämäläinen in 1938: It was worth seeing when old bearded men took their wrinkle cheek missuses with dance steps to the middle of the floor in order to dance there a few, sometimes pretty complicated figures—​you know the quadrille—​in front of the opposite couple, and brought their “lady” back to her seat. And this continued incessantly until the small hours, when everybody went to sleep, tired and sweaty, in order to be able to continue the same procedure next evening with new energy. (1938, 99–​103)

The Skolts, like the Karelians, did not have ceremonial or ritual dancing at weddings; the main part of the celebration consisted of eating, drinking, and singing (Paulaharju 2009, 183–​188). However, as the wedding party could last for a long time, young people would gather together from time to time and have some dancing outside the official rituals and ceremonies. The Okkolduuna singing game is particularly mentioned as a popular entertainment on such occasions (Niemeläinen 1983, 24). Skolts’ dances and games were almost completely forgotten during their ten-​year-​ long evacuation during and after World War II. When they were relocated, they did not have a winter village anymore, and they lived quite far apart from each other. Thus it became difficult to arrange traditional dance events, and after a few occasional ones in the 1950s, they disappeared (Niemeläinen 1983, 35). Following the Sámi renaissance in the 1970s, the Skolts began to actively revitalize their dances. Folk dance groups were established, which performed at local feasts but also elsewhere at folklore festivals. During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the Skolts were often seen at the international folk music festival in Kaustinen, the largest such festival in Finland. During the first phase of the revitalization most of the dancers had been born in Pechenga, but only the oldest had performed the dances actively in their youth, and others had learned them as “folk dances” after the war (KRA Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa 1978/​1979, 111).

126   Petri Hoppu

Figure 5.4  Skolt children dancing the quadrille in Inari, 2009. Photo: Harri Nurminen 2009.

Today the quadrille is the best known and most popular of the Skolts’ dances. It is taught regularly, and even Skolt children are obliged to learn it: since the late 1980s it has been part of the elementary curriculum in Sevettijärvi, and it is also common that children perform the quadrille at different events (see Figure 5.4). Active revitalization is necessary to keep the tradition alive, since the dances no longer belong to the repertoire of common dance events. The contacts with Russian Sámi have further strengthened the revitalization process, since their dances and dance activities are similar to the Skolts’ (“Katrillin pyörteissä” n.d.).

Conclusion In addition to leu’dd singing, the quadrille has become emblematic of the Skolt culture, although it is a global dance form, known from the Caribbean Islands to Siberia. As it has become clear, the Skolts’ culture consists of elements from various areas (Finland, Norway, Russia, other Sámi groups), and their quadrille dancing can be seen as a particular form of identification in the midst of a myriad of influences; the quadrille provides a good entry into the Skolts’ multiple identities (see Grau 2007, 193).

Dancing Multiple Identities    127 The Skolts’ quadrille can be seen as a distinctive cultural feature similar to the minuet in some of the Finnish-​Swedish regions (Hoppu 1999) and “röntyskä” dances of the Ingrian Finns living in Northern Ingria near St. Petersburg, Russia (Malmi 1978).8 In all these cases, dances are limited to a small geographical area and among an ethnic and/​or linguistic minority. The ethnic folklore groups in these regions have deliberately wanted to be distinguished from mainstream folk dancers and their repertoires. Skolts, Ingrian Finns, and Finnish-​Swedish minuet dancers have stuck to the dances of their ancestors, yet on the other hand they have wanted to keep them alive in the present rather than regard them as merely historical relics. Therefore, the contexts and concrete situations wherein the dances are and have been performed differ remarkably from what they were in the past, because change over time is inevitable. Especially in the case of Skolts and Ingrian Finns, the societal, cultural, and economic changes have been drastic since the early twentieth century, and both peoples have experienced dispersion from their homelands; this has resulted in the contexts of dancing changing almost completely. Still, despite their dramatic past, diaspora, and discrimination in their new settlements, the Skolts have been able to preserve their culture and distinctive ethnic identities. Their identities are characterized by many points in their social and personal histories, and dancing is a part of the routes they have traveled within these experiences. It can be said that within this present-​day identification process the quadrille has reached a kind of symbolic ethnic status among the Skolts, which is one of the reasons it is still danced, performed and learnt actively. Today there are no more dancers who danced it and other traditional dances in their youth, and the number of Skolts who were born in Pechenga is becoming smaller and smaller. Still, even in its revitalized form, the Skolt quadrille is regarded as a part of embodied local history that claims authenticity through its mode of transmission (see Buckland 2006, 16). The fact that the quadrille is considered as emblematic as the Skolt language and le’udd singing means that it is highly valued as an iconic marker of Skolt ethnic identity. For example, the quadrille was one of the official themes in the workshops of the international Skolt Sámi language and culture conference in Inari in June 2012 (Sanila 2012),x which demonstrates the important ways that dance serves in the construction of ethnic identity. The quadrille is an important part of the Skolt's embodied culture, and even if it has been displaced and relocated, it continues its existence in new contexts from their home villages in Inari to the Finnish capital Helsinki.

Archival Sources Folklore Archives of Finnish Literature Society in Helsinki: KRA Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa KT 517:  111–​135. 1978/​1979. “Skolt Sámi Dances and Games.” Documented by Pirkko-​Liisa Rausmaa, Esko Rausmaa, and Heikki Laitinen in Kaustinen (1978) and Sevettijärvi (1979).

128   Petri Hoppu

Notes 1. The Skolts’ quadrille resembles Karelian and Northern Russian quadrilles, which often have six figures as well. Although there are a number of local variations, many of the figures are almost identical in these quadrilles. However, the formation is more often two opposite lines than a square (Malmi 1978; Rausmaa 2000, 47–​50) 2. A similar dance (Shestjorkka) has been documented in Sumski Posad in Russian Karelia, but it begins with three and ends with nine ladies (Malmi 1993, 56). 3. Even though there is no description of the dance “ristisiirre,” one can assume that it was a square dance, since the name resembles those of many square dances in Finland and Karelia (e.g., ristikontra, ristikko), and Paulaharju mentions it together with the quadrille. 4. Kerenski was an extremely popular dance in Finland and Karelia for a short time at the end of the 1910s. It most likely came from Russia, and it was renamed after the Russian Revolution. Alexander Kerensky was a major political leader after the first Russian revolution in February 1917. After the second revolution in November he had to flee Russia. In Finland someone wrote a satirical song with a two-​step melody about his fate soon after his defeat, and this song gave name to the dance as well. 5. Patespa (originally Pas d’Espagne), Vintjerkka (Vengerka), and Krakoviak were popular couple dances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, known in many local variations with different names in Finland and Karelia. 6. The game is of Russian origin. According to Finnish folklorist Viljo J. Mansikka (1910, 138), the singing game Sowing of Millet was widely known in Russia. The same game was commonly known in both Russian and Finnish Karelia under the names Prossan kylvö (Sowing of millet) and Tsuurun kylvö (Sowing of sand) and with Karelian lyrics (Rausmaa 1984, 133). 7. Both Okkolduuna and Obsikruugi resemble circle dances in Russian and Finnish Karelia. Many of them are called kruuga or ruha, from the Russian word krug (circle) (Rausmaa and Rausmaa 1977, 387; Malmi 1993, 20–​22). 8. Since the early 1990s Ingrian Finns have been allowed to emigrate to Finland under a simplified procedure as returnees; as a result, many folklore groups in Ingria ceased to exist at the end of the decade. However, the emigrants in Finland have established a new group, Tuulistullaa, which continues röntyskä traditions (“Röntyskät” n.d.).

Bibliography Buckland, Theresa Jill. 2006. “Dance, History, and Ethnography.” In Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture, Identities, edited by Theresa J. Buckland, 3–​24. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Graff, Ola 2005. “Kem e du?—​Om joik som identitetsmarkering: Folkmusik och etnicitet.” Folk och musik 11: 30–​42. Grau, Andrée. 2007. “Dance, Identity, and Identification Processes in the Postcolonial World. In Dance Discourses:  Keywords in Dance Research, edited by Susanne Franco & Marina Nordera, 189–​207. London & New York: Routledge. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “Introduction:  Who Needs ‘Identity’?” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, 1–​17. London: Sage. Hämäläinen, Antti. 1938. Koltta-​Lappia sanoin ja kuvin. Uutta Lapin lääniä I. Porvoo: WSOY.

Dancing Multiple Identities    129 Hoppu, Petri. 1999. Symbolien ja sanattomuuden tanssi:  Menuetti Suomessa 1700-​luvulta nykyaikaan. Helsinki: SKS. Ingold, Tim. 1976. The Skolt Lapps Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jouste, Marko. 2006. “Suomen saamelaisten musiikkiperinteet.” In Suomen musiikin historia, edited by Anneli Asplund, Petri Hoppu, Heikki Laitinen, Timo Leisiö, Hannu Saha, and Simo Westerholm, 272–​307. Kansanmusiikki. Porvoo: WSOY. Laitinen, Heikki. 1981. “Saamelaisten musiikki.” In Kansanmusiikki, edited by Anneli Asplund and Matti Hako, 179–​198. Helsinki: SKS. Lehtola, Veli-​Pekka. 2002. The Sámi People—​Traditions in Transition. Translated by Linna Weber Müller-​Wille. Aanaar: Kustannus-​Puntsi. Linkola, Martti, and Pekka Sammallahti. 1995. “Koltanmaa, osa Saamenmaata.” In Koltat, karjalaiset ja setukaiset: Pienet kansat maailmojen rajoilla, edited by Tuija Saarinen and Seppo Suhonen, 39–​57. Kuopio: Snellman-​instituutti. Malmi, Viola. 1978. Narodnye tantsy Karelii. Petrozavodsk: Karelija. Malmi, Viola. 1993. Karjalaisen kansantanssin lähteillä. Helsinki: Vapaan Sivistystoiminnan Liitto. Mansikka, Viljo J. 1910. “Laulu Hirssin kylvöstä.” Virittäjä 14, no. 8: 137–​139. Mustonen, Tero, and Kaisu Mustonen, eds. 2011. Eastern Sámi Atlas. Tampere: Snowchange. Niemeläinen, Päivyt. 1983. “Suomalainen kansantanssi.” In Suomalainen kansantanssi, edited by Päivyt Niemeläinen, 19–​51. Helsinki: Otava. Paulaharju, Samuli. 2009. Kolttain mailta. Rev. ed. Helsinki: SKS. (1st ed. 1921). Pentikäinen, Juha. 1995. Saamelaiset: Pohjoisen kansan mytologia. Helsinki: SKS. Rantala, Leif. 2011. “The Story of the Akkala Sámi.” In Eastern Sámi Atlas, edited by Tero Mustonen and Kaisu Mustonen, 188–​191. Tampere: Snowchange. Rausmaa, Esko, ed. 2000. Katrillia tanssimaan! Helsinki: Kansanmusiikin Keskusliitto. Rausmaa, Pirkko-​Liisa. 1984. Ilokerä: Laulutansseja ja piirileikkejä. Helsinki: SKS. Rausmaa, Pirkko-​Liisa and Rausmaa, Esko, eds. 1977. Tanhuvakka. Suuri suomalainen kansantanssikirja. Porvoo: WSOY. Whitelocke, Bulstrode. 1777. Bulstr. Whitelockes Dag–Bok öfver dess ambasade till Sverige åren 1653 och 1654. Upsala: Johan Edman.

Internet Sources “From Petsamo to Inari.” 2003. Siida: Skolt Sámi Life. http://​www.samimuseum.fi/​saamjiellem/​ english/​historia.html (accessed July 20, 2013). Hautala-Hirvioja, Tuija. 2013. “Saamelainen kuvataide Suomessa – kolmen kuvataiteilijasukupolven kautta tarkasteltuna.” Tahiti (4). http://tahiti.fi/04-2013/dossier/saamelainenkuvataide-suomessa-–-kolmen-kuvataiteilijasukupolven-kautta-tarkasteltuna/ (accessed January 2, 2015). “Katrillin pyörteissä.” n.d. Saa’minue’tt. http://​www.saaminuett.fi/​kolttasaamelaiset/​kulttuuri/​ katrillin-​pyorteissa.html (accessed July 20, 2013). Moshnikoff, Minna. 2014. “Helsingissä tanssittiin katrillia.” Kolttauutisia. http://oddaz.saaminuett.fi/2014/09/21/helsingissa-tanssittiin-katrillia/ (accessed January 2, 2015). Munves, Jonathan. n.d. “Reindeer Herding in Finland.” Sami Culture. http://​www.utexas.edu/​ courses/​sami/​diehtu/​siida/​herding/​herding-​fi.htm (accessed July 20, 2013). Nilsen, Thomas. 2010. “Sami Languages Disappear.” Barents Observer. http://​barentsobserver. com/​en/​sections/​society/​sami-​languages-​disappears (accessed July 20, 2013).

130   Petri Hoppu “Röntyskät.” n.d. Virtuaali-​Inkeri. http://​www.inkeri.com/​Virtuaali/​Toksovo/​Rontsykat.htm (accessed July 20, 2013). Sanila, Tanja. 2012. “Koltansaamen kielen ja kulttuurin konferenssi 14.–​15.6.2012.” Kolttauutisia. http://​oddaz.saaminuett.fi/​2012/​06/​01/​koltansaamen-​kielen-​ja-​kulttuurin-​konferenssi-​14-​ 15-​6-​2012-​2 (accessed March 19, 2014). “The Skolt Sámi Today.” 2003/​2009. Siida: Skolt Sámi life. http://​www.samimuseum.fi/​saamjiellem/​english/​nykypaiva.html (accessed July 20, 2013).

Chapter 6

To Call Dance Ja pa ne se Nihon Buyô as Ethnic Dance Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall

What does it mean for a society to equate performance with national identity? And when a particular kind of dance functions as nationally and culturally representative, how do we unpack the cultural politics and social histories that lie, often occluded, behind that equation? Specifically, what happens when we, in the case of a well-​known tradition from one part of Asia’s continent-​long, eastern archipelago, repeat a nativist claim that kabuki and its dance are especially or even essentially Japanese? In its different sections, this chapter aims to not simply introduce its readers to the elements that comprise the dance associated with kabuki—​a dance called Nihon buyô—​but also to locate how the aggregate of those elements is understood within domestic and global contexts as ethnically Japanese and to interrogate the historic processes through which that dance has come to represent both Japanese ethnic and national identity. The intersection of ethnicity, culture, and nation on the one hand, and dance and performance on the other, is a terrain increasingly well scrutinized by historians and ethnographers. Many chapters in this handbook address these complex but also common politics, relying on work in performance studies accomplished in the 1990s and beyond that has questioned the facile national and ethnocentric logics that dominated much of dance’s presentation across the twentieth century, even within such seemingly transnational practices as either ballet or modern dance. Anthony Shay’s Choreographic Politics argues that dance ensembles, especially national dance companies, “become useful vehicles for the expression of ethnicity and nationalism through the symbolic substitution of movement” (2002, 6). Meanwhile, in her assertion of the possibility of a sociological analysis of American modern dance, Helen Thomas notes that while dance and art “reflected dominant aspects of the idea of American character, they were not exhausted by them, nor did they mirror them in a correspondential sense” (1995, 26). Randy Martin, in Critical Moves, conceives of dance as “foreground[ing] the mobilization of participation that is essential to grasp the dynamics of history, but difficult to notice through the standard means of reckoning with political activity, making dance

132    Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall a key analytic response to develop a critical understanding of society” (1998, 55). As this variety of critical responses suggests, dance can be read as imbued with ethnic and national meanings, as somehow exceeding them, or itself as an analytic tool for inquiry into the society, nation, race, and ethnicity.

Cultural Husbandry and Japanese Dance The Japanese are conservative, we are told: they never let a performing art disappear. True, we can still see performances on the Japanese stage of ancient bugaku [舞楽], a courtly dance often portraying war and peace, or divine animals and birds. Usually paired with the equally historic gagaku [雅楽], the literally “refined” music of the seventh-​century Japanese court, bugaku dance is probably Chinese in origin, although it derives from even older Indian, Central Asian, and East Asian forms (see Figure 6.1). While these performance traditions have largely disappeared in their countries of origin, bugaku dances remain performed in Japan thanks to a pragmatic artistic conservatism—​a kind of Japanese cultural husbandry that circulates around select performance practices, communally keeping them, preserving them for posterity, and also reusing them in new contexts. Such husbandry, even when patriarchal, need not presume rigidity, for traditions must be refashioned when not wholesale invented. Accordingly, bugaku’s ancient material has been regular fodder for emerging structures. In recent history, for example, bugaku has been useful for two nineteenth-​century institutions—​both divine, and both re-​invented: the Shinto-​derived Tenrikyô faith and the Japanese imperial court. In both cases, bugaku dance provides the pomp and circumstance through which the institution claims cultural authority.1 In the last century, the 1958 tour of Japan by the New York City Ballet and a boomerang return visit to the United States by the Imperial Household Gagaku Company in 1959 provided material for George Balanchine’s 1962 ballet Bugaku, set to a score by the vanguardist Japanese composer Mayuzumi Toshiro (cf. Herd 1989). As these examples attest, foreign sources have been important for the earliest history of Japanese dance. Likewise, that early tradition’s recent engagement with European and American traditions can confirm the movement of Japanese dance as not simply corporeal and local, but also conceptual and migratory. Perhaps because of its long history, its strong relation to today’s imperial household, and Balanchine’s thematic and stylistic incorporation of it within the hallowed Western tradition of ballet, those unfamiliar with Japanese dance might be tempted to think of bugaku as a dance tradition that is quintessentially Japanese, importantly representative, or even widely appreciated in Japan. They would be wrong on all counts—​and surprised to learn that bugaku is, to borrow Judith Ann Herd’s observation of its corollary gagaku, “considered by many Japanese, even today, as a foreign form borrowed from China and

To Call Dance Japanese     133

Figure 6.1  17th-​Century Korobase (Bird’s Head) Mask for Bugaku Dance. © Trustees of the British Museum

Korea” (1989, 150). In his useful article “Models of Performance,” James Valentine cautions of the dangers of making cultural generalizations based on a single dance form (1998, 268 cf. Valentine, 1982). Though we might agree with Valentine’s argument, we must note that his point is an easy one to make precisely because the dance around which he constructs his argument is this more marginal bugaku. Even in its heyday, the aristocratic dance of the Heian period (794–​1185), petrified a thousand years ago, was performed only at the court and at Shinto shrines. In contradistinction to bugaku, there couldn’t be a dance more equated with “Japanese-​ness” than Nihon buyô. Even its name—​“Nihon” (日本meaning Japan) + “buyô” (舞踊 meaning dance)—​establishes as parallel the performative movement of the body and what Roland Barthes has called “the interstice without specific edges,” those semiotic markers not of an actual Japan, but “the empty sign” of

134    Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall national identity, of “Japaneseness” (1982, 26). Of course Nihon (or Nippon) refers to Japan, while the formal-​sounding buyô agglutinates the Chinese character 舞, pronounced as either bu or mai, to the character 踊, pronounced yô or odori. The first pronunciation in each of these pairs [bu and yô] indicates a lexeme that is sinic in origin, while the second [mai and odori] has a “native,” Ural-​Altaic etymology that dates to before the waves of seventh-​and eighth-​century Chinese influence. With the formal heaviness of these Chinese-​style pronunciations, the name buyô weds two of the three major classifications of movement within Japanese dance. Buyô, as word and as practice, brings together mai, or dignified, lateral movement and odori, excited, vertical movement. The old sacred and somewhat aristocratic mai, which is most notably exhibited in the classic noh theater and features relatively simple movements comprising dignified steps in straight lines and circling patterns, is complemented by folk-​derived, popular odori, which features more flamboyant movement including leaping and jumping. The practice of Nihon buyô also incorporates a third major classification, the imitative or mimetic movement known as furi [振]. The dance practice signified by this retroactive, turn-​of-​the-​century neologism, Nihon buyô, flourished from roughly 1660 to 1900 in theatrical settings, popular among large segments of the population, including the samurai of prepremodern times, who were not supposed to be seen at the theaters of the merchant class. Nihon buyô’s revived postwar popularity continues today; thousands of spectators daily watch kabuki programs that invariably include Nihon buyô (known in English also through the descriptive moniker kabuki dance), either as separate pieces in the program or as a dance segment within a play. Fans can see, at least once a week, performances of Nihon buyô on television, sometimes featuring kabuki actors, but most often professionals from the Nihon buyô dance world. Also available are recitals of dance by outstanding interpreters, sometimes solo, sometimes in small groups, and most impressively at the Kabuki-​za Theatre in Ginza or at the National Theatre—​where one is far less likely to find any kind of bugaku performance. Dance teachers (among them superb and well-​known performers) present their students in recitals from time to time, and so numerous are the teachers that one is able to catch a recital of some kind (and sometimes several) almost any week of the year. Although the term “Japanese Dance” or “Nihon buyô” is a modern locution, the practice’s claim to a broadly national and ethnic importance is not farfetched, for kabuki and the dance within it encompass a wide range of Japanese aesthetics. Although far from exhaustive, together they represent a large swath of Japanese cultural practice among a wide range of classes and populations. Yet in the words of Anthony Shay, “the careful observer is able to catch tantalizing glimpses of important discourses of political, ethnic, gender, and class issues that are left unspoken when the nation is symbolically dressed in its Sunday clothes and putting its best foot forward” (2002, 232). What will this cultural efflorescence tell us about politics of performance? How can we see in it not simply discourses that represent Japanese-​ness, but underlying structures that give rise to the very sense of national identity it seems to capture so well?

To Call Dance Japanese     135 The courtly bugaku of the Heian period froze into its stately simplicity centuries ago. The ceremonious noh theater (which shares with bugaku the dignified mai) arose in the fourteenth century and became the official ceremony of the Tokugawa shogunate in the seventeenth century; it is a glorious theater preserving the Zen-​influenced aesthetic of the Japanese Kamakura, Ashikaga, and Muromachi periods, what might be called the Japanese Middle Ages. In contrast to bugaku and noh, Nihon buyô, which was born out of kabuki in the seventeenth century during an energetic and often flamboyant period when Japan’s popular culture flourished like it does today, has never stopped developing. Recent kabuki stars appear regularly on television talk shows and sometimes cross over to roles in contemporary drama, followed religiously by adoring fans; they become embroiled in tabloid-​ready scandals involving the Japanese mafia, the yakuza; and they can be seen occasionally incorporating elements from pop music and teen culture into supplementary numbers that precede special for-​youth performances. Though here we would do well to distinguish kabuki stars who perform Nihon buyô on the kabuki stage from those practitioners, frequently women, who perform Nihon buyô not as part of kabuki theater but as its own independent, albeit highly imitative performance. Such Nihon buyô specialists, who perform only dance, can still persuade young women, and especially their parents, that the dance form is excellent training for a normative femininity, the practice supposedly instilling discipline, elegance, and beauty. It is common for independent artists from other spheres, such as film, photography, and graphic design, to involve themselves in the “traditional” worlds of kabuki, bunraku puppetry, or Nihon buyô. Recent examples include photographer Sugimoto Hiroshi’s 2011 direction of the Sonezaki Shinjû (The love suicides at Sonezaki); the Japanese new wave director Shinozaki Makoto’s production of kabuki documentaries; or filmmaker of a younger generation Obayashi Nobuhiko’s current collaboration with Nishikawa Ukon, the headmaster of Nihon buyô’s Nagoya School. Of course the most striking association of Nihon buyô with contemporary arts must be in the form of Tanaka Ikko’s stunning 1981 graphic design for a 1981 US tour of Japanese traditional arts. Arguably one of the ten most celebrated examples of Japan’s vibrant twentieth-​ century graphic design scene, and by one of its most recognized designers, Tanaka’s aptly named Nihon Buyo impresses both its domestic and international spectators (see Figure 6.2). Critic Hattori Sae describes this poster as presenting a kind of riddle, in which “almost instantly after confronting its puzzle-​like assemblage of geometric shapes, do we recognize a dancer of Nihon buyô” (Hattori 2004, 47). Leaving aside the graphic innovation that makes the poster so captivating, we can quickly see how, within the twentieth-​century’s bivalent codes for modernity and tradition, Nihon buyô functions especially well as a clear signifier for Japan: as nation, as ethnicity, and as traditional performance. These opening observations on Japanese dance forms and locations, and on the conceptual and migratory nature of Japanese dance traditions, suggest the need for a reconsideration of Nihon buyô, from its aesthetic principles to its sex/​gender presumptions, and from its historical trajectories with their varying representations of Japanese life to the very concept of “dance” that Nihon buyô’s stance within modernization

136    Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall

Figure 6.2  Tanaka Ikkô, Nihon Buyo, Print, 1981. © Ikko Tanaka 1981/​Licensed by DNPartcom

proffers. It is these factors that have allowed Nihon buyô to stand, just as bugaku has not, for something we might call Japanese. The practice’s inclusiveness—​and its cultural cannibalism—​and the popularity of Nihon buyô make it a valuable vehicle for studying the ways in which ethnicity, culture, and dance are equated. From their differing perspectives, this chapter’s two authors, writing together, aim to explain how Nihon buyô has come to be regarded as a national, Japanese dance, at the same time that we contextualize the ways in which this category of dance has incorporated ethnic meanings.2

To Call Dance Japanese     137

Nihon Buyô as Product of Modernity When kabuki began in the early seventeenth century, it based its performances on dance, influenced partly by noh, the major theatrical form at that time, and partly by popular forms of dance. This blend came to be known as kabuki dance or kabuki odori, and thus it was called until the early twentieth century. It was precisely during this two-​hundred-​ year period when kabuki odori emerged and took on mature forms that the Tokugawa shogunate enforced strict controls over Japanese contact with the non-​Japanese world. When these controls came to an end with the weakening and ultimate collapse of the shogunate in the mid-​nineteenth century, foreigners visiting the country were quick to attend theatrical performances, particularly kabuki. The dance-​like movement they saw within Japanese kabuki they called “Japanese dance.” In part a translation of this moniker imposed by Western visitors, Nihon buyô is a modern locution, a neologism. And it is in the late emergence of this term that we can find one of the most important keys to understanding the nationalizing significance resident within Nihon buyô’s mode of performance. It might seem extraordinary that the first anthology of plays featuring Nihon buyô dance was published only as late as 2002, edited by performer, choreographer, and headmaster of the Nagoya School of Nihon buyô, the earlier referenced Nishikawa Ukon. The recent appearance of such a book, itself limited only to choreographies performed by the Nagoya School, suggests the difficulty of separating Nihon buyô from its placement within larger, usually kabuki, theatrical pieces. Critic Okayasu Tatsuo (2002) writes in his preface to Nishikawa’s Nihon Buyô Anthology of Dance Theatre: Among kabuki plays that feature dancing [shosagoto], a great number can be called kabuki dance theatre [buyô-​geki], be they matsubame-​mono [dance performances set against a pine tree backdrop] which draw from Nô and kyôgen or double suicide dramas based in jôruri [narratives of bunraku puppetry]. But separating dance theatre out into a fixed category, establishing a genealogy, and identifying individual plays as such—​these are things that have not been done before. It is only recently that the term ‘dance theatre’ has entered common usage.

Okayasu’s praise of Nishikawa’s editorial innovation also points to problems of nomenclature and category. As Okayasu goes on to indicate, the term Nihon buyô was introduced in the late Meiji period (1868–​1912). It was not, we must quickly add, even in use when the vast majority of Japan’s kabuki buyô-​geki “dance theater” was initially penned and choreographed. Prolific writer, critic, and translator Tsubouchi Shôyô (1859–​1935) is credited with inventing and popularizing the term Nihon buyô, alongside Fukuchi Gen’ichirô (1841–​1906), who became influential in the early twentieth-​century world of Shin-​buyô or new dance. The earliest use of the term Nihon buyô dates back only to 1907, a point when kabuki had begun a precipitous decline (Yamazaki in Hahn, 2007, 21. See also Nishikata, 2006.). Against this backdrop, buyô was a useful term in its amalgamation of both the lateral mai movements of noh theatere and the vertical movements

138    Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall of odori, found in kabuki and other popular dance. Yet Tsubouchi’s intervention was not simply the creation of a useful term, but the forging of a radical conceptual innovation. Never before in Japanese had there existed a general term to describe the deliberate movement in a performative context of the body in space, combining mai, odori, and furi. Tsubouchi was perhaps inspired by the extant term butô [舞踏], which combines the mai character with the character tô or fumi for stepping. As a term, butô is familiar to most English readers as “butoh,” the abbreviated term for the avant-​garde dance movement ankoku butô (literally dark dance), begun in 1959 by Hijikata Tatsumi, which he also ironically called Tohoku kabuki, citing a region in Japan known more for its poverty and farming than for high culture. Hijikata’s use of butô is ironic, the word being in common use from the late 19th century onwards to signify Western “social dancing,” especially ballroom dance with its prominence of steplike movement. As Yôshû (Toyohara) Chikanobu’s woodblock print Kiken butô no ryakuzu (Sketch of the dignitaries dancing, ca. 1890) suggests, the dancing Japanese aristocracy, in such venues as the Rokumeikan (Deer Cry) Pavilion in Hibiya, Tokyo, were curious sights that earned both public interest and scorn for their foppish Westernization. In eschewing such existing vocabulary and instead coining a new term, buyô, Tsubouchi wanted to formulate a worthy term that could serve as a Japanese corollary for a concept evident in so many European words: dance, danse, Danz, and so forth. But more than just the addition of nomenclature, Tsubouchi Shôyô’s invention of “dance” can be understood as an epistemological clearing necessary for the emergence of a dancer-​ly Japanese modernism. Dancing in Japan had been conceived only through specific and conventional categories of movement—​mai, odori, and furi—​or by its location within a narrative performance tradition (usually kabuki). Rather, in the combinatory traditions that the English terms kabuki dance and Japanese dance had already established, the performative movement of the body through space, separated from either theater or ritual, could now be understood as a coherent act. In this sense, Nihon buyô became both Japanese tradition and, in the very same instant, the modernity through which tradition was understood. We can recall here the intervention of literary critic Katatani Kôjin, who argued in The Origins of Japanese Literature that “where [Tsubouchi] Shôyô excelled was in daring not to accept a Western view of ‘literary history’ ” (1993, 149). Likewise for performance, Tsubouchi insisted on inventing a uniquely Japanese systematization of the arts. Just as the modern novel with its incumbent realism emerged only in fits and starts in a modernizing Japan under foreign influence, dance would follow suit as part of the new “national theater.” But where modern literature and dance differ radically is that Japan had no tradition of novelistic realism, while the new form of dance/​buyô that Tsubouchi invented was fashioned out of extant material, the already fluid and culturally hybrid form of kabuki dance that developed during the Edo period. In other words, while Tsubouchi hoped to nurture new, Japanese realist novelists so that Japan might have a “modern” literature, he could take fairly unchanged for his new epistemology what kabuki dance had developed over two centuries (Tsubouchi 1904, 32–​33).

To Call Dance Japanese     139 Tsubouchi was a prolific translator who would complete a complete translation of Shakespeare’s oeuvre in forty-​one volumes by 1928. His early career, however, was marked by a politics of cultural anti-​imperialism, nurturing a homegrown realism that could allow Japanese fiction to stand equal to the West. Tsubouchi’s essay on Japanese dance, Nihon buyô-​ron (Theory of Nihon buyô), was published later in Tsubouchi’s writing career, but Tsubouchi had established the conceptual basis for his Nihon buyô neologism fairly early in his career. This conceptual breakthrough occurs in Tsubouchi’s Shingakugeki-​ron (Theory for a new theater), which appeared in November 1904, nine months following the outbreak of the Russo-​Japanese War. Its author had already anticipated a “successful” postwar international context of realigned national pecking orders and exhorted his readers to prepare a “national” culture befitting a modern nation. In his treatise Tsubouchi sets for himself the task of codifying a “national theater” (kokugeki). Having dismissed shinpa (or Japanese performance based on principles of Western realist theater) as inadequately Japanese, due to its dogged imitation, Tsubouchi theorizes a tripartite Japanese theatrical tradition that would hold a candle, he believed, to the West. After presenting first noh and then kabuki, Tsubouchi proposes a third category, created by separating into their own categeory furigoto (also called shosagoto), those elements of kabuki that privileged dance. The unusual nature of Tsubouchi’s architecture for a national theater is underscored by the fact that his third and, he admits, surprising category is hewn from the second, culturally conventional category of kabuki. As Stephen Vlastos, after Arif Dirlik, suggests, the truism that all traditions are invented can prevent a reading of local workings of power. In other words, “a theoretical position that ignores the social conditions of the production and reception of invented traditions … denies to marginal and oppressed populations legitimate recourse to the authority of the past in their ongoing struggle to fashion counterhegemonic cultural identities” (Vlastos, 1998, 5). We can see in Tsubouchi’s intervention an invented tradition of dance that was itself an effort to resist a European and Western cultural hegemony. To call dance Japaense meant both attributing national qualities to existing practices of performative motion as well as fashioning new paradigms through which such movement could be understood. It could be no coincidence that just around the time of Tsubouchi’s invention of Japanese dance, artistic radicalism using the moving body became possible. Of course it was not only the power of Tsubouchi’s pen, but the new fad of Western ballroom dancing that inaugurated this shift to novel forms of the performative Japanese body. In a fascinating proposal, contemporary curator Mizusawa Tsutomu, drawing on the coincidental depiction in oil by Ludwig Ernst Kirchner and by Yorozu Tetsugorô of Japanese acrobats in 1912 and 1913, respectively, argues that the performative space of the body becomes a plane of activity available to a number of artists in a wide range of arts in the very early twentieth century. Examples include composer Yamada Kôsaku, famous for his garden dancing in 1915–​1916, or painter Fujita Tsuguharu and dancer Kawashima Riichirô, who began learning to dance in Paris in the style of Isadora Duncan around 1913 (Mizusawa 2000, 22). Of course, it was also in 1911 that eighteen-​year-​old Michio Itô, who would arguably become the first Asian American dancer, moved to Europe, where he would be “discovered” by Ezra Pound. Itô later moved to New York and then

140    Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall Pasadena, California, where he had an active career as a choreographer and worked in Hollywood until his deportation to Japan in 1941 (Wong 2009, 158). While it is reductive to suggest that Itô’s international trajectory is due to Tsubouchi’s translation, it should still be evident that the migratory movement of modern dance is obverse to the emergence of Nihon buyô as a new means of conceptualizing the moving Japanese performative body.

Steps, Leaps, and Bounds: Aesthetic Threes in Nihon Buyô In this section we introduce the narratives and the movements that comprise Nihon buyô, but in so doing, we also wish to assert a general cultural preference, evident across a wide range of Japanese arts, that can also be found at the core of these dance performances. While our goal is not to reify Japanese cultural expression, we do note that a broad range of aesthetic and artistic practices shares with Nihon buyô a preference for uneven, triple arrangements. This tendency does not make those practices ethnically Japanese, nor would their absence preclude those arts from being also Japanese. Still, if we wish to describe their formative structures, we also find ourselves repeating logics that can be identified across a broad range of Japanese cultural experiences. In contemporary arts and performance contexts, the terms “Japan” and “Japanese” are frequently used as fixed referents, suggesting a timeless, unique, and frequently “pure” culture; the argument of Japanese homogeneity finds an uncanny parallel in Japan’s own role in a global lexicon, where it often signifies, in a reductive manner, a tradition of ascetic simplicity. Japan’s purportedly “pure” culture finds its mirror in the austerity of the Zen-​inspired arts of the Kamakura (1185–​1333) and Muromachi (1338–​ 1573) periods: noh theater, ikebana flower arrangement, the tea ceremony, and gardens of stone or sand. Simplicity, quietness, elegance. In his enlightening The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, Donald Keene, for more than half a century the foremost interpreter of Japanese literature for the English-​speaking world, writes of the Japanese sense of beauty. Since he bases his thoughts on the Tsurezuregusa (Essays in idleness), written in the early fourteenth century by the priest Yoshida Kenkô, it is natural that Keene’s perspective should be colored by the tastes of Kenkô’s period. In his chapter on aesthetics, Keene discusses four aspects of Japanese taste: suggestion, irregularity, simplicity, and perishability. Related to these, or perhaps merely an extension of them, are such “Japanese” qualities as elegance, love of nature, decorum, and—​as we shall see later—​earthiness. Yet even more common than this Zen-​influenced, samurai—​hence ruling class—​ aesthetics is the more fundamental, three-​part structure found in Nihon buyô and in so many of Japan’s arts, whether elite or popular. While the courtly bugaku seems a world unto itself, it has influenced many subsequent performing arts in Japan, since bugaku

To Call Dance Japanese     141 embodies the fundamental rhythmic sweep in noh, kabuki, and Nihon buyô. It is so fundamental to Japanese aesthetics that one finds this rhythm in the beating of sticks at festivals, in the initiation of a move in many forms of theater and dance, and even in the clacking of the clappers that signal the opening of the curtain at a kabuki performance. This rhythm is known as jo-​ha-​kyû and suggests the gathering intensity or pace as a performance progresses. The simplest—​and least accurate—​translation might be “beginning-​middle-​end,” but jo-​ha-​kyû is far more complex than this translation suggests. In his brilliant The Noh Theater, Komparu Kunio explains the Japanese preference for uneven numbers as an “intentional rejection of the harmonious in favor of the discordant, a consistent respect for the asymmetrical in time and space constructs” (1983, 21). He goes on to describe the “dynamic balance” brought about by the tensions arising from asymmetry in architecture, before elucidating the three-​part divisions of such Japanese arts as ikebana flower arrangement (ten-​chi-​jin), calligraphy (shin-​gyô-​sô), and noh theater (jo-​ha-​kyû). His penetrating discussion reveals a principle of almost Einsteinian elegance: jo, meaning “beginning,” refers to position and is thus a spatial reference; ha means “break” or “ruin” and is a “disordering element”; and kyû, “fast,” refers to speed and is a temporal element: The concept jo-​ha-​kyû unifies the contradiction of the essentially opposing concepts of space and time, binding them with a breaking element. The result is the discovery of beauty in unbalanced harmony and a process for reaching fulfillment. We might say that it allows us to apprehend the spatial balance of heaven-​earth-​man within time, seeing position in space and speed in time as one. (Komparu 1983, 25)

Komparu’s distillation can never explain all Japanese aesthetics; the culture is rife with rebels, avant-​gardists, dissidents, and revolutionaries. Still, Komparu’s simplicity is remarkably effective in describing the patterns that often mark both mainstream and countercultural, dominant and resistant expression in Japan. We have indicated above another tripartite element fundamental to Nihon buyô, namely the three components of the choreography: mai, odori and furi. Kabuki dances are by and large made up of odori and furi, with just small doses of mai. Of course, mai forms of dance can be found in a wide variety of performance style in addition to its theatrical presentation in noh. Besides the courtly bugaku/​gagaku mentioned above, mai includes dances performed publicly at religious festivals, such as kagura dance, associated with Japan’s Shinto animism, or its agricultural cousin, dengaku, which marks farming labor and embodies hopes for a good crop. Mai also encompasses sarugaku, en’nen, and kusemai, each known for its combination of voice and dance. Odori itself has a shorter recorded history than mai, developing especially in the Edo period, and is strongly associated with popular entertainment, the foremost being the bon-​odori or its regional variant Awa-​odori, regular items in community summer festivals. In Nihon buyô dances that are based on noh pieces, mai may play a more important part. At the beginning of such dances, and sometimes throughout, we see the typical walking and movement style of the noh dance, with its straight lines and circular

142    Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall movements. But soon the music (which had been restricted to the flute and drums of the noh) turns kabuki-​like as the shamisen (three-​stringed, banjo-​like instrument) takes over and we hear melodies and song in the nagauta style, or one of the many other styles that developed in kabuki. The suriashi or rubbing step deriving from noh (Hanayagi 2008, 93), which was used in the beginning of the performance, disappears, and we see the more realistic walking styles of kabuki. The first part, or the most noh-​ like section, may be quite abstract, but once we have entered the kabuki-​like part of the dance, not only odori, but frequent furi, become part of the choreography. Mimetic and pantomime-​like, furi are achieved most commonly with a fan, or some other prop like the hand towel (tenugui), or through gestures of the hands, arms, legs, and so forth. Furi are used in many ways, to suggest sleep, laughter, sorrow, and many other emotions or activities. With the fan there are hundreds of possibilities, since it has three shapes: closed, fully open, and half open, each capable of symbolizing a multitude of objects like pipe, sword, pole, knife, bottle, bowl, letter, and so forth. Moved in one way it suggests snow falling, in another rain, in yet others wind, leaves, moon, mountain, waves, stream, or waterfall. Many of these mimetic uses of the fan may recall everyday activities like cutting radishes, smoking a pipe, or poling a boat, or less mundane activities from the samurai era, like fighting with a sword, spear, or halberd; shading one’s eyes against the sun to peer at the enemy; or cutting off a head (Hanayagi 2008, 184–​186; Hahn 2007, 14). The spectators, lost in the beauty, drama, or emotion of the dance, may not be aware of whether they are witnessing mai, furi, or odori, but the combination of three elements that form the foundation of Nihon buyô choreography buttresses the argument that the dance reflects a Japanese cultural preference for uneven over even, and for three-​part structures. A three-​part division is seen again in two frequently used movements of kabuki, one for women and one for men. The woman’s movement of the head, called mitsuburi (three shakes or flourishes), is often used as a punctuation to a section of dance or as an elegant, graceful, and feminine way to look at someone. To gaze at someone or something down left, one begins at the right, tips the head to one side slightly, then turns it gently to look right (Hanayagi 2008, 44–​45). The male movement known as a mie (generally translated as pose, although it bears much in common with the cinematic close-​up) is used at climactic moments, often to express anger or strength, but it can be performed elegantly, too, to express emotions like distress or strong intent. The pose begins by stamping or some other movement to dispose the limbs in a particular way. Next the head is thrust up slightly, and finally the chin is drawn in, as the eyes open wide and glare (Hanayagi 2008, 46). The mie is accompanied by a loud whack on the wooden clappers. It is difficult to avoid experiencing the jo-​ha-​kyû rhythm in the mie. Elements that Keene discusses—​asymmetry, simplicity, irregularity, suggestion, elegance, and restraint—​remind us that the ebullience of the Tokugawa era did not make the Japanese forget the aristocratic tastes of earlier days. On the other hand, the memories of that past elegance did not obliterate the exuberance of the popular culture that developed from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and colored all the arts in Japan. Some dances seem almost taken out of an earlier age. A dance play like Funa

To Call Dance Japanese     143 Benkei (Benkei on the boat) is heavily indebted to the noh play of the same name. The main actor, in the role of Shizuka, the female lover of the great warrior Yoshitsune, performs an elegant and restrained mai. In the second half he returns, wielding a halberd, as the defeated warrior Tomomori, whose ghost has risen from the waves to take vengeance on Yoshitsune. Many of his strong movements are drawn from the noh play as well, but because of the more specific distinction between male and female in kabuki, the performance becomes a striking display of virtuosity as the actor portrays both a delicate woman and a sturdy samurai. A solo woman’s dance like Shiokumi (The salt gatherer) is restrained and elegant from beginning to end, as the dancer reflects the lovely poetry of the noh text, evoking the melancholy evening on the seashore and memories of her lost love. Yet Shiokumi is far from pure noh; it is perfectly merged with kabuki dance, more real in its gestures, more odori than mai. Toward the end of the dance she takes up a long-​handled, three-​tiered decorative (and useless) umbrella and dances the final kyû section in pure odori style, reminiscent of nothing in noh, yet she remains decorous and genteel throughout. Other dances of the genre dance category, like Komori (Babysitter) or Tomo Yakko (Attendant footman) display none of the elegance of noh, but are pure representations of the lively, energetic, sometimes comic spirit of the townsman culture embodied in Nihon buyô. Tomo Yakko features a lengthy section of highly rhythmic stamping and the performance of several giba, a painful movement in which the dancer thrusts both feet straight out before him and falls onto his buttocks from about a foot above the floor. The dance of the chivalrous commoner (otokodate), Sukeroku, which forms his entrance in the favorite kabuki play, Sukeroku, is mostly elegant, and displays the stylishness (iki) of the eighteenth-​century dandy, but it is punctuated by a number of strong mie in heroic aragoto (rough stuff) style that are a specialty of the Ichikawa Danjûrô family, who created this role (Keister 2009, 225). In a country where the group dominates, it may strike the observer that Nihon buyô rarely uses groups (and then only in recent choreographies). It is essentially a solo form, with a number of important pieces with two dancers in which there is, of course, a reflection of familial or social relations. There are certainly dance plays (buyô geki), which use large casts and incorporate the intricacies of social relationships with complex dance choreographies. The famous Kanjinchô (The subscription list) is an example, as is the colorful and flashy (at least in the multiple changes of costume) and equally famous Musume Dôjôji. But aside from this category, one most often sees a single dancer on stage. But interlocutors are not absent: the solo dancer, not always, but often, interprets a number of roles in one dance. He or she may, for example, at one moment be a delicate geisha, leaning forward to fill a long pipe with tobacco and light it from a brazier. Then, turning to indicate a change of character, this geisha who, womanlike, sat with knees together and elbows in, separates the knees, bends the elbows away from the torso, and turns the pipe in his hand so that on accomplishing the turn we see a man holding the pipe in a strong masculine grip. One of the most dramatic dance forms is the monogatari, or narrative dance, often of a martial character, recounting a battle scene. In such pieces the dancer usually

144    Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall impersonates two or more characters who fight with each other. As the battle progresses, he turns and clutches his fan in one way to indicate it is a sword, then turning, changes the fan to suggest a halberd, or perhaps, held at the back of his neck, to represent his helmet. Whether the performer is alone or one of several or many, the character’s position as a social animal is normally conveyed. Even if another character is not impersonated, the lyrics of the song may suggest social context and relationships. This important aspect of Japanese life is rarely absent from kabuki dance, or from kabuki drama, in which many characters must face the intolerable demands of a society’s triumph over the individual. The Japanese preference for the uneven, which we saw in the tripartite organization of the noh drama as it moves from “beginning” to “break” to “rapid,” jo-​ha-​kyû, we find again in Nihon buyô. Dance pieces are normally organized around three major segments. The first is called the de, or entrance; the second, which forms the heart of the dance, may be made up of several segments, or simply one. Whatever the case, the spectator experiences this central part as a unit. The one or two parts most often included at this point are the monogatari or narrative and the kudoki or lamentation. The former is characteristic of male roles, and the latter of female roles, but both may occur in any role. As a matter of fact, the interpretations of critics may not agree about which part forms the monogatari and which the kudoki. The central portion of the dance may include other elements as well. The third section is the odoriji, which, as the name suggests, includes a good deal of the fast movements, including stamping, clapping, and perhaps jumping, that are typical of odori. The important de may actually feature no entrance at all, since a number of dances begin with the performer already in place at center stage, or entering by means of a stage elevator, or, in some noh-​derived plays, from a curtain at stage right created to resemble the multicolored curtain of the noh stage. Even if the dancer enters rapidly on the hanamichi walk, which extends from stage through to the rear of the theater, upon arriving at the seven-​three, the focal point of the hanamichi about three-​tenths from the stage and seven-​tenths of the distance from the rear of the auditorium, he or she will pause and perform an introductory dance. This tends to be leisurely in tempo and expresses the nature and mood of the character. As the de ends, the dancer approaches the stage and often walks upstage (to the rear of the stage), turns away from the audience, and removes zôri (slippers), and gives any props he carried onto the stage to an assistant, who has met him at the rear of the stage. With the central part of the dance, the performer enters into the body of the piece, and there is often a shift in the music. Whatever the mood, the lyrics describe it expressively: melancholy for the kudoki and more dramatic for the monogatari. This portion may include a part in which the artist uses a fan to suggest objects or aspects of nature, like the weather. As the central section ends, the dancer once again turns his back to the audience and is helped by the stage assistant to change some part of the costume, normally a lowering of the top part of the kimono to reveal the top of the underneath garment of a different color, changing the feeling of the following section. The odoriji is usually performed, at least in part, without a fan or any other prop, so the hands are free

To Call Dance Japanese     145 for decorative rhythmic movements. The tempo of this final section increases notably, and the music is more rhythmical and lively, often using bells and drums. There is a final section, the chirashi or scattering, which signals the end of the piece and usually features the dancer posing at center stage, having once more replaced whatever costume pieces had been removed during the dance and holding the props he entered with. Since the asymmetry of the Middle Ages was still appreciated by the townsman culture, the dancer’s pose at center stage is rarely, if ever, facing straight ahead, but rather focused at one or the other downstage corners of the stage. The performance is experienced by the spectator as a three-​part dance, since the singing (oki) that precedes the dancer’s entrance and the “scattering” at the end when he resumes his original shape and poses are not truly part of the dance. Like jo-​ha-​kyû in noh, there is variety in this experience, but in general it conveys the Japanese love of asymmetry and the uneven, and it moves from a leisurely to a rapid tempo.

Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Nihon Buyô That the kinds of embodiment found in Nihon buyô are themselves traced to Japan’s founding myths reinforces the concept of Nihon buyô as Japanese. The creation of Japanese dance is part of the creation stories and early myths of Japan, a stunning and highly original story, related in Japan’s oldest book, the Kojiki or Record of Ancient Things, dating from 712 CE. Chapter  17 of the Kojiki recounts how the sun goddess, Amaterasu, angered by the destructive behavior of her brother, retreated to the heavenly rock cave and shut herself within, casting the world into darkness. The gods assembled and engaged in various rituals and offerings, and finally a goddess, Ame no Uzume (which Basil Hall Chamberlain engagingly translates as “Heavenly Alarming Female”; Bowers [1952, 3]), came forward; bound her sleeves and her head with ritual vines; and then, grasping bundles of sacred leaves, leapt onto an inverted bucket and “stamped resoundingly upon it”—​and created Japanese dance. “Then she became divinely possessed, exposed her breasts, and pushed her skirt band down to her genitals” (Philippi 1968, 84). The gods laughed uproariously, and the Sun Goddess was so intrigued that she opened the door a crack and was finally brought out to fill the world again with sunshine. In this astonishing story, which shares the theme of resurrection with other stories of the theater’s origins, Ame no Uzume performs what appears to be a shamanistic dance, ending in possession—​a kind of dance performed in Japan frequently in the past. Rarely performed within the modernization that followed the 1868 Meiji Restoration, it can still be glimpsed in Kurosawa Akira’s portrayal of the Heian period in his award-​winning Rashomon (1950). Ame no Uzume begins with ceremonial movements evoking the mai, which were to flourish in Japan’s Middle Ages. There follows a wilder dance, with

146    Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall stamping and perhaps mimetic gestures, certainly a kind of odori. It is given drama by the context in which it appears, and above all, it is efficacious, for the jo of ritual preparation, followed by the rhythmic ha of the odori, results in the kyû of possession and brings the epiphany of Amaterasu, savior of the world. This happy result is brought about by the cooperation of a performer who delights and an audience that responds with wild laughter. The performance is earthy and divine. It merges the delights of sexuality with the richness of fertility, suggested by rhythmic beats, bountiful breasts, and fruitful genitalia. Heavenly Alarming Female drives away the forces of darkness, elicits healthy, purifying laughter, and brings the rebirth of life and light. The performance also underlines the physicality (even, carnality) of odori. We will find some of this in Nihon buyô, but transposed, symbolized, suggested rather than played out explicitly. The most evident sensuality in Japanese dance practice is perhaps in the dances of geisha and courtesans, meant to seduce male patrons. Even in such a ceremonial and comic dance as Sambasô, there are echoes of the dance of Heavenly Alarming Female (see Figure 6.3). Sambasô, in its many Nihon buyô versions, is an outgrowth of an archaic ceremonial piece, performed in noh theater, Okina, in which three old men dance to bring long life and fertility to the world. The first two men, Okina and Senzai, dance with great dignity, but the third, Samba, dances with vigorous rhythm and a youthful feeling. It is, of course, Samba whom kabuki has chosen to place at the center of the Nihon buyô

Figure 6.3  Hanayagi Chiyo’s Sanbasô. © Hanayagi Chiyo

To Call Dance Japanese     147 version, sometimes giving Okina and Senzai small roles or entirely deleting them from the dance. As Samba dances, he holds in one hand a fan and in the other a set of bells, called a bell tree (suzu), shaped like a small Christmas tree with a handle and covered with tiny bells. As he moves he shakes the bells, which tinkle as he twists his wrist. He shakes the suzu in four directions, seeming to scatter seeds and fertilize the earth. Is it too daring to see in this shaking of the bell a phallic spirit? And when he brings fan and bell together, is there not an intimation of blessing the sexual act that brings birth and life? The dance of Samba is subtle and suggestive, yet comic and joyous, bringing together the heavenly stamping of Ame no Uzume before the rock-​cave door, the ceremoniousness of noh, and the frisky buoyancy of the odori. Just as these social and sexual details are built into the vocabulary and the language, they are built into the patterns of the performance, since sex and class are depicted through posture and movement. (See Hanayagi, 2008.) Male roles take up more space, as men did both physically and symbolically in traditional Japan. The movement is expansive and outward, with legs separated at the knees, elbows out, head held straight and firm. Women, on the other hand, keep the knees together, elbows held against the body, and tilt the head slightly as they move, revealing a willowy and “feminine” character, using diminutive, ingressive movements. When sitting both men and women may rest their buttocks on their feet, but women often will spread their feet enough to allow the buttocks to touch the ground, thereby reducing their height. Men of great importance or strength walk with larger strides than men lower on the social scale: samurai and lords, for example, take up more space than townsmen, who walk with feet closer together, toes facing almost forward, while samurai point their toes outward, implying greater strength and power. Women walk with their feet pigeon-​toed, increasing the sense of drawing inward and occupying less space. Strong women, usually evil, may occupy slightly more space, and certainly affirm their strength by scarcely tilting the head at all. As a matter of fact, the major roles of evil women in kabuki are most often played by actors who specialize in male roles, not by the onnagata who are specialists in female roles. There is a broad range of roles in kabuki, and hence a broad range of movement patterns to indicate not only strength and delicacy, but also elegance and vulgarity, denoting varieties of masculinity and femininity and levels of class. The concept of hin (elegance, grace, refinement) is of great importance in playing upper-​class women’s roles, and the skilled actor will suggest this quality in small and subtle ways, like the handling of the costume or the use of the eyes. While depiction of sexuality is quite clear in kabuki dance, one would never mistake a man for a woman (although there are delightful comic scenes in which men disguise themselves as women and comically blend the movements for both sexes). The kabuki theater uses only men and has devised a highly stylized manner of presenting, not an imitation of a woman nor a transhistorical womanly essence (if such a thing could even exist), but an idealized, highly stylized representation of woman that is specific to the theater and that carries with it the frisson of the non-​normative within an appearance that corresponds to dominant male fantasies. The world of Nihon buyô, which grew out of kabuki, of course uses the same stylized

148    Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall representation of women that the kabuki actors do, but the dance world is dominated by women, although there are many distinguished men participating in it as well, including kabuki actors, many of whom are headmasters of kabuki dance guilds. What is fascinating in the dance world, as contrasted with the kabuki theater, is that both men and women play male and female roles. One might even see performances of dance plays in which a major female dancer plays the major male role, while lesser male students dance smaller female roles. Katherine Mezur’s Beautiful Boys/​Outlaw Bodies:  Devising Kabuki Female-​Likeness has offered a highly compelling application of theories of performativity to kabuki, drawn from the work of Judith Butler, Sue-​Ellen Case, and Jennifer Robertson. Although Mezur either ignores Nihon buyô or subsumes it within the category of kabuki, her theory of the onnagata emphasizes the way in which the male body “resists complete assimilation with the onnagata exterior” (2005, 47). Interested in how “political, economic, and social forces of the Edo Period shaped onnagata performance,” Mezur argues for “an intercultural feminist theory of gender performance” (17–​18). She finds, in the male body’s resistance to its own performance, a disruption of the conventional presumption of identity between the perfomative sex/​gender and the actor’s sex/​gender, leading to three main characteristics: transformativity, multiplicity, and ambiguity. In this regard, the effect of an onnagata performance is not the presentation of an ideal, patriarchal femininity, but a unique “female-​likeness” that carries within it productive seeds of trouble. Although Mezur claims that the male body must lie beneath the onnagata for it to carry its disruptive potential, recent work by Loren Edelson points to the fact that women, too, were trained to perform in onnagata roles (2009, 107). Describing the history of one postwar women’s kabuki troupe, Edelson’s summary of women’s onnagata reinforces Mezur’s observations: “[T]‌he troupe made its reputation performing the classics and ‘mirroring’ the acting of grand kabuki. Despite naming themselves an all-​ female company, the Ichikawa Girls’ Kabuki Troupe approached kabuki by acting like men” (2009, 109). As in kabuki, beginners in Nihon buyô are trained to perform both male and female roles, until they may perhaps begin to specialize in one or the other. It is the custom of many kabuki actors, and members of the Nihon buyô world as well, to perform both male and female roles. Gender ambiguity on stage, albeit constrained, reflects the role that ambiguity also played in pre-​Meiji Japanese sexualities. Edelson and Mezur both give short shift to the relation among kabuki, Nihon buyô, and male-​male eroticism, but the question of how male homosexuality intersects with the model images of Japanese femininity proffered in Nihon buyô requires further study. Male-​male practices that arose in Edo’s floating world and that were to thrive until the arrival of Christian missionaries after the Meiji Restoration have been studied in fascinating detail in several books (Leupp 1995; Pflugfelder 1999; Schalow 1990). But for our attention to Nihon buyô, we need to note a thriving world of catamites who not only gave professional pleasure to wealthy patrons of the merchant class, but entertained them further, and perhaps more artistically, from the stages of the kabuki theaters, where they occasionally became major onnagata.

To Call Dance Japanese     149

Social Bodies in Motion: Categories and Classifications The broad range of Nihon buyô reflects the Japanese ethos from the age of the gods, through the patrician culture of the Heian, the austerity of the samurai culture of the Middle Ages, and the colorful energy of the Genroku (1680–​1720 CE), into the decadence of the early nineteenth century and the exotic influences of the Meiji era. If we understand ethnicity to refer to “the sense of kinship, group solidarity, and common culture” (Hutchinson and Smith 1996, 3), then we should find vivid representations of Japanese ethnicity in so popular and lasting an art as Nihon buyô, which belongs to the “organized system of significant symbols” (Geertz 1973, 46) that gives shape and meaning to the life of the Japanese. Indeed, it is not difficult to find themes, structures, patterns, behaviors, and feelings in Japanese dance that spring from earlier cultural components and suggest the “systematic relationships among diverse phenomena” (Geertz 1973, 44). Especially represented in Nihon buyô is the lively and colorful Genroku era at the end of the seventeenth century, when kabuki reached its first peak, Japanese dance was thriving in the theater, and the townsmen for whom these entertainments were created were achieving economic power undreamed of a century before. This was a commercial world, brash and vulgar in comparison with the refinements of the Kyoto aesthetes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Beautiful clothing; dandyish behavior; thriving pleasure quarters; theaters that flirted with the grotesque and delighted in the sensual; and a new kind of interior decoration that was less subdued, more gilded and gaudy, gave a new impetus to the dance. Now we find in Nihon buyô characters from the new society, flaunting the gaiety of the day and wearing the bright colors and stylish modes of their contemporaries, when they were not creating them. They delighted their fans with new ways of tying their obi (sashes) or wearing their hair and new patterns invented for their costumes. In this atmosphere, Japanese dance imbibed flavors unknown to the Middle Ages. Looking back at this glittering era, we find it reflected in the dance by new themes and qualities: bright color, gaiety, a touch of the grotesque, comedy, theatricality, and flamboyance, and by the early eighteenth century, the influence of the puppet theater. As the Tokugawa era advanced toward the grim days that would lead to the Meiji Restoration, the kabuki world reflected the pessimism and chaos of a society that was breaking apart, and the dance broadened its scope to include not just the geisha and princesses featured in major dances in the mid-​eighteenth century, but also important male roles and characters from all walks of life, including servants, streetwalkers, salesmen, thieves, country bumpkins, and libidinous monks. The broad categories of Nihon buyô dances and dance plays have never been successfully organized. The most frequent organization used today is according to source, but no method appears capable of including the entire repertory. Since Nihon buyô developed in the kabuki theater, many of the dances are drawn from plays, including, of course, those from bunraku, the puppet theater, which developed at the same time as

150    Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall kabuki and attained such popularity that kabuki was forced to adapt its plays for human actors and even use some of its techniques. One of these techniques, known as ningyô-​ buri, or doll movement, is a kind of furi used occasionally in a segment of a woman’s dance to create the impression that the character has become a puppet. The style is highly virtuosic: the blank-​faced, unblinking dancer is manipulated by two black-​clad operators mechanically with unarticulated fingers and leaning at a slight angle, sometimes a bit above ground. A skillful performance can be quite convincing. The technique is rare, but curiously, it is almost never used for male characters. In the context of Japanese ethnicity, one cannot help wondering whether the actors, perhaps unwittingly, reflected something of woman’s place in the Tokugawa world, where her life was largely manipulated by a male-​dominated society. Kabuki-​ and bunraku-​derived dances depict characters from all walks of life and from all periods of Japan’s history, creating a panorama of Japanese types and reflecting many facets of its psychology and culture. In the dances we find themes of loyalty, revenge, and the struggle between duty (giri) and human feeling (ninjô) that underlies many of the great plays of the two major writers for kabuki and the bunraku puppet theater. In the domestic dramas (sewamono) of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, we frequently see a young man of the merchant class who is forced to choose between duty to his family or master and his love for a beautiful geisha. Invariably he chooses love, the more human of the two attachments, and commits suicide with his lover. This is dramatized, and no doubt romanticized, in moving scenes in which the lovers travel to a special site and kill themselves. Such travel-​dance scenes are known as michiyuki and appear in many plays, featuring moments of intense poetry and rich music, and are choreographed almost throughout as dance. The plays of the second great dramatist, Takeda Izumo II, deal more often with samurai and nobles and belong to the category of the period play (jidaimono). They too include michiyuki scenes and great moments of struggle, but for the samurai, the decision is almost always on the side of honor, heroism, and tragedy. He sacrifices himself (and sometimes his child) for his superior. Famous plays of Izumo’s, like Chûshingura and Yoshitsune’s Thousand Cherry Trees, contain beautiful michiyuki scenes. If one looked only at these scenes and studied carefully the feelings of the characters, one would gain a fairly good understanding of the Japanese caught in a struggle between society’s requirements and their own personal desire for happiness. The scenes also present normative roles of feminine gentility and elegance and masculine heroism and decorum. They help us to realize how profoundly emotional the Japanese people are beneath the mask of restraint and politesse, and it is not rare for audiences to respond to these scenes emotionally as well. Dance pieces derived from the noh theater are myriad, ranging from solo dances of noble characters, to entire dance plays that develop the drama and dance inherent in the sedate noh drama. Some of these are almost completely transposed to the kabuki style, like the famous Musume Dôjôji (The maid at Dôjô Temple, 1753), inspired by the noh Dôjôji, or the solo dance Shiokumi (The salt gatherer, 1811), derived from the noh Matsukaze. Many dances are grouped together under the name of a noh character or place, or a type or style

To Call Dance Japanese     151 that they represent. For example, Sambasô pieces, Matsukaze pieces, Yamamba pieces, and Soga pieces include dances that present varying perspectives on a single character. These four names, like many that appear in noh drama, are highly evocative for any literate Japanese. Each name will evoke perhaps a literary masterpiece, a particular place, a historical event or era, and sometimes religious or legendary memories. Dôjôji pieces and Shakkyô pieces, also derived from noh, are named for the location where the dance takes place, Dôjô Temple for the first, and for the second the stone bridge (shakkyô) leading to paradise and upon which lions dance. Each name is evocative of religious and demonic powers. Shakkyô pieces are all lion (shishi) dances, and some of them are among the oldest still performed, often among the most popular and appealing. Shûjakujishi portrays a geisha or a princess who turns into a lion. Kagamijishi shows a palace maiden who is possessed by a lion spirit. The moving Renjishi features two actors who dance together the story of a father lion preparing his son for the difficulties of life; they dance with hand-​held lion masks and are finally possessed by the lion spirit, and at the end, transformed into veritable lions, they return to dance vigorously, whirling long “lion” wigs (see Figure 6.4). One category of noh-​derived dance plays is the Matsubame Mono or Pine Panel Play, which was first devised in 1840 for Kanjinchô (The subscription list) and flourished in the late nineteenth century, when noh had lost its prestigious place as the official ceremony of the shogunate. Unlike earlier noh-​derived dance pieces, the matsubame mono attempts to imitate the original noh play in many ways. The setting is a glorified kabuki version of the pine panel that adorns the rear of the noh stage, the costumes often imitate those of the original, and much of the dialogue and many of the movement patterns resemble those of noh. Although the plays are usually quite faithful to noh at the beginning, as they progress they become increasingly kabuki-​like, and their endings are among some of the most flamboyant scenes in kabuki. Hence they embody a broad gamut of Japanese performance aesthetics, from the restraint of noh to the brilliant histrionics of kabuki. Modern critics often complain that these pieces, unlike earlier ones like Musume Dôjôji, do not create kabuki from noh, but bring noh into kabuki. The opening may sometimes be wearisome, but it is fascinating to watch the elegance and simplicity slowly give way to the strongly rhythmic baroque of the climax. All noh-​derived dances follow this pattern, but the matsubame mono sometimes keep the noh style long into the performance, while pieces like Renjishi abandon such movements very quickly. Indeed, some versions of noh-​derived plays, like Gojôbashi, have no elements of mai in them whatsoever. This pure kabuki version of the noh Hashi Benkei (Benkei on the bridge) also exists in a Nihon buyô version that uses the same name as the noh play and remains more faithful to the original. Other categories of dance are kyôran (Madness) pieces, some of which derive from noh, and tanzen pieces, which reflect the stylish walk of the early seventeenth century known as tanzen, which was affected by dandies of the day. Ghost pieces form another group, as do kaomise pieces, which were performed at the opening plays of a kabuki season. Shûgi pieces are celebratory or ceremonial and are usually performed in formal kimono (often with hakama divided skirts). Dances performed in formal dress

152    Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall

Figure 6.4  Hanayagi Chiyo’s Kagamijishi. © Hanayagi Chiyo

are known as su-​odori, a “bare” style that may be used for any dance. They are highly regarded by the connoisseur and require the dancer to create the entire spirit of the dance without costume or makeup (see Figure 6.5). Jiutamai is another kind of dance, which originated and is still chiefly performed in Kyoto, marked by the conservative spirit of that city and influenced deeply by noh. It is a very quiet, subtle dance that corresponds to the description many foreigners give of Nihon buyô, because it is restrained and elegant. Among its most famous exponents are women seventy years of age or older.

To Call Dance Japanese     153

Figure 6.5  Hanayagi Chiyo performing in su-​odori style. © Hanayagi Chiyo

There are other categories, of course, but the one that cannot be neglected here is Fûzoku mono, dances portraying customs and manners, often translated as “genre pieces.” These are the many dances that appeared in the early nineteenth century and increased immensely the content of Nihon buyô by adding characters from every

154    Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall walk of life, including even the lowest. Dozens of dances were choreographed to represent events of everyday life and occupations that would not have occurred to dancers of the earlier years. Now, in addition to geisha and to historical, legendary, literary, and noble characters, the dance stage swarmed with vendors and salesmen of every type, with babysitters, servants, schoolgirls, monks, footmen, thieves, festival celebrants, actors, dancers, and clowns—​a whole new world to enrich the dance repertoire. When we consider the vast range covered by the categories above, it becomes clear that the content of Nihon buyô sought a broad representation of Japanese society, history, and culture, just as the movement patterns and styles of walking, sitting, and so forth are a broad representation—​and idealization too, no doubt—​of the behavior and manners of people of many kinds in the Japanese world. The relation of content to a popular imagination of Japan’s own ethnicity is easily grasped, but there are more subtle reminders of the many phases of Japan’s culture and history. Shay’s description of the metropolitan power of state dance companies could also characterize the way Nihon buyô marshals “the highly visible intersection of ethnic and nationalist representation and political interests through valorizing folklorized and idealized visions of village and tribal societies filtered through the national capital city and the elite populations residing there” (2002, 10). Although many might initially find it difficult to see the similarity between Japan’s Nihon buyô and state ensembles such as the Chinese State Folk Ensemble or Croatia’s LADO, we would do well to understand Nihon buyô’s “multicultural formation” as akin to such homogenizing and normativizing cultural forces.

Social Contexts for Contemporary Nihon Buyô The world of Nihon buyô reminds one of the organization of the provincial warrior lords during the Japanese Middle Ages, when warring clans struggled for power, and the samurai who served them—​at least in the idealized vision that has come down to us from the Tokugawa era—​proved courageous and loyal supporters of their daimyô (lords). In all the performing arts of Japan there is a sense of belonging exclusively to one school or one guild, and it is frowned upon for a disciple (deshi), as the students are known, to “serve two masters.” Aside from the belief that one can master only one art in one lifetime, it shows a lack of seriousness, devotion, and loyalty to attempt to study with more than one teacher, and certainly in more than one school. In the world of Japanese dance there are hundreds of schools (guilds), although there are only roughly twenty major ones. They are organized in a medieval manner into ie or “houses,” the equivalent of a clan or guild. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of teachers in the Hanayagi school, for example, or the Fujima school. The organization

To Call Dance Japanese     155 is always vertical, with the iemoto or headmaster at the top of the hierarchy. Like the daimyô of the past, he (or she) “rules” the school, advised by top-​ranking dancers of the school, who achieve their rank by inheritance, family ties, outstanding skill and fame, or seniority. It is sometimes the case that some of the advisors are more skillful dancers than the iemoto, but the latter is at the top nonetheless. Each student stands in the same relationship to his or her teacher (whatever that teacher’s rank in the guild’s hierarchy) as the teacher does to the iemoto, and the same loyalty and obedience is expected. There appears to be little resistance to this antique system, but with the influx of modern democratic ideas, it is possible that some changes may be made. Dance critics write from time to time of the evils of the iemoto system, blaming it for a conservatism that discourages originality and denies creative opportunities to brilliant young disciples. Americans of Japanese descent have normally continued to practice many of the Japanese arts, including those of music and dance. While some may see this as an affirmation of “Japanese-​ness,” it is striking that Japanese living in Japan are rarely if ever described as affirming their Japanese-​ness by practicing Nihon buyô or koto. Nihon buyô still seems quite foreign to most Americans, but there is a growing group of people who study it in Los Angeles, Honolulu, New York, Portland, Seattle, and even in such places as Claremont, California. During the 1940s it seemed unlikely that Japanese dance would flourish in the United States, and yet we now know that there were dance teachers in the relocation camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated, who carried on the traditional arts. This “hidden legacy” was celebrated in programs in San Francisco (2008) and Los Angeles (2010), which revealed that courageous young women persevered against all odds in order to keep alive their traditions even in those difficult and discouraging conditions—​not as an affirmation of Japanese-​ness against America, but as a gift to their community and to the entire country, who would later come to realize the criminality of penalizing Americans for the actions of Japan. Nihon buyô functions, within the popular imagination, as a distillation and condensation of Japanese aesthetic practice, and this might suggest it also as a target for critics of the tradition, conservatism, and masculinist privilege that cuts deep within that terrain. Although tabled in 2007 by Prime Minister Abe Shinzo following the birth of Hisahito—​a male heir—​the previous summer, there are still plans for and active debate over the possibility of a female accession to the Japanese imperial throne. Especially since the Olympic adoption of women’s judo as a medal-​winning sport in 1992, women judo-​ka have often outperformed their male teammates in international competitions, leading to increased domestic pressure for female equality in the world of Japanese martial arts. Likewise, Japan debates whether women’s sumo can become something more than a regional and still unusual working-​class practice. Yet when it comes to the traditions of kabuki and Nihon buyô, little such debate exists. Because both male and female performers can excel in Nihon buyô and achieve the role of sensei or teacher, there are few formal lines of gender discrimination. Indeed, Hanayagi Chiyo, cited several times in this chapter, is a prominent female

156    Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall performer and teacher who has been celebrated as an important leader of an officially sanctioned, national art. In 1995, for example, Hanayagi was decorated by the emperor of Japan with the Order of the Sacred Crown, Fourth Degree. She has similarly been awarded the top national prize for creative dance (sôsaku buyô) fifteen times since 1978. If we recall the Tanaka Ikkô poster that ironically yoked Nihon buyô to a modernist graphic design, we would not be mistaken in seeing in that abstraction Hanayagi’s own face, for she was the only female artist among the five Japanese traditional arts practitioners—​in “Noh, Kyogen, taiko drumming, shamisen, and Nihon buyô”—​to visit Los Angeles as part of a national program linking Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New  York City—​the very tour for which the poster was comissioned.3 Even though kabuki updates itself regularly with new technologies, new theaters, and new mass-​media approaches to attract ever-​young er audiences, kabuki has settled into defining itself, when it comes to gender roles, according to the Edo-​era convention of an all-​male troupe. As Edelson notes, familial lineages of children, grandchildren, and great-​grandchildren each succeeding onto the kabuki stage are precisley for male offspring alone, notwithstanding the short-​lived exception for an actor’s daughter’s cameo performance while she is still a shôjo, or “maiden,” under the age of eighteen. This iemoto seido, or family system, restricts women practitioners to work within Nihon buyô. When female family members have gone into the profession of dance, such as Ichikawa Botan III and Ichikawa Kôbai II, the daughter and sister respectively of the famed actor Danjûrô XII, they have found their place in the far more limited space of “Japanese dance.” Nihon buyô thus serves as a place where female talent, importantly understood not simply as personal aptitude, but also incorporating familial legacy, can earn social recognition. But when considered as a social institution and not as a set of techniques or performances, Nihon buyô frequently functions in a derivative relation to the kabuki tradition from which it borrows its repertoire. Tsubouchi’s tripartite model of Japanese performance was never fully realized. Instead, although highly esteemed, Nihon buyô is not even always considered to be a fully distinct performative practice, not warranting, for example, its own, unique support from the National Cultural Agency. If Nihon buyô can be understood as a place for women’s and men’s excellence, it is still subordinated to the male genndered kabuki tradition to which it is attached. And, unlike Takarazuka theater, with its unique, twentieth-​century dramaturgy and its all-​female troupes, Nihon buyô does not differ enough from kabuki to draw an audience seeking a modern, Japanese alternative to premodern theater. Contributing to a structuralist analysis intended to reveal latent cultural norms, in other words the always partial logics of authority and authenticity, semiotician Algirdas Greimas developed his famous “semiotic squares” in the mid-​1960s to read culture not from a juxtaposition of integrally distinct and opposing elements—​not from an essential difference per se, but rather through a semiotic praxis of elucidating a singular, dominant social position presumably interested in and capable of generating its own contradictions and opposites. (Greimas, 1983.) Our semiotic square of

To Call Dance Japanese     157

Figure 6.6  Semiotic Squaring of Japanese Dance. © Graphic design by Yi Zhang

leading Japanese perfromative practices (see Figure 6.6) allows us to read their interrelation through the patriarchal logic emanating from Japanese kabuki. In today’s context, this square operates through a contradistinction of two axes: one, an axis of tradition/​modernity, the other, an axis of male (masculinity)/​female (femininity). Rejecting any essentializing of these positions or of the sexed bodies of performers they might activate (Thomas, 2003, 39), we can nonetheless note, through the clarity of this semiotic square, that the two Japanese performative practices that feature female stars and frequent performances by women—​in other words, Nihon buyô and the all-​female Takarazuka revue—​are also marked for their supposedly aleatory, depdendent, or imitative nature (Robertson, 1998, 39). Structured in this awkward opposition to the authority and originality attached respectively to the “tradition” of kabuki or the “innovation” of postwar butoh, Nihon buyô’s association with Japanese ethnic and cultural identity exists as obverse to a culture of male dominance. Of course, butoh has a number of prominent female practioners, and our semiotic sqaure is meant diagnostically—​not in any prescriptive way. Still, it offers one suggestion of the cultural authority that both defines and circumscribes Nihon buyô when this epitome of Japaneseness in dance is considered through the lens of gender. To call Nihon buyô “Japanese” is to inscribe once more this overlapping system of ethnicized and gendered norms.

158    Leonard Pronko and Jonathan M. Hall

Notes 1. See Fujitani (1998). 2. For the sake of clarity in English, this category of dance is referred to in the following pages by its Japanese name, Nihon buyô. 3. This was the August 1981  “Classical Performing Arts Friendship Mission of Japan,” presented by the University of California Los Angeles in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Asia Society. Performers included “Kita Nagayo (Noh), Nomura Mansaku (Kyogen), Hanayagi Chiyo (Nihon buyô). Sugiura Hirokazu (Shamisen), Kitada Kisaku (Hayashi)” See Theatre Journal 33, no. 2 (May 1981): 285.

References Barthes, Roland. 1982/​1970. The Empire of Signs. New York: Hill and Wang. Bowers, Faubion. Japanese Theatre. New York: Hermitage Press, 1952. Edelson, Loren. 2009. Danjuro’s Girls: Women on the Kabuki Stage. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Fujitani, Takashi. 1998. Splendid Monarchy:  Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Greimas, Algirdas. 1983/​ 1966. Structural Semantics:  An Attempt at a Method. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Hahn, Tomie. 2007. Sensational Knowledge:  Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Hanayagi, Chiyo. 2008. Fundamentals of Japanese Dance (Kabuki Dance). Translated by Leonard Pronko and Takao Tomono. Tokyo: Kodansha Shuppan Service Center. Hattori, Sae. 2004. “Tanaka Ikkô’s Nihon Buyo,” Repre 3, no. 1: 47–​54. Herd, Judith-​Ann. 1989. “The Neonationalist Movement: Origins of Japanese Contemporary Music.” Perspectives of New Music 27, no. 2: 118–​163. Hutchinson, John and Anthony D. Smith, eds. Ethnicity. 1996. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Karatani, Kojin. 1993. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press. Keene, Donald. 1988. The Pleasures of Japanese Literature. New  York:  Columbia University Press. Keister, Jay. 2009. “Urban Style, Sexuality, Resistance, and Refinement in the Japanese Dance Sukeroku.” Asian Theatre Journal. 26, no 2: 215–​249. Komparu, Kunio. 1983. Noh Theatre:  Principles and Perspectives. New  York:  Weatherhill/​ Tankosha. Leupp, Gary P. 1995. Male Colors: The Construction of Male Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Martin, Randy. 1998. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mezur, Katherine. 2005. Beautiful Boys/​Outlaw Bodies:  Devising Kabuki Female-​Likeness. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

To Call Dance Japanese     159 Mizusawa, Tsutomu. 2000. “The Artists Start to Dance: The Changing Image of the Body in Art of the Taishô Period.” In Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s, edited by Elise K. Tipton and John Clark. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. 14–​24. Nishikata, Setsuko. 2006. Kindai Nihon buyôshi [History of dance in modern Japan].Tokyo: Engeki shuppansha. Nishikawa, Ukon. 2002. Nihon buyô: buyôgeki senshu [Nihon buyô: anthology of dance theatre]. Nagoya: Nishikawa-​kai. Pflugfelder, Gregory M. 1999. Cartographies of Desire:  Male-​ male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-​1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Philippi, Donald L., trans. 1968. Kojiki. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Robertson, Jennifer. 1998. Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schalow, Paul. 1990. The Great Mirror of Male Love. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Shay, Anthony. 2002. Choreographic Politics:  State Folk Dance Companies. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Thomas, Helen. 1995. Dance, Modernity and Culture. London: Routledge. Thomas, Helen. 2003. The Body, Dance, and Cultural Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tsubouchi, Shôyô. 1904, Shinrakugeki-​ron. Tokyo: Waseda Daigaku Shuppan. Valentine, James. 1982. “The Anthropology of Cultural Performances in Japan:  Dance as a Document of Japanese Culture.” Annual of Institute of Buddhist Cultural Studies [Ryukoku University] V: 15–​18. Valentine, James. 1998. “Models of Performance:  Space, Time, and Social Organization:  in Japanese Dance” In Interpreting Japanese Society, edited by Joy Hendry, London: Routledge. 259–​281. Vlastos, Stephen. 1998. “Tradition:  Past/​Present Culture and Modern Japanese History.” In Vlastos, ed. Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1–​16. Wong, Yutian. 2009. “Artistic Utopias:  Michio Ito and the Trope of the International.” In Worlding Dance, edited by Susan Leigh Foster. Hampshire, UK:  Palgrave Macmillan. 144–​162.

Chapter 7

Diasp oric Et h ni c i t y, G ender, an d  Da nc e Muslim Macedonian Roma in New York Carol Silverman

Dance is a potent symbol of ethnicity for Roma in Balkan diaspora communities, where identity is a complex question and multiple allegiances compete. Focusing on Muslim Macedonian Roma in New York, I analyze dance as a gendered expressive behavior embedded in community ritual events. Dance expresses social relationships, status, and familial alliances; it is a dynamic interactive behavior that can transform and build relationships, foster communication in the community, or enact conflict. Because solo female dance may be interpreted as sexualized, its dynamics are carefully monitored; women thus performatively negotiate their display of dance in varied contexts. The genre čoček is especially charged as both the badge of Romani ethnicity and the most potentially sexual, therefore, potent art form. By exploring two generations of Roma in New York City in terms of attitudes, style, and repertoire, I show how dance and music continue to occupy a significant place in community life and ritual.1

Roma: From India to Macedonia to New York Linguistic evidence reveals that Roma are originally from India and that they migrated from south Asia sometime around 1100–​1300 AD (Matras 2002; Hancock 2002). Roma were established throughout Eastern Europe by 1400, some settling and others following a nomadic way of life.2 They have been indispensable suppliers of diverse services to non-​Roma, such as music, entertainment, fortune telling, metal working, horse dealing, wood working, sieve making, basket weaving, comb making, and seasonal

Diasporic Ethnicity, Gender, and Dance    161 agricultural work. Initial curiosity about Roma by European peoples and rulers quickly gave way to hatred and discrimination, a legacy that has continued until today. Despite their small numbers, Roma inspired fear and mistrust and were expelled from virtually every western European territory (Hancock 2002; Fraser 1992; Kenrick and Puxon 1972; Petrova 2003). In the Balkans, however, the policy of the Ottoman Empire toward Roma was, in general, more lenient than in Western Europe, at least from the 16th to the 18th centuries (Marushiakova and Popov 2000). Many Macedonian Roma (and other Balkan peoples) converted to Islam in the 16th to 18th centuries to pay lower taxes and to move up the Ottoman ranks. The Muslim religion and Turkish culture and language were the marks of civilization, and conversion often meant merely a change in name (Hupchick 1994). Muslim Balkan Roma display many similarities to other Muslims of the region in terms of culture, ritual, music, and dance. This shared history mitigates the tendency (in scholarly and lay writings) to see Roma as exceptional or unique. True, Roma have their particular historical trajectory of marginalization and some specific dance genres; but a healthy dose of comparison to other Balkan Muslims shows many commonalities. In fact, Muslim Balkan Roma in New York share more cultural patterns with their Balkan neighbors than with other Romani groups, such as American Kalderash. I aim to de-​ exoticize Roma by suggesting that these comparisons are historically and ethnographically emplaced. Petrova suggests that negative stereotypes of Roma blossomed in 15th century Western Europe and spread eastward (2003:128). Roma were viewed as intruders probably because of their dark skin, their non-​European physical features, their foreign customs, and their association with magic and invading Turks. The positive yet dangerous coding of Romani otherness hinges on their romanticization by non-​Roma as free souls (outside the rules and boundaries of European society), their association with the arts, especially music and the occult, and their proximity to nature and sexuality. Using Said’s concept, we can claim that Roma are “orientalized” and exoticized (1978).3 Trumpener emphasizes the association of Roma with an ahistoric, timeless nostalgia: “Nomadic and illiterate, they wander down an endless road, without a social contract or country to bind them, carrying their home with them, crossing borders at will” (1992, 853). Simultaneously they are reviled as unreformable untrustworthy, liars, and rejected from civilization. “Feared as deviance, idealized as autonomy” (Trumpener 1992, 854), Roma serve as one of the West’s quintessential others. Perhaps the most tragic period of Romani history was World War II. With the Nazi rise to power, Roma faced an extermination campaign in which 500,000 to 1.5 million were murdered, representing between one-​fourth and one-​fifth of their total population (Hancock 2002; Kenrick and Puxon 1972). After the war, Roma received neither compensation nor recognition as victims. The post-​World War II communist regimes in Eastern Europe officially downplayed ethnicity but nevertheless defined Roma as a social problem. Roma were targeted for integration into the planned economy, forced to give up their traditional occupations, and assigned to the lowest skilled and lowest paid industrial and agricultural state jobs (e.g., street cleaners). Nomadic Roma were

162   Carol Silverman forcibly settled, settled Roma were sometimes forcibly moved, and sometimes aspects of their culture, such as music, were outlawed. Cheap housing was nominally provided by the state but ghetto-​like segregated neighborhoods were commonplace. On the positive side, during socialism, Romani school attendance grew (despite inferior segregated schools), violence was rare, and Roma held steady employment and received the benefits of the paternalistic state (Silverman 1986). In the postsocialist period, harassment and violence toward the Roma of Eastern Europe have increased, along with marginalization and poverty. They are the largest minority in Europe (10–​12 million) and have the lowest standard of living in every country, with unemployment reaching 80 percent in some regions. East European Roma face inferior and segregated housing and education including tracking of children into special schools for the disabled. Poor health conditions, specifically higher infant mortality and morbidity, shorter life expectancy, and higher frequency of chronic diseases all plague Roma. Discrimination is widespread in employment and the legal system, and even educated people routinely express disdain for Gypsies. Hate speech and racial profiling are common in the media. Perhaps most troubling are the hundreds of incidences of physical violence against Roma perpetrated by ordinary citizens and also by the police.4 In response to this, a Romani human-​rights movement has mobilized in the last 25 years via a network of activists and nongovernmental organizations. Macedonia, which was part of Yugoslavia until 1991, reports 130,000–​200,000 Roma.5 On the one hand, the constitution mentions full equality; the Romani language is spoken by 80 percent of Macedonian Roma; there are several Romani-​language radio programs and television stations. On the other hand, there is widespread police brutality and discrimination in hiring, education, service in public establishments, and the legal system; moreover, surveys show 59–​80  percent of non-​Roma have negative feelings toward Roma (Plaut and Memedova 2005:16). Considering the this situation, Romani refugees from the crisis of postsocialism can now be found in every Western European nation and in the United States and Canada. I emphasize that Europe rather than India has been home to Roma since the 15th century and that multiple rediasporizations within and from Europe have occurred. The United States hosts Roma from every group and subgroup but they do not coalesce as a pan-​Romani community. Macedonian Roma rarely interact with other Romani groups, such as Kalerash, although occasionally they intermarry with other Balkan Roma. The center of Macedonian Romani life in the United States is located in the New York City borough of the Bronx in the Belmont neighborhood. Belmont is a historic Italian neighborhood, but in the past 50 years, Hispanics, Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Montenegrin Muslims, south Serbian Muslims, and Balkan Roma moved into the area while the Italian population has declined.6 Now Balkan (mostly Albanian) restaurants, groceries, photography studios, and pizza/​burek (a doughy pie with feta cheese, spinach, or meat) parlors are interspersed with older Italian businesses. Macedonian Roma began moving to New York City in the late 1960s, specifically from the city of Prilep, but also from Bitola, Skopje, and other cities. At the time, the Yugoslav government supported sending “guest workers” to Western Europe, the United States,

Diasporic Ethnicity, Gender, and Dance    163 and Australia because of hard currency remittances. Emigrants saw working abroad as a way to make good money, move up the social scale, and help out relatives at home. After the guest-​worker policy ended, the sponsorship of relatives and the need for spouses continued. The wars in Yugoslavia (1991–​1995) brought economic crisis to the entire region causing another wave of emigration. Although push factors (out of Yugoslavia) in the 1960s were mostly economic, now they include lack of hope, lack of a political future, and fear of police brutality and other forms of discrimination. Pull factors (to the United States) include the need for spouses, better employment possibilities, and less outward racism. “Chain” immigration, that is, one family sponsoring another was the common pattern until the mid-​1990s, when American laws became more restrictive. Now spouses are the most only numerous migrants. Although Macedonia is the nominal “home,” New York Roma often travel to other diasporic locations such as Western Europe. The movement of people, things, and ideas occurs among several sites in the diaspora, occasionally even without reference to Macedonia. A woman in Toronto, for example, saved money to visit her sister in Melbourne, Australia, whom she had not seen for 25 years; this was more important than a cheaper trip to Macedonia where she has many more relatives. Travel, of course, is contingent on having the proper documents and the money for tickets and gifts. All Belmont families started their immigrant experiences with virtually no material resources; rather, they relied on human resources. The majority are still working class but some families have reached the middle class, and a few are the upper class. Although the emigrant generation typically had a fourth to eighth-​grade education, the second generation in the United States is becoming well educated, especially females. Whereas mothers worked in factories or cleaned offices, many daughters are pursuing professional college degrees, for example in the fields of business, law, computing, and teaching (see Silverman 2012b). The community is extremely close knit; everyone knows one another face-​to-​face, sees each other often at celebrations, and socializes within the community. Roma rarely have close friends outside the community. Leila illustrated, “Family values … are very important. My family was everything to me. … This was always the main issue growing up.” She saw family as defense against the hostile outside world: Not to feel alone in the world, like many Americans, that is the main reason I stayed within the family. I could not imagine going against the family and the tradition, and being out there on my own and being ostracized from everything I knew from the time I opened my eyes. Your family is who you are, and it is there forever. The family is a positive thing, and it is our only defense. We have no choice, especially in Europe. If you go and you try to become a part of somebody else’s community as a Rom, they don’t want you. So you have to make the best of it. The family is so strong because we are not accepted anywhere. It has become almost an obsession.

Leila points out that kin orientation is an adaptive mechanism in a world filled with hostility against Roma. For many cultures, relying on one’s own family has been a way to ensure trust to counter the threats from a mistrustful environment. This is still

164   Carol Silverman somewhat true for young Roma. What defines the field of social relations is a “very high level of interpersonal and intercommunal investment and trust—​economic, social, emotional and moral.” (Werbner 2002, 272). Community members “define their subjectivities as moral individuals through long-​term relations of sociality such as marriage, family, and community” (Werbner 2002, 272–​273). The Muslim religion is a strong cultural identification point, but the level of practice varies tremendously. In general, Macedonian Roma two decades ago were not very observant; even today, some eat pork, and many drink alcohol and do not pray. During the 1980s, I rarely heard of anyone going to a mosque except for a funeral. In the 1990s, however, the Muza Mosque/​Islamic Center in Belmont became a vital community center, and many young Roma have now become quite religious. The marriages of a many Romani couples, for example, have featured a ceremony in the mosque and a few nonalcoholic weddings have taken place.7

Identity Issues For Belmont Roma, identity issues arise because the possibility of assimilation is ever present. They are well aware of the tension between American individualistic ethics and the collective family ethics of their community. Especially for young Roma, the lure of American culture can be strong. Some youth see freedom of movement, individual use of money and time, and sexual relations as attractive, but most try to balance these American values with their traditional beliefs. Living, working, and going to school alongside non-​Roma makes Roma aware of what they claim distinguishes them from others: their culture: their family orientation, their ties to Macedonia, their restrained sexuality, their customs, language, music, and dance. Note that this list does not include all the usual features of ethnic identity (Romanucci-​Ross and De Vos 1995): shared territory, history, and language; territory and history are missing. Most Belmont Roma know a little about their origins in India, but, as mentioned earlier, they relate to Macedonia as a referential home. I contend that their home is wherever their community is; this diasporic attitude minimizes homeland. Because they are people oriented more than place oriented, they take their home with them wherever they are. Belmont Roma are proud to be Roma, but exactly what that means is contested. For the older generation, it may be language and customs; for the middle generation it may be finding appropriate spouses for their children; for youth it tends to be family, music, and dance. But all Roma are forced to deal with their public identity whether they want to or not, because of the stigma associated with being “Gypsy.” In the Balkans, non-​ Roma readily identify (and often stigmatize) Roma by where they live, what language they speak, how they dress, their music and dances, or the color of their skin. For American immigrants, however, there are more choices available because America provides a more mobile environment, and Americans pry less than Europeans: privacy is valued. In America, you can hide your family history, you don’t live in an

Diasporic Ethnicity, Gender, and Dance    165 exclusively Romani neighborhood, few can pinpoint your foreign language, and there are other dark-​skinned people around. As a result, in Belmont, Roma exhibit a diversity of self-​presentational attitudes. Many community members do not readily reveal their ethnicity to non-​Roma because of stereotypes of “Gypsy” criminality and nomadism. Some, on the other hand, are proud to identify as Roma. One woman, for example, used her wedding to finally admit to her co-​workers that she was Romani. She invited them to the event, and by exposing them to her culture’s music, she demonstrated her Romani ethnicity. On the other hand, Roma sometimes hide their ethnicity by refusing to publicly identify with symbols of their culture, even positive ones. In the 1990s, two brothers from Skopje tried to organize a Romani dance group in Belmont. They are excellent dancers and had performed in several groups in Macedonia. Parents, however, were reluctant to let their children attend the dance group, especially the girls. One brother said, “When they reach fourteen or fifteen years old they don’t want to let the girls out. Also, they don’t want people to know they are Roma. This is art—​they should be proud of Romani folklore. We gave up—​these people just don’t understand.” Similarly, in the 1990s a prominent musician refused to play in a prestigious concert for non-​Roma when he learned that he was identified as Romani in the program notes. This same Rom was extremely proud of his music when it occurred in all-​Romani contexts, but he shied away from the Gypsy label in mainstream American contexts because of the stigma. His sons, however, have now embraced a public Romani musical identity; perhaps the surge in the popularity of Gypsy music in the world music market has helped alter their perceptions (see Silverman 2012a). Another factor is the emergence of a nascent activist movement in the community, spearheaded by several brave and energetic young Roma. For example, in April 2012 Sonya Jasaroska organized the first International Romani Day Celebration in Belmont which was a combination of speeches, presentations, music and dance. Also in April 2012 the Balkan-​American Community Center was unveiled (via music and speeches) with ambitious plans for culture, sports, business, and education programs that target youth. However, by 2013 it had closed and the mosque had taken over some of its functions.

Ritual and Dance In Belmont, marriage underscores the significance of the family and demonstrates transnational ties via the network for spouses. Everyone is expected to marry, and those who don’t are often criticized. In Belmont, young people do not “date,” but rather congregate with other Roma in the streets, at ritual events, on dance lines, at the mosque, at the Balkan community center, and at school; they also avidly communicate via e-​ mail and Facebook. They are constantly exposed to non-​Roma in many contexts such as work and school, but the ideal of marriage remains within the diasporic community. Traditionally, this meant that the parents looked for appropriate spouses and the

166   Carol Silverman children acquiesced. However, there are myriad variations: at one extreme, parents may force children to marry (this rarely happens), and at the other, parents may acquiesce to a match entirely orchestrated by the children. Intermarriage, though discouraged, happens occasionally. In my interviews and conversations, I found that young people (aged 18–​30 years) consistently cited Romani dance and music as defining features of their ethnicity. When I asked them what makes them Roma, as opposed to Macedonian or American or Turkish, they talked about Romani music and dance at their celebrations. Elders less often mentioned music and more often spoke of language, religion, in-​group marriage and values (such as respecting the elderly) as core ethnicity features. Although the Romani language is disappearing in New York (and even the Macedonian language is declining), the interest in and commitment to music and dance is extremely strong in the younger generations. Young people are so committed to music and dance that they have organized stand-​alone events (unconnected to rituals) specifically for the purpose of dancing to live music. Music is integral to Belmont Roma not only in ritual contexts but as background to whatever they are doing. For example, when they are driving, when they are repairing or cleaning the house, or when they are relaxing, Roma listen to music and often sing along. Some young people have thousands of songs on their computers and they trade music via the Internet with relatives in Macedonia and other parts of the diaspora. Although music may be used as background (as with mediated musics) or foreground (as with live music), dance, on the other hand, is an active form of embodied community and family engagement. Dance occurs in Belmont whenever there is live music and sometimes when there is recorded music. Celebrations with live music and dance are the glue that binds Roma to their families and communities. Ritual events are the emotional focus of the community, and it is here where dance displays diasporic social relations. Both in the Balkans and in the diaspora, community members not only gather regularly for events, but also plan them well ahead of time and discuss them long afterward. They figure clearly in how Roma performatively conceive their identity and how they distinguish themselves from both non-​Roma and from non-​Balkan Roma. Moreover, celebrations are motivations for and manifestations of diasporic migration: Roma plan travel to coincide with celebrations (e.g., attending a relative’s wedding), and trips are sometimes the cause of events (e.g., visiting relatives sponsoring a farewell banquet). At any Macedonian Romani event, participants typically hail from several diasporic locations, including Western Europe. Ritual celebrations display cultural values and serve as markers or organizing principles of the year and the life cycle. Celebrations are complex events comprising many genres, e.g., music, dance, costume, food, and ritual. Many dramatic roles are filled, much economic planning is necessary, and reputations and status are established, or questioned, or negotiated. Furthermore, via celebration, Romani life evinces a conscious and heightened performative dimension. Digital and photographic documentation has been common since the 1970s and the resulting tapes and clips become treasured historical documents (see later).

Diasporic Ethnicity, Gender, and Dance    167 In emphasizing the role of the community, however, I  mean to imply neither a conflict-​free atmosphere nor a system in balance. To the contrary, danced behaviors often lead to conflict or reenact prior arguments and schisms over respect and reputations. For example, at one wedding, a fight erupted between the in-​laws because of an old schism; at another wedding, a female relative was very upset about the order of dance-​line leaders. To protest, she did not attend another event. As I will explain next, the order of dance-​line leaders is a very sensitive issue because it demonstrates the hierarchy of familial respect.

Weddings in Belmont By far, weddings are the most frequent celebratory events and the focus of community attention, but New York Macedonian Roma also celebrate other life cycle events such as circumcisions, anniversaries, and graduations, and calendrical events such as the end of Ramadan and New Years Eve. Weddings, above all, are seen as key to the growth of the family and the community. Because the bride is ideally brought into the groom’s family, weddings affirm patrilocal residency, patriarchal relations, and the reproductive capacity of women. The bride is thus the ritual focus and the most symbolically endowed personage. She is the person undergoing the most marked transition, and because the alliance between two families depends on her, she is the most precarious person. Although I do not have the space to describe the full range of Macedonian Romani wedding rituals (see Seeman 1990 and Silverman 2012a), I note that they follow the general structure of all Balkan weddings, regardless of religion and ethnicity. In the American context many traditional rituals have been eliminated and a few new customs have been introduced. Rather than seeing diasporic weddings as lacking, I explore how weddings actively innovate, that is, what they include, exclude, and change. Being working Americans, Belmont Roma must confine their weddings to one to two weekend days. This rigid American work schedule stands in marked contrast to Macedonian work schedules. Roma in Macedonia can usually adjust their work schedules to the demands of week-​long weddings, but in America this is more difficult. However, even in Macedonia, weddings have been shortened in the last few decades. The longer Macedonian wedding is typically shortened to one to three days in New York, but they are not necessarily consecutive. Some rituals are eliminated, some are combined, and some find new locations and times. For example, the henna party that in Macedonia usually takes place in the bride’s house a few days prior to the wedding, is often held at the groom’s house in New York. At one 1990s wedding, approximately 25 women occupied the living room of the groom’s family’s tiny three-​room apartment; as in Macedonia, the few men were relegated to the kitchen. There was recorded music, and the women danced solo čoček (see later) with abandon.

168   Carol Silverman At a wedding in the mid 2000s, the groom’s parents sponsored a large henna party the night before the wedding banquet in the courtyard of their apartment building in Belmont. They beautifully displayed clothing and gifts for the bride in an adjacent room, and hired a band of local and diaspora musicians The clarinetist and singer, who were born in Macedonia and were relatives of the bride’s father, were flown in from Germany. The bride wore a gown, then šalvari (wide-legged pants), then another gown. Šalvari are infrequently worn in the United States but a few elders insist that brides wear them at ritual moments such as these. In Macedonia and Western Europe they are required, although styles constantly change (Dunin 2013). The bride led the first dance with a fancy handkerchief, and one by one, her female family members as well as the groom’s female relatives led the line. Before each woman led, she tipped the musicians. As this was a female-​centered party, the men were absent or stayed on the sidelines. The dancing became bawdy as the women loosened up (see later), and the mothers of the bride and groom climbed on chairs and mimed sexually suggestive movements in a humorous way. In terms of the intense female presence, this event resembled the henna parties I had attended in Macedonia despite the absence of the custom of applying henna to the bride’s full head of hair. Instead, just a dab of henna was applied. The next day (Saturday) included a ceremony in the mosque (this custom is now common in Belmont). As the couple emerged from the mosque, they danced to a band of acoustic instruments, including clarinet, accordion, and tarabuka (hand drum) in the street. Many relatives congregated, and although the dancing in the street blocked city traffic, neighbors were was very polite. The highlight of the wedding was the evening banquet, whose location mirrored American weddings in that it took place in a rented hall with a dais, catered food, and a wedding cake. Other American customs include throwing the bouquet, throwing the bride’s garter, drinking champagne, and cutting the first piece of cake. Dance is the medium through which participants display social relationships (Sugarman 1997; Cowan 1990); for example, the first line dance8 of the wedding banquet is led by the most respected female elder (usually the groom’s mother or grandmother). In Macedonia, she often holds a sieve decorated by women with a grain product, greenery, and red cloth (see Figure 7.1). The sieve symbolically links the fertility of the land (wheat and flour) to the fertility of the bride and the blood of life. In New York the sieve is purchased already decorated or is replaced by a fancy handkerchief (see Figures 7.2 and 7.3). The order of the dance line indicates respect in terms of age and status. The “speaker" calls up families one by one to lead the line, in the order of age and closeness to the sponsoring family. The speaker is usually a man who has a flair with words, is a good organizer, and knows the proper order; recently, however, women are taking over this role. The speaker must not insult people by omitting them; the sequence must be ko redo or vo red (Romani or Macedonian: in order). Dance, then, is a performative display of social structure. One common speaker’s formula is Akana ka khela … or Sega ḱe igrae… (Romani or Macedonian; now so and so will dance). I have been at several wedding where people were furious at the order. Often

Diasporic Ethnicity, Gender, and Dance    169

Figure 7.1  Woman leading dance line with a sieve, symbol of fertility and good luck. Macedonia 1994. Photograph by Carol Silverman, used with permission.

a speaker is instructed in the proper order by knowledgeable elders in the sponsoring family. Many of the dance lines are lead by women because they are the primary dancers. As the family goes up to the front of the banquet hall to lead, a family member requests a tune from the musicians and a male tips them. Knowing they are on display, females dress up for the event; this is an occasion for parents to scrutinize potential spouses for their children. People discuss who is wearing what and who is dancing next to whom; most important, parents of marriageable children ask kaske or čija (Romani or Macedonian: whose) is that son or daughter, meaning to what family does he or she belong. Because dance lines are integrated sexually in New York, they also serve as meeting places for young people. Since individualized dating is not practiced, youths

Figure 7.2  Groom’s mother leading the dance line, holding a handkerchief. New York, 1995. Photograph by Carol Silverman, used with permission.

Figure 7.3  Bride leading the dance line, holding a handkerchief, while groom tips the musicians. New York, 2011. Photograph by Suzy Ademoski, used with permission.

Diasporic Ethnicity, Gender, and Dance    171 of the opposite sex look each other over on the dance line and conversations are initiated. Young men and women sometimes dance next to each other and relationships develop. Future matches, then, are planned via the dance line at ritual celebrations. Close female kin of the bridal couple are expected, even obliged, to dance for hours at weddings, no matter how sweaty and how tired they are. The only excuse not to dance is illness or mourning. Women who do not dance well or are mentally or physically disabled also dance and even lead dance lines. Male dancing is more optional than female dancing; there are some moments where male dancing is required such as when their families are called up to lead the dance line. Men dance for entertainment, too, and some men dance a great deal, but they are not obliged to dance as much as women. On the dance floor, one finds both children learning by immersion and seasoned elders. A typical wedding dance line, whether located in the Balkans or Belmont has more women than men. Some men dance together often, put a great deal of energy into the dance for a short while, and then sit down. In New York there is an enthusiastic group of young men who always dance together; they look for each other at celebrations and try out complicated steps. Whenever their favorite dance is played, these boys will appear. In fact, men seem to demonstrate their masculinity more in line dances rather than in solo dance; they perform kicks, sharp movements, and high leg lifts. Women and girls also tend to dance with their relatives and friends; they too join the dance line in pairs or groups, rarely alone, but unlike men, women and girls are on the dance floor for practically the whole event.

Čoček The most characteristic Romani dance form is the solo dance known as čoček. Note that čoček can also refer to the musical genre used for this dance, in 2/​4, 7/​8, and 9/​8. As a musical form, čoček is often marked by Turkish-​derived scales and by mane, or taksim, a highly improvised free rhythm and/​or metric exploration of the scale or makam, played over a metric ostinato; the term thus serves a double function as indicating both a dance and a music genre. Note that čoček can also refer to the line dance performed to this musical genre (also called oro). As a solo dance, čoček is improvised, utilizing hand movements, contractions of the abdomen and pelvis, shoulder shakes, movement of isolated body parts (such as hips and head), and small footwork patterns. Men as well as women perform it but it is overwhelmingly associated with women. Čoček is clearly an heir to the dances of the Ottoman çengis, female professional dancers (the term comes from köçek, male professional dancer), but in Romani communities its subtlety and restraint distinguish it from contemporary belly dancing. I conceive of solo čoček dancing as a continuum, with subtlety and a covered body (as found at Romani community events) on one end and belly dancing and exposed skin on the other end (Silverman 2003 and 2008). It can be

172   Carol Silverman

Figure 7.4  Bride and groom standing on chairs dancing čoček. New York, 2011. Photograph by Suzy Ademoski, used with permission.

compared to the improvised female social dance performed at weddings and other family gatherings in the Middle East. Čoček is also danced at heightened ritual moments, for example, when the bride and groom dance solo with each other standing on chairs and the wedding guests dance solo around them (see Figure 7.4). Čoček as a female solo dance has an important place in ritual line dances. It is often danced in the middle of the dance floor near the front of the dance line; simultaneously, the line snakes around (see Figure 7.3). For example, the bride’s close female kin dance čoček in the center as relatives are called up to lead the dance line. A few female members of the beckoned relatives (rarely men) will join the bride’s women in the center to dance čoček. The style changes as new tunes are played and new family members are summoned. Even though women may be ostensibly doing the same dance for hours, its texture migrates, for example, from fast and bouncy to slow and heavy. A good čoček dancer has the admiration of the entire community, and her family will show off her talents (see Figure 7.5). Girls practice čoček at home and watch videos of Turkish belly dancers to try out new moves. Dancing solo čoček, however, must be negotiated carefully because of its connection to sexuality.

Sexuality and Dance In contemporary Romani life, dance mediates female sexuality and reputation and its practice is governed by community ideas of propriety, context, and talent. The ideology of female modesty and decorum was historically shared by all Balkans groups regardless

Diasporic Ethnicity, Gender, and Dance    173

Figure 7.5  Woman at a circumcision celebration dancing čoček on top of a car. Macedonia, 1990. Photograph by Carol Silverman, used with permission.

of religion; today this ideology appears stronger among Muslims (Sugarman 2003). As Cowan writes (based on Eastern Orthodox Greek Macedonian materials): “Dance is a problem for women because in the dance site... ambivalent attitudes about female sexuality as both pleasurable and threatening are juxtaposed” (1990, 190). Among all Balkan groups, the embodied nature of dance highlights its association with female sexuality. For Muslims “the female body is the embodiment of seductive power and its open expression is therefore strongly condemned in moral-​religious discourses” (Nieuwkerk 2003, 268). The Balkan Muslim Romani moral system contrasts pativ or pačiv or pakiv (Romani, respect) with ladž (Romani, shame). In the South Slavic languages, Roma speak of these concepts as čest (honor) and sram (shame). A professional belly dancer nema sram (has

174   Carol Silverman no shame). A bride who is a virgin is čestna (honest, pure), and many Belmont Roma still practice a test of virginity (Silverman 2012a). In fact, the blaga rakija (sweet brandy) event celebrates the bride’s virginity; this is widely practiced in New York in the form of a second banquet sponsored by the bride’s family. This association of women with sexuality bears directly on the stigma of the female professional dancer for it is both the commercial relationship with a paying audience and the display of the body to strange males that threaten female modesty. For this reason dancing professionally is regarded as far more immoral than singing professionally (Silverman 2003). Thus, there are no professional female singers or dancers among Belmont Roma, even though there are many talented female performers. Yuri Yunakov, a famous Bulgarian Muslim Romani musician in this community, remarked that he would never let his daughter (who is a very talented dancer) become a professional dancer, as it was a degrading profession. Dancing for money involves performing for strange men, selling one’s sexuality, and thereby devaluing it. Ironically, there were two weddings during the last decade in which a professional non-​Romani belly dance was hired. The young people thought it was interesting but most members of the older generation thought it was distasteful. Theoretically, Romani women must conform most to ideal behavior precisely because sexuality poses a danger of ladž or sram. Women, especially unmarried females. are scrutinized by other women as to their bodily appearance, deportment, and dancing styles. Clothing (especially hem lines and bodices), make-​up, eye contact, socializing patterns, time spent outdoors—​all are noted and evaluated for violations of modesty. Note that this applies to girls and women who are educated and active in the work force. Females in college and those working far from home are all scrutinized, regardless of their financial independence or mobility. An important manifestation of the proper deportment of sexuality is monitoring where and for whom dance is performed. According to Dunin’s pioneering research with Romani communities in Macedonia, segregated male and female dancing was the norm until the 1970s. Women danced in private home settings to the accompaniment of female musicians; to dance for men was considered crude (1971, 324–​325; 1973, 195; 1984; 1985; 2000; 2006; 2008). Note, however, that this was also true for Christians and for non-​Romani Muslims of the Balkans (Sugarman 1997). Dunin’s Macedonian research in the 1970s showed that line and processional dancing were sexually integrated, whereas solo dancing (which is more sexually suggestive) was segregated (Dunin 1973; 1977). By the 1980s, however, due to the relaxation of gender divisions in many areas of life, solo dances could be found in mixed company. Today women in Macedonia and New York dance solo in the presence of men; women also continue to dance in sexually segregated events such as henna parties. How do they negotiate their style and context? Although women want to show off their solo dance skills, they delicately negotiate the propriety of the display. Some displays are crass and transgressive, whereas others are appropriate, depending on context and audience. Note that a trademark feature of čoček is “throwing” the stomach, a movement that is quite sharp and rhythmic; this movement becomes especially dramatic in the 9/​8 rhythm which has become emblematic

Diasporic Ethnicity, Gender, and Dance    175 for Turkish Roma (Seeman 2002; 2007). In fact, at New Year’s dances sponsored by Macedonian Roma in New York, 9/​8 tunes are played exactly at midnight, a heightened time of abandon. Stomach movements are higlighted during these heightened moments (with family members present) and in all-women henna parties. Family members, then, can serve as a safe cushion for solo čoček dancers. Furthermore, mothers and fathers put their daughters on stage to dance with musicians who are male relatives. For example, even though Yuri Yunakov would not consider letting his daughter become a professional dancer, he has encouraged her to dance on stage at many festivals and parties when he is performing. At Romani community events, good dancers are encouraged with shouts of appreciation and even with monetary tips; an exceptional dancer can even receive bakšiš (tips) on her forehead. Similarly, female relatives of good dancers often stop dancing and instead clap for the talented performer. In spatial terms, the closest audience for proper female čoček dancers is composed of relatives. Strangers, however, do watch from afar. The physical proximity of relatives is not only a permeable wall—​a shield of protection against claims of sexual immorality, but also a transparent screen through which to view female bodily displays.

Repertoire Note that in addition to solo čoček, Roma perform line dances to čoček music that vary in step and style by region, age, and subgroup of Roma. Meters of 9/​8 and 7/​8 are less common than 2/​4 meters, and often 9/​8 tunes are played later in the evening and induce increased intensity. The most common 2/​4 line dance in Macedonia, Kosovo, and southern Serbia is a three measure dance, sometimes called oro,9 with versions that vary by rhythm and footwork; it is also danced to 7/​8. Also note that, in addition to čoček, Balkan Roma have always danced at least some of the line dance repertoire of the non-​Roma in their region. Often line dances start slow and speed up at the end in typical Macedonian style. The New York Macedonian Romani repertoire of line dances includes Bugarsko (Bulgarian), Lesno (light), in 7/​8, danced slow or fast, Čačak, Bitolska, or Romska Gaida (Bitola or Romani bagpipe), Eleno Mome (Oh, Elena, girl), Jeni Jol (New way, Turkish), and several 9/​8 dances. Beranče or Ibraim Odža (often in 12/​8, 3–​2–​2–​3–​2) is another popular line dance, especially performed by Roma from Bitola. The older generation tends to have a larger dance repertoire. Elder Roma or talented young Roma are often called upon to lead the older, slow, heavy line dances (Pharo/​Teško, heavy, Romani/​ Macedonian) in 2/​4 or 7/​8 and crossing dances that many young people do not know. Several older women and men in the New York community are excellent dancers. Some younger Roma are also very avid dancers. They talk about missing dancing when there are no weddings, and eagerly look forward to every celebration. American couple dances have also made their way into Romani weddings. At most weddings, the bridal couple enters and does a slow American couple dance to a Romani song; sometimes the dance morphs into a free form čoček and became more intense as

176   Carol Silverman relatives threw money over the couple (see Figure 7.4). At a recent wedding, a DJ played rock music over the speakers during band breaks and the young people danced with abandon.

Video Diaspora Face-​to-​face communication is highly valued among Roma, and thus communication across distances poses special problems. Roma communicate in the diaspora using various technologies via various performative means of representation.10 Entering a Macedonian Romani home in Macedonia, New York, Vienna, or Melbourne, one is immediately struck by the ubiquitous presence of the television screen. What is on the screen may not be the local news or soap opera, however, but rather videos of family members dancing at celebrations, both distant and close to home. Video is a primary means of sharing evaluative information, building and dismantling community, and making style (Bourdieu 1984). Furthermore, videotaping and video watching may be considered “performances of modernity,” (Schein 1999; Appadurai 1996) in the sense that evaluation of the performative sense of the culture is a hallmark of a conscious identity formation. In New York many Roma frequently use telephones or camcorders to tape dance. Families also hire professionals to record large events. These professionals edit their videos into a packaged product with titles and effects. In addition, guests at celebrations also bring their telephones, so multiple taping is a common occurrence. My camera was one of many cameras at most events I attended, both in Macedonia and in the diaspora. In Macedonia, adult men tend to operate video cameras; in Belmont women and teenagers have become adept with video technology. Roma deliberately videotape in order to show relatives in the diaspora what is happening in their communities. Videos, however, do not document everyday life and work activities. Rather, celebrations are the focal point of sociability for the community, and the display of heightened ethnicity is evident. Dance performance, then is a vehicle for the display of identity. When documenting their celebrations, Roma focus on people via dance and music. There are few video frames that do not include people; location does not command attention. Place is literally absent from Romani videos, supporting the notion that Romani communities exist wherever there are Roma, regardless of location. Persons depicted in the videos are actively doing something—​speaking, playing an instrument, singing, but above all, dancing. People enjoy being the object of the camera; there is neither shyness on the part of performers nor hesitation on the part of the people behind the camera. This reflects the positive coding of performance in Romani life. Parents, for example, encourage children to sing, play an instrument, and dance for relatives at celebrations. Video subjects either already know the audience for whom the video is intended, or else they ask, and they tailor their performances for it. Often, they face directly into the camera and offer greetings to the intended viewers as they dance.

Diasporic Ethnicity, Gender, and Dance    177 Along with personal greetings, dance is a ubiquitous feature in Romani videos. As I have explained, at Romani celebrations live music is the medium for hours or even days of dancing. A time analysis of the videos evinces long sequences of dancing. The video dance line is a guide to figuring out who is related to whom, who has married whom, who has children now, who has grown up, who looks ill, who has died, and so on. This is very important in the diaspora, where people rely on videos to gather and evaluate information. It was also important to me, the ethnographer, as a graphic guide to who was who in the diaspora community. In the last decade, the Internet has emerged as a ubiquitous medium in the lives of young Roma. Virtually all young New York Roma use the Internet, and they often share photographs and music audio and video files via email or Facebook, building up huge collections. Since 2006, postings by Macedonian Roma on YouTube began to appear. In the last few years, young Roma from Belmont have posted excerpts from their weddings for their relatives to see on the Internet. Music and dance from private celebrations are the foci of these videos, but concerts and television shows can be found as well. Commercial videos are also frequently posted. Home dance videos of celebrations are a visual window into the aesthetic system of the community. The aesthetic system displays stylistic markers such as čoček dance forms, which serve as badges of identity for the group, and those markers compose a system of style. These markers surface most obviously in performances, where symbols (objects, genres, and behaviors) are elevated to repesentational icons for the group (Leuthold 1998:18). Videos feature these symbols prominently, and it is precisely these iconic behaviors that are evaluated most thoroughly. It is important to emphasize that style is related to consumption and economic class (Bourdieu 1984). If possible, Roma begin watching the videos immediately. Communal viewing elicits evaluative comments that interpret the values of the community and debate the aesthetic system; viewers comment on the costumes (e.g., are the hem lines too short for the women?), the music (how could the hosts afford to hire those famous musicians?), the dancers (what good style she has!), the number of guests (few people came to their wedding because they aren’t speaking to most of their relatives), the money spent on the event (the limousine cost $200 an hour!), the manner in which rituals are performed (the parents of the bride really didn’t want to let her go!), or their omission (she forgot the sieve when she led the dance). In 1994, I gathered in the Bronx with Aiše and her son Ramo to watch a wedding video. I had shot this video in Skopje few weeks earlier. As we watched, Aiše caught up on all the news about family whom she hadn’t seen in several months. She commented on the clothing, the hair, the food, the music, the dance styles and steps, who drank too much, and who was engaged to whom. She also used the occasion to explain the wedding rituals to Ramo who was at a marriageable age and “needed to know these things.” Videos illustrate and initiate conversations about the display of symbols of Romani ethnicity. They are the visual and social medium to concretize and reconfigure various subjectivities, including representations of identity such as dance. Moreover, they convey information about people and situations across the distance of diaspora.

178   Carol Silverman Following Appadurai, I suggest that videos both create and reflect a Romani performative diasporic public sphere transcending the boundaries of the nation-​state (1996, 4). Appadurai asserts that a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity is the effect of media and migration on the work of the imagination (1996, 3). For Roma, electronic communication “impels the work of imagination” (1996, 4), which is, above all, the performance of identity. “People not only position themselves vis-​à-​ vis modernity through multifarious practices but also struggle to reposition themselves, sometimes through deploying the very codes of the modern that have framed them as its others” (Schein 1999, 364). Videos, through collective readings of images and words, create “communities of sentiment” (Appadurai 1996, 8), which provide meaning for Roma. In conclusion, dance is a significant symbolic and social activity for Macedonian Roma in the diaspora. In New York, young Roma participate in and valorize their community’s expressive forms, specifically live music and dance; these artistic forms tie them to their families, their community, and to the other diasporic communities. Čoček as a solo art is especially related to gender and status, and thus is dynamically negotiated in varying contexts. Furthermore, Roma actively use and disseminate videos to extend the symbolic life of dance across diasporic time and distance. Moreover, dance performatively expresses and strategically displays Romani identity, which is further differentiated by gender, status, and age.

Notes 1. This article is based on fieldwork in New York from 1988–​2012, with comparative fieldwork in Macedonia. Research was supported by grants from International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the Open Society Institute, and the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon. Some information is taken from Silverman 2008 and 2012a with permission of the publisher. Pseudonyms are used in this article, except for activists and famous musicians. The author is not Romani but rather of Russian Jewish background; she has been welcomed into family and ritual settings and sincerely thanks her hosts for their generosity and guidance. 2. According to Fraser (1992) and Hancock (2002), nomadism was more prevalent in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe due to regulations preventing settlement in the west. The binary division between nomadic Roma and settled Roma is somewhat artificial. Whereas much of the literature contrasts nomadic groups to sedentary groups, the on-​the ground situation was and is more fluid (Stewart 1997). The Roma from Macedonia discussed in this article are sedentary. 3. Todorova, discussing whether the Balkans are orientalized in reference to the rest of Europe points out that we are not dealing with a colonial situation (1997); nevertheless, the Balkans are posed as “other” to Europe, and, Roma are posed as “other” to the Balkans (also see Neuburger 2004). Ken Lee specifically extends Said's argument to Gypsies: “Whilst Orientalism is the discursive construction of the exotic Other outside Europe, Gypsylorism is the construction of the exotic Other within Europe-​Romanies are the Orientals within” (2000:132).

Diasporic Ethnicity, Gender, and Dance    179 4. For detailed information on these topics, see Petrova 2003; Ringold, Orenstein, and Wilkins 2004; Barany 2002; [www.erio.net]; [www.errc.org]; [www.ertf.org]). Disturbing cases of racist violence targeting Roma have occurred in recent years; in 2008 Italy, France, and Denmark began deporting Romanian and Bulgarian Roma. 5. The Macedonian census of 2002 listed 52,000 Roma (2.7 % of the total population), but scholars agree the actual numbers are much higher (Plaut and Memedova 2005:16). Almost all Macedonian Roma are currently sedentary. 6. Although I have not conducted a formal census, I approximate that there are several hundred Macedonian Romani families in the New York who number several thousand Roma, with half of them living in Belmont. When they can afford it, Roma move out of Belmont to more upscale neighborhoods in the region and purchase their own homes. 7. The revitalization of Islam needs to be seen in a larger context; similar phenomena are happening in Macedonia and in other places in the Balkans and Western Europe. 8. Line dancing follows the usual pattern in the southern Balkan-​dancers hold hands in a circle and the line moves to the right; the leader has a visible, respectful, and sometimes improvisatory role; the last person also guides the line and sometimes improvises. 9. Most community members do refer to dances by name, and, when names are used, they are not standardized. When a leader requests a song or dance, there is sometimes miscommunication, and the leader might refuse to dance until the musicians play the “right” melody. From the point of view of musicians, this can be very frustrating because they sometimes have to guess several times what the leader wants. 10. See Appaduriai’s discussion of the linkage of electronic media to migration in the modern global world (1996).

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large:  Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Barany, Zoltan. 2002. The East European Gypsies:  Regime Change, Marginality, and Ethnopolitics. London: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cowan, Jane. 1990. Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece. Princeton:  Princeton University Press. Dunin, Elsie. 1971. “Gypsy Wedding:  Dance and Customs.” MakedonskiFolklor IV(7–​8): 317–​326. Dunin, Elsie. 1973. “Čoček as a Ritual Dance Among Gypsy Women.” MakedonskiFolklor VI(12):193–​197. Dunin, Elsie​. 1977. “The Newest Changes in Rom Dance (Serbia and Macedonia).” Journal of the Association of Graduate Dance Ethnologists, University of California, Los Angeles, 1(Spring):12–​17. Dunin, Elsie​. 1984. “A Gypsy Celebration of St. George’s Day in Skopje.” In Dance Occasions and Festive Dress in Yugoslavia, edited by Elsie Dunin, 24–​27. Los Angeles: UCLA Monograph Series 23. University of California at Los Angeles, Museum of Cultural History. Dunin, Elsie​. 1985. “Dance Change in the Context of the Gypsy St. George’s Day, Skopje, Yugoslavia, 1967–​1977.” In Papers from the Fourth and Fifth Annual Meetings, Gypsy Lore

180   Carol Silverman Society, North American Chapter, edited by Joanne Grumet, 110–​120. New York: Gypsy Lore Society. Dunin, Elsie​. 2000. “Dancing at the Crossroads by the Skopje Roma during St. George’s Day.” In ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology 20th Symposium Proceedings. August 19–​26, 1998, 244–​254. Istanbul Turkey: DanzmuzikKulturFolkloraDogru. Dunin, Elsie. 2006. “Romani Dance Event in Skopje, Macedonia: Research Strategies, Cultural Identities, and Technologies.” In Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture, Identities, edited by Theresa Buckland, 175–​198. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Dunin, Elsie​. 2008. “Čoček in Macedonia: A Forty Year Overview.” In The Balkan Peninsula as a Musical Crossroad: Struga, Macedonia, September 2007, edited by Velika Serafimovska, 115–​125. Skopje, Macedonia: Sokom. Dunin, Elsie. 2009. “The ‘Cloning’ of čoček in Macedonia: Media Affecting Globalization as Well as Localization of Belly Dancing.” In Struga Musical Autumn: First Symposium of ICTM Study Group for Music and Dance in Southeastern Europe, edited by Velika Serafimovska, 213–​225. Skopje, Macedonia: Sokom. Dunin, Elsie. 2013. “Festive Dress and Dance Events in the Romani Community of Skopje, Republic of Macedonia, 1967 and 2011.” In Resplendent Dress from Southeastern Europe, edited by Elizabeth Barber and Barbara Sloan, 207–215. Los Angeles; Fowler Museum. Fraser, Angus. 1992. The Gypsies. Oxford, England: Blackwell. Hancock, Ian. 2002. We Are the Romani People:  Ame Sam e RromaneDžene. Hatfield, England: University of Herfortshire Press. Hupchick, Dennis. 1994. “Nation or Millet? Contrasting Western European and Islamic Political Cultures in the Balkans.” In Culture and History in Eastern Europe, 121–​155. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kenrick, Donald, and Grattan Puxon. 1972. The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies. New  York: Heinemann. Lee, Ken. 2000. Orientalism and Gypsylorism. Social Analysis 44(2):129–​156. Leuthold, Steven. 1998. Indigenous Aesthetics:  Native Art, Media and Identity. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Marushiakova, Elena and Vesselin Popov. 2000. Tsiganite v Osmanskata Imperia (Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire). Sofia: Litavra. Matras, Yaron. 2002. Romani:  A  Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge, England:  Cambridge University Press. Neuburger, Mary. 2004. The Orient Within:  Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Nieuwkerk, Karin van. 2003. “On Religion, Gender and Performing: Female Performers and Repentance in Egypt.” In Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean, edited by Tullia Magrini, 267–​286. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Petrova, Dimitrina. 2003. “The Roma:  Between A  Myth and A  Future.” Social Research 70(1):111–​161. Plaut, Shayna and Azbija Memedova. 2005. “Blank Face, Private Strength: Romani Identity as Represented in the Public and Private Sphere.” In Roma’s Identities in Southeast Europe:  Macedonia, edited by Azbija Memdova, et  al., Ethnobarometer Working Paper. [www.ethnobarometer.org/​pagine/​macedonia.pdf]. Ringold, Dena, Mitchell Orenstein, and Erika Wilkins. 2004. Roma in an Expanding Europe: Breaking the Poverty Cycle. Washington DC: World Bank.

Diasporic Ethnicity, Gender, and Dance    181 Romanucci-​Ross, Lola and George De Vos, eds. 1995. Ethnic Identity: Creation, Conflict, and Accommodation. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Schein, Louisa. 1999. “Performing Modernity.” Cultural Anthropology 14(3): 361–​395. Seeman, Sonia. 1990. “Music in the Service of Prestation: The Case of the Rom of Skopje.” MA thesis, University of Washington. Seeman, Sonia​. 2002. “’You’re Roman!’ Music and Identity in Turkish Roman Communities.” PhD dissertation University of California, Los Angeles Department of Ethnomusicology. Seeman, Sonia​. 2007. “Presenting ‘Gypsy,’ Re-​presenting Roman: Toward as Archeology of Aesthetic Production and Social Identity.” Music and Anthropology [http://​research.umbc. edu/​MA/​number11/​seeman/​see.htm]. Silverman, Carol. 1986. “Bulgarian Gypsies: Adaptation in a Socialist Context.” Nomadic People 21–​22: 51–​62. Silverman, Carol​. 2003. “The Gender of the Profession: Music, Dance and Reputation among Balkan Muslim Romani (Gypsy) Women.” In Gender and Music in the Mediterranean, edited by Tullia Magrini, 119–​145. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Silverman, Carol​. 2008. “Transnational Chochek: The Politics and Poetics of Balkan Romani Dance.” In Balkan Dance: Essays on Characteristics, Performing, and Teaching, edited by Anthony Shay, 37–​68. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press. Silverman, Carol​. 2012a. Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora. NY: Oxford University Press. Silverman, Carol. 2012b. “Education, Agency, and Power among Macedonian Muslim Romani Women in New York City.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Symposium on Romani Feminisms) 38(1):30–​36. Stewart, Michael. 1997. The Time of the Gypsies. Boulder, CO: Westview. Sugarman, Jane. 1997. Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sugarman, Jane​ . 2003. “Those ‘Other Women’: Dance and Femininity among Prespa Albanians.” In Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean, edited by Tullia Magrini, 87–​118. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Todorova, Maria. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press. Trumpener, Katie. 1992. “The Time of the Gypsies: A ‘People Without History’ in the Narratives of the West.” Critical Inquiry 18: 843–​884. Werbner, Pnina. 2002. Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims. Oxford, England and Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research.

Pa rt  I I C HOR E O G R A P H I N G T H E NAT ION

Dance as a Display of Ethnicity and Nationalism

Chapter 8

“An Intere st i ng Ex perim ent in E u g e ni c s ” Ted Shawn, American Dance, and the Discourses of Sex, Race, and Ethnicity Paul A. Scolieri

Ted Shawn, the “Father of American Dance” (1891–​1972), was closely involved with the “ethnic dance” movement in the United States—​a trend among American choreographers to adapt the techniques and styles of folk, national, or sacred dance traditions for the concert dance stage.1 Shawn believed that this trend originated at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where the “Streets of Cairo” exhibit first introduced Americans to “Oriental” dancing.2 The trend intensified, he claimed, with the popularity of dancing legend (and later, Shawn’s wife and dancing partner) Ruth St. Denis, whose performances of “divine” dances based on Indian, Egyptian, and Japanese themes “enlarged and enriched the vocabulary of modern dance.” (Shawn, 1954, 83) Shawn even credited himself for having expanded this vocabulary by incorporating Native American, “Negro,” and Spanish folk dances into the repertory of Denishawn, the dance company that he and St. Denis founded. Shawn maintained that the Denishawn tours of the U.S. vaudeville circuit, from 1915 to 1930, were an important stage in the ethnic dance movement, because they “prepared the public for the authentic and traditional dancers from many countries who were to appear later,” referring to the influx of foreign performers and ethnic dancers onto American stages in the postwar era (83). Moreover, Shawn was dedicated to training future generations of dancers in ethnic dances—​first at his Denishawn schools in Los Angeles and New York, and later at his University of Dance at Jacob’s Pillow, the international dance festival Shawn founded in the 1940s. An integral component of the University’s curriculum, “ethnic dance” classes were taught by dancers such as La Meri, “the undisputed queen of ethnic dance (1959, 8)” Shawn once even insinuated that he contributed to the popularization of the term: “ ‘Ethnic Dance’ is the term I have used to include all dancing of folk, national, and racial origin (1948, 11).”

186   Paul A. Scolieri Although Shawn’s lifetime of dancing, writing, and teaching influenced the ethnic and racial diversification of American theatrical dance, that influence was not always positive. Over the course of his career, Shawn held diverse and often contradictory views about “primitive, racial, oriental, and national” dances and their place on the American dance stage (1948, 11). For instance, during the Denishawn years, arguably the height of his artistic influence, Shawn sought to distinguish his form of “art dance” from “the stylized, artificial crystallizations of 19th-​century ballet,” “the meaningless acrobatics of the commercial theatre,” and the “savagery” of social dances, especially jazz. In that pursuit, he asserted that Denishawn’s distinct American character made it superior to other theatrical and vernacular dance forms. By the mid-​1920s, Shawn narrowly defined American dance in terms of moral and physical purity—​a standard he adopted from the discourse of eugenics.3 Eugenics—​a 19th-​century neologism derived from the Greek, meaning “wellborn” or “good breeding”—​was a pseudoscience or “an epiphenomenon of a number of sciences, which all intersected at the claim that it was possible to consciously guide human evolution” toward a physical, intellectual, and moral ideal through selective breeding (Gillette 207, 2). By the 1920s, the United States had become a “eugenical world.” (Hasian 1996, 1) From the courtroom to the cinema, the scientific laboratory to the museum, eugenics permeated nearly every sphere of American culture, spreading its promise of “race betterment” and anxiety about American degeneracy. This eugenic creed resonated with Shawn’s own conviction that dancing was “the supreme method for becoming identified with cosmic forces and through that identity being able to shape those forces toward the benefits of one’s own tribe and self ” (1948, 11–12). For Shawn, eugenics and dancing were affined methods for (re)producing ideal bodies. The influence of eugenics on Shawn’s vision for American dance manifests most clearly in two of his related writings. In The American Ballet, Shawn’s 1926 treatise on American dance, he delineates his vision of a dance for “America’s elect” (1926, 53). To realize this vision, he proposes reinvigorating the dances of the nation’s “Anglo-​ Saxon forefathers” and selectively eliminating certain ethnic and racial dances from the nation’s stages and ballrooms.4 With “An American Ballet,” Shawn’s scenario for a three-​act dance, Shawn conceived of staging man’s evolution from his pure, primordial beginnings to his modern-​day state of ethnic and racial dysgenia, a condition that he intended to represent with a dance involving immigrants who are violently absorbed in the melting pot of New York City. Shawn’s solution to the racial and ethnic “chaos” was to perform a metaphorical ethnic cleansing, which Shawn, symbolizing “the Artist Soul of America,” was himself to conduct. Though never performed, “An American Ballet” suggests the degree to which Shawn experimented artistically with eugenic ideas about race betterment.5 In this essay, I  elucidate the ways that the eugenics movement informed Shawn’s vision of American dance in the 1920s, particularly with respect to The American Ballet and “An American Ballet.” Moreover, I explain how Shawn received a very specific and intense exposure to eugenics through his personal and professional relationship with his idol, Havelock Ellis, the British physician and leading proponent of the eugenics

“An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics”    187 movement in Europe. In 1922, Shawn met Ellis in London, ostensibly to talk about their shared interest in dance. As it turned out, their conversation focused on Shawn’s personal troubles, including his embattled masculinity, his homosexuality, his troubled marriage to St. Denis, and, thus, his narrow prospects of fathering children. Based on Shawn and Ellis’s meeting and correspondence, I argue that Shawn’s anxiety about his own sexual “unfitness” informed his racist, nativist, and xenophobic “experiment” with eugenics in American dance.

“Unconscious Eugenics”: Ted Shawn Meets the “Saint of Sex” The term eugenics was coined by Sir Francis Galton, a British scientist who developed the theories of evolution and natural selection made famous by his cousin Charles Darwin. By taking a statistical approach to the study of heredity, Galton inspired a social movement aimed at improving the genetic gene pool (what he referred to as “germ plasm”) through “selective breeding” (Hasian 1996, 1). This end was most often sought through two means: “positive eugenics,” which promoted higher rates of fertility among the most socially and physically able members of society, and “negative eugenics,” which sought to improve the gene pool through the restriction, segregation, or elimination of undesirable traits of the “unfit,” including the “feeble-​minded,” insane, poor, and terminally ill. Rarely applied neutrally, these measures carried out a broad range of policies that cut across the ideological and political spectrum. Eugenics influenced a host of progressive reforms, including the development of sex education, the legalization of birth control, labor reform, and women’s suffrage. However, eugenic theories also advanced discriminatory attitudes and policies based on race, ethnicity, class, and sex. For instance, it provided a “scientific” rationale for sterilization programs and anti-​immigration policies. The most extreme manifestation of negative eugenics was the Nazi Party’s “Final Solution,” a program that justified involuntary sterilization and euthanasia of the mentally retarded and terminally ill and, subsequently, the systematic extermination of Jews, blacks, and homosexuals in order to promote the “Master” Aryan race. As its genocidal implications became painfully clear in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the international eugenics movement lost its momentum. In the United States, the eugenics movement gained momentum at the turn of the century through the establishment of scholarly organizations and research institutes. Three of the most influential centers of eugenics research, publishing, and teaching were the American Breeders’ Association, which was founded in 1903 and published American Breeders Magazine (later, the Journal of Heredity); the Eugenics Record Office, which opened in 1919 in Cold Spring Harbor, New York; and the American Eugenics Society, which formed in 1922 in New Haven, Connecticut, and counted among its members J. P. Morgan, Miss E. B. Scripps, and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who delivered the welcoming

188   Paul A. Scolieri address to the First National Conference on Race Betterment in 1914 (Rosen 2004, 85). With financial support from philanthropic organizations such as the Carnegie Institute, eugenics research was conducted at leading universities, including Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford.6 Eugenics also found an influential spokesman in former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, whose 1914 article “Twisted Eugenics” warned against the threats of “race deterioration.”7 Ideas about “race betterment” were disseminated to the American masses by “combining entertainment with art and education with recreation” via “better-​baby” contests and hygiene exhibitions at public fairgrounds (Hasian 1996, 43). For example, the Eugenics Record Office trained young eugenicists to perform field studies and gather information for the institute’s degeneracy studies. One of their first tasks was to write a play titled Acquired or Inherited?, a “eugenical comedy in four acts.”8 A “shibboleth of the Progressive Era,” eugenics also informed the “biological racism” at the heart of key legislative reforms in the 1920s.9 For example, in 1924, the state assembly of Virginia passed the Sterilization Act, which authorized the state to perform involuntary sterilizations of institutionalized “mental defectives” in order to deter the “transmission of insanity, idiocy, imbecility, epilepsy, and crime.”10 Also in 1924, the Johnson-​Reed Immigration Act—​“a triumph of the eugenics movement” 11 —​drastically tightened immigration quotas to manipulate the racial and ethnic composition of the U.S. citizenry. The rise of eugenics in the United States coincided with the debates between evolutionism and creationism, especially in the years leading up to the 1925 Scopes Trial, wherein the State of Tennessee prosecuted schoolteacher John Scopes for violating its prohibition against teaching evolution in the classroom. In 1929, eugenics framed two public accounts involving dysgenic dancers, one fictional, the other real. That year, Erskine Caldwell published The Bastard, a popular novel that became one of the best examples of eugenic literature in the United States. Caldwell’s “bastard” is a man named Gene who was born to a hootchy-​kootchy dancer and an unknown father. As a consequence of his ill-​breeding, Gene develops into a eugenic nightmare: he drinks excessively, commits incest, and spreads sexually transmitted diseases. Caldwell’s fictional Gene became popular at the same time that a very real Eunice Pringle became infamous. In 1929, Pringle was a 17-​year-​old vaudeville dancer who was allegedly raped by the stage and film impresario Alexander Pantages in his famous downtown Los Angeles theatre. Her highly publicized trial against Pantages originally led to a conviction, but soon thereafter Pantages was released on appeal. Pringle ultimately admitted that Joe Kennedy, the patriarch of the American political dynasty, had coerced her into making false accusations against Pantages as part of an elaborate business scheme. The public trial made a spectacle of the young dancer in eugenic terms: her questionable morals, her failure to complete high school, and her alleged prostitution. She was even forced by the judge to appear in court wearing the red dress in which Pantages allegedly raped her.12 In 1913, Wisconsin was the first of 35 states that eventually adopted eugenic marriage legislation. States began to require that couples earn marriage certificates based on successful completion of medical exams, which often included tests for sexually transmitted

“An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics”    189 diseases (Rosen 2004, 53–84). It was in this context of marriage reform that Shawn and St. Denis wed. On August 13, 1914, Edwin Myers Shawn married Ruth St. Denis. “That statistical statement,” Shawn wrote in his autobiography, “while quite true, is completely misleading in its simplicity” (1979, 37). By this disclaimer, Shawn meant that the circumstances surrounding their nuptials were “tinged by cloak-​and-​dagger overtones.” He might have meant that the word marriage both overdetermined and underestimated the nature of their relationship, which was as much a business partnership and artistic collaboration as it was a romance. By “misleading,” Shawn might have more specifically been referring to the fact that the newlyweds did not consummate their marriage until two months after their wedding day, which kept them from immediately publicizing their union.13 Of course, the press eventually learned of the famous dancing couple’s marriage, which one writer characterized as “an interesting experiment in eugenics.” On November 22, 1914, the Washington Post announced the marriage between Shawn and St. Denis in a satirical article entitled “Union of the Splendidly Developed Dancer Ruth St. Denis and Edwin Shawn, ‘the Handsomest Man in America,’ May Produce Results of Great Value to the Science of Race Betterment.”14 The writer chides the couple’s “eugenic charms” and speculates that the medical community will scrutinize these “perfect specimens of humanity” given their great promise to produce a “eugenic baby” and to “improve our poor, deformed race.” Shawn and St. Denis left themselves vulnerable to the writer’s send-​up by relaying anecdotes about their physical and artistic exceptionality. St. Denis, the established world-​famous dancer, is portrayed as a beauty with strength that would “prostrate an ordinary man” yet is “remarkably qualified to be the progenitor of a more beautiful race.” St. Denis explains that she decided to marry Shawn because she “could not bear to think of leaving him alone with those nymphs,” referring to the young female dancers who always surrounded him on and off stage. Shawn’s unquestionable beauty forced the writer to speculate whether a eugenicist would approve of him as an “ideal of manhood.” Shawn apparently misled the reporter into thinking that he “never had a serious illness in his whole life, and that every organ is in perfect condition,” when, in fact, during his junior year of college, he had suffered a bout of diphtheria that left him temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. Ultimately, the writer’s exaggerated descriptions of the couple’s superiority serve only to dramatize the unusual nature of their union, especially their 12-​year age difference and their unconventional profession as dancers. “Eugenic science would not approve of this,” quips the writer, who also mentions the inexplicable gap in time between the couple’s August wedding and its November announcement, pointing to a potential crack in the veneer of their eugenic luster.15 Instead of a eugenic child, Shawn and St. Denis created eugenic dances and dancers. They developed a public image of their Denishawn dance troupe as a family. For instance, the young Denishawn dancers affectionately referred to Shawn as Papa. St. Denis called her dances “children of the brain” and her dancers “flesh and blood ‘children’ ” (St. Denis 1939, 306). However, in private, St. Denis avoided most familial attachments, distancing herself even from Shawn. The couple was separated during parts of

190   Paul A. Scolieri

Figure 8.1 

1917 and 1918, while Shawn was enlisted in the army, and again between 1919 and 1922, when they toured separately. Their letters to each other during these periods attest to the conflicted nature of their relationship. In several letters, St. Denis histrionically expresses her love for and devotion to Shawn, whereas in others, she candidly refers to her adulterous affairs with other men and makes reasoned pleas for an open marriage.16 Shawn grew increasingly distraught by St. Denis’s conflicting messages, though he maintained an “ideal of fidelity” (Shelton 1990, 155). The tension eroded their relationship to such a degree that when the opportunity arose, they sought the counsel of the one man whose experience with dance and the pressures of an unconventional and childless marriage rivaled their own: Havelock Ellis, one of the most outspoken proponents of the eugenics movement. In the scientific world, Ellis was best known for his pioneering role in sexology, the science of sexuality. With J. A. Symonds, Ellis wrote the first English-​language medical book on the topic of homosexuality, Sexual Inversion (1897), which posited that “inversion” is an instinct or “congenital element” as opposed to “acquired”—​a critical distinction to the depathologization of homosexuality.17 Ellis’s ideas for sexual reform were influenced by the eugenics movement. He corresponded directly with its leading proponents, including its founding figure, Galton, with whom he actively participated

“An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics”    191 in devising strategies to shape public opinion that would eventually lead to legislative reform (Richardson 2003, 216). For example, in 1906, Ellis declared St. Valentine the “patron saint of sexual selection” so as to convey the impression that “eugenics had an eminently respectable, romantic, and importantly national past.” Ellis’s eugenic ideas extended beyond the sphere of selective breeding and into the domain he called “social hygiene,” by which he meant reform for working and living conditions. In his book The Task of Social Hygiene (1912), he famously argues that “[i]‌t is the task of this hygiene not only to make sewers, but to re-​make love, and to do both in the same spirit of human fellowship, to ensure finer individual development and a larger social organization” (Ellis 1913, viii–ix). For Ellis, “re-​making love” included advocating for women’s suffrage, birth control, and sexual education. It also meant challenging the prevailing Victorian view that dance was a form of moral degeneracy and instead recognizing its eugenic imperative within the spheres of sexuality and religion. Shawn and St. Denis became aware of Ellis through his article “The Philosophy of Dancing,” which was published by The Atlantic Monthly in 1914.18 The article formed the basis of Ellis’s book The Dance of Life (1923), his most successful publication in the United States, in which he argues that dancing and architecture are the two “primary and essential arts.” Ellis’s ideas about dance were meant to expand a parochial Victorian view of dance as sexually illicit and culturally degrading. In fact, for Ellis, dancing is the “supreme symbol” of sex and religion (1923, 36). For example, he explains that the human impulse to dance activates during the “process of courtship,” wherein the males compete not only with other males in a contest of sexual selection, but also with females whose imagination they must capture. By his beauty, his energy, his skill, the male must win the female, so impressing the image of himself on her imagination that finally her desire is aroused to overcome her reticence. That is the task of the male throughout nature, and in innumerable species besides Man it has been found that the school in which the task may best be learnt is the dancing-​school. Those who have not the skill and the strength to learn are left behind, and, as they are probably the least capable members of the race, it may be in this way that a kind of sexual selection has been embodied in unconscious eugenics, and aided the higher development of the race. The moths and the butterflies, the African ostrich and the Sumatran argus pheasant, with their fellows innumerable, have been the precursors of man in the strenuous school of erotic dancing, fitting themselves for selection by the females of their choice as the most splendid progenitors of the future race (46). (Italics added.)

For Ellis, dancing is an unconscious reenactment of a choreographed battle for individual and racial survival. The “strenuous school of erotic dancing” teaches humans the skills of sexual discrimination. Just as dancing reenacts a primal scene of sexual conquest, so, too, does it propagate religious beliefs by representing sacred myths.19 Inasmuch as religious dancing re-​enacts “divine drama[s]‌,” Ellis maintains that dancing is a sign of a religion’s fitness.20

192   Paul A. Scolieri In an article about Ellis’s Dance of Life, Judith Alter points out that choreographers and writers uncritically embraced his broad and unconditional validation of dance as an art form. She observes the influence that Ellis had on John Martin, Walter Sorell, and Roderick Lange, among others. She also mentions that Shawn had an “admiration” for Ellis, which is an understatement at best.21 Shawn completely idolized Ellis with a devotion he often expressed in religious terms. In the inaugural issue of Denishawn Magazine, Shawn refers to Ellis as “St. Havelock,” the “Saint of Sex,” and “one of the greatest messiahs” and to Ellis’s article “The Philosophy of Dancing” as “the dancer’s bible” (1924). Shawn even described the experience of meeting Ellis “as holy as the Last Supper” and likened his contact with Ellis to touching “the hem of the garment of Jesus.”22 In 1922, St. Denis and Shawn were completing a four-​week engagement at the London Coliseum. Shawn received rave reviews for his performances, which catapulted him from St. Denis’s limelight and made him “an internationally acclaimed dancer” (1979, 106). Shawn considered the London performances a great artistic and professional achievement, even though the success was somewhat eclipsed by his sadness and jealousy over St. Denis’s public liaisons with other men. In an un-​redacted draft of his autobiography, Shawn admits he was tortured by St. Denis’s search for “ ‘romance’ in all directions” and commiserated with Martha Graham, then a Denishawn dancer, who was similarly heartbroken. Graham was in love with Louis Horst, the Denishawn musical director, who not only refused to divorce his wife, but also brought her along with the company to London. It was during this trip that St. Denis and Shawn separately met with Ellis at his home in the London suburbs. Shawn recorded the date of the meeting in his diary: Tuesday, June 3, 1922, at 11 a.m. St. Denis had visited Ellis a day earlier, which minimally suggests the highly personal nature of their talks. In their respective autobiographies, St. Denis and Shawn describe these meetings as philosophical salons on the topic of dance. In reality, they were more like marriage-​counseling sessions. In fact, months before these meetings, Ellis mailed Shawn a paper on the topic of “childless marriage,” which strongly suggests that they had already begun to communicate with Ellis about their marital problems.23 In a 1969 interview, Shawn exposed additional details about his meeting with Ellis, explaining that he had hoped to meet Ellis above all other Brits, including King George, and that he had imagined the meeting would be like “a charming garden party.”24 It was quite the contrary. Well it was a memorable meeting. I went out to his strange bleak, suburban apartment. I don’t know what I expected, but this noble head, snow white hair, long patriarchal white beard, and sort of very rough, smelly tweeds. Tweeds always seem damp when they’re thick. He sat back in a chair, sort of concave, hands folded, and this strange, high-​pitched little voice that I was totally unprepared for. But if I ever came into the presence of a saint! This man, to me, rates as one of the greatest messiahs, one of the avatars. I was—​with him, every moment, I was aware that I was in the presence of divinity itself. It was a thrilling, ennobling experience.

“An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics”    193 Despite the unexpected sterility of the surroundings, Shawn opened up to Ellis: “Since he was the great saint of sex, and had preached on the beauty and rightness of sex, the art of love—​how marvelous, how ecstatic, how right, how wonderful it can be—​I began to pour out my heart, the agonies and sufferings that I was going through.”25 Shawn must have felt confident talking with Ellis about the state of his marriage, particularly the great shame and embarrassment he felt owing to St. Denis’s affairs. Ellis would have been an ideal person to address Shawn’s concerns, since he was also in an unconventional and childless marriage. Ellis’s biographers tell us that he was impotent. Moreover, like Shawn and St. Denis, Ellis and his wife, Edith, lived apart for long periods of time, as she preferred the company of her lesbian lover. As the foremost medical authority on the topic of sexual inversion (a 19th-​century term for homosexuality), and the husband of a lesbian, Ellis was, in some measure, the ideal person to counsel Shawn, who confided in Ellis about his homosexuality. Moreover, Shawn might have confided in Ellis about his suspicion that St. Denis was herself a lesbian.26 However, Ellis’s response to Shawn’s “agonies and sufferings” was not as sympathetic as Shawn might have expected from his “Saint of Sex.” Ellis replied: “Well I have always maintained that two artists should never marry.” Consequently, Shawn asked Ellis whether he should consider divorcing St. Denis, to which Ellis gave the following contradictory advice: “Once a marriage has been made, it becomes a thing itself. It is a living entity, and [ … ] once you have created that entity you’ve created something that if you tried to kill it, it would be like murder. This is now your karma. You work it out.”27 Shawn was not entirely persuaded by Ellis’s advice to remain married to St. Denis—​ a decision that would have kept him from ever realizing his eugenic promise. In fact, Shawn questioned the reliability of this advice when he met with another of his idols just a few days after meeting with Ellis. At Ellis’s insistence, the British philosopher and poet Edward Carpenter attended a matinee performance of the Denishawn company at the London Coliseum. Shawn and St. Denis had written in glowing terms about Carpenter and his collection of poems Towards Democracy (1883–​1902). Shawn likened him to Walt Whitman, especially for his bold declarations of sexual freedom. In fact, Carpenter wrote Homogenic Love (1894), whose neologistic title gave Shawn the language to identify his same-​sex desire.28 Comparing Carpenter to Whitman was not entirely coincidental, as Shawn might have known that the two literary giants had once been lovers. Assisted by a younger man, the frail 80-​year-​old Carpenter met Shawn backstage after the performance. They dined together, and, according to Shawn, “a beautiful rapport was established.”29 During their meal, Shawn asked Carpenter about the integrity of Ellis’s marriage to Edith, to which Carpenter cryptically responded: “Edith Ellis believed that if society would totally and completely recognize and accept homosexuality as simply one form that is right and normal in the way of a sex expression, give it such complete acceptance that it is never even questioned or thought about as anything but the ordinary experience of life, she believed that this would release enormous stores of creative energy for the benefit of mankind. After a pause he said very simply, ‘And so do I.’ ” Shawn

194   Paul A. Scolieri described Carpenter’s response as an “epic making statement” that validated his own sexual views: “Of course it was so sweet, so tender, so utterly simple for him to say.” Shawn went on to call his meeting with Carpenter “the most tremendous human contact I ever had.”30 Notwithstanding Shawn’s proclivity to exaggerate, his time in London was a life-​ defining experience, both professionally and personally. That said, he left London with conflicting advice about the state of his marriage and his desire to procreate from, of all people, an impotent eugenicist and a homosexual poet. Evidently, Ellis was ambivalent about the advice he had given Shawn. A month after their meeting, Ellis wrote to Shawn, empathizing with Shawn’s “complicated situation.”31 Ellis rescinded his advice to stay married to St. Denis and instead encouraged Shawn to “be true to his own nature or else suffer the difficulty in attaining harmony between one’s own ideals and the facts of life one is up against.” Despite Ellis and Carpenter’s encouragement to accept his homosexuality “as right and normal,” Shawn remained married to St. Denis, at least on paper.32 Based on their correspondence to each other during the time between their London engagement and their historic 1925–​1926 tour of the Orient, they continued to enjoy a passionate long-​distance relationship. A year after their London visit, Shawn traveled through Spain to study folk dances and flamenco. He wrote to St. Denis daily, recounting the sights and sounds of Seville, endlessly describing the costumes and props that he had purchased, and repeating his vows of fidelity to her. In a letter dated May 15, 1923, he explains that he had declined a proposition from a local guide who offered him the opportunity to have sex with a group of gitanas who performed privately for Shawn in a theater in Seville. Shawn remonstrated (to the guide, and to St. Denis in the letter) and vowed to remain “pe-​ure!” Shawn could not easily dissolve his marriage for reasons that were as much financial and artistic as romantic; yet remaining married to St. Denis also meant that he needed to find an alternate way to leave a legacy befitting “the handsomest man in America”—​a legacy that would reflect Shawn’s “great racial stock” and his superior moral fiber (1926, 80). Shawn’s paternal grandfather was a German immigrant (one of 13 von Schauns) and his mother was of English and Danish descent. In fact, Shawn traced his maternal ancestors back 10 generations to the Danish invaders of England at the time of King Canute (Terry 1976, 19). Indeed, Shawn was the progeny of both Anglo-​Saxon and Nordic ancestry. If he were not going to fulfill his eugenic promise as a husband and father, then he would fulfill it through his art, ethnicity, religion, and race.

Choreographing the Melting Pot: Ted Shawn’s American Ballets On August 7, 1925, Shawn, St. Denis, and the Denishawn company boarded the SS President Jefferson to travel from Seattle to Yokohama, Japan, where they began what

“An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics”    195 was scheduled to be a 24-​week tour of Asia. Theirs was the first ever tour of the Orient by an American dance company. In their autobiographies, Jane Sherman and Doris Humphrey, then young Denishawn dancers, recall playing and dancing with Papa Shawn while aboard the ship. St. Denis remembers lounging on the ship’s deck as Shawn recited verses of Walt Whitman. In the meantime, Shawn found time to finish a manuscript entitled The American Ballet, a book he had hurriedly drafted on the train from New York to Seattle. The American Ballet is Shawn’s treatise on American theatrical and social dancing and a call to reform attitudes, expectations, and performances of American dance. In the foreword, Shawn introduces his vision for American dance as if it were a birth announcement for a eugenic baby. He proclaims that “the long period of pregnancy is nearly at an end—​the new birth is imminent” (1926, v). This American dance would be conceived by “spiritual seed” and nurtured in the “cradle” of America for it to develop from a “strange and red-​faced” newborn “without teeth [or] hair” into a “healthy baby” (12–13). However, within the book’s opening pages, it becomes clear that Shawn did not necessarily want to give birth to a new dance, technique, or style so much as he wanted to revive the dances of his Anglo-​Saxon forebears—​the Virginia Reel, the March and Circle, and the Boston Fancy. To justify his vision, Shawn selectively and sometimes erroneously draws upon Ellis’s key passage about the “unconscious eugenics” at play in the dance of sexual selection. Interestingly, and perhaps unconsciously, Shawn mistakenly attributes this passage to the ancient Greek philosopher Lucian (ca. 120), and not to Ellis.33 Ellis might not have minded being mistakenly overlooked. At Shawn’s request, Ellis wrote the introduction to The American Ballet, which was no doubt a quid pro quo for Shawn’s having written “The Dancer’s Bible,” his paean to “St. Havelock” in Denishawn Magazine. Decades later, Shawn revealed that he was commissioned to write the article by the Houghton-​Mifflin Publishing Company in advance of the distribution of Ellis’s book in the United States. In exchange, Ellis wrote the introduction to Shawn’s The American Ballet. In exchange, Ellis agreed to write the introduction to Shawn’s book, though by no means reciprocated Shawn’s adulation. Overall, Ellis condescendingly refers to Shawn’s writing as a form of “eloquent pleading” and distances himself from Shawn’s book in several other ways. 34 Ellis renounces his newfound status as the “prophet” of dance, claiming that “there cannot be a more unsuitable person to introduce such a book,” as he had neither “practical connection with the ballet nor any scientific knowledge of dancing.” He then dissociates himself from Shawn’s central claims, which Ellis explicitly says “may be discounted.” In some measure, his ambivalent introduction undermines Shawn’s use of eugenics as a tool to build his racist and xenophobic case for an American dance. This type of scientific disclaimer was not altogether uncommon: “From the scientists’ perspective, amateurs popularized eugenics at the expense of the very science that fueled it” (Rosen 2004, 64). Shawn introduces his vision for the “dance of America” as a “democratic” art that will “encompass all forms” (1926, v). However, throughout the book, he addresses his presumed white, educated Anglo-​Saxons reader through a series of expressions that

196   Paul A. Scolieri invoke a shared racial past. He refers to “a new social dance of our own,” a return to the “American country dances of the time of our grandmothers,” and to the threatened “tradition of our Anglo-​Saxon forefathers” (52). Elsewhere, he describes this new dance as a spiritual bequest to be inherited by “America’s Elect” or its “better people.”35 The power of this dance, he promises, will restore the nation to a state “that was conceived by men who wrote the Constitution,” many of them slaveholders (1926, 51). To his readers, Shawn poses the rhetorical question: “What is the fine thing, what is the deep and abiding and permanent thing which we have to express through the medium of dance?” (1926, 7). His response is Anglo-​Saxon folk dances and court dances of Europe. He arrives at this answer only after paying a passing consideration to the dances of “local color,” such as those of the Native Americans and “American Negroes.” Shawn wrote about nations, races, cultures, and religions somewhat interchangeably. Within the same swath of text, he compares the “church” of Egypt, the “culture” of Greece, and the “nations” of Italy and Spain (1926, 6). His system of classification is entirely arbitrary, as are his standards for evaluation. For instance, Shawn considers Native American dance a form of American dance, based on his conviction that indigenous Americans are “the most sensitive and advanced souls of the entire white race” albeit “deteriorated” and that their dances express their “high order” and “ethical nobility” (1926, 16). Though Shawn envisioned that there could one day be a “negro ballet,” he summarily excludes from his vision of American dance all forms of “Negro” dance—​the Charleston, tap dancing, the “shimmy”—​which he believed needed to be “cleaned up and cleared up” (1926, 51). Shawn’s anxiety about racial dysgenia is nowhere more evident than in his writings about jazz, in which he echoes the racist diatribe against jazz by modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan in her 1927 autobiography, My Life. Duncan also claimed to have been moved by the democratic poems of Walt Whitman, yet she similarly dismissed jazz rhythm as the expression of the “primitive savage” (1955, 244). Shawn intensifies Duncan’s dismissal with the pseudoscientific language of evolution, calling jazz an “absolute retrogression” and, quoting Daniel Gregory Mason, the “doggerel of music” (1926, 49–50). Shawn’s racist claim is based on a pseudobiological rationale: “The negro brought with him all the primitive simplicity of the rhythm of the savage, the unsophistication in regard to his body and its natural functions. Because of the structure of his vocal organs, the negro has a rich and beautiful voice, and an inherent love of sweet melody” (1926, 21). Moreover, he proposes that American dance be cleansed of the infectious presence of jazz: “Jazz is the scum of the great boiling that is now going on, and the scum will be cleared off and the clear fluid underneath will be revealed” (1926, 7–8). By “great boiling,” Shawn obviously refers to—​and indeed, reverses—​the theme of ethnic integration, made famous by Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot (1908), “the biggest Broadway hit—​ever.”36 The racist imperative at play in Shawn’s writings is so entrenched that he does not explain his reasoning about why black music and dance threaten American values or the American obsession with them—​a fixation he called a type of “public astigmatism” (1926, 87). Why, for example, are the Virginia Reel and “Old English dances” “superior” to or more “refreshing” than the “poison and putrefaction of jazz”? (1926, 52–53). This is

“An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics”    197 a paradox that Shawn could not even reconcile for himself. In fact, in his 1929 book Gods Who Dance, a collection of essays about dance and religion, he discusses his admiration for Burmese dancing based on his perception of its similarity to American jazz (1926, 75). In some instances, Shawn eschews reason and rhetoric altogether and summarily bases his impressions on his own racist experiences: “But when one sees a white person do these dances, it is disgusting, because the negro mental and emotional conditions cannot be translated into the white man” (1926, 22). Drawing on a common rhetorical device from eugenic discourse, Shawn appeals to his readers’ racial panic and threatens them with a metaphorical racial annihilation:  Do we want to accept the dictum of the hectic Broadwayite, the denizen of the cabaret, the habitué of the slums, the negro from the dives of southern cities, and the inhabitants off the Barbary Coast of San Francisco as our last word in the way of social dancing? Do you think that the low interpretation of these people is capable of making a dance form which will express you? Do you think that the mental and moral conditions of those people will produce a type of social dancing which will be an expression of your personality? I think you will all agree in the negative. Then what are we going to do about it? Apparently if we go to a place where there is dancing, we have only one alternative—​to stand still or to dance what everyone else is dancing. (1926, 51–52)

Shawn’s ultimatum is backed by two equally disturbing threats—​to “stand still” or to “dance what everyone else is dancing”—​both of which lead to the paralysis, annihilation, or disappearance of the white race. This threat is posed not only from the jazzy Negroes of the South but also from those on the “Barbary Coast,” the poor (“the habitué of the slums”), and the “hectic Broadwayite,” an oblique reference to Jews. Elsewhere, Shawn references the threat of the “the moron.” This was not a generic aspersion but a specific reference within eugenic discourse to the “feeble-​minded” and “mentally retarded” as anomalies to the eugenic ideal. In the last chapter of The American Ballet, Shawn describes his dream for a dance school that would be a breeding ground for eugenic dancers. He envisioned a campus of 60–​100 children “chosen in regard to parentage which would indicate artistic leanings, physical health and beauty, character and intelligence” (1926, 125) However, the curriculum would cover the “universality of the dance,” including dance forms of Spain, Japan, and East India. Students would be exposed to “the great foreign dancers of the world”; yet his own American dance company would include only “American born and American trained dancers, dancing to music by American composers, with scenery and costumes designed by American artists, and under the direction and management of American business men of great vision” (40). Indeed, in 1928 Shawn and St. Denis instituted new policies governing the admission of students to their Denishawn School and company that would achieve that vision. This change in policy may have reflected the federal immigration quotas that were instituted by the Immigration Act of 1924. Doris Humphrey, then a Denishawn dancer, later recalled the meeting when St. Denis and Shawn announced that the number of

198   Paul A. Scolieri Jewish students in the company was not to exceed 10 percent. It was the first time that Humphrey had heard “either director express a racial prejudice,” including the time she spent with Shawn and St. Denis during their extensive travels throughout the Orient in 1925–​1926 (Humphrey 1972, 62–63). Humphrey explains that this quota led her and fellow dancer Charles Weidman to leave Denishawn. The prospects for black dancers in Denishawn were even more limited. For example, Edna Guy, an African American student at Denishawn, was permitted to perform at student recitals, yet she was never invited to join the company. Instead, Guy traveled with the company as a personal assistant to St. Denis. Like Humphrey, Weidman, and many other Denishawn dancers, Guy severed ties with Denishawn. She went on to become a leading figure in the emerging Negro dance movement.37 Despite the influence of eugenics on Shawn’s writings and policies, he generally avoided the temptation to create “eugenic art.” Shawn neither choreographed spectacles of human degenerates nor dramatized cautionary tales of American dysgenia. On the contrary, Shawn’s dances staged “eugenic ideals” of physical, moral, national, and racial exceptionalism, even when such dances were based on “primitive, racial, oriental, and national” dancing (1948, 3). Such ethnic dances allowed Shawn to stage his eugenic aspirations, since he considered them, as did Ellis, a privileged means for man to connect to his primordial, and thus more pure version, of himself.38 This often led to interesting contradictions between Shawn’s writings and his choreography. For example, in The American Ballet, Shawn warns: “We need never to borrow material from any nation, for we are full to abundance with undeveloped ideas and themes” (1926, 26). Shawn had written these words nearly a year before he composed his signature solo dance, The Cosmic Dance of Siva (1926), an interpretation of the Hindu god Siva’s mythical dance that led to the creation of the world.39 No doubt Shawn would have reconciled this contradiction by referencing Ellis, who wrote about the “supreme religious importance” of Siva’s cosmic dance. Ellis’s valorization of this dance inspired Shawn to actively pursue learning the dance when he traveled to India. During a week’s hiatus from the Denishawn Orient tour, Shawn met with a swami who taught him the dance. In his autobiography, Shawn explains that he performed the dance in “brownface” on tour with the Ziegfeld Follies in the United States, where it “stopped the show at every performance” (1979, 208). Shawn often organized “primitive, racial, oriental, and national” dances within larger choreographic structures that implied the process of evolution: Think animated museum dioramas that display man’s movement toward “race betterment.” This impulse is evident within one of Shawn’s earliest works, a 13-​minute film called Dances of the Ages, which was produced by the Thomas A. Edison Company in 1913. A dream sequence within the film dramatizes the “dances of the ages”—​from the caveman’s fire dance and an ancient Greek bacchanal to the French minuet and the modern American rag. A similar evolutionary structure governs many of Shawn’s dances, especially O, Libertad! An American Saga in Three Acts: The Past, the Present, and the Future (1937), which, as the title suggests, chronicles the history of the Americas from Montezuma to the modern era. In some dances, the evolutionary structure is present even when the subject matter does not involve ethnic dances. For instance, Labor Symphony (1934) evokes the

“An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics”    199 evolution from man’s dependency on physical labor to his mastery of industrial machinery. The evolutionary dimension of Shawn’s dances speaks to his overarching idea that dance is a reflection of man’s progress toward becoming a “more perfect race” (1926, 77). There is one glaring exception to the claim that Shawn never conceived of eugenic art: “An American Ballet,” Shawn’s scenario for a three-​act dance based on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. What we know of the dance comes from Shawn’s typewritten outline and first scenario.40 Although never performed, the scenario reveals the extent to which Shawn aspired to transfer his experiment with eugenics from the page to the stage. As outlined, the choreography dramatizes the central idea of his The American Ballet book—​namely, that dance is an ideal means toward producing a “more perfect race” (1926, 77). It makes that case by dramatizing the history of America from its primordial beginnings to what Shawn perceived as its modern state of racial and ethnic dysgenia, a condition created by the combined forces of immigration, industrialization, commercialism, and jazz. In all likelihood, Shawn conceived of the dance while writing The American Ballet, though possibly earlier. St. Denis tells us that Shawn recited passages from Leaves of Grass on the SS President Jefferson en route to the Orient, which is when he completed the book manuscript. He must have written the scenario after 1924, since he annotated it with the Doubleday edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass published that year, but before or at the very latest during the 1927–​1928 Denishawn Follies tour, when Shawn still had a reasonable expectation for mounting a production with the Denishawn group. By 1928, Shawn was aware that the Denishawn days were numbered.41 In 1927, a man named Fred Beckman came between Shawn and St. Denis. At first, Beckman became Shawn’s representative and later, his lover. When Shawn learned that Beckman and St. Denis had their own “secret liaison,” he fled for Connecticut, then Germany, which only hastened Denishawn’s inevitable dissolution (Foulkes, 2002, 83). “An American Ballet” was a very ambitious enterprise, due not only in its scope and length but also to the complex social statement that Shawn had planned to convey through dance. For example, he intended for each of the dance’s sections to correlate with a specific passage from Leaves of Grass. Although he annotated the scenario with passages from Leaves, he did not explain whether those verses were to be read during the performance. In some measure, Whitman’s poetry gives the dance not only its structural framework but also its ideological basis. Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass before eugenics had a name, yet his work is repeatedly cited as a “much-​favored literary prop to the eugenic argument” (Wolff 2009, 220 n.28). Moreover, Whitman’s writings and the eugenics movement were similarly influenced by phrenology, the 19th-​century “science” that determined a person’s character and faculties based on cranial measurements. A copy of Orson Squire Fowler’s Practical Phrenology, “the bible of the American phrenological movement,” was found among Whitman’s belongings. Fowler was also a distributor and later publisher of Leaves of Grass. Fowler and Whitman’s writings share the phrenological belief that there is a correlation between a person’s soul and his or her physical body: Again, the qualities of the mind correspond with the build of the body. If the latter is beautifully formed, well proportioned, handsome, etc., not only will its motions

200   Paul A. Scolieri be easy and graceful, but the feelings will be exquisite, the mind well balanced, and a beauty, perfection, taste, refinement, elegance, and good sense will characterize every thing he says or does.… This accounts for the fact that men great in a particular line generally have a remarkable build, walk, countenance, manner of thinking, expression, and action (Fowler 1840, 32).

Shawn, the so-​called “Handsomest Man in America,” accepted this proto-​eugenic idea about the correspondence between physicality and character. In fact, he cites eugenicist Albert Edward Wiggam, who similarly argued that the relationship between physicality and sociality is determined eugenically: “[Beauty] is as deep as protoplasm, as inherent as intellect, as vital as character. In the large it is woven into protoplasmic fabric with all that is admirable and excellent. It is correlated with intelligence and refinement of soul. It is one sure germinal basis of racial stock. It blooms instantly where given a happy soil and a congenial air.”42 “An American Ballet” draws on this belief in the correspondence between physicality and character via characters who personify various American types. This is especially true of the character “Artist Soul of America,” which Shawn describes as a prophet-​like figure whose perfection and beauty heal a degenerate mass of immigrants in the final act. As written, the first act begins with St. Denis as the Spirit of the Sea, whose movements represent the expansiveness of the earth, the glory of the mountains, and the beauty of the landscape. Shawn, as Man, discovers the Spirit of the Sea and plants himself into the earth. In a scene that recalls both Ellis’s “dance of life” and the Garden of Eden, the Sea and Man experience a sexual awakening, which leads to the peopling of a new Continent. The second act, the Dance History of America, comprises a sequence of nine sections of dances of American types:  Native Americans, pioneers, colonial laborers (blacksmiths, harvesters, woodsmen), lumberjacks, cowboys, and Negroes. This section also features a dance called “The Love of Comrades,” based on Whitman’s series of Calamus poems about homosexual love. Shawn retains Whitman’s use of the word comrade, a euphemism for homosexuality, and suggests that he meant to include homosexuals in his choreographed pageant of American types by stipulating in his scenario that the dance should be performed by men—​“virile and wholesome—​but with a romantic theme.” Having established the formation and population of America, in the third act, Shawn dramatizes the threats to its destruction by choreographing the melting pot, the metaphorical symbol of American ethnic integration. In Shawn’s care, the melting pot is more of a meltdown. Not surprisingly, he sets this meltdown in New York City, which he had repeatedly described as a type of modern-​day cesspool: “New York [ … ] is a city of the world and not a city of America.… It has a huge foreign population which intends to remain foreign; therefore, if we are to understand what the message of America is, we cannot expect to find anything but a small portion of it in New York” (1926, 8). Shawn’s vision of New York could not have less in common with Whitman’s, especially given the

“An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics”    201 latter’s valorization of the city’s ethnic and class diversity, succinctly expressed by the following lines in Leaves of Grass: Superb-​faced Manhattan! Comrade Americanos!—​to us, then, at last, the Orient comes. To us, my city (Whitman 1904, 293).

In a revealing gesture, Shawn casts St. Denis as “New York,” the symbol of impurity, promiscuity, and danger. At first, she sits enthroned, a symbol of wealth and power, but soon begins to stir the pot of immigrants who pour into her city. These “immigrants from all [over] the World” perform “episodic dances of Europe: Spain, Italy, Hungary, Russia; Africa: Savage and Negro; Asia: East Indian, Japanese, Chinese, etc.” Shawn’s melting pot is a chaotic, dangerous “maelstrom,” wherein “crowds of immigrants are all sucked into a whirlpool of American City People” yet “emerge just long enough to establish identity and then are sucked back.” The intensity of the melting pot transforms them into an unidentifiable mob of impurity. They emerge as dehumanized levers, wheels, and cogs of a machine that manufactures “cheap masked figures” or the “Spirit of Jazz.” In Shawn’s view, both technology and jazz represented modernity’s dehumanizing effects on man. To restore their lost humanity, Shawn appears as the “Artist Soul of America”—​a messianic figure who heals the world of its dysgenia through art. Shawn’s outline emphasizes that the Artist Soul character represents the “art consciousness of America” who has come to protect American purity from the threats of “commerce, jazz, sensuality, and greed.” To guide the nation, the Artist Soul takes to city’s streets wielding a torch, which Shawn says, is like a “flame in Liberty’s Torch” with the power to “heal the Mob and surmount them.” However, in his Notes to the Composer Shawn explains this same scene in slightly different terms, emphasizing the beauty and perfection of the Artist Soul who triumphs over the dysgenic mass:  Then comes the artist soul of America who sees the tops of the great buildings like some golden dream city—​signifying the beauty that may and shall emerge from America’s beginnings. He starts for his goal but is met by the forces of the commercial business world, by cheap jazzy pleasure seekers, by sensual desires, by other obstacles. Hurled back he searches within and finds his inner light, which turning on the crowd reveals to each of them his perfect self and they acclaim him—​Messiah. He mounts until he stands on the torch of Liberty, and radiating light, the Artist Soul becomes itself the flame of Liberty’s Torch.

In this final moment of the dance, Shawn stages an Armageddon, using his own body as a weapon against the threats of annihilation posed by the degenerate masses. Abiding by the admonition that he levels at his readers in The American Ballet, Shawn offers his body as an exemplar of racial, ethnic, and moral perfection: “We must in all our activities be a torch to the world, and in the dance most of all” (1926, 14). He describes this form of physical display as a battle, invoking the proto-​eugenic language of Darwin’s

202   Paul A. Scolieri “battle of the fittest,” and paradoxically, as a type of eugenic beauty pageant. Shawn’s victory is won through physical display rather than physical conquest. Indeed, his victory is inherited rather than earned. This much is conveyed by the “Artist Soul’s” “torch,” the unmistakable symbol of human heredity. Upon “searching within,” the prophet figure learns that he is the bearer of “radiant light,” a curious healing substance that links him to “America’s beginning,” not unlike the mysterious germ plasm in the science of eugenics, the hidden stores of genetic material that is carried forward from one generation to the next as if in a eugenic relay race. Of course, Shawn’s “torch” also evokes the Statue of Liberty’s welcoming beacon, although in his hands, the “flame of Liberty’s Torch” is used to repel rather than attract foreign bodies and to spotlight his own physical perfection. After all, throughout The American Ballet, he laments the attention that jazz takes from the Denishawn brand of theatrical dancing. Here his battle with the “dark charms” of greed, sensuality, and jazz are not necessarily with the forces themselves, but for the attention they draw away from his practice of an emerging “art” dance. The final battle scene in “An American Ballet” resolves when the Artist Soul heals the forces of evil embodied by immigrants, pleasure seekers, and jazz freaks. Essentially, Shawn’s torch-​wielding dance enacts a purification rite—​a metaphorical ethnic cleansing. In turn, the masses recognize him as the Messiah. In this final scene, Shawn’s eugenic fervor converges with his deep belief in dance’s healing power, a belief based on his experience recovering from diphtheria during his adolescence. In fact, Shawn started to dance as a form of physical therapy, which transformed his paralyzed body into an ideal of beauty, grace, and perfection—​“the handsomest man in America.” Shawn’s fundamental belief in the sacred healing power of dance, combined with his adoption of eugenic ideas about ethnicity and sex, informs the final moment in the dance, wherein his beautiful, white, Christian body overcomes the forces of unfitness in an attempt to restore purity to the national body. However, it is important to note that Shawn’s spectacular racial triumph transpires only in relation to a silent sexual victory. Twice when describing his battle with the forces of “Commerce, Jazz, Sensuality, and Greed,” Shawn cryptically alludes to “other obstacles” (in the notes) or “etc.” (in the outline). Presumably, sexual puritanism counts among these unnamed forces at contest for America’s soul. In The American Ballet, Shawn expresses his disapproval of the American obsession with partner dancing between men and women, which he goes so far as to say is “degenerate” and an obstacle to the creation of art. He writes: “The wooing and courtship theme in life has its place, and a very important place, but it should not absorb all of our life. We would not get any business done, and we would not produce any works of art” (1926, 52–53). His criticism partially explains how “An American Ballet” clears the stage of heterosexual courtship in order for new sexual desires to emerge. Within the dance’s narrative of human evolution there is a distinctive development of sexual relations: the dance begins with the mating of Man and the Spirit of the Sea, progresses toward a dance among comrades, and concludes with the solo performance of a demigod-​like figure who transcends sexuality. The dance charts a sexual evolution that reflects Shawn’s own narrative of sexual discovery—​his eugenic pairing with St. Denis, his relationships with comrades such as

“An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics”    203 Ellis and Carpenter, and later, his vow of purity. Thus, Shawn stages himself as the “flame in Liberty’s Torch” not necessarily to shadow his glaring sexual unfitness (his childlessness, his adulterous marriage, his homosexuality) but perhaps to spotlight how, through his identification as an artist and as the “Father of American Dance,” he believed he had transcended it.

Conclusions: “The Stepchild of the Dance World” When a Washington Post writer announced the marriage between Shawn and St. Denis as an “interesting experiment in eugenics,” he could not have imagined how Shawn’s anxiety to fulfill his eugenic ideal as a husband and father would later lead him to assert himself as an artist through his racial, ethnic, physical, and moral superiority. Essentially, Shawn redesigned the “interesting experiment” by closely observing the variables of his marriage and sexuality and establishing his own experimental controls: his book The American Ballet and his scenario for “An American Ballet.” In these texts, Shawn experimented with applying scientific ideas to formulate his emerging form of modern American theatrical dance. Eugenics, as filtered through Ellis’s sexology, inspired Shawn to experiment with ways that dance could contribute to the “betterment of the race,” and of Americans, in particular. For Ellis, dancing was a sign of sexual or religious fitness. For Shawn, dancing was both the symptom and the cure. In Shawn’s view, betterment meant a return to Anglo-​Saxon social dances and/​or to the sacred dances of “primitives,” such as Native Americans, Indians, and other “exotics.” Both pedantic and polemical, The American Ballet and “An American Ballet” were written by someone inflamed by ideology. Yet, apparently, that flame was short-​lived. Shawn eventually aborted his experiment in eugenics. In fact, in his autobiography, he describes the moment he received his copy of The American Ballet while still on tour in the Orient. He reports that he barely recognized the words in the book as his own and that he had not thought of the manuscript in over a year. Although he does not disavow the book’s central ideas, this admission minimally suggests that the fervor with which he had written it had since subsided. As for “An American Ballet,” Shawn wrote the scenario, outline, and notes, but the dance never saw the stage. When Shawn conceived the work, he had neither the time nor resources to mount a full-​length, three-​act work of the magnitude he envisioned. The scenario calls for original costuming and music, as well as a significantly greater number of dancers than that of the Denishawn company of the late 1920s. Indeed, it was highly experimental for Shawn to conceive of an evening-​length modern dance work. It is also possible that Shawn had become ambivalent about the dance, especially its choreographed “ethnic cleansing.” Shawn was on a solo tour in Germany in 1930–​ 1931, and by the time he had returned, his scenario was out of line with the aesthetics

204   Paul A. Scolieri and politics of the emerging modern dance movement in New York. By 1930, Shawn’s former student and dance partner, Martha Graham, had begun to present radical dances with her all-​female dance group. In dances such as Revolt (1927), Poems of 1917 (1928), Immigrant: Steerage, Strike (1928), and Heretic (1929), she dramatized the plight of the rebel and the outsider, rendering Shawn’s concern for “America’s elect” politically and socially irrelevant. In 1931, former Denishawn student, Edna Guy, participated in producing the first Negro dance recital in New York and thus, was no longer relegated to the backstage as St. Denis’s assistant. In 1932, leftist dance artists formed the New Dance Group and committed themselves to fostering a revolutionary dance movement. Modern dancers wanted to empower the masses with dancing as a political weapon—​quite the opposite of Shawn’s intention to purify the masses with his torch of truth. Arguably, Shawn continued his eugenic experiment at Jacob’s Pillow, an abandoned farm in Becket, Massachusetts, that was at first his summer residence and later developed into the center for His Men Dancers, the all-​male dance company he directed between 1933–​1940. Many of the dances he created for this group were used as vehicles to display eugenic virtues of virility, athleticism, beauty, piousness, and industriousness, even when the dances involved ethnic peoples.43 However, he never again attempted to stage explicit threats of racial annihilation, make ultimatums for ethnic segregation, or call for a dance of “America’s elect.” Ultimately, the Father of American Dance embraced ethnic dance into his family, even if only as “the step child of the dance world” (1959, 28).

Notes 1. Dance critic and historian Walter Terry famously called Shawn the “Father of American Dance” in his biography Ted Shawn: Father of American Dance. However, the moniker was Shawn’s own idea. In a letter dated January 30, 1938, Shawn berated Terry for a review he had written about the history of modern dance that ignored Shawn’s formative role in the art. Shawn urged Terry to “straighten out” that oversight. 2. In his letters to La Meri (Russell Meriwether Hughes), Shawn vigorously encouraged her to teach at the Pillow and to publish her writing on ethnic dance. Ted Shawn Collection, Box 19, Folder 16; Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 3. Shawn, Every Little Movement, 82. Elizabeth Kendall has made a link between the eugenics movement and Shawn’s writings and dances. (Where She Danced, 105–​106.) 4. Shawn used the word ballet instead of dance in The American Ballet and “An American Ballet” in order to convey a sense of the seriousness associated with the “known form” of the European theatrical tradition. (Shawn, The American Ballet, v). Shawn also wrote an introduction to a similarly titled book, The American Ballet, by Olga Maynard (Philadelphia: Macrae Smith, 1959). Shawn, The American Ballet, 53. 5. Shawn, “Outline and First Scenario for American Ballet in Three Acts.” 6. For a condensed outline of prominent eugenicists and research centers in the United States, see Lynn, Eugenics: A Reassessment, 24–​27. 7. The article is largely a critique of the argument that war negatively affects race betterment because the best men go to war and are killed.

“An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics”    205 8. For a discussion of the ERO and the relation between eugenics and 20th-​century U.S. drama, see Wolff. 9. For a more detailed analysis of the U.S.  legislative reform ushered in by eugenics, see Holloway, 21–​51. 10. “Acts and Joint Resolutions.” In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld this law in Buck v. Bell. 11. According to eugenic historian Kenneth Ludmerer, as quoted in Lynn, Eugenics: A Reassessment, 35. 12. For an analysis of Caldwell’s The Bastard in light of eugenics, see Currell. Interestingly, Denishawn was closely linked to the Pantages circuit; the company was one of the first acts Pantages hired to join his roster of entertainers on his successful vaudeville circuit of theaters in the United States. 13. This is according to Terry, Shawn: Father of American Dance, 61. 14. The “Handsomest Man in America” was a conciliatory title that Shawn received after a previous reporter had mistakenly confused him with Paul Swan, “The Most Beautiful Man in the World.” For Shawn’s discussion of the title, see One Thousand and One Night Stands, 45. 15. For a similar article, see “Dancer Wed Her Youthful Partner,” Tucson Citizen (November 28, 1914), 4. 16. St. Denis wrote to Shawn asking for an open marriage on the basis “that harmony can only be between [them] in a basis of honesty and freedom … each of [them] feeling reasonably satisfied that his own soul is his own and not another’s.” Letter, Ruth St. Denis to Ted Shawn, December 30, 1921, Ted Shawn Collection, Folder 15, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 17. See Weeks for a detailed explanation about how Ellis’s medical explanations were adopted by campaigners for homosexual rights. 18. In The Dance of Life book, the title of the chapter based on Ellis’s Atlantic Monthly article, “The Philosophy of Dancing,” was changed to “The Art of Dancing.” 19. For more on Ellis’s ideas about sexuality and dance in relation to Shawn, see Foster, “Closet Full of Dances.” 20. Ellis, The Dance of Life, 45. Also quoted. in Shawn, The American Ballet, 114. 21. Shawn, interview by John Dougherty, Reminiscences: from Childhood to the Dissolution of Denishawn, January 11–​ 30, 1969, sound recording and transcript, 281, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (hereafter Reminiscences). 22. Reminiscences. 23. The paper was included in a letter from Ellis to Shawn (November 17, 1921), Ted Shawn Collection, Box 39, Folder 4; Dance Division, New  York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 24. Reminiscences. 25. Reminiscences. 26. In 1967, Shawn wrote a letter to one of his former students and dancers, John Dougherty, wherein he ruminates about St. Denis’s lesbian relationship with one of their young Denishawn dancers, Pearl Wheeler: She had a doglike devotion to Miss Ruth personally. Between you and me, privately, it was apparent to me that it was inherently Lesbian, although so far as I know there was no overt expression of this. However, Miss Ruth used Pearl, and trading on this attraction, tossed bits and scraps of physical caresses at times when

206   Paul A. Scolieri Pearl needed coaxing or was about to blow up. Pearl often came to me when Miss Ruth was especially “ruthless” and cried on my shoulder, but when there was any real question of choice, she belonged to Ruth body and soul—​as maid, companion, general errand girl, as well as costumer, wardrobe mistress, costume designer, dancer—​anything Miss R needed, Pearl tried to be that. (Letter, Ted Shawn to John Dougherty, December 20, 1967, John Dougherty Collection, UCLA.) 27. Attributed to Ellis in Reminiscences. 28. Letter, Ted Shawn to Ruth St. Denis, December 31, 1920, Ruth St. Denis Letters, Folder 107 (January 1920); Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 29. Reminiscences. 30. Reminiscences. 31. Letter, Ellis to Shawn, June 9, 1922, Ted Shawn Collection, Box 39, Folder 4, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 32. Attributed to Ellis in Reminiscences. 33. Shawn, The American Ballet, 43. For original passage, see Ellis, The Dance of Life, 46. 34. Ellis in Shawn, The American Ballet, ix. 35. Shawn, “The History of the Art of Dancing in Four Parts: Part III,” The Denishawn Magazine (1924) vol. 1, no. 3, 11. 36. See Nahshon, ed., From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot, 211. 37. For more on Guy’s achievement in context of the Negro dance movement, see Manning, Modern Dance /​Negro Dance: Race in Motion, 30–​38. 38. Ironically, Shawn acknowledged that many “primitive, racial, oriental, and national” dances were not necessarily “pure,” and, in Gods Who Dance, that certain dance traditions had been influenced by multiple cultural, religious, and political influences. 39. This is based on Shawn’s description of the dance. See Shawn, Gods Who Dance, 6. 40. The document is six pages in length. Three pages outline the three acts of the dance with sparse descriptions of their individual sections. The other three pages are written as “Notes to the Composer” and give a more detailed explanation of the dance. 41. According to Shawn, Denishawn disbanded in 1931, although there are several different ways to date the company’s dissolution. Shawn, The American Ballet, 5. 42 Wiggam in Shawn, The American Ballet, 79–​80. 43. Drawing on the work of Nancy Ordover, Siobhan Burke has convincingly made this argument.

Bibliography Manuscripts, Unpublished Sources, and Interviews Jacob’s Pillow Archives (Becket, Massachusetts)

Shawn, Ted. “Outline and First Scenario for American Ballet in Three Acts.” (unpublished typescript) Shawn, Ted. One Thousand and One Night Stands, Unpublished Manuscript of Ted Shawn’s Autobiography, Part 1. Jacob’s Pillow Archive, Becket, Massachusetts. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dance Division (New York, New York) Letter, Havelock Ellis to Ted Shawn, November 17, 1921, Box 39, Folder 4, Ted Shawn Collection. Letter, Havelock Ellis to Ted Shawn, June 9, 1922, Box 39, Folder 3, Ted Shawn Collection.

“An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics”    207 Letter, Ruth St. Denis to Ted Shawn, December 30, 1921, Folder 15, Ted Shawn Collection. Letter, Ted Shawn to Ruth St. Denis, May 15, 1923, Folder 30, Ted Shawn Collection. Letter, Ted Shawn to Walter Terry, January 30, 1938, Folder 517, Ted Shawn Collection. Shawn, Ted. “Primitive Rhythms” commentary [sound recording], 1951, Ted Shawn Collection. Shawn, Ted, interview by John Dougherty, Reminiscences: from Childhood to the Dissolution of Denishawn, January 11–​30, 1969, sound recording and transcript. UCLA (Los Angeles, California) Letter, Ted Shawn to John Dougherty, December 20, 1967, John Dougherty Collection, UCLA.

Published Sources “Acts and Joint Resolutions (Amending the Constitution) of the General Assembly of the State of Virginia, Session Which Commenced at the State Capitol on Wednesday, January 9, 1924.” Richmond, Va.: David Bottom, Superintendent of Public Printing, 1924. Accessed August 1, 2010 at [http://​www.eugenicsarchive.org/​html/​eugenics/​static/​images/​1241.html] Alter, Judith B. “Ellis’s Essay ‘The Art of Dancing’: A Reconsideration,” Dance Research Journal 24, no. 1 (1992): 27–​35. Burke, Siobhan. “Imagining the Dance of America, Regenerating ‘The Race’:  The Eugenic Fantasy of Ted Shawn.” Senior Thesis, Barnard College, 2008. Caldwell, Erskine. The Bastard. New York: Heron, 1929. Carpenter, Edward. Towards Democracy. London: J. Heywood, 1883. Carpenter, Edward. Homogenic Love: and its Place in a Free Society. Manchester: Labour Press Society Limited, 1894. Currell, Susan. “Introduction.” In Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s, edited by Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell, 1–​16. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006. “Dancer Wed Her Youthful Partner,” Tucson Citizen (November 28, 1914), p. 4. Duncan, Isadora. My Life, Isadora Duncan. New York and London: Liverlight, 1955. Ellis, Havelock. Sexual Inversion (Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1). Watford:  The University Press, 1897. Ellis, Havelock. “Eugenics and St. Valentine,” Nineteenth Century 59 (1906): 779–​787. Ellis, Havelock​. “The Philosophy of Dancing,” The Atlantic Monthly (1912): 197–​207. Ellis, Havelock. The Task of Social Hygiene. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1913. First published 1912. Ellis, Havelock. The Dance of Life. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1923. Foster, Susan Leigh. “Closet Full of Dances: Modern Dance’s Performance of Masculinity and Sexuality.” In Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage, edited by Jane C. Desmond, 147–​207. Madison, WI.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Foulkes, Julia L. Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey. Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Fowler, Orson Squire. Fowler’s Practical Phrenology. New York: Fowler and Wells, 1840. Gillette, Aaron. Eugenics and the Nature-​ Nurture Debate in the Twentieth Century. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Hasian, Marouf Arif. The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-​ American Thought. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Holloway, Pippa. Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–​1945. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

208   Paul A. Scolieri Humphrey, Doris. An Artist First: An Autobiography, edited and completed by Selma Jeanne Cohen. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972. Kendall, Elizabeth. Where She Danced:  The Birth of American Art-​ Dance. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984. First published 1979. Larson, Edward J. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Lynn, Richard. Eugenics: A Reassessment. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001. Manning, Susan. Modern Dance /​Negro Dance: Race in Motion. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Maynard, Olga. The American Ballet. Philadelphia: Macrae Smith, 1959. Nahshon Edna, ed., From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays: Three Playscripts. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2006. Ordover, Nancy. American Eugenics:  Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Richardson, Angélique. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century:  Rational Reproduction and the New Woman. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Roosevelt, Theodore. “Twisted Eugenics,” The Outlook 106, no. 1 (January 3, 1914). Rosen, Christine. Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Rowbotham, Sheila. Edward Carpenter:  A  Life of Liberty and Love. London and New York: Verso, 2008. Shawn, Ted. “The Dancer’s Bible: An Appreciation of Havelock Ellis’s The Dance of Life,” The Denishawn Magazine 1, no. 1 (1924): 12–​14. Shawn, Ted. “The History of the Art of Dancing in Four Parts: Part III,” The Denishawn Magazine 1, no. 3 (1924): 8–​11. Shawn, Ted​. The American Ballet, with an introduction by Havelock Ellis. New York: Henry Holt, 1926. Shawn, Ted​. Gods Who Dance. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1929. Shawn, Ted​. Fundamentals of Dance Education. Girard, KS: Haldeman-​Julius, 1948. First published 1937. Shawn, Ted. Every Little Movement: A Book about François Delsarte, the Man and His Philosophy, His Science and Applied Aesthetics, the Application of This Science to the Art of the Dance, the Influence of Delsarte on American Dance. Pittsfield, MA: Eagle, 1954. Shawn, Ted​. Thirty-​Three Years of American Dance (1927–​1959). Pittsfield, MA: Eagle, 1959. Shawn, Ted with Gray Poole. One Thousand and One Night Stands. New York: Doubleday, 1979. First published 1960. Shea Murphy, Jacqueline. The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Shelton, Suzanne. Ruth St. Denis: A Biography of the Divine Dancer. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990. First published 1981. Sherman, Jane. The Drama of Denishawn Dance. Middletown, CT:  Wesleyan University Press, 1979. Siegel, Marcia B. Days on Earth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. St. Denis, Ruth. Ruth St. Denis, An Unfinished Life:  An Autobiography. New  York and London: Harper, 1939. First published 1937. Stern, Alexandra. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.

“An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics”    209 “Students of Eugenics Closely Watching This Marriage: Union of the Splendidly Developed Dancer Ruth St. Denis and Edwin Shawn, ‘the Handsomest Man in America,’ May Produce Results of Great Value to the Science of Race Betterment,” Washington Post (November 22, 1914). Terry, Walter. Ted Shawn: Father of American Dance. New York: Dial, 1976. Weeks, Jeffrey. “Havelock Ellis and the Politics of Sex Reform.” In Socialism and the New Life:  The Personal and Sexual Politics of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, edited by Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks. London: Pluto, 1977. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1904. First published 1855. Wolff, Tamsen. Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-​Century American Drama. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Chapter 9

Dancing A ng e l s and Princ e s se s The Invention of an Ideal Female National Dancer in Twentieth-​Century Iran Ida Meftahi

Hailed as “ancient” (bastani), “authentic” (asil), “traditional” (sunnati), and “classic” (kilasik), the Iranian “national dance” (raqs-​i milli) emerged in the creative performing arts sphere of Tehran in the early twentieth century. In the decades that followed this genre became an artistic means for showcasing the narratives of the nation through dancing bodies. Offering a genealogy of this choreographic genre, this chapter explores raqs-​i milli as an artistic medium whose trajectory encompasses innovative experiments with concepts, nuances, movements, and aesthetics, drawn from the “repository of Iranian national culture” throughout the twentieth century.1 Moreover, it examines the female national dancer as a performative subject of the nationalist stage, embodying the characteristics of a modern Iranian woman. In the aftermath of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905–​1909), the newly established public sites of sociability brought together performing artists, not only from various parts of Iran, but also from the southern regions of the Russian empire, mainly the Caucasus. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its consequent dispersion of ethnic and cultural Russians into Iran, Tehran’s artistic scene developed into a cosmopolitan center for experimentation in the performing arts. With the mingling of these diverse peoples in the public sites of entertainment, Persian musical and performing arts conventions came into close contact with their counterparts from other places. This cohabitation of performing arts and artists provided creative spaces for the shaping of modern Iranian “national” music, dance, and theater. It also paved the way for female performing bodies to appear on the public stage and to replace and consequently eliminate the transvestite male zanpush. In the decades that followed each of these disciplines, including dance, became professionalized. They all, however, share continuity with their early emerging years.

Dancing Angels and Princesses    211 Looking at the dancing body of the nationalist theatrical stage of the twentieth century, this chapter first provides a historical overview covering roughly two periods: from the early 1920s to the mid-​1940s, when most dance performances were part of the theatrical scene; and from the mid-​1940s to the 1970s, when an independent public dance scene was developed.2 It then examines the nationalist biopolitics that regulated the stage and its staged dancing subjects.3 The chapter also explores the prevailing trends in the discourse of dance in Persian periodicals of the Pahlavi era. Focusing primarily on the female subject of the national dance through a comparative perspective, this chapter investigates the ways regulated female performativity defamiliarized both the image of raqqas—​the contemporaneous dancer of the popular cabaret scene—​and bachchah-​ raqqaqs—​the sexualized adolescent boy dancer of previous eras. Finally, how the female performer of this invented genre embodied the ideas, aesthetics, and ethics of Iranian nationalism and modernity is addressed.

The Dancing Bodies of Early Nationalist Plays and Musicals There is evidence of nonvernacular dance performances in the newly developed Iranian performing arts scene of the early twentieth century. These dances were performed either as an element of the variety show concerts popular in that era (see Kouhestani-​ Nejad 2002, 2:268), which included short musical, theatrical, and cinematic presentations, or as a component of operettas, the musical theater genre that combined music and poetry with singing, acting, and dancing. The majority of these privately funded performances occurred in the area of Lalehzar Street, in particular on the stage of the Grand Hotel. Gaining popularity in Iran during the 1910s, most of the earlier operettas were performed by touring companies from Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia (comprising the southern region of Caucasus at the time). Popular operettas performed in Iran included the works of the Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov (1885–​1948), such as Arshin Malalan, Asli va Karam, and Mashadi ‘Ibad, as well as the Armenian Upiray-​i Anush and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Although the newly introduced operetta genre was widely seen and well received for its amusement factor, the unfamiliarity of the language was an obstacle to its reception by the Persian-​speaking audiences in the capital, Tehran. This in turn induced these troupes to translate their work into Persian. Within a few years Iranian playwrights were similarly motivated to compose operettas in Persian, often based on romantic historical and nationalist narratives. This choice of theme suited the general nationalist-​modernist theater environment, which had been developing over the decades after the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–​1911. Being largely inspired by European dramatic traditions and seeking to educate and mobilize

212   Ida Meftahi the public, these new theatrical trends defined themselves in distinction to the preexisting vernacular Iranian performance traditions of ta‘ziyah and taqlid. Among the famous early operettas of this era are Parichihr va Parizad (1921), written by Reza Kamal (aka Shahrzad), and Rastakhiz-​i Salatin-​i Iran (1921), composed by Mirzadah ‘Ishqi, both of which have historical and romantic plots. Produced in Iran by touring companies from the Soviet regions, these operettas often featured dancers. These included Kavah’i Ahangar (1921), by the Azerbaijani troupe of Sharifzadah, and Kaykhusraw (1920), by Monsieur Ruba. While this newly emergent theater community strove to present “modern” ideas to the Iranian nation through its artistic productions, it was faced with a variety of restrictions, including on the casting of women. Traditionally, in the Iranian forms of ta‘ziyah and taqlid (performed by the mutribi troupes who combined dancing, acting and music), the cross-​dressing zanpush men and transvestite bachchah raqqas portrayed the female roles. Figure 9.1 shows a picture of a Qajar-​era (1794–​1925) mutribi troupe featuring a bachchah-​raqqas). The new modes of theater, however, required women to act (see Shahriyari 1986 for a description of zanpush). For example, in the early stagings of the important nationalist operetta Rastakhiz-​i Salatin-​i Iran, in which ‘Ishqi criticized Iran’s backward condition, the two female leading roles were played by men (Mansouri and Shirvani 1975, 209). The problem of casting women was partially resolved in the 1920s by the recruitment of non-​Iranian or non-​Muslim (mostly Armenian) women to the Iranian stage. As proved by the performing arts documents, a number of dance styles were presented in these musical performances. Some were clearly identified as ballet or “Caucasian” (qafqazi), and some were vaguely labeled “Asian” (asiya’i), “European” (urupa’i), “oriental or Eastern” (sharqi or mashriqi), “new” (jadid), and “old” (qadim) (see Kouhestani-​Nejad 2002). Presumably some of these “nonindigenous” dances adopted Iranian elements when they emerged as the genre ballah’i irani (“Kunsirt-​i bashukuh-​i ‘ali” 1924, 4) or accompanied Iranian traditional music (“Namayish-​i ‘ali” 1921, 4). The majority of Iran’s early dance performers were new immigrants from various regions of the newly formed Soviet Union, including Monsieur Ruba, introduced as an artist from the Russian Imperial Ballet; Gul Sabah Khanum; Mademoiselle Asiya (Qustaniyan); Mademoiselle Marie; and Suri Khanum (see Kouhestani-​ Nejad 2002). Though actively dancing in the theatrical context of the time, these performers were commonly identified as “aktir” and “aktris,” not “raqqas,” which was the regular term used to connote a “dancer.” Later the Iranian Armenian Madame Aqabayov joined this cosmopolitan scene, becoming the most celebrated star of the operettas in the 1920s and1930s. Aqabayov’s role in Parichihr va Parizad (1921) was significant in creating her fame and bringing her acclaim; offstage she became known as “Madame Pari,” meaning “fairy.” Her progressive-​minded male audiences praised her performance in her diverse acts, ranging from Carmen (1923) to Parichihr—​an idealized Persian princess and the beloved of the Sasanid King Anushirvan.

Dancing Angels and Princesses    213

Figure 9.1  bachchah raqqas (top center) in a Qajar-​era mutribi ensemble Courtesy of Mahoor Institute of Culture and ArtPublished in Ruhollqh Khaliqi. 2011/​1390. Sarguzasht-​i Musiqi-​yi Iran [A History of Iranian Music]. Unabridged Edition. Tehran: Mahoor Institute of Culture and Art, 751.

In these historical plays and operettas the dancing bodies have enacted interchangeable roles, ranging from the entertaining and seducing of kings—​such as the Sasanid era (a.d. 224 to 651) King Anushirvan and the Safavid (1502–​1736) Shah Abbas—​to participating in reconstructions of ancient Iranian rituals. Performing seductive oriental dances for the king—​as in Haft-​hijab (the Dance of the Seven Veils) by Salomé—​was a recurring scene in the historical plays and seemingly inspired by the several stagings of Salomé starring Aqabayov (“Talar-​i madrasah’i aramanah” 1921, 4; “Namayish-​i ba shukuh” 1921, 3). An early example of the staged reconstruction of an ancient ritual in

214   Ida Meftahi the form of dance is found in the operetta Kavah’i Ahangar (“Kavah’i” 1921, 4), in which A’in-​i Jam—​an ancient Iranian ritual—​was staged. Ali Nasr, the pioneer who founded Iran’s first official theater school, the Foundation for Acting College (Bunyad-​i Hunaristan-​i Hunarpishigi), in the 1940s on Lalehzar Street, especially deployed dance in the productions of his Comédie Iran (Kumidi-​i Iran) in the 1920s. Monsieur Ruba and Madame Aqabayov, who were known for their dancing skills, were both members of this company for a time (“Bisharat” 1921, 4). Ali-​Naqi Vaziri, one of the most influential musical figures in early twentieth-​century Iran and a promoter of Iran’s national music, also endeavored to combine theater and music, founding the “Musical Club” (Kulup-​i Musikal) in 1923. Viewing theater as “a site for critiquing people’s habits” and “a ‘university’ [danishgah] for arts and ethics with no entrance exam for its audience,” Vaziri sought to portray theater as an institution to create theatrical that “could boldly remind the Iranian nation of its missteps” (Vaziri 2006). Vaziri identified opera as the assembly of five art forms, namely music, dance, painting, poetry, and theater, staging several productions with the Kulup-​i Musiqi between 1923 and 1930. Most of these works, including Rawya-​yi Majnun (The dream of majnun), Dukhtar-​i Nakam (The discontented girl), and Gul-​rukh (The flower-​face), incorporated dance scenes (see Ayoubi 2006). Among these works, Rawya-​yi Hafiz (The dream of hafiz), staged in 1925, is of particular significance, because in the play the fourteenth-​ century poet Hafiz fantasizes about his beloved’s dance. Pari Aqabayov was reportedly the leading star in most of Vaziri’s works.4 In the scripts of his musical plays Vaziri often employed the verses of classical Persian poets such as Firdawsi (940–​1020), Nizami (1141–​1209), and Hafiz (1325–​1389). His musical drama Juda’i (Separation), performed in 1928, especially sought to instill patriarchal sensibility in his audiences, urging the men to enroll in military service (Ayoubi 2006, 34). Displaying musical scenes of marching and dancing, the staging of this play was concurrent with the Iranian government’s enforcement of mandatory military service. Dancing bodies continued to enact themes of nationhood and nationalism up until the first Pahlavi era (1926–​1941), when these subjects were not only supported by the government but also enforced as a criterion for public performances (Mir Ansari and Ziaii 2003, 23). The nationalist “moral plays” (namayish-​ha-​yi akhalqi) were another popular genre of the era that often included dance. These plays were known to be a medium for moral censure, using “recreation” and “amusement” to direct their audiences toward virtue and to correct social vice or “old-​fashioned” habits such as drug addiction, consumption of alcohol, gambling, and prevention of girls’ education (see “Dar ti’atr-​i sirus” 1929, 3). The Barbud Society (Jami‘ah’i Barbud), founded in 1926 by the eminent musician Ismail Mihrtash, was another collective that staged (nationalist) musicals. Aiming to showcase the Iranian “national arts,” the company staged operettas such as Layli va Majnun, Khayyam and Khusraw va Shirin (also titled The Sasanid Princess) (Jannati-​ ‘Ata’i 1954, 74). In the company’s major production in 1930 of Shab-​i Hizar va Yikum (The night of one thousand first),written by Reza Kamal, Madame Pari appeared as the principal ballerina along with a troupe of Caucasian dancers (Gharibpour 2005, 107).

Dancing Angels and Princesses    215 In addition to the artists mentioned previously, Madame Allahverdiov and her troupe were also engaged in dance performance in the 1930s, appearing in the operettas Layli va Majnun) in 1932and Raqs-​i Firishtagan (Dance of angels) in the musical Firishtah (Angel) in 1934; and in Bihisht (Heaven) in 1937, as well as in the ballet Jashn-​i Gul-​ha va Shadi-​i Parvanah-​ha (The festivity of flowers and the jollity of butterflies) in 1935 (Mansouri and Shirvani 1975, 212, 232). Madame Hamberson also danced in the theatrical productions of Layli va Majnun (1932) and Rustam va Suhrab (1934) at the Firdawsi Millennium. Madame Cornelli’s students danced in the plays Taj-​i Iftikhar (Crown of pride) and Sulayman va Bilqays in 1932, as well as in the annual celebrations of Cornelli’s ballet studio in 1932 and 1935 (Mansouri and Shirvani 1975, 212, 222). A number of newly founded government (theatrical) institutions also served as platforms for teaching dance in the 1930s and 1940s, aiming to improve actors’ movement skills and their public appearance. For example, Madame Escampie taught dance at the Foundation for Acting College, founded by Ali Nasr in 1939 (on Lalehzar Street), and Madame Cornelli taught at the Municipal Opera (Upira-​yi baladiyah). Nationalist periodicals of the time widely promoted physical education for Iranian women, introducing dance as a suitable exercise that could be done in the confines of their homes (see, e.g., “Varzish va zibai’i” 1937, 20). Some of the aforementioned non-​Muslim dancers also appeared in the newly emerging Iranian film industry. The Armenian-​born Asiya Qustaniyan, who also acted in the 1933 silent film Haji Aqa Aktur-​i sinama (Haji Aqa the cinema actor), performed a ballet-​influenced Iranian dance that is perhaps the earliest visual account of this hybrid form. Madame Escampie also danced in Tufan-​i Zindigi (The turmoil of life) in 1948. By the mid-​1940s the number of operettas had decreased. Particularly after state-​ forced unveiling of women in 1937, Muslim actresses gradually joined the theatrical sphere, primarily as actors, not yet as dancers. Concurrently, an independent dance scene emerged, prompted by a wave of immigrants from the Soviet countries who specialized in dance. These changes resulted in the three disciplines of dance, music, and theater growing apart. This diversification of performing arts genres and the gradual shift toward professionalization can be observed in the play Ilahah’i Misri (The Egyptian goddess), which was performed by Muslim actresses; the ballet was performed by Madame Allahverdiov’s troupe (Azarakhshi 2003, 253). Most presentations of dance after 1945 were directed by dance artists and choreographers and were exclusively characterized as “dance performances.”

National(ist) Theatrical Dances Although from the early twentieth century ethnically diverse dance artists were using Iranian themes in their choreographies, the first major dance project that heavily portrayed itself as being in the service of enhancing Iranian national arts was Nilla Cook’s

216   Ida Meftahi Studio for the Revival of the Iranian Classical Arts (Istudiyu-​yi Ihyia-​yi Hunarha-​yi Iran-​i Bastan), founded in 1946. Recruiting a few young ballet-​trained women of mixed or non-​Muslim background, as well as several men, Cook sought to revive and restore the seemingly “forgotten ancient art of Iranian dance” (Nazimi 1948). In her choreographic attempts to reconstruct and revitalize Iranian dance, Cook was inspired by ancient Iranian visual imagery—​drawing on the Orientalist scholar Arthur Pope’s (1881–​1969) manuscripts on Persian arts (Ramazani 2002)—​as well as folklore, Persian poetry and mythology, and Zoroastrian and Islamic rituals, including the Sema of the Mevlevi Dervish orders. A former employee of the US embassy in Tehran who worked with the Iranian state as an inspector for theater and cinema, Cook withdrew from both occupations with the hope of establishing a national institution for the performing arts in Iran. Although she did not succeed in that ambition, she attracted the support of the royal family, and Princess Shams Pahlavi became the patron of Cook’s dance project. Her studio’s first performances took place in 1947 at the Rex Cinema Theater (Saleh 1947) and in the garden of the American Embassy in the presence of the prime minister, Ahmad Qavam (“A Cultural Relations Reception” 1947, 1). Only a few years after its formation, her troupe toured in Turkey, Greece, Italy, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, India, and Lebanon (Mansouri and Shirvani 1975). Besides “restoring Iranians’ sense of pride in their own culture,” according to Ramazani (2008), Cook’s other agenda was to break down the barrier between public dancing and “women of good families,” to contribute to the process of modernization in Iran. Cook’s nationalist creations at times aligned with the state, as exemplified by her 1947 production Ardeshir Babakan, which revolved around the founder of the pre-​Islamic Sasanid empire (third century b.c.). Inspired by “Achaemenid art and Zoroastrian ritual and symbolism,” this piece recounted a fairy tale about five (mythic) angels who urged Ardeshir Babakan to save Iran (“The Persian Studio” 1947, 14–​16). Presenting the Sasanid king as the hero of ancient Iran who restored Zoroastrianism and “remade” Iran from destruction, the piece implied a parallel between Babakan and the Pahlavis, who were purportedly the modern-​day saviors of Iran. The program notes to Cook’s company’s performance in the 1940s highlight this particular nationalist venture by quoting from the pre-​Islamic kings of Darius and Babakan in the captions to the images of posed dancers. A Babakan quote on the cover reads, “Oh! Angel of the earth! Awake our nation from this sleep” (Studio’s program note n.d.). Cook’s other works include Gurd-​afarid, inspired by a story in the Shahnamah and movements of zurkhanah; Majnun va Lalah (Majnun and the tulip), inspired by Nizami Ganajvi’s Layli va Majnun; Prayer of Darius, inspired by a Luristan goddess figure of five thousand years and Magi, the fire priest; and the Dance of the Rose and Nightingale, inspired by a poem of Hafiz (Cook 1949, 406; Ramazani 2002). Cook’s troupe also presented folk dances, including gilani, for which the dancers wore the regional costumes of the time (“Da‘vat-​i sifarat” 1945, 793). In addition to Cook’s company, two famous Armenian dance artists of the 1950s and 1960s, Madame Yelena and Sarkis Djanbazian, also produced works on similar themes.

Dancing Angels and Princesses    217

Figure 9.2  Dance of Samarqand. AVAZ International Dance Theatre. choreography: Anthony Shay.

Settling in Iran as part of later waves of immigrants from the Soviet Union, both Yelena and Djanbazian opened dance schools in Tehran, where they taught ballet, as well as dances from various regions of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. They gradually added Iranian national dances to their repertoires, and in the 1960s, the Iranian regional folk dances. Gul-​i Shiraz (The flower of Shiraz) is one of Yelena’s choreographies that was inspired by the life of the poet Hafiz (“Hich-​gah faramush” 1961). The influential Sarkis Djanbazian was also an advocate of dance as a “national” Iranian art form. Claiming to have established Iran’s first song and dance group, Djanbazian and his company performed ballet-​influenced Iranian “characteristic” and folk dances along with a European classical repertoire. Seeing himself as a liberator of the “national art form of dance” from its vulgar position in the “cheap entertainment scene” (Nabavi 1954), Djanbazian aimed to revive Iranian ancient, national, and folk dances by staging them on pointe, thereby depicting them in a manner easily accessible to a wider “international audience” (“Jashn-​i hunaristan” 1950, 21). In addition to live performances, Djanbazian’s troupe performed balletic dances in a number of cinematic productions of the 1950s, including Khabha-​yi Tala’i (The golden dreams) (1950) and Dukhtari az Shiraz (A girl from Shiraz) (1954). The Iranian-​born and European-​trained Lili Lazarian also had a ballet academy in Tehran, where she taught various styles of dance, from ballet to tango and paso doble. Labeled “European dances” (raqs-​ha-​yi urupa’i), partner dancing became a public practice in the 1930s and 1940s in Iran. Lazarian also choreographed ballet-​based Iranian dances, including Qalb-​i Madar (The mother’s heart), based on a poem by Iraj Mirza (1874–​1926); Yatim (The orphan), based on Parvin I‘tisami’s (1907–​1941) poem; and the ballet of Takht-​i Jamshid (Persepolis) (Lazarian 2003, 450).

218   Ida Meftahi The Iranian National Ballet Company—​ known as the Iran Ballet Academy at its foundation—​ was established in 1956 by two protégés of Nilla Cook, Haideh Akhundzadeh (née Ahmadzadeh) and Nejad Ahmadzadeh, as Iran’s first major government-​funded dance company. Besides functioning as a ballet company, this institution was meant to stage Iran’s “ancient and folk” dances (“Man bihtarin dastah’i” 1957, 26) and to “visualize Iran’s literature and history” (Abasalti 1961, 4). Supported by the Ministry of Culture and Arts, the company aimed not only to entertain the court and public, but also to present the national arts of Iran to visiting foreign dignitaries (De Warren, 1968). The Iranian repertoire of the company included works such as Gurd-​afarid, inspired by the Iranian epic poem Shahnamah by Firdawsi; Miniyatur-​ha-​yi Irani (Iranian miniatures), based on dancing figures prevalent in that style of painting; Dilbaran (Sweethearts) (1969); Rawya (The dream) (1969), a fictional story set in the Safavid court; and Ru-​nama, all of which combined the gestural vocabulary of Iranian dance with basic ballet movements. Although in most of the company’s European classical ballet repertoire the lead dancers were guest artists recruited from abroad, in their milestone production of Bijan va Manijah (1975), based on a love story from The Shahnamah, the soloists were native Iranians. Between 1963 and 1970 the company traveled internationally to perform national folk music, song, and dance repertoire in countries and regions such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Italy, the Soviet Union, Poland, Morocco, Japan, and Canada (see Ahmadzadeh 2008). The staging of national dances to showcase Iranian arts and culture nationally and internationally soon became the responsibility of the Iran National Folklore Organization (Sazman-​i Milli-​i Fulklur), a large, state-​funded company created in 1967 that aimed “to safeguard the nation’s treasures in ethnic dances, music and ceremonies” (“Mahalli Dancers of Iran” 1976). The company dancers were trained in the three-​year program of the College of National and Folk Dances (Hunaristan-​i Raqs-​ha-​yi Milli va Mahalli), which was dependent on the Folklore Organization. The students of this college were recruited from various cities through an audition advertised in the press. Besides dramatized folk dances, the company created and staged a wide range of national dances, including the choreographic reconstruction of the Safavid and Qajar court dances, as well as the narrative-​based Haft Paykar (1972), which portrayed the Sasanid king Bahram’s love story, inspired by the verses of thirteenth-​century poet Nizami Ganjavi. Other balletic productions of this company were Simurgh, which featured an angel who fought the wicked Ahriman, and the Iranian literary love legends, including Candle and Butterfly and Rose and Nightingale (Safa 1975). The company staged occasional productions that underlined the state’s politics, as exemplified by the trilogy Naft-​i Shu‘lihvar (Burning oil), Naft-​i Siyah (Black oil), and Naft-​i Sifid (White oil). Denoting the Shah’s White Revolution, which was launched in 1963, the piece framed petroleum as a “national product” saved from foreign hands by the Iranian king: “Oil, this national and empowering treasure of our homeland has been stolen for years to color the foreigners’ (dinner) table. With the leadership, ingenuity, wisdom and hard work of the Shah, a page was turned in history. And now it begins

Dancing Angels and Princesses    219 a happy life, hopefulness and “great civilization” for Iran” (National Iranian Folklore Organization, season 1973–​1974). The National Dance Company regularly performed in the Rudaki Hall, Iran’s most prestigious concert stage, founded in 1967, and presented Iranian dance to visiting politicians and dignitaries. The company toured internationally to England, Turkey, Pakistan, and the United States to showcase Iranian culture (“Antalya festivali” 1973; “Preserve Folklore” 1974;“Dirakhshish-​i raqsandigan-​i” 1972). The Pars National Ballet, founded in 1966, also selected themes from classical Iranian literature, labeling them “national ballet.” They included Mard-​i Parsa va Khishtzan, based on a poem by Sa‘di (twelfth to thirteenth centuries), and Shaykh-​i San‘an va Dukhtar-​i Tarsay, based on the verse of Attar (1145–​1221). In the process of professionalizing dance as an artistic field, the term raqsandah was deployed to demarcate and distinguish the high status of trained national dancers from those contemporaneous performers of popular entertainment, with the latter working in cabarets and cafes and derogatorily labeled raqqas and raqqasah. The negative associations with these last terms increased after the 1950s as a result of the development of Tehran’s nightlife industry; the Iranian cabaret dancer with seemingly “uncontrollable” sexuality was the key attraction, bringing multitudes of (male) spectators to the cabarets, restaurants, and vernacular Iranian musical cafés (known as kafah). Raqqas also became the main dancing persona of Lalehzar theaters, replacing the national dancers as the now governmentalized “national stage” moved to other areas, mainly the prestigious Rudaki Hall. Raqqas also dominated the widely seen commercial film industry of filmfarsi, replacing the ballet-​trained dancing bodies that formerly were featured on the screen. The popular private-​sector entertainment and cinema industries largely relied on the bioeconomy of dancing bodies, in which they were saved from bankruptcy by selling overt performances of sexuality. The relatively small “national art” stage of the late Pahlavi period, on the other hand, was a site for enacting the bioideology of nationalism to limited and selected audiences, autonomously from its box-​office sales.11 Although the position of dance significantly changed after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the “national dance” style of choreography continues to thrive to this day. Referred to by various labels—​ranging from “classical Persian dance” and “Iranian ballet” to “contemporary” and “traditional” dance—​similar notions of choreography are prevalent in the Iranian diasporic communities, in which national heroes and characters such as Arash, Rustam, and Gurd-​afarid, embodied by diversely trained dancing bodies, occasionally stir a sense of “national pride” in Iranian audiences.12 See Figure 9.3 for a photo of a diasporic production of this genre by Avaz International Dance Theater. Within postrevolutionary Iran, a renamed and reformed style of movement-​based performance known as “rhythmic movements” (harikat-​i mawzun) became a medium through which to stage dances with genealogical connections to raqs-​i milli, echoing themes and movements similar to those of the prerevolutionary national dances. Examples include works produced by two former soloists of the National Dance Company, including Simurgh (Phoenix) (2002) by Farzaneh Kabuli, and Haft-​Iqlim (The seven regions) (2003) and Zal va Rudabah (2009) by Nadir Rajabpur. Another

220   Ida Meftahi

Figure 9.3  The logo of the weekly Nahid, 1920s.

resurgent theatrical trend is the operetta, seen mainly in the works of the famous theater director Pari Saberi, who fuses music, poetry, dance, and theater based on Iranian literary themes (“Pari Saberi” 2009). Examples of her works are the Shahnamah-​inspired Bijan va Manijah (1997), Shams-​i Parandah (The flying shams) (2000), Layli va Majnun (2006), and the Shahnamah-​inspired Haft-​Khan-​i Rustam (The seven adventures of Rustam) (2009), as well as Rustam va Isfandiyar (2010).

The Biopolitics of the Nationalist Stage and the Emergence of Multiple Dancing Subjects The dancing body of the nationalist theatrical stage of twentieth-​century Iran may be further analyzed in light of the biopolitics that affected that stage. As previously mentioned, the newly developed performance scene of theater and music in the city of Tehran did not include female performers, and transvestite zanpush performers enacted the female roles. Nevertheless, the modernist environment of theater, which sought a new social order, was not content with the “ambiguous” performance of sexuality by the zanpush men. Writing in October 1914, the author and theater critic Khan Malik Sasani affirmed this frustration:  “I have to note that until women act in theatre, we won’t achieve a satisfying result. We have to learn from Istanbul [Turkey] to utilize Armenian and Jewish women, so that odd men would not perform the female delicate

Dancing Angels and Princesses    221 roles” (Sasani 2002, 3). Similar assertions were made by other writers, including Murtiza Mushfiq Kazimi, who in an article in the journal Iranschahr, published in Berlin, criticized the situation of theater in Iran, claiming that “the (Iranian) audience are addicted to feminine dance of young [men] in woman’s costume,” as women were absent from performances (Mushfiq Kazimi,1984, 328). Within a few years a number of Armenian and foreign non-​Muslim actresses took on female roles in many plays, yet these grievances continued to persist in the media until 1930. A critic reflected on Firshtah’i Umid (The angel of hope), a play that promoted women’s education, advising the directors to first try to hire (the non-​Muslim) “madames” and only turn to hiring the “improper” zanpush if these women acted deceitfully or misbehaved (Shabahang 1930). Khan Malik’s description of a zanpush as “an odd man,” and the emergence of female actors replacing the “odd” zanpush in the early twentieth-​century new theater in Iran, may be analyzed in light of Afsaneh Najmabadi’s argument on the heteronormalization of the public space as a product of the process of “achieving modernity” in Iran (2005, 3).5 In her pioneering historiographical study, Najmabadi asserts the irrelevance of the gender binary of men and women in the pre-​twentieth-​century Iranian context, wherein separate visible gender categories such as amrad and mukhannas mingled in the public space.6 She argues that through interactions between Iranians and Europeans (especially during the nineteenth century), Iranian society became self-​conscious about the presence of European spectators, who misinterpreted some of their everyday public homosocial behaviors as markers of homosexuality and thus backwardness. This spectatorship resulted in the erasure of some of those “effeminate masculinities,” leading to the existing gender binary of man/​woman that has been normalized in modern Iranian society. This heteronormalization is preeminently evident on the modernist theatrical stage of Iran, from which the transvestite zanpush was eliminated because he embodied these previous “effeminate” behaviors and so did not match the image of a modern individual and representative of contemporary society. Yet while in the early twentieth century several non-​Muslim actresses from diverse ethnic backgrounds joined the modernist theatrical milieu of cosmopolitan Tehran to replace the zanpush, the female presence on the public stage was especially heightened by the presence of the Iranian Armenian performer Madame Aqabayov. Admiringly labeled (Madame) Pari, meaning angel, by her (mainly) male audiences, Aqabayov was praised for her performances in various plays, including her role in Parichehr va Parizad. For her performance in the operetta Ilahah (The goddess), in which she enacted the flowers’ goddess, Madame Pari was described by a newspaper contributor as “an angel of heaven having no stain on her whiteness” (“Aqa-​yi mudir-​i muhtaram” 2002, 2). Although her non-​Muslim religious background gave her access to the public stage, Pari Aqabayov also owed part of her success to her training in opera and ballet in Europe, which gave her a unique quality and novel corporeal skills. The level to which Madame Pari was praised, and the position of non-​Muslim “other” female performers as the locus of the gaze of their predominantly Muslim audiences, is comparable to Tavakoli-​Targhi’s (2001) description of the ways in which European (farangi) women were seen by late eighteenth-​and early nineteenth-​century Persian

222   Ida Meftahi travelers to Europe. Describing the (European) “other” women as fairies, these travelers, unaccustomed to the public display of female beauty, saw the unveiled body of European women as markers of “developed” countries. Viewed as cultured and educated, European women became the “future” ideal of Iranian women (Tavakoli-​Targhi 2001, 54, 55). Similarly, the staged performing bodies of these non-​Muslim “other” women were the subject of their male audience’s gaze: in a theatrical sphere in which ideas of modernity and nation were largely being experimented with, the non-​Muslim female performers’ bodies were seen as the future and the “ego-​ideal” for the Iranian woman. The presence of zanpush was not the only gender-​related dilemma of the early twentieth-​century modernist artistic milieu. While non-​Muslim women’s presence on the public stage became established in the late Qajar era (1794–​1925), there remained a severe resistance to Muslim women’s presence in the public theatrical space, not only as performers but also as spectators. Similar attitudes also existed toward public performance for female-​only audiences (Firuzabadi 2003; Mudarris 2003). These pressures were not exclusively social, as the state also exhibited caution about allowing female performers to enter the country. A number of documents from the police office in the late Qajar (Idarih’i Nazmiyah) indicate that the government hesitated to issue a visa to a Muslim actress from Baku Azerbaijan to enter Iran in 1926 (Kouhestani-​Nejad 2002, 2:300–​305). When it at last issued a conditional visa, Nazmiyah stated to the Department of foreign affairs: “Due to religious conventions and regulations as well as the current situation of the society, Muslim women, regardless of their nationality, are not permitted to perform in public concerts, but their performance in women-​only gatherings would not be too problematic” (“Pasukh-​i mujaddad-​i nazmiyah” 2002). Similar restrictions on Muslim women’s participation in the artistic sphere of a state-​sponsored institution are evident in letters exchanged in 1923 between the editor of the newspaper Shafaq-​i surkh and Qamar-​al-​Muluk, a reader. Criticizing the newly founded College of Music (Madrasah’i ‘Ali-​i Musiqi) for its policy of not accepting Muslim women, Qamar-​ al-​Muluk argued that if learning music was considered problematic according to Islam, then men should also be barred from music education. Pointing to the inability of progressive-​minded Iranian modernists—​namely Ali-​Naqi Vaziri, the founder of the College of Music, and the poet and playwright Mirzadah ‘Ishqi—​to emancipate women, she claimed that the women of her era were less welcome at public social activities than their predecessors, who could attend mixed gatherings, including the traditional ta’ziyah and rawzah (“Namah’i Qamar al-​Muluk” 2005). The editor of the newspaper responded: “Teaching music to women by men is not very ‘seemly’ (zibandah) in our society, and the cause for the imposed limitations of men and women’s mixed gatherings is the corrupt behavior of men and the frivolousness of some women” (“Shafaq-​i surkh” 2005, 4). A similar approach is evident in the advertisement for a play in 1928 by Comédie Iran (Kumidi-​i Iran), which announced that unchaste women and dissolute men would not be admitted to the venue (Shaybani 2003, 3). The issue of public order can be read in light of Schayegh’s (2009) discussion on social “hygiene” in early twentieth-​century Iran (122).7 Anxiety about escalating corruption in the newly urban public social sphere

Dancing Angels and Princesses    223 marked the sites of popular entertainment as sensitive and volatile spaces that required regulation of their participants. Despite the initial resistance to performances arranged for female audiences, during and after the 1930s women’s associations organized moral plays, in which ideal modern Iranian women were showcased on stage, blaming the “old-​fashioned customs” (Dadgar 1930, 2; Dawlatabadi 2003). Although up to the 1930s and 1940s the majority of dances were performed by non-​ Muslim women, nationalist periodicals gradually adopted a favorable attitude toward dance, encouraging their female readers to dance in the confines of their homes. This attitude was in keeping with the nationalist concern about Iranian women’s physical health, viewed as the prerequisite for a progressive nation. The central assertion was that only a healthy and educated mother could raise healthy and educated children (see Dawlatabadi 1984). Promoting the importance of sports and physical education for a healthy nation, periodicals emphasized the effects of physical exercise on women’s mental and physical health, regularly referencing women’s activities in the “progressive” countries (e.g., see “Chira khanum-​ha” 1935, 8; “Nimunah’i az” 1934, 8). In particular, because of the idealization of and the positive relationship with Germany during that era, the women of Germany and their athletic and artistic activities were held up by nationalist periodicals as examples of women in a successful nation who were supposedly of the same “Aryan” race as Iranians. Dance was viewed in this context as an especially suitable physical exercise for women, a prevalent practice in those progressive countries, and thus became a signifier for the actual practice and embodiment of “modernity” (e.g., see “Luzum-​i varzish” 1937, 4). Another instance of dance-​related nationalist endeavor was the staging of folk dance. The regional folk dances of Iran, with their strong ties to various Iranian ethnicities, were rearticulated in the nationalist framework as an “authentic” element of Iran’s national culture. Relying on a purist premise that the folklore of rural areas of Iran remained untouched by “Arab/​Islamic invasion”—​because of their remoteness from urban centers and the difficulty in reaching their originating sphere of performance—​these cultures were perceived as true exemplars of the Aryan race that needed to be investigated (e.g., see “National Instruments” 1959). The state also supported this position, promoting both folkloric studies as well as public performance of folklore and regional performing arts. Although there is evidence of the staging of folk dance in Tehran in the1940s (“Hunarpishah’i” 1940), from the 1950s onward there was increased interest in staging these performances in urban areas, and they were reported on in periodicals. The Pahlavi government was especially invested in presenting these dances in governmental public spaces, including garrisons, factories, and schools all around the country, even in the most conservative cities such as Yazd and Qom (see Mansouri and Shirvani 1975, 237; “Duvvumin Jashn-​i Farhang va Hunar” n.d., 49). Framed under the general label “folk dance,” the dances of various ethnicities of Iran, including Azeris, Kurds, Gilaks, and Baluchi, became a regular component of official celebrations in larger festivals, such as the Festival of Culture and Arts (Jashn-​i Farhang va Hunar)—​organized as a set of

224   Ida Meftahi performances, lectures, and exhibitions in various cities around the country (1969–​ 1978)—​and Jashnvarih’i Farhang-​i ‘Ammah (Folklore Festival) (1978). While the official groups, such as the National and Folk Dance Group of the National Ballet of Iran and the Iran National Folklore Organization, showcased these dances in Iran and abroad, the Ministry of Culture often sent local dance groups from various regions of the country to other cities, often far away from their place of origin, to present dance as a key component of the national culture. Although reframing folk dance as an element of “Iranian national culture” tended to ignore the folk dances’ ethnic affiliations, in comparison to other aspects of ethnic cultures—​particularly languages, which have often been disguised in official public displays—​the nationalist policies toward dance were not repressive but rather supportive, promoting them as part of the national commodity culture.8

Nationalism and Prevailing Trends in the Press’s Discourse on Dance Three main trends emerged in the published discourse on dance during the Pahlavi period, which arguably can be traced back to observations on the choreographic approaches of national dance and the ways dancing bodies were presented on stage. A  primary inclination—​stimulated by the prevailing literary nationalism—​was to suggest that Persian poetry was a genuine Iranian inspirational source and a national cultural repository for all performing art forms. Drawing on Persian poetry and literature has been offered as a particularly optimal solution for revitalizing Iranian dance to a high art form. Nilla Cook, for example, asserted: “If the dance has fallen from the position of national dignity it once held and is now the province of café entertainers of low order, it is because it has been divorced from poetry. Reunited to it, it could fill once more a sacred office” (Cook 1946, 10). In a similar approach, Hassan Shirvani, a regular commentator on music and theater and later head of Tehran’s Opera Bureau, in an account published in the monthly Namayish (Shirvani 1957, 33) suggested a combination of Persian poetry, music, and dance in lieu of a pure national performing art form. Shirvani’s suggested hybrid resonates closely with early twentieth-​century Iranian operettas. Abdullah Nazemi, the founder of the aforementioned Pars National Ballet (Ballah’i Milli-​i Pars), in an interview with Talash contended that the only solution for elevating the art of dance in Iran was to pay attention to national dance and national ballet. Nazemi maintained that Iran’s rich poetic narratives would be better suited for Iranian ballet productions than the content borrowed from the (European) classical ballet (Shafi‘i 1967, 77). In a more recent account, an informant of the dance scholar, Anthony Shay, identified the frequent use of literary and historical themes in Iranian dance productions as a “green card to dance” and a “legitimate way of validating dance” (Shay 2005).

Dancing Angels and Princesses    225 The press discourse also offered historical narratives for dance(s) of Iran. Based on archeological and literary evidence as well as European travelogues, several journalists and scholars attempted to examine the way Iranian people danced in ancient and medieval times. These accounts, being written in the twentieth century and dealing with a past as distant as two millennia ago, were often highly romanticized. One of the earliest and most widely cited historical accounts deploying archeological evidence was “The History of Dance in Iran,” by Yahya Zoka’ (1924–​2001). Exploring dance in prehistoric and ancient Iran, this article was published several times prior to the revolution and still receives pseudoscholarly attention (Zoka’ 1962, 1964, 1978). Nilla Cook also discussed various historical sources to trace back dance in Iran, including pre-​Islamic architecture: These principles of design, which made Persepolis, the Athens of Asia, and have lived on, in essence, through so many eras of Persian art, are the birthright of the Persian Dance. If it has been claimed that the “Greek Dance,” as imagined or reconstructed from sculpture and paintings, is the “natural dance,” which indeed it is, the same claim could be advanced for the Iranian Dance, as imagined or reconstructed from Achaemenid Art. The Iranian Dance, springing from such a tradition, has as much right to plastic freedom and natural grace as Greek. (Cook 1946, 9)

In a 1949 article Cook connected the prejudices against dance in the Middle East to the loss of its religious and national association (Cook 1949, 406). Cook’s presumption of the high status of religious dances in pre-​Islamic Iran is shared by others (see Ali-​Akbari Baigi and Muhammadi 2000, 1326; Rezvani 1962). The Paris-​based choreographer and performer Medjid Rezvani, who in 1962 compiled the first book-​length account of dance in Iran, repeatedly asserted the high status of dance in ancient Iran. Assuming a religious significance for dance in the Achaemenid era (550–​330 b.c.), Rezvani claimed that kings were frequent participants in these ceremonies. Arguing a Persian genealogy for Greek dances, Rezvani questioned the tendency of Iranian scholars to look for theater’s roots in Greece. He maintained that in the Sasanid era, learning dance and music was mandatory for the princes and princesses, who held the highest social status. He also declared that Iranian dancers were globally recognized for their skills during the Sasanid era. A choreographer himself, Rezvani illustrated a dance scene of the Persian princess Roxana, which he presumed had balletic manifestations (‘Araqizadeh 1978). There are a number of writings about dance in the Safavid (1501–​1736) and Qajar (1785–​1925) periods, some of which portray idealized images of the Iranian dancer of the past. An interesting example is Shahid-​i Shiraz (1962), a semifictional travelogue by Khan Malik Sasani, who used an unspecified historical document to shed light on Iranian dance in the Safavid era. In his account of a bazmi (festive) dancer, Khan Malik offers the following description: “The dancer must be young, very beautiful, and pleasant, with a fit and proper body, large eyes, and a face like a flower; she should delicately follow the rhythm of the music and feel it; she should dance like the reflection of the winter clouds on waves of the sea; she must be confident” (Sasani 1962, 80). Providing

226   Ida Meftahi nineteen movements, each with a poetic label such as “butterfly” (parvanah), “flame” (shu‘lah), and “message” (payam), Sasani introduced the ultimate task of a dancer as the bending back and picking up of a needle with her eyelid. Employing the term “raqs-​i milli” (national dance), the famed Iranian musician Ruhullah Khaliqi also investigated dance in his historical study of music in Iran (Khaliqi 1999). Employing several paintings and travelogues to examine dance in the Qajar era (1794–​1925), he introduced to readers a number of prominent (female) performers from the early decades of the twentieth century (Khaliqi 1999, 471–​486). The ballet was a major focus of the dance discourse in periodicals until the late 1970s. Though balletic performances were common from the 1920s onward, the concept of ballet was not yet a topic for lengthy discussions distinct from theater and music. The emblematic appearance of the goddess Anahid as a winged angel on pointe shoes standing beside a railroad, the logo of the weekly Nahid in 1923, was one of the first visual manifestations of ballet in the media (See Figure 9.4) (Nahid 1923). Another early mention of ballet is found in the famous speech given by Ali-​Naqi Vaziri at The College of Music (Madrasah–​yi ‘Ali-​i Musiqi) in 1925, in which he categorized theater as an educational medium and operetta as a means for visualizing history and pointed to ballet as a form of opera (Vaziri 2006). Writings about ballet, ballet dancers, and ballet companies surfaced during and after the 1930s, when dance developed into a professional discipline. In the Persian

Figure 9.4  A troupe of entertainers, mutrib, from the Qajar period.

Dancing Angels and Princesses    227 periodicals, ballet received the most attention of all dance forms, more than the vernacular dances of Iranian origin. Although the majority of the ballet-​related accounts were translations from European languages, a few Iranian authors also attempted to introduce and promote this art form. The poet and writer Houshang Irani, for example, began his article on ballet by introducing this dance as “the most organized form of arts, [which] can exhibit the pulse of creation with its full appearance” (Irani 1951). The Persian periodicals called for a national ballet company before the creation of such a company in 1956. An early example of this is Sarkis Djanbazian’s account of the significance of dance as an art form supported in all “progressive” (mutaraqqi) countries of the world. Djanbazian especially emphasized the necessity of having an Iranian ballet-​trained national company capable of presenting the concepts and innovations of “the old and new Iran” (Djanbazian 1950). The Iranian scholar Ehsan Yarshater later supported Djanbazian, introducing him as the most appropriate individual in Iran to undertake this project (Yarshater 1957, 27). The creation of an Iranian ballet to perform national narratives was primarily discussed by those who sought to justify the government’s investment in this “imported” art form. The discussion of ballet’s capacity to serve as a “progressive” medium for visualizing Iran’s history and culture remained in the periodicals until the Revolution of 1979. One of these articles pointed out: “The same as in the United States and other developed countries, ballet in Iran has national characters and qualities, in addition to its classical forms and techniques” (“Balah dar iran” n.d.). To some others, including the cultural critic Jalal Sattari, Pahlavi’s investment in ballet and opera appeared pretentious and futile and “tended to pride ‘us’ in the eyes of foreign guests” (Sattarie 2000, 51–​52).

The National Dancer in a Comparative Perspective To appear authentic, modern, and artistic while sharing cultural elements, the national dancer distantiated herself from the concurrent cabaret dancer of the popular entertainment scene and the bachchah-​raqqas, the boy dancer of earlier eras who was similar in gender performativity to the zanpush.9 An important transformation in the dancing body in the twentieth century occurred through a change in the performance venue, marked by a departure from the traditional setting of hawz to the European-​style proscenium stage of the prestigious Grand Hotel in the1920s and the Rudaki Hall in the1960s.10 According to the journalist Farrokh Safavi (1960), this spatial transition had an impact on the elevation of Iranian dance to a high art form. The costume—​the most obvious means of framing the performing body—​also was radically altered. The covered body of a national dancer looked distinctly different from

228   Ida Meftahi that of the transgressive, “seminaked” female cabaret dancer, who dressed to expose and accentuate her hips and breasts. The national dancer, on the other hand, was often fully covered with vivid, stylized vernacular clothing, primarily inspired by Persian miniature paintings. The costumes of bachchah-​raqqas were quite similar to female costumes of the Qajar era, featuring long sleeves and light colors. To appear feminine, the male bachchah-​raqqas had to grow their head hair, shave their facial hair, and put on makeup (Shahri 1992, 59–​60). A further distinction between national dance and popular dance is that the popular urban music of Tehran, often accompanied by explicit lyrics, though played in cabarets and most probably also serving as the accompaniment to the dance of bachchah-​raqqas, never accompanied the “elite” national dancers. Instead, these dancers performed to traditional Persian music, regional folk music, and sometimes contemporary and classical European music. The behavior of the national dancers also stood out against the transgressive bachchah-​raqqas and the cabaret dancer. The confident performance of sexuality expressed by a cabaret dancer marked her as vice. Conceivably the bachchah-​raqqas also experienced a similar backlash. Yet between these two genres the difference in gender played a major role. Whereas the male bachchah-​raqqas performed charming, delicate, and sexual gestures such as blinking and “raising a single eyebrow” (abru bala andakhtan), which connoted bisexual/​drag behavior to modernists, the cabaret dances were largely performed by female dancers (see Shahri 1992, 2:50–​65). In contrast, both male and female dancers of raqs-​i milli were quite asexual, physically fit, healthy, confident, joyful, and active, and displayed a sense of pride in their behavior. Men depicted a greater degree of “masculinity” in their moves, whereas the women’s movements displayed controlled femininity and charm. While using movements from Iranian dances—​mainly the popular solo improvised dance—​the often “ballet-​influenced” national dancer moved in a stylized manner that contrasted with the dancing of both a cabaret dancer and bachchah-​raqqas. In addition to choreographic units derived from the solo improvised dance, national dance also borrows from the movement vocabulary of Iranian regional folk dances and rituals. Depending on the proficiency and background of the performers and choreographers, the movements could also be more polished or influenced by ballet. For example, whereas wrist rotations are a common element in Iranian dance, in national dances done by the National Dance Company, the arms were extended further. The three genres share the rotation of wrists, triplet steps, and some movements of arms. The most important movement for characterizing their differences, however, is the gher—​the free-​flow rotation of hips causing a psychological state of elation in the performer—​as well as the shimmy-​like movements of shoulders. These movements were exaggerated by both cabaret dancers and bachchah-​raqqas (Shahri 1992, 60), but were not absorbed into national dance. Arguably, the elimination of these gestures was intentional, to remove signifiers of transgressive sexuality and distinguish the form from the “dowdy” ruhawzi dance of bachchah-​raqqas and cabaret dancers. This process of de-​ghering—​elimination of the gher—​was interpreted by Abdullah

Dancing Angels and Princesses    229 Nazemi, the director of the Pars National Ballet, as leaving out the essence of Persian dance (Friend 2007). While female national dancers share some movements with the cabaret dancer and bachchah-​raqqas, male performers of national dance do not use feminine movements in their dances, as their dances have been hypermasculinized (see Shay 2008).

Inventing National Dance and an Ideal Female Modern Dancing Subject By exploring the characteristics of the national dancer through a historical perspective and in relation to nationalist trends and biopolitics, we can arguably view national dance as an invented genre that was constructed to meet the demand for a national high art form and to showcase an ideal national body on stage. Relying on the notion of the “invented tradition,” as described by Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), raqs-​i milli can be viewed as a nationalist construct that borrows heavily from literary texts, historical imaginations, folk culture, and ancient symbols to create an appropriate dance that resonated with the expectations of modern Iran. Furthermore, the staged national dancer is a multifaceted character who internalizes the advocated virtuous characteristics of the nationalist biopolitics and discourse. She is an invented ideal female subject who combines charm with chastity in her behavior and internalizes ballet while claiming authenticity with her Iranian dance movements, themes, clothing, and music. Her healthy and athletic body is well-​versed in the physical training of both vernacular Iranian dances and ballet. With her heterosexual performance of femininity, which is markedly distinct from the “vague” sexuality of zanpush and bachchah-​raqqas, she reemphasizes the gender binary of modern Iran on stage. Her controlled femininity distantiates her from the transgressive sexuality of the raqqas of the popular cabaret stage. She often looks like the ideal women described in Persian classical literature, with attributes such as large eyes, youth, a beautiful face, and a physically fit body—​all aesthetic qualities portrayed in Persian literature. She depicts an idealized—​and even ancient—​past, internalizing contemporary ideas that were commonly espoused by the nationalist outlets. Her corporeal “modernity” typecasts various modes of the mythic ideal Iranian woman, such as a heroine in Gurd-​afarid, a Persian princess in Haft-​Paykar, a chaste beloved in Layli va Majnun, and a pure angel in numerous productions throughout the twentieth century, from early productions of Cook to many postrevolutionary religious rhythmic movements. The female national dancer is the ultimate bodily staging of an Iranian woman: one who embodies the aesthetics of “modernity” in her ballet-​trained, stylized, fit, and “chic” body. She is authentic for her Iranian movements and clothing, and her female sexuality is regulated in her graceful feminine charm, as she performs narratives of the nation for her audiences to witness and emulate.

230   Ida Meftahi

Notes 1. Together with raqs-​i mahalli (regional folk dance), the term raqs-​i milli was often used to refer to the two main categories of Iranian dance. Though the category of folk dance clearly refers to the diverse existing regional folk dances with ethnic ties, “national dance” is an ambiguous term for a genre that also is referred to interchangeably as “ancient dance” (raqs-​i bastani), “Iranian classical dance” (raqs-​i kilasik-​i irani), “Iranian ballet” (ballah’i irani), “characteristic dance” (raqs-​i karaktiristik), and sometimes “Iranian traditional dance” (raqs-​i sunnati-​‘i irani). All these terms have different connotations, yet most are about either Iranian culture or Iranian history. For their part, “Iranian ballet,” “classical” (kilasik), and “characteristic” (karaktiristik) dance have obvious balletic implications. 2. Despite the influence of vernacular ideas and themes, here I discuss a dancing body largely inspired or shaped by non-​Iranian disciplines of dance, mainly the classical ballet. 3. A Foucauldian term in origin, I use biopolitics to refer to politics, power dynamics, and conditions within the theatrical milieu that governed the stage, shaping or reshaping the performers’ bodies. Biopolitics submits to the way modern states control their populations through subjugating their bodies in everyday life. See Foucault (1984). 4. In addition to Pari Aqabayov, Madmoiselle Mahin (Vaziri), a Muslim, was reported to be dancing in one of his 1930s productions. 5. According to Afsaneh Najmabadi (2005), among those things European travelers found unusual in public was the homosocial behavior and appearance of some men, whom they perceived as homosexual. Trying to adjust to the European binary of man and woman, Iranians started heteronormalizing the public sphere by abandoning (or privatizing) some of these sexual behaviors and diminishing the representations of them from visual arts. Najmabadi discusses the shifts in Qajar era paintings of human bodies as well as the symbols of the sun and lion. Other incidental changes include the banning of boys from dancing and the highlighting of the masculine signifier the mustache. 6. As Najmabadi explains, “young adolescent males” were referred to as amrad, and mukhannas meant “an adult man desiring to be an object of desire for adult men” (2005, 3). 7. Cyrus Schayegh discusses the ways in which the new forms of urban popular entertainment were blamed for the dissemination of the social maladies corruption, venereal disease, and repression of the “healthy” sexual drives of men, leading to a decrease in the size of the average (Schayegh 2009, 122). 8. The Pahlavi state had a dualistic attitude toward cultures of different ethnicities in Iran. Even though some aspects of folk culture such as folk dance and music were promoted, the state had an oppressive approach to many aspects of ethnic identities, particularly language. For instance, in non-​Persian regions of Iran, neither the students nor the teachers had the right to speak in their mother tongue in school or to learn it in the school system. In contrast, the same restrictions were not enforced regarding ethnic music or dance; much to the contrary, ethnic dance and music were even promoted. I believe this difference in policy can be attributed to the lack of seriousness in accepting dance and music as modes of political communication, whereas a non-​Persian language could have seemed directly harmful to the Pahlavi policy of “one nation/​one language/​one country” (see Asgharzadeh 2005). 9. This section is based on my analysis of videos of some performances in the national dance genre in the last decade of the Pahlavi era by the national dance company, including Haft-​ Paykar and Qajar, as well as Ru-​Nama (1970) by the National Ballet of Iran. Because the

Dancing Angels and Princesses    231 films are scarce, I have also examined a number of images of dance from the period. As points of reference, I have also used cabaret dance scenes of the genre filmfarsi as well as images of zanpush and bachchah-​raqqas. While observing bachchah-​raqqas as a point of reference—​by virtue of their being the closest dancing persona in the traditional public setting to the zanpush explored in the context of the early twentieth-​century modernist theatrical sphere—​my main analysis relies on female dancing bodies. 10. In the later Qajar era, it was common for the traditional performance of taqlid to be staged at homes for ceremonial purposes, on a surface prepared by setting wooden planks over a small pool (hawz). 11. The Annual Cultural Reports published by Pahlavi’s Ministry of Culture and Arts prove how limited the audiences of the performances given by the dance sectors dependent on that ministry were. For example, for all their performances in various governmental sites, including universities and garrisons as well as Rudaki Hall, the National Folklore Organization had 24,740 attendees in 1974 and 182,250 in 1976, whereas the Iranian National Ballet Company, which presumably performed mainly at the Rudaki Hall, had 27,490 attendees in 1976 (“Sazman-​i milli-​i” 1974, 223; “Istifadah kunandigan” 1976, 481). 12. Choreographic attitudes similar to those of raqs-​i milli can be seen in the works of the Europe-​based choreographers Nima Kiann and Shahrokh Moshkinghalam as well as those staged by North American companies such as Vancouver Pars National Ballet and the Ballet Afsaneh.

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Chapter 10

The Spectacul a ri z at i on of Soviet /​Ru s sia n Folk Da nc e Igor Moiseyev and the Invented Tradition of Staged Folk Dance1 Anthony Shay

Introduction: Spectacle and the State Folk dance has always had a special appeal for the modern nation state. It presents the opportunity to show the population in rainbow colors of tradition, and constitutes a form of visual symbolic political support for the state. The folk, usually peasants and tribal populations, are perceived as constituting the most basic, pure, and authentic ethnic representation of the nation state; in many cases they constitute the potent symbol of the basis of a particular state’s existence as homeland to these ethnic groups. However, in order to be effective as a cultural and political representational tool of the state, the dancing, with colorfully garbed peasants, must be spectacular. This can be accomplished in two possible ways. In its earliest version, the use of large masses of participants in spectacularized venues—​the Greek dictator Ioannis Metaxas’ mass rallies, the Nazi German use of masses of peasants in German national costume and the dekady 2 and the Communist Party Youth festivals of the former Soviet Union come to mind. (Loutzaki 2008; Von Bibra 1987; Swift 1968) The second and more recent means of producing spectacle, and ultimately the one that prevailed, seen on world stages for over 50 years, was to spectacularize the dances, which required the development of a new type of dance genre, sometimes based on older dance traditions, and sometimes entirely invented dances, new choreographic strategies, and a new type of dancer: the professional folk dancer. This was the method that Igor Moiseyev (1906–​2007) used when he invented, or created a new style of Russian

Spectacularization of Soviet/Russian Folk Dance    237 folk dance for presentational purposes. As we will see, Moiseyev can be described as a master of the art of the spectacularization of dance. So brilliantly did he succeed, that many nation states in the world followed and emulated his innovations. In this chapter I argue that performances of the Moiseyev Dance Company and its many emulators dominated the concert dance stages of the world for over 50  years, drawing the largest audiences to their performances of any other dance genre, precisely because of the promise of spectacle. During the lifetime of the Moiseyev Dance Company, the company began with its first and primary mission: valorizing Russian ethnic identity. This was crucial for Stalin, who realized that Russian defense of the Soviet Union from the Nazi German threat rising in the Third Reich would be a vital element in the success of resisting Nazi aggression. Russian audience members wanted to see themselves in a spectacularized setting that emphasized the positive aspects of their Russian identities. In the case of Moiseyev the men appeared handsome, youthful, their masculinity emphasized by the spectacular athletic feats for which the Moiseyev Dance Company was famous. The appeal to Russian audiences was immediate. They embraced the Moiseyev image of Russianness and believed Moiseyev’s choreographic creations to be an authentic representation of their ethnicity. This acceptance was most likely spurred on by the appearances of the Moiseyev Dance Company during the war in the Soviet Union to bolster patriotic feelings among the Russian viewers. I argue that the foundational reason for the establishment of the company was to valorize and represent Russian ethnic identity through spectacularized dance, and for this reason “The Russian dance was the first number on the first programme … ” (Ilupina and Lutskaya 1966, 10). Ilupina and Lutskaya further comment on the position of Russian dance in the Moiseyev ensemble’s programs: “The company today has a marvelous and quite unique collection of dance suites dedicated to Armenia, Mexico, Moldavia and the Soviet Baltic republics. But the Russian Suite should be mentioned first. It reflects all that is best in the Russian character” (ibid., 11). The general Russian population quickly accepted the invented dance tradition that Igor Moiseyev created as authentically representative of Russian identity. To the average Russian to this day, the ways in which Igor Moiseyev valorized Russian dance gave them a pride in their ethnic identity. As the Ilupina and Lutskaya study of the company observes: “as a nation, Russians have an amazing gift for dancing which knows no age barriers” (1966, 9). In this foregrounding of the Russian presence in the repertoire, the Soviet Union stressed the pride of place that the Russian ethnic population occupied in the former Soviet state. To this day, when the Moiseyev Dance Company performs in Los Angeles, the large Russian population reacts emotionally, crying and reveling in nostalgia for the Russian homeland that a Moiseyev performance provides.

Staging Russia In the early years of the Revolution in Russia, in the mid 1920s, after Stalin consolidated his power, the Communist Party attempted to de-emphasize Russian folklore,

238   Anthony Shay to show their internationalist leanings, and to demonstrate their brotherhood with the other nationalities who inhabited the USSR and abroad. Thus, the party supported non-Russian folkloric genres. Many urban party members deplored authentic Russian folklore, which was demeaned as the backward expression of ignorant peasant women, and many party radicals wanted to eradicate Russian folklore for its reminder of backwardness. A decade later, in the mid 1930s, Stalin, a native Georgian, had a change of heart, and his policy of suppressing expression of Russian culture and language while supporting the other nationalities came to an abrupt end. He began the promotion of Russian folklore and culture as synonymous with Soviet culture: “Rather than being a neutral background to set off the other nationalities, Russian nationality emerged as an ethnic group in itself. In fact, Russian now stepped forward as the dominant nationality—more ‘equal than all the rest’” (Olson 2004, 38). It is clear that Stalin’s volte face was driven by a motive deeper than his love for Russian folk songs and dances: the rise of Nazi Germany, and the voracious appetite they had for other people’s land loomed dangerously near. Stalin needed Russian folklore to build a sense of patriotism, ethnic and national pride, and a readiness for the Russian majority to defend the Motherland. The rehabilitation of Russian folklore began in 1934 with a highly publicized and emotional speech by the famous Russian writer Maxim Gorky who declared folklore to show: “The optimism of folklore expresses the deepest aspirations of the masses … the most artistically perfect types of heroes were created by folklore” (quoted in Miller 1990, 8). Right after the speech, the Party began to redirect the way in which folklore was studied, and above all, performed because they realized (with a small prod from Stalin’s iron fist) that “the right kind of folklore could make the masses aware of their role in Russian history and could advance communism and foster patriotism among them” (Miller 1990, 9). All of this change of heart required the party to completely reorganize the way in which folklore was to be publicly presented and represented. “In 1936 the government intervened directly in the study of folklore and the field was subject to constant party supervision until the death of Stalin in 1953” (Miller 1990, 9). So it is not surprising that the Moiseyev Dance Company was founded early in 1937, shortly after this reversal of Soviet policy on the use and presentation of Russian folklore. When the Moiseyev Dance Company arrived in the West in 1958, this change of attitude was pervasive in the repertoire in which I noticed immediately how much importance was given to the Russian repertoire. The company’s official history, produced by the state printing house states: “Russian folk dances occupy a place of primary importance among the dances of the many nationalities inhabiting the USSR” (Chudnovsky 1959, 43). Indeed, during that first tour, Russian folk dances comprised nearly half the entire program, and they were especially featured in the most spectacular numbers with the largest casts of dancers. Not only in Russia, but also throughout the entire former USSR, Russians occupied a central position. I remember that in touring the various regions of Central Asia, the

Spectacularization of Soviet/Russian Folk Dance    239 Intourist guides would invariably list the nationalities in a particular republic or city, and they would always begin their recitation by telling the tourists how many Russians lived in the city, even when they constituted a tiny minority. In the Uzbek city of Samarqand, when the guide finished her recitation, I asked her in Tajik why she did not list the Tajiks, the largest percentage of the population of the city first, she said “because I was told to.” (personal observation May 3, 1989). We can see it in dance performances: In a performance of an Uzbek Ensemble, a dance historian describes the finale of a dance representing several nationality groups: “In the end, the four Russians formed the hub of a huge wheel around which the other dancers formed spokes. While the giant wheel revolved, Miss Russia was hoisted high in the center, representing the role of Great Russian in uniting the various racial and religious groups in the nation and also pointing to the predominant role of the Great Russian in the U.S.S.R. (Swift 1968, 241–242)

This prominence of Russians was, above all, highlighted by the central position of the Russian language and the centrality of Moscow in Soviet life.3 Folk dance had always received attention in the former Soviet Union; “in the 1930s, folk dance groups sprouted in hundreds of towns and cities, with even the NKVD having its own Song and dance Ensemble. In 1956, 3,000,000 people were reported to have taken part in the preliminary contests in the U.S.S.R. Trade Union Festival of Amateur Art” (Swift 1968, 241). The Soviet Union continued to support staged folk dance throughout its existence. However, the last thing that the Soviet officials wanted in the field of representation of the Soviet state was authentic, that is, actual in-the-field folk dance or music; “Officially and forcefully, folklore was proclaimed to hold an exalted status. This demagogic ideology referred to folklore as `the people’s creative work …’”(Zemtsovsky and Kunanbaeva 1997). This pattern of creating idealized, highly choreographed peasant dances and choreographic scenes became ubiquitous throughout the world of state-based folk dance ensembles. The issue of ethnicity dominated Soviet life, and, ultimately, as the economy floundered, ethnic tensions, beginning with the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, followed by the other ethnic and national groups, brought an end to the Soviet Union, which splintered along ethnic lines. The cult of folklore came into being because, since the late 18th century, folklore was an indicator of ethnicity, and in the former Soviet Union, folklore was valorized. It is important to remember that in prerevolutionary Russia, a romanticized folklore was very popular. Composers used folk music themes in their music. Wealthy Russians had a dacha, a country villa, in the countryside, which served as a stand-in for country life. Some patriotic Russians even formed folk choruses with their peasants. This nostalgia for the countryside continued after the Revolution, when the powerful members of the nomenklatura (the Communist political elite) appropriated dachas in emulation of the good life of the prerevolutionary elite classes.

240   Anthony Shay As Laura J. Olson (2004) points out in her study of Russian revivalist folk song, the revivalist process continues on the level of several parallel traditions, including the Soviet Russian style performed by professional ensembles like the Moiseyev Dance Company. In post-Soviet Russia, Russians were frequently bewildered by the hostility that their presence provoked outside of Russia, especially in the Baltic states. Unsure in their new ethnic and national identity, many Russians turned to forms of folklore to shore up and glorify their ethnic history. In this process, they created a new identity based on a romanticized vision of a glorious Russian past that, according to Olson, included the valorization of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Don Cossocks, which represented a bellicose masculinity and love of freedom and political independence, and the mythic Russian village, where life was pure in some Golden Age, so that “Russianness itself is sacred because the Russian people are ‘chosen’” (Olson 156). Of course, carried to extremes, political groups like Pamiyat’ and the arch conservative Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s followers infused this heady mixture of Russianness with antiSemitism and anti-Western xenophobia. Thus, although currently Russian revival music and dance are tied to romantic visions of a Russian past, by contrast, during the period in which Moiseyev created his dance genre and created most of his famous choreographies, Russianness was a stand in for an overall Soviet identity, that of Soviet Man, because the Russians were the leading and most representative ethnic group of the former USSR, and, therefore, they were the ideal ethnic group to embody that identity.

The Festive State In order to frame this discussion, I first turn to anthropologist David M. Guss’s concept of “The Festive State,” which the Moiseyev Company embodies, perhaps even more than the creation of the faux festivals that Guss describes for Venezuela. Guss points out that: “an important strategy for relocating festive practice in the sociopolitical reality in which it occurs has been to view it as cultural performance” (2000, 7). Because “states too have always recognized the incomparable power of festivals to produce new social imaginaries” (ibid.,13). Nowhere was this more in evidence than the history of festivals displaying colorful rainbow ethnicity through folk dance in the former Soviet Union, some of which Igor Moiseyev directed. Moiseyev Dance Company performances can be conceived of as instant festivals, portable and more manageable than the traditional festivals with their thousands of performers and viewers. In order to make his new choreographic inventions of folk dance more effective, its “superabundance of symbols and meanings, [should] be shrunk as much as possible to a handful of quickly and easily understood ideas … an icon of ‘national tradition,’ a borrowed image of difference made to stand for the nation as a whole” (ibid). That the Moiseyev Company was a stand-​in for the former USSR. as a whole, and currently the Russian Federation, cannot be in doubt. It was the first attraction to represent the former Soviet Union and

Spectacularization of Soviet/Russian Folk Dance    241 to tour the United States at the height of the Cold War, and the spectacle on display truly amazed its American viewers, and Moiseyev’s successes dismayed the American government. (Shay, 2002) In order to be effective as spectacle, “folklore had to be cleaned up. It would be colorfully costumed and dramatically rechoreographed. In short, it would be repackaged so that it could compete onstage with other art forms no matter how classical or refined” (Guss 2000, 114). Guss’s concept acquires additional meaning in the case of the Moiseyev Company, which occasionally performs scenes from classical ballets like Prince Igor and Night on Bald Mountain, which Moiseyev has choreographed, and his ballet-​trained dancers perform with ease, demonstrating Moiseyev’s artistic capacity to create within classical forms. Guss points out the result of this manipulation of folk dance: The aesthetic makeover required in order to translate these forms into national spectacles shares many features cross-​culturally. The privileging of the visual, accomplished through colorful costumes and dramatic choreography, combines with technical excellence and virtuosity to present a cheerful, unceasingly optimistic world. This increased theatricalization abjures any mention of true historical conditions and replaces them with the staged creation of a mythic detemporalized past. (2000, 14)

Moiseyev always presents the smiling face of the former Soviet Union and today’s Russian Federation. The smiling face was a ubiquitous feature of the happy citizenry of the USSR, reflected in folk dance company performances and in virtually every photograph in the well-known Soviet Life journals that were sent widely throughout the world. Thus, Guss’s concept of the festival and the invention of tradition allow us to understand the multiple cultural, political, and aesthetic levels that characterize a Moiseyev performance, and the history of his invention of a new dance genre. First, I will look at the concept of revivalist dance and music in terms of folklorist and ethnomusicologists, which basically means individuals performing dances not of their own heritage. Moiseyev’s oeuvre is undoubtedly revivalist from their point of view. I will then describe and analyze Igor Moiseyev’s work, and ultimately his influences on concert dance stages around the world. A second conceptual tool that I will use to frame this study is that of parallel traditions that I have used in earlier studies of state folk dance ensembles, immigrant groups, and American revivalists. (Shay 2002, 2006, 2008)) Simply put, if one takes “dance in the field” to employ Theresa J. Buckland’s (1999) term, that is native villagers or tribal people dancing in their own native settings, performing dances in a celebratory or ritual context as a base, then other derived forms of those dances can be envisioned as parallel to it. Thus, any other version of that dance, known to folklorists and ethnomusicologists as “revival” folk dance, refers back to dance in the field. I am using the term revival folk dance to parallel a study of Russian folk music by Laura J. Olson (2004) Performing Russia:  Folk Revival and Russian Identity, using the same concept and terminology. I suggest that the same villagers performing their dances out of the original context, (i.e.,

242   Anthony Shay a village wedding) such as in a festival in the capital city, an amateur folk dance group, the official professional folk dance ensemble, or a group of Americans dancing in a recreational setting, present some examples of parallel traditions to the original dance in the field. I used this concept of parallel traditions to counter criticism of those scholars who disdain the notion of studying anything other than the original context as inauthentic. “ … [W]‌e must safeguard traditional culture from becoming a theatrical object expressing the artistic priorities of individuals” (Rombos-​Levides 1992, 104). Rombos-​ Levides is presumably referring to individuals like Igor Moiseyev. Dance scholars Georgiana Gore and Maria Koutsouba note, “Any representation of traditional dance outside its customary context is no more than ‘imitation’ and may be seen as an artificial and adulterated version of the ‘original’ ” (Rombos-​Levides 1992, 30). Thus, I created the concept of parallel traditions to enable scholars to look at all these traditions without recourse to making invidious judgments of the various layers, and analyzing the truly interesting phenomena the performances that all the layers of parallel traditions potentially have to offer to scholars in dance, music, the humanities, and social sciences. Each of these parallel traditions is redolent with issues of identity, authenticity, appropriation. If looked at as equally valuable and worthy of research, each level and the individuals who participate in each of them can provide interesting data for the scholar. The entire spectrum of dance, in all of its parallel traditions, constitutes a social, political, and aesthetic text for researchers across the humanities and social sciences. I further suggest that each of these other parallel traditions contains its own aspects of authenticity, meaning that the performance of these parallel traditions has its own reality for the performers, and furthermore, those individuals who participate in those dance activities regard what they are performing as “real” and “authentic.” Although for many years purist researchers claimed that only those dances that occurred in native villages and tribal contexts were worthy of scholarly attention, several studies of revivalist performers and performances have begun to appear recently that demonstrate that all the levels of parallel traditions contain important data for analyzing human behavior (Cohen 2002; Olson 2004; Rosenberg 1992; Shay 2002, 2008; Slobin 1996).

Igor Moiseyev and the Invention of Tradition Another aspect of revivalist performances, that paradoxically is almost the opposite of revival, involves the “invention of tradition” in Hobsbawm and Ranger’s terms (1983). In spite of the fact that Igor Moiseyev’s work is often referred to as revivalist, there is no revival process in his work, no attempt to recreate old village dances, but rather the

Spectacularization of Soviet/Russian Folk Dance    243 creation of something new to represent the old and the traditional. What we are dealing with is the invention of an entirely new dance genre. This essay addresses what is frequently called revival folk dance, because it involves Russian individuals who did not learn Russian folk dances in the village, but in the studio. It also involves a ballet-​trained choreographer, Igor Moiseyev, who, following the dictates of the state’s directives, created a truly new form of dance with little connection to the forms of dance found in Russian villages.4 These factors lead to the use of the term revival folk dance in this article, while I am claiming that, in fact, what Igor Moiseyev created was an almost entirely new dance genre. And, yet, “In the minds of many Russians, folk performance was still associated with the professional folk singers who made successful solo careers within the Soviet system” (Olson 2004, 106). The same observation applies to the professional dancers of the Moiseyev Dance Company. Russian immigrants in Southern California flock to see Moiseyev performances in Los Angeles concert halls, their eyes moist from the Russia that was a “cheerful, unceasingly optimistic world” evoked by these dances, as Guss noted (2000, 14). They attend night clubs oriented to the Russian immigrant, to participate in the nostalgia that former Moiseyev dancers create in their performances. In other words, the dances that the Moiseyev Company and others like them—​for example, the professional dance ensemble that performs with the Pyatnitsky Chorus or the Beryozka all-​female dance ensemble—​have become so familiar with Russian audiences, that many individuals consider these revivalist performances to be authentic folk dances that they could see in a Russian village. In fact, these companies can be considered as performing a Soviet Russian dance genre. “After the revolution the new ‘School of Russian Ballet’ was based more on character than on classical ballet style. This was the basis for the teaching of folk dancing in Russian schools” (Olson 2004, 252, n. 128). This new genre of revival folk dance has become the stereotype of Russian folk dance, both among many Russians, as well as among foreign viewers. For the Russians, this “new” music and dance constitute a potent symbol of Russian ethnic identity. In order to study the revival music and dance of post-​Soviet Russia, Laura J. Olson (2004) avoids the value-​laden term fakelore and calls the performances of revivalist Russian musicians and dancers “folklorism.” Thus, she defines folklorism as “The process of inventing authenticities and national symbols—​and asserting them as natural” that forms the focus of her study. (2004, 6) It is important to remember that: “Stalinist Russia (as well as the entire Soviet Union) made a cult of folklore, and especially Russian folklore, since the Russians dominated the Union. But in that cult, real, authentic folklore hardly found a place” (Harkins 1990, ix). Folklore performances in the former Soviet Union could take on a more sinister aspect. Izaly Zemtsovsky and Alma Kunanbaeva, folklorists in the former Soviet Union observed: The “amateur artistic activity” that the regime so prominently supported consisted, for the most part, of an imagined folklore, one fabricated by socialism for its own purposes. There actually existed a system of made-​to-​order folklore, under which

244   Anthony Shay obedient scholars and frightened performers produced folklore on command, sometimes under the threat of immediate physical violence (1997, 6)

Folk Dance as Spectacle Following World War I, as chauvinistic nationalism fueled the establishment of radical fascist, oppressive monarchical, and soi dire communist regimes, especially throughout Central and Eastern Europe, folk dance and music became a major political tool that many governments utilized for political ends. Throughout the late 18th and, increasingly, in the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries, the peasant, the latest candidate for the Romantic role of noble savage, became the symbol of the nation. Following the writings and thoughts of German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–​1803), the elites of many of these countries elevated the status of the peasant as representing everything pure of the national essence: language, folk tales, folk songs, and folk dance. Because there was no widespread popular political support for most of these regimes—​in Greece, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Italy, Spain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, among others—​symbolic support had to be created. What better symbol was made available than large-​scale festivals in which thousands of peasants, dressed in their colorful costumes, performed their native dances and music in spectacularized settings? These sites were frequently enormous, Olympic-​size stadiums in the principal cities of the respective nation-​state, but also “Festivals, parades, competitions, local houses of culture, and amateur troupes at various levels of support, proficiency, and national visibility provided places and moments, hooks on which to hang the acceptable forms of music-​[and dance-​] making” (Slobin 1996, 3). The peasant, then, became the perfect stand-​in for the nation as a whole, and their performances of traditional dances served as a visual symbol of mass support for nondemocratic regimes of all political stripes that claimed the nostalgia and innocence of the Golden Era of the Pure Peasant as the basis of their often violent regimes. Even nontotalitarian political movements based on ethnicity, such as the Croatian Peasant Party, utilized folk music and dance to gain political ends and acquire support. (For Greece, see Loutzaki 2008; for Germany, von Bibra 1987, 379–​382; for Croatia, Sremac 2001; for the USSR, Miller 1990) Folklore was selected by these governments, like the Soviet Union because of the popularity of folklore that existed prior to the Revolution and because the Soviet Union was “a government eager to miss no opportunity to spread Bolshevik ideology” (Miller 4). Mass folkloric displays of dance and music served as the vehicle for demonstrating their popularity with the masses. The sheer volume and number of performances of folk music and dance could be staggering: “Every year in the USSR, approximately eleven thousand professional folklore collectives give over four million performances, attended by more than five hundred million people” (Miller 1990, 3). Outside of the USSR., the number was multiplied.

Spectacularization of Soviet/Russian Folk Dance    245 In 1958, the first performances of the Moiseyev Company in the United States, the first cultural exchange arrangement following the Joseph McCarthy era of the Cold War, millions of Americans flocked to see the Moiseyev Company live, and many more millions watched their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, a program that drew millions of viewers (Shay 2002). In the earlier part of the 20th century, these government and official efforts to valorize peasants and their material and cultural production was also designed to familiarize the urban populations with authentic folk traditions, and to garner respect for authentic peasant dances, music, and clothing, and to turn urban attention away from the “decedent” urban popular music dances such as the fox trot, and later rock ‘n roll, that originated in the United States, England, and France.5 However, during the 1930s and beyond, the various governments, through departments, schools, ministries of culture, and publications began to dictate just what folklore was to consist of—​an official folklore was created, and the creation of a new folk dance genre and the Moiseyev Dance Company was part of that process. To support this official folk dance, the Soviet government produced a series of how-​to dance books. (See Tkachenko 1954 as an example). For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, actual peasant cultures and peasants were widely despised by the urban classes for their perceived backwardness, conservatism, poverty, and lack of education and sanitary facilities. During that time, dance masters choreographed ballroom dances based loosely on peasant dances for urban audiences, in order to express their nationalism, and city people performed these dances—​folk-​inspired forms or character dance, and these came to be called national dances. As dance historian Lynn Garafola observes: The 1830s and 1840s coincided with a veritable craze for folk-​derived forms on the stage and dance floor alike. At the Paris Opera, the official headquarters and disseminator of ballet romanticism, national dance figured in over three-​quarters of the house offerings, operas as well as ballets, while at public halls, regardless of whether they catered to an elite or popular clientele, polkas, mazurkas, and that earlier “ethnic” import, the waltz, dominated the proceedings. (1997, 3)

Thus, it was not easy to convince urban dwellers, especially members of the intelligentsia that there was value or interest in peasant cultural expression unless it was mediated by urban composers and choreographers. As Garafola indicated, these dances had to be sanitized, urbanized, and tamed before they were acceptable. These efforts to create new, sophisticated, and professionalized folk dance and folk music began apace—​in the mid 1930s in the Soviet Union, and after World War II elsewhere and under the aegis of the Soviet government. Igor Moiseyev was a pioneer in this project. “In the dance, the same lack of authenticity, characteristic of such ensembles as the Moiseevtsy [sic], even won an international reputation” (Harkins 1990, ix). As an effort at popularizing peasant choreographic forms for urban audiences, the governmental efforts were largely unsuccessful until after World War II. Peasants had been regarded as backward and unsophisticated for too long, and the pull of the

246   Anthony Shay forbidden fruit of tangos and swing, often banned by oppressive governments, remained too powerful to successfully quash. Nevertheless, after World War II, increasingly urban youth was attracted to the “new,” invented, spectacularized folklore that attracted hundreds of thousands of youthful practitioners in the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, and the former Yugoslavia. These young urbanites dressed as peasants and performing folk songs and dances indicate that “the Russian intelligentsia’s appropriation of the culture of their historical Other—​the Russian peasant” (Olson 2004, 4) was in full swing. Throughout this region, the performance of folklore by urban performers, from authentic to invented, became a cottage industry with millions of participants. (Sremac 2001; Hanibal Dundović personal interview May 2, 2008; Swift 1968) Historically, the Communist Party has held changing, sometimes diametrically opposed ideas of how to utilize folk dance and other forms of folklore for purposes of propaganda. The soviet state turned folklore into a cult that proclaimed “folklore as a leading indicator of ethnicity and ethnic culture” (Harkins 1990, ix). Nationality and ethnicity loomed large throughout the entire history of the former Soviet Union, and folklore served as a vehicle in the construction of ethnic and national identity.

The Spectacularization of Folk Dance After a major reorganization of their arts programs in 1936, in which they established the All-​Union Committee for Affairs of the Arts in the Council of People’s Commissars, the government of the Soviet Union, after years of sponsoring massive festivals that showcased the rainbow assortment of ethnic amateur performances of groups and nationalities within their borders (the so-​called dekady), turned to Bolshoi-​trained choreographer and dancer Igor Moiseyev, who had administered and directed the All Union Festival in Moscow, to found a professional company. According to Mr. Moiseyev (“Astonishing Moiseyev Dance Company” Vol. 2, 5), The first meeting of the company took place on February 10, 1937. With the official state imprimatur, Moiseyev founded the State Ensemble of Folk Dances of the Peoples of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, known in the West as the Moiseyev Dance Company and began producing a series of choreographies, many of which are still performed today. Thus, Moiseyev ushered in a new era in the history of concert dance: from the era of folk dance as spectacle to the era of the spectacularization of folk dance. The Moiseyev Dance Company, and the age of the state-​sponsored professional folk dance ensemble, which Moiseyev’s vision inspired, began in earnest after World War II. Igor Moiseyev was hugely successful with his new company, and beginning with Mr. Moiseyev’s ensemble, many nation states of all political stripes founded professional folk dance ensembles, all of which owe their existence to the success that he generated with his choreographic diplomacy. These ensembles dominated world concert stages for the next half-​century.

Spectacularization of Soviet/Russian Folk Dance    247 It is crucial to note that, despite all the rhetoric that is found in program notes about how much Moiseyev loved folk dance, interviews and numerous books about the company indicate that its director, Igor Moiseyev did not turn from classical ballet to dance ethnology as a source for his new dance genre. His dances reflect very little of dance-​ in-​the-​field; Igor Moiseyev sought the spectacular, and a viewing of authentic dance-​ in-​the-​field reveals little of the spectacular. (JVC Music and Dance Library, Vol. 23) As ethnomusicologist Theodore Levin observes of the invented tradition of Russian folk music, which applies equally to dance, “regional differences largely melted away before the overwhelming, homogenizing force of a Russian-​Soviet national folk style” (Levin 1996, 25). For example, an important element of authentic Russian folk dance is improvisation. Nothing is an accident or improvised in Moiseyev’s choreographies; dancers and their movements are choreographed to the eyebrows. From the exact turning of heads left to right, to the level of hands and arms, to the exact pointing of feet, Moiseyev’s choreographies leave nothing to chance; his choreographies constitute machine-​like, well-​ ordered drill team reviews. Repeated viewings of his works reveal that even the walking or standing poses that the dancers perform are carefully and artfully arranged. Moiseyev’s new Russian genre of folk dance was even more all-​encompassing than just for Russian dances:  it could be used by the entire Soviet Union. “The Soviets invented ‘national’ dance styles based upon Soviet ballet for cultures whose own dance styles did not seem appropriately athletic or flashy” (Olson 251, n. 109). Or as it was more euphemistically expressed: “Russian ‘brothers’ were sent to teach the natives in the republics how to create authentic folk dances, suitable to each republic” (Shay 2002, 65). All the Russian dances, not to mention those of the Ukraine and other republics, show little sign of regional or even national difference. Like winding sheets, one size fits all. In fact, Moiseyev created a new folk dance tradition with a new vocabulary of movements for the stage, and this new vocabulary was firmly informed by, and embedded in, classical ballet practices; his dancers were trained in ballet. Ballet training was a requirement for all the company dancers. “The Moiseyev Dance Company, which he founded in 1937 and still directs, is actually a ballet-​trained group of professional dancers whose focus is on folk material” (Kisselgoff 2006, C1). I will argue that the dancers did not focus on folk material but, rather, on an invented choreographic tradition that barely resembled actual folk dance. The staged quality of Moiseyev’s choreographies also extended to the costumes that became almost uniforms, and the music he utilized that the composers and arrangers for the company created to accompany the dances was played by a theater orchestra that constituted a small symphony orchestra. Over the period that Moiseyev worked, his new movement genre became the official style of folk dance. Like many invented traditions, so successful was Moiseyev’s new folk dance that many Russians came to believe that it was the authentic Russian dance tradition. I would argue that the term folk dance in terms of the Moiseyev Dance Company is an ironic misnomer: the very notion of folk dance is a form of dance that is performed un-​self-​consciously by those people who did not receive training in a formal setting like a dance studio. Therefore, Moiseyev created both a new style of dance and a new type of

248   Anthony Shay dancer. And, as we will see, although Moiseyev’s new dance tradition was informed by ballet, it was not ballet, nor even quite character dance, but a new genre of dance. Crucially, the Moiseyev school of dance movement and choreography became the official folk dance style of the Soviet Union. The movement vocabulary is detailed in a major book (Tkachenko 1954), and a series of subsequent booklets that were published by the government, and distributed for choreographers throughout the Soviet Union to use as a basis for public performances. In a classicizing gesture, the movements and figures are named, as is the case for classical ballet, so that professional dancers pass on a frozen dance-​movement vocabulary to future generations, creating a static, frozen corpus of movement, which is the opposite of the ever-​changing world of actual folk dance found in the field. Tkachenko’s book begins with a general overall set of positions and movements, in essence the basics of ballet character dance. This is followed by a chapter on each republic, beginning with Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus, and then the rest of the republics by size of population from the largest to the smallest. Each dance tradition is described in broad strokes, and then the steps and figures of the tradition are described in detail allowing the book to serve as a dance manual for choreographers. In addition, each chapter on one of the republics provides the interested reader with two or three typical choreographies. The numerous booklets that followed in the same format, featuring the same illustrations and choreographic symbols, provided additional choreographies for amateur companies or school groups to use. This entire system of professional and amateur ensembles, and a literature to underpin them became the official way in which folk dance was to be presented.

Moiseyev’s Movement Vocabulary For purposes of this chapter, I watched numerous live concerts of the Moiseyev Dance Company beginning in 1958, in Los Angeles, Brussels, and Moscow. In addition, I belonged to a folk dance group, the Gandy Dancers of Los Angeles, which had access to a film, The Nation Dances, that Moiseyev made in the 1940s and was made available to us by the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco. The members of the Gandy Dancers studied those films and exactly copied the choreographies, step by step, and figure by figure, thinking that these were authentic folk dances, and so I learned and performed several of the dances from that film. In addition, a colleague, Robin Evanchuk, received permission to stage The Old City Quadrilles, and she subsequently taught them to the AMAN Folk Ensemble that I directed (1960–​1977). I performed that dance countless times on the stage, so my body is familiar with Moiseyev’s movement vocabulary and several of his choreographies through both practice and observation, which enabled me to analyze Moiseyev’s movement vocabulary. It is important to note that Moiseyev has one movement vocabulary, and that is derived from classical ballet character dance, and this vocabulary is used for dances from all the republics and many folk dances from other countries; regional differences

Spectacularization of Soviet/Russian Folk Dance    249 are expunged. Nevertheless, as much as this new genre was informed by ballet, it was importantly different:  the dancing under Moiseyev’s influence became lower to the ground—​significantly earthier. While the dancers still used ballet positions and pointed toes, they did it in boots and shoes with hard heels and soles, not slippers or ballet shoes. This footwear mitigated the ballet movements to the point that Moiseyev’s invented tradition appeared to be more like folk dance. The bulk of the dances in the Moiseyev repertoire consist of simple running steps, pas de basques, polka steps, skips, rapidly alternating left and right feet at enormous speed, a step-​brush, step-​brush step, r-​l-​r stamp left and l-​r-​l stamp right, moving to the side first right with right foot in front left behind, and then repeated on other foot in the opposite direction, are among the many simple steps and figures that Moiseyev employs. A typical movement for the Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarus) dances, performed in place is: step right, step behind left, step right, face diagonally left, extend the leg and touch or hit the heel, using the same foot kick up high in the same direction. The strategy of using these simple and basic dance steps gives the illusion that the dancers are performing simple folk dances. Importantly, the very simplicity of these steps allows the dances to be performed at great speed, an important element in the Moiseyev oeuvre.

Moiseyev’s Choreographic Strategies One of Mr. Moiseyev’s basic choreographic strategies is to identify one or two striking aspects of an ethnic dance or movement tradition, and to build a dance around those elements using the rather simple and basic steps and figures that constitute his movement vocabulary. This is crucial to the success of his choreographies, because it is frequently the only element in the dances that differentiates one “tradition” from another. As in the naïve fashion that I attempted to portray an essential “Croatian-​ness” or “Serbian-​ness” through the performance of dances by selecting one or two emotive states that I described in the introduction to this volume, Igor Moiseyev clearly believed that he could evoke a national or ethnic essence through his dances, a belief current among ballet choreographers for over a century before. Another source notes: “The Russian Suite should be mentioned first. It reflects all that is best in the Russian character—​its fervour and reserve, modesty and recklessness, pride and a sense of humor. Take any part of the Russian Suite and in it you will see a new fact of the national character” (Ilupina and Lutskaya 1966, 11). Thus, Moiseyev was able to choreographically portray the essential Russian character, or the essential character of any of the national groups, a strategy that was fully endorsed by the Soviet state. Observing the DVDs of the company, dancers will immediately note that in addition to incorporating a specific movement or two, such as the trembling movements of the body, arms, and hands found in the Kalmyk dance, or the “broken-​ankle” movement in which the dancers allow their ankles to bend over and touch the floor, as one does when one sprains one’s ankle, found in the Gaucho dance of Argentina, and the spectacular gliding

250   Anthony Shay alternating with a loping movement reminiscent of horseback riding in the Partisans, the majority of the steps come directly from Moiseyev’s basic movement vocabulary.6 Because Moiseyev utilizes a basic ballet vocabulary with named steps, as well as several of the simple steps I described earlier, it allows the choreographer to quickly move a large corps of dancers into effective formations that intricate footwork would not allow. For example, his Bulgarian suite from the Sop region, eschews the use of the very intricate footwork found in that tradition and for which it is justly famous; rather, he almost exclusively uses a rapid series of alternating left-​right steps with high lifts, pas de basques, and punctuated with stamps in order to achieve the impression of enormous speed and high energy. Using a large number of the actual intricate steps and figures of the tradition would be lost in the basic movement palette that Mr. Moiseyev favors. Another important characteristic of Moiseyev’s choreographies is their unrelenting cheerfulness. The dancers throughout a typical performance smile relentlessly, and his choreographies, despite the undoubted virtuosity of the dancers, can appear as naïve as befits faux peasants. Moiseyev, like all artists in the former USSR, were required to follow the dictates of the government. And like the fading photographs that were featured in the old house organ, Soviet Life, the Soviet people were to be shown as all smiling, all happy, all the time. Moiseyev historian Mikhael A. Chudnowsky characterized the way in which folk art was regarded in the former Soviet Union: “Folk art, whatever its form, is always on the side of good, always wholesome and optimistic” (1959, 23). Indeed, Moiseyev’s works reflect this concept in many of what I call “fun in the village” choreographies in the repertoire of the Moiseyev Dance Company. Through the use of scenes such as the girls whispering in each other’s ears, and the boys and the girls teasing one another, much in the way one might encounter on the playground of an elementary school. The dancers also seem to be asexual or presexual, no hint of sexuality or sensuality is found in Moiseyev’s work, as throughout all Soviet life, befitting the prudish nature of the Communist Party. Needless to say, a hegemonic sense of heteronormativity pervades throughout a Moiseyev performance. Moiseyev is a master at producing effective, large-​ scale choreographic formations: small circles become large circles or vice versa, circles become rows and columns, the rows become lines, which become weaving and interweaving hordes of dancers, that become pairs of dancers turning rapidly. He produced these effects in a kaleidoscopic manner, drawing “oohs” and “ahs” and gasps from adoring audiences, rather like a magician producing a mysterious feat from his bag of tricks. An important signature element in almost every Moiseyev choreography, at least those featuring male dancers, is a section in the end of the dance before the finale, in which he produces a large number of solos and duets in which the dancers seem to explode, each soloist or pair executing a difficult series of virtuosic tricks like the many versions of prisijadka, a generic name for the famous Russian and Ukrainian squats in which the dancer kicks out his foot, and either performs a series in a squatting position, or rises with each change of feet, barrel rolls, coffee grinders, and other gravity defying figures. The women’s virtuosic figures consist of rapid spot turns or stamping figures, neither of which occur in any of the films that I have seen of in-​the-​field Russian dancing.

Spectacularization of Soviet/Russian Folk Dance    251 In The Partisans, for example, Moiseyev uses two movements in the beginning and end of the work in which the dancers, wearing floor-​length capes, glide smoothly, or lope, as if on horseback, and in part two, casting aside the capes for the battle scene, they employ a piston-​like rapid up and down movement of the legs. Then, typical of many Moiseyev choreographies, the individual dancers begin a series of virtuosic athletic tricks and feats. Atypically, one or two female dancers, dressed in the same clothing as the men perform these same feats, but at the end they pull off their caps, letting them fall and exposing themselves as women, at which point the audience goes wild with appreciation for the female artists performing male steps and figures. Similarly, in the Gopak, a choreography that most commonly serves as a finale in a typical Moiseyev concert, the same pattern of large-​group movements with simple footwork, climaxed by the athleticism of soloists and small groups, characterizes the work. This choreography, with its dazzling array of virtuosic, highly athletic figures, almost always constitutes the finale, bringing audiences around the word to their feet.

A New Mission Following World War II, in a very different political situation, in which the world divided along three fault lines: The First World, essentially the United States and Western Europe, the Second World, the Soviet Union and its allies and satellites, and the Third World, which pejorative term came to later be called the “Developing World.” In this divided world, both the United States and the Soviet Union attempted to establish political domination and influence. The Moiseyev Dance Company became an important tool in that struggle through its spectacular and virtuosic performances. The former Soviet Union reveled in the success that the Moiseyev Dance Company garnered through their performances, in which they obtained hard currency from the West and scored political points in the newly liberated former colonies, now emerging after World War II and subsequent wars for independence, as independent states of Asia and Africa. Moiseyev’s choreographic strategies of representation, in which the dances of the Asian and Muslim populations who were part of the former Soviet Union were featured alongside the Russian dances, made a political impact. This programming strategy became a popular aspect of Moiseyev performances in what was called the Third World. This programmatic strategy also served to highlight the intense racism that characterized the United States at that period and that became an increasing embarrassment to the diplomatic efforts of the United States. “Within the United States, there was a growing realization among those concerned with international relations that Jim Crow not only was analogous to Nazi treatment of the Jews and thus morally indefensible but was also contrary to the national interest” (Fredrickson 2002, 129). This was true especially in the 1950s and 1960s, the period of the height of success of the Moiseyev Company’s most visible touring period in the developing world.

252   Anthony Shay Thus, after World War II, the Moiseyev Dance Company had two missions, valorizing and representing Russian identity and winning hearts and minds in the developing world. These two missions were often in tension during the height of the Cold War. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Moiseyev Dance Company returned to its original mission, especially reflecting a sharp return to Russian ethnic nationalism. Founded in February 1937, the Moiseyev Dance Company began with 38 dancers who gave their first performance in October of that year. In Moiseyev’s own words, the performance was “so primitive, so crude. Most of our dancers were just naturally gifted, but had so little training” (Ilupina and Lutskaya 1966, 4). The Moiseyev Dance Company was known officially as the Academic State Ensemble of Folk Dances of the Peoples of the USSR, and the ensemble soon numbered around 110 dancers and a theater orchestra (ibid.). The term academic has nothing to do with the university, but rather was a prized official designation that indicated that the company could tour in the West. Because of fears of defections by disgruntled ethnic minorities and potential demonstrations by ethnic diasporic populations, the Soviet government awarded very few “academic” designations to non-Russian groups. The first dance companies that were inspired by the Moiseyev model were those that were founded in the constituent republics of the Soviet Union. The State Ensemble of the Ukrainian SSR was founded right after the Moiseyev Dance Company, and its artistic director and choreographer, Pavel Virsky had staged dances for the 1937 first Festival of Ukrainian art, at the same time that Moiseyev “was just gathering together the company” (Parker 1972, 6).7 Ukrainian dance scholar Andriy Nahachewsky notes that: “The Moiseyev State Folk Dance Ensemble of the USSR, based in Moscow has been an extremely important group in the history of folk-staged dance, and has had a profound influence on spectacular ethnic reflective dance, directly or indirectly the whole world over. This influence is perhaps as great in Ukraine as anywhere” (2012, 202). Nahachewsky observes that the Ukrainian state ensemble was founded “in Kyiv [Kiev] a few months later” than Moiseyev (ibid). The companies that most closely emulated the Moiseyev Dance Company outside the Soviet Union were the ensembles in the satellite states, whose directors would have seen Moiseyev at the many youth festivals held in the USSR and throughout Eastern Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Prague, Warsaw, Budapest and other capital cities. It is no accident that shortly after the Soviet Union’s consolidation of its political and military grip on Eastern Europe that Mazowsze, the Polish State Ensemble (Jouglet, 1954) and the Hungarian State Ensemble were founded in 1950 (Varjasi and Horváth 1956, 6),8 and the Bulgarian State Ensemble also founded in 1950 after a visit of the Pyatnitski choir, which had a Moiseyev-like dance ensemble, gave its first performance in 1952. (Kouteva 1966, 76, 78) By the late 1950s, ensembles outside of the direct influence of the USSR, such as Bayanihan in 1958 (Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company), the Dora Stratou Greek Folk Dances in 1953 (Shay 2002, 180), and the Reda Company of Egypt in 1959 (Shay 2002, 147), followed in the steps of Moiseyev. Mahmoud Reda saw the Moiseyev Dance Company in the Moscow Youth Festival of 1957 (ibid). In 1952 Dora Stratou saw the Soviet-inspired combination folk dance performance of Kolo, Lado, and a group of Macedonian village dancers that formed the basis of the future Macedonian State

Spectacularization of Soviet/Russian Folk Dance    253 Ensemble, Tanec, which was her inspiration to create a professional level folk dance ensemble in Greece (Shay 2002, 180). Although these ensembles differ in detail, especially given the very different dance and music traditions found within each of the ethnic and national units, some companies have choirs, whereas others do not; some use native instruments, whereas others use theater orchestras of western instruments; some use authentic village costumes, whereas others create costumes. But the basic idea of spectacularized folk dance, and the establishment of state sponsored folk dance ensembles, many numbering over 100 dancers, and its success in representing the nation state, I argue in this chapter, began and originated with Igor Moiseyev.

Moiseyev in the World The effect of Moiseyev’s performances outside of the USSR. after the World War II was electrifying and immediate. Following the war, as the Soviet Union was consolidating its political and military hold on Eastern Europe, the Soviet government held a series of youth festivals, first in Moscow, and then in Prague, Warsaw, and other Eastern European capitals. Among other activities, such as athletic events, dance took pride of place. The Moiseyev Dance Company was a staple of these events, and always took first prize in the dance contests, much as the Emperor Nero always won the first prize in music festivals in Ancient Greece and Rome two thousand years before—​and for the same reason. The USSR directed each of its republics, autonomous areas, and the satellite states to found folk dance companies, and, of course, the model was the Moiseyev Dance Company. Some of the companies, like the Polish State Folk Dance Ensemble, Mazowse, slavishly copied the Moiseyev movement style, altering Polish folk dance to fit the character dance tradition, although their costumes were more authentic and they added a chorus to sing syrupy sweet Polish folk songs to accompany the dancing; nevertheless, the result is a nearly Moiseyev look-​alike company. A few companies, like LADO of Croatia and the Dora Stratou Dance Theatre of Greece, firmly and consciously resisted the spectacularizing gesture of Moiseyev, and chose instead to emphasize the maximum authentic elements of movement, costume, and music in their performances. However, overwhelmingly, the majority of the dozens of companies that formed following World War II, utilized many of the spectacularizing elements that Moiseyev had created to show off their respective ethnic groups and nation states in as spectacular way as possible, as David M. Guss so effectively describes and analyzes. From Ballet Folklorico de Mexico to the Bayanihan Dance Company of the Philippines, from the Turkish State Folk Dance Ensemble to the Mahmoud Reda Company of Egypt, from the Caracalla Dance Company of Lebanon to the Cuban National Company, and, ultimately, Riverdance, the Moiseyev spectacular touch and his new folk dance genre, his invented tradition that dominated concert stages throughout the second half of the 20th century, was felt around the world as millions of viewers in the 20th century experienced folk dance exclusively in this format.

254   Anthony Shay The much-​decorated and venerated Igor Alexandrovich Moiseyev passed away in 2007 at the ripe old age of 101.

Notes 1. Russian specialists, transliterating from the Cyrillic alphabet use spellings such as Moiseev and Piatnitskii for Moiseyev and Pyatnitsky, which are found in official English language programs and publications. I am using the latter spellings as more familiar to English language readers. 2. For information about the dekady see Swift 1968, 159–​162, passim. 3. I remember being startled when I asked the receptionist at the Intourist Hotel in Tashkent what time it was, and she replied “In Moscow it is three thirty.” Moscow lay eight time zones to the west! 4. Many dances from Russia can be viewed on the JVC Video Anthology of World Music and Dance, volume 23. The video powerfully demonstrates my parallel traditions concept in showing many levels of performances from clearly unstaged dances, and as the video progresses one sees a wide variety of amateur levels of performance. These performances can be compared to the performances of the Moiseyev Company listed in the References. 5. The Moiseyev Dance Company performed a parody of the decadent West performing rock ‘n roll dances called Back to the Apes. 6. This gaucho dance from Argentina was mislabeled as Mexican Dance, volume 2, dance 3, in the three-​volume collection The Astonishing Moiseyev Dance Company. It is correctly labeled in volume 1, in which it is performed with a different cast. 7. Nahachewsky in his study of Ukrainian dance, spells Virsky’s first name Pavlo, which I take to be the Ukrainian spelling, Pavel being the Russian form found in the program that I have. 8. In Varjasi and Horváth 1956, page 94 there is a photo of Igor Moiseyev with Miklos Rabai, the artistic director of the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble in rehearsal.

References “The Amazing Moiseyev Dance Company.” DVDs, Three Volumes. 2007. Pleasantville, NY: Video Artists International. Bayanihan. 1987. Manila: Bayanihan Folk Arts Center. Buckland, Theresa J. 1999. Dance in the Field:  Theories, Methods, and Issues in Dance Ethnography. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Cohen, Ronald D. 2002. Rainbow quest: The Folk Music Revivial and American Society, 1940–​ 1970. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Chudnovsky, Mikhael A. 1959. Folk dance Company of the U.S.S.R.: Igor Moiseyev, Art Director. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Fredrickson, George M. 2002. Racism:  A  Short History. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press. Garafola, Lynn. 1997. “Introduction.” In Rethinking the Sylph:  New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet, edited by Lynn Garafola. Hanover, NH and London, Wesleyan University Press, 1–​10.

Spectacularization of Soviet/Russian Folk Dance    255 Guss, David M. 2000. The Festive State:  Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Harkins, William E. 1990. “Preface.” In Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseuofolklore of the Stalin Era. London: M. E. Sharpe, ix–​xii. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, editors. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ilupina, Anna and Yelena Luskaya. 1966. Moiseyev’s Dance Company. Moscow:  Progress Publishers. Jouglet, René. 1954. Mazowsze: Chant et Danses du Folklore Polonais. Paris: Cercle d’Art. Kisselgoff, Anna. 2006. “A Visionary of Balletic Folk Dance Turns 100.” New  York Times, January 8, 2006, C 1, 13. Kouteva, Maria. 1966. Našite 15 Godini. Sofia: Nauka I Iskustvo. Loutzaki, Irene. 2008. “Dance as Propaganda:  The Metaxas Regime’s Stadium Ceremonies, 1937–​1940.” In Balkan Dance: Essays on Characteristics, Performance and Teaching, edited by Anthony Shay. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Co., Inc., 89–​115. Miller, Frank J. 1990. Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era. London: M. E. Sharpe. “Moiseyev Dance Company: A Gala Evening. n.d. NY: V.I.E.W. Nahachewsky, Andriy. 2012. Ukrainian Dance:  A  Cross-​ Cultural Approach. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Olson, Laura J. 2004. Performing Russia: Folk Revival and Russian Identity. London: Routledge. Parker, Ralph. 1972. “Ukrainian Dance Company.” Souvenir dance program. Rombos-​Levides, Marica. 1992. “Dynamics of Traditional Dance as a Penetrating Force in the Formation of Modern Greek Ideology and Culture.” Proceedings. 17th Symposium of the Study Group on Ethnochoreology. Nafplion, Greece, July 2–​10, pp. 99–​108. Rosenberg, Neil V., editor. 1992. Transforming tradition:  Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Shay, Anthony. 2002. Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Companies, Representation and Power. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Slobin, Mark. 1996. “Introduction.” In Returning Culture:  Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Mark Slobin. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1–​13. Sremac, Stjepan. 2001. “Folklorni Ples u Hrvata od Izvora do Pozornice: Izmedju drustvene I kulturne potrebe, politike, kulturnog I nacionalnog identiteta.” Unpublished PhD diss., University of Zagreb, Philosophy Faculty. Swift, Mary Grace. 1968. The Art of the Dance in the U.S.S.R. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Tkachenko, Tamara. 1954. Narodny Tanets. Moscow: Isskustvo. Varjasi, Rezsö and Vince Horváth. 1956. Rhapsodie Hongroise: L’Ensemble Populaire de L’Etat Hongrois. Budapest: Corvina. Von Bibra, Anne. 1987. “Continuity and Change in the Dance Events of Two Lower Franconian Villages During the Twentieth Century.” Unpublished MA Thesis, UCLA. Zemtsovsky, Izaly and Alma Kunanbaeva. 1997. “Communism and Folklore. In Folklore and traditional Music in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, edited by James Porter. Proceedings of a One-​day Conference, May 16, 1994. UCLA:  Department of Ethnomusicology, 3–​23.

Chapter 11

L AD O, The Stat e E nse mbl e of Croatian Fol k Da nc e s and Song s Icon of Croatian Identity Anthony Shay

Introduction: Lado and Folklore Four women in matronly headpieces, pleated white linen floor length dresses and sleeveless red or blue winter coats, stand side by side facing diagonally upstage, and suddenly sing in sonorous Slavic voices, in minor seconds and thirds: “Tančec, vijaj se vijaj, za lugemu za zelenoj” (Little dance, twisting and turning through the copse, across the greensward). 1

A row of 12 young maidens, wearing long braids tied together with silk embroidered ribbons, and intricate pleated red and white blouses with full sleeves and full pleated skirts, come walking toward the matrons, singing and walking measured steps upstage toward the matrons, singing in response, “Ko nam ga vije, prelepoj Maroj, za lugemu za zelenoj” (Who leads it, beautiful Mary, through the copse, across the greensward). Then, singing “Posa-, Posavina moje pojle ravno, milo janje moje dragaj dušo moje, ja ne, ja ne želim da iz tebe selim, milo janje moje dragaj dušo moje” (Posa-, Posavina my even field, My dear lamb, my dear soul; I never want to leave you, my lamb, my dear soul), using a simple cross step, the line quickly forms a circle and the first girl leads the line, which glides smoothly under the upraised arms of the last two girls who form a bridge. Skirts billowing, they repeat this figure twice. Thus, opens the suite of dances, posavski plesovi (dances of Posavina, a region that stretches eastward along the Sava River south and east of Zagreb). The bright sounds of the tamburica ring out and males dancers in

LADO   257 white linen shirts and trousers and move into the first of three dances. The suite consists of three simple dances, the last a shaking dance, drmeš, in which the body reflects the movement of the feet and locked knees create little shaking movements, and ends with rapid whirling that makes the white and red skirts bell out, and excites enthusiastic responses from audience members.This sute, choreographed by Zvonko Ljevaković for the group Jožo Vlahović, which eventually became Lado, won a prize in Prague in 1947, leading to the professionalization of the company and the name change. The costumes, the singing, the orchestral music of the bright tamburica plucked string orchestra, and the dance steps are all authentic. This is not, however, a group of villagers, but a professional performance by Croatia’s professional folk song and dance ensemble. No matter to what degree authentic elements permeate Lado’s performances, one cannot forget that the deceptive simplicity of the choreography and movements, the viewer is watching the result of hours of careful preparation and rehearsal. Unlike peasant performing those same dances, the art in Ljevaković’s choreographies are found in the precision of the transitions, arms and feet all moving in unison, upright posture, and dignified bearing. Nevertheless, Zvonko Ljevaković worked, seemingly against the government’s wishes in the beginning, strove to create the anti-Moiseyev, anti-spectacular company. Unlike the spectacle and athleticism of a Moiseyev performance, Lado invites the viewer into a world of delicate precision, nuance, and ethnographic detail of costume, music, and dance. A true Croatian nationalist, which was a dangerous political position in postWorld War II Yugoslavia, he wanted to create an art to reflect the deepest, most profound aspect of Croatian ethnic identity represented most fully in the cultural expression of the Croatian peasant. Croatia was a peasant state, and Lado, under Ljevaković’s direction, would reflect those peasant values of neatness, dignity, and an abiding work ethic. In order to approach an understanding of Lado, the state ensemble of folk dances and songs of Croatia (Ansambl narodnih plesova I pjesama Hrvatske, Lado), and its prestigious place in the existence of the Croatian state and its people, a crucial departure point is the role of folklore in the history of Eastern Europe in general, and of Croatia specifically. The use and study of folklore in the United States and Germany—​ the countries most associated with the beginning studies that led to modern folklore studies in Eastern Europe in the 19th and early 20th century—​differs widely, and that difference is based on the viewpoints of the researcher. For Americans, the search for “All that is Native and Fine,” in David E. Whisnant’s (1983) terms, was rescuing lost items of folklore, essentially “salvage” folklore, whereas Eastern Europeans searched for all that was purely of their ethnicity and that marked their very existence as a people. Between these two schools of folklore studies there was one important similarity—​ the pursuit of authenticity:  “the notion of authenticity legitimated folklore in both countries” (Bendix 1997, 5). The search for the authentic, the pure, and the traditional undergirds both folklore studies everywhere and the principles of staging that define Lado’s existence. In the culture of many professional state-​sponsored folk dance ensembles including Lado, the concept of authenticity is part of the company culture. In this usage, for

258   Anthony Shay purposes of analysis in this essay it means the utilization of traditional elements such as dance steps, figures, costumes, musical instruments, folk songs, harmonies, and other elements that are incorporated in the stagings and choreographies that the ensemble presents to the public. It is not, however, a replication of a typical village performance, but the synthesizing of all that is aesthetically interesting in that performance, and a refinement of it. Folklorists Robert A. Georges and Michael Owen Jones define folklore, as it is used in America at least, in this way: “The word folklore denotes expressive forms, processes, and behaviors (1) that we customarily learn, teach, and utilize or display during face-​to-​ face interactions, and (2) that we judge to be traditional” (1995, 1, italics in the original). What this means for many folklore scholars is that Lado’s performances do not qualify as folklore under either of these premises. The company rehearses and learns its dances and songs in studio conditions, from choreographers and other dancers, and the original folkloric songs and dances that Lado performs, although traditional, are arranged for the stage. However, the word folk (narodni) appears prominently in its official title. Moreover the directors and members of the company take their mission of performing authentic materials in an authentic manner very seriously—​it is their life. Although the directors utilize “authentic” elements such as steps and figures, music, and costumes, Lado produces stage performances; there is no attempt to reproduce a village dance event exactly but, rather, to produce its essence packaged professionally for audiences. As Georges and Jones point out in their study, the early study of folklore consisted of “Phenomena associated with past and passing lifestyles [that] came to be conceptualized as artifacts. They were valued because of the insights they could potentially provide into a people’s roots, heritage, and continuity” (1995, 34). Thus, it is in this description that we can find the crucial connection between folklore and Lado’s performances: The Croats who form a small nation, having suffered deep political and ethnic separation for centuries caused by their domination by larger nations—​Austria, Hungary, Venice, Serbia, Italy, and briefly Napoleon—​all of whom to some degree or other attempted to absorb the Croats into their respective states, as the Croats struggled to maintain their ethnic identity and existence. As an overwhelmingly peasant nation up until the World War II, Croatian folklore became a crucial vehicle for self-​definition, self-​preservation as a people, and self-​presentation as a modern nation. Their music, dances, and important school of naïve art, all present views of peasant life in an idealized fashion, as we will see in this chapter. The impressive Ethnographic Museum in Zagreb and an astonishing publishing output of books and articles on every aspect of folk art and folk life underscores the importance of the iconic peasant identity in Croatian life. The study of folklore in Europe also became an important vehicle, beginning with the writings of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–​1803), the “most influential champion of expressive culture,” for discovering ethnic and national origins. (Bendix 1997, 34) One crucial reason that Herder championed folklore and linguistic studies was “to combat the Enlightenment, which regarded tradition as a symbol of ignorance and fanaticism” (Cocchiara. 1981, 168). Through Herder and his followers, the study of tradition—​folk tales, language, songs, music, and later, dance and material culture—​would potentially

LADO   259 permit the scholar to determine the early history of European peoples, their ethnogenesis as a distinct ethnic group, but with each having its own distinct history, culture, language, and folklore, which had deep consequences for newly awakened nationalist sentiments. This history became crucial, because it demonstrated that the people in question were entitled to the land on which they lived: it laid out true and authentic national borders. Thus, wherever Croatian songs and dances can be seen and heard belongs to the Croatian patrimony—​the patrimony that Lado represents in its cultural presentations.

Lado’s Founding Lado was officially founded as a professional dance company on November 11, 1949 by an official decree of the Croatian Republic of the former Yugoslavia as the “State Ensemble of Folk Dances and Songs.”2 However, behind this formal announcement there lies a long history that has contributed to the way in which the company developed into the world-​class ensemble that we know today. Lado is the inheritor of over two centuries of staging folk dance and music that characterized the cultural production of first Croatia’s urban populations, and later the peasantry as well. Thus, dance was used as a vehicle of Croatian ethnic representation from an early date. In its beginnings, the artistic directors and members of Lado faced three important issues: First, how to prepare, choreograph, and present folk dance and music for the stage to represent Croatia, Croatian identity and ethnicity, and later represent other ethnic groups in Yugoslavia while Croatia was still a constituent republic in the former Yugoslavia. The second important issue was how to create a professional folk dance company when no models existed, other than that provided by the Moiseyev Dance Company of the former Soviet Union. The third issue, and one that still must be continuously confronted is to define what Lado’s relationship to the state is, which includes all the attendant and varied political, social, and economic aspects that have characterized the Croatian Republic and its place in the former Yugoslavia, as well as Croatia’s recent status as an independent state. This essay will focus on the first two issues, especially in the earliest years during which the format for the performances of the ensemble were established, and that format continues to dominate Lado’s performances, although the scope of performance has expanded to include all-​musical performances. From the outset, Lado was declared officially an “independent institution.” However, the state provides most of Lado’s financial support, without which it would not be possible to exist. (Ivana Lušić. Personal interview. April 30, 2008) Therefore, the managing and artistic directors must be sensitive to both the government and the public in the choices they make to include in the repertoire. Many changes have occurred over the past 60 years. One of Lado’s major achievements was to strategically position itself to consistently represent the Croatian people

260   Anthony Shay in a way that the public finds relevant and positive in a constantly changing political arena. More than ever, since Croatia’s independence, Lado’s appearances attract the Croatian public, demonstrating its popularity at a time when the taste and popularity of many state-​supported dance ensembles in neighboring countries, such as Bulgaria, are waning due to their close associations with the former communist governments and their often conservative and unchanging ways of staging folklore. (See Buchanan 2006, Neilsen, 2008) As was the case in most nations with a state-​supported dance ensemble, the impulse for establishing professional folk dance companies came from the successes and the model of the Moiseyev Dance Company of the former Soviet Union: The Soviet model, even after Stalin expelled Yugoslavia [in  1948] from the Cominform for deviation from established orthodoxy, played a very strong role in the organization of cultural performance and public representation…The new Yugoslav government strove to quickly bring culture under the purview of the state by funding and controlling professional performance organizations and by creating administrative structures to supervise the amateur’s cultural productions. … this policy also resulted in the establishment of professional folk dance companies, like “Ensemble Kolo” founded in 1948, in Belgrade, and “Lado” in Zagreb, modeled, as I was told on a number of occasions, on the Moiseyev Ensemble of the USSR. (Maners 1995, 104–​106)

However, as we will see later, Zvonimir (Zvonko) Ljevaković, the founding artistic director of Lado, strongly resisted following the Moiseyev school of using classical ballet-​ based character dance (sometimes called national dance), as a basis for his folk dances, choosing instead to create a new way of staging folk dance, based on a more authentic model with which he was already familiar and largely responsible for creating what dance historian Stjepan Sremac (2001) terms the Zagreb school.

Early Staging of Croatian Folk Dance and Music Croatian dance scholar Stjepan Sremac chronicles the history of staging folk music and dance in Croatia and notes the way in which this phenomenon differed among Croatians in comparison with other ethnic groups: I noted very early that Croatians, in comparison to neighboring ethnic groups and other people (in Europe), paid more attention to and honored their choreographic and musical traditions, including their staged presentations. I was especially struck by the fact that Croatians never developed a purely recreational dance activity or enjoyed their own dance traditions, as was the case with so many other, if not the

LADO   261 majority of Europeans, but rather began immediately to seriously pursue their staged presentations, which continues right down to today. (2001, 5)

Sremac gives three important examples of the way in which Croatians historically used folk dance for purposes of staging and representation.

Moreška The first, and earliest example of using a folk dance form for staging that Sremac cites is the famous Moreška sword dance that was at one time performed in several towns and villages on the Dalmatian coast by a large cast of young men, who were historically primarily members of urban craft guilds, for at least three centuries. The first mention of the public performance of the Moreška comes in 1784, from Split. (2001, 8). However, it is clear that the origins and performances of the dance come from an earlier time period. The dance can still be seen today and the Morešeka constitutes an important and vital role in the civic and tourist life of the Island and town of Korčula, one of the most important historical sites of its performance. (See Zebec 2001, 448) Lado, too, has performed at least two different choreographies of Moreška. The Moreška is a sword dance, one of the many so-called Moorish dances, like the Morris dance of England, and the various Morescas of Mexico that were created during the Renaissance and depicted the battles of the Christians and the Muslims (Moors). The dance requires a large number of participants and many hours of rehearsal since the figures are physically demanding and the swords can inflict serious injuries. The Korčula moreška rather than featuring Christians and Muslims, oddly has the “good” guys as Ottoman Turks in red, and the “bad” guys as the Moors in black. The dance is accompanied by a brass band playing arias from Italian opera. At one point in the 1970s, LADO performed a version of the dance, which was staged by Zvonimir Ljevaković. I saw it again in the 2003 gala performance.

Dvoransko or Salonsko Kolo The second way in which folk dance constituted a basis for presentation, and especially as a symbol of Croatian identity, was the creation of the dance genre known as dvoransko kolo or salonsko kolo (court or salon circle dance). The dance has also been variously calked Slavonsko dvoransko kolo and Hrvatsko dvoransko kolo.3 “The imagery of the folk dance, the kolo, and the medium of folk song pervaded the tropes of the cultural renaissance [prepored]… Its central image for unity is a giant kolo” (Dubinskas 1983, 33).4 The kolo, a dance done in a circle or semicircle, is one of the most common dance forms in the northern and central parts of the former Yugoslavia. The name, however, is sometimes used both for dance events or for dances that are not performed in circles.

262   Anthony Shay The creation of folk dances for elite Europeans was a phenomenon that occurred in the Romantic period of the early 19th century during the spread of nationalist emotions and awareness throughout Eastern Europe at a period when urban elites wanted to demonstrate their patriotic feelings toward their nation, and dvoransko kolo was no exception. It was composed for the urban elite, and later used in theatrical contexts by performers. Dance masters created social dances that were inspired by folk dances, and in most cases the elite urban populations would never have actually performed an actual peasant dance. The first instance of the use of a folk-​inspired social dance for national representation in Croatia occurred during the visit of the Emperor Franz Josef II in 1818. The real center-​piece of the celebration, however, was a huge kolo dance held in front of the bishop’s palace. Dancers and singers dressed in folk costumes were led in a circle by Count Janko Drašković. But these were no villagers singing “folk” songs in the Sunday kolo. Drasković was a leading Croatian noble politician; and the ersatz “peasants” were nobles and bourgeois of Zagreb, bedecked in “artistic” stylizations of village garb and singing a poem penned by the Count himself. (Dubinskas 1983, 28–​29)

The relationship between the urban elites and the peasantry were tense because, on the one hand, the peasants were regarded as the repository of all that is pure and authentic in the nation and its people, but, on the other hand, the urban elites despised the peasants for their perceived ignorance, poverty, and backwardness. There was a veritable insatiable demand for “national” dances in Europe in the 19th century. (See Garafola 1997, 3; Shay 2006, 16–​18) Croatia’s answer to this dance craze was dvoransko or salonsko kolo, of which, according to both Sremac and dance historian Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter (2008). For the most part, dvoransko kolo was performed with an even number of couples, and had between six and eight figures, constructed in the manner of the then popular quadrille. For many decades, the dance served as an iconic nationalist symbol for the members of the Ilirski Pokret (the Illyrian movement), a political movement that characterized the so-​called Croatian Renaissance of the early 19th century. And so hrvatsko and slavonsko kolo, in a period of less than five years of its conception in its more or less final form, became part of the repertoire of every dance event not only in Zagreb, but in every part of Croatia. It is truly unusual how these two relatively complex figure dances were able to spread so quickly. Its critical role came about because of its symbolic national meaning, which nevertheless was typically urban, these were specifically urban dances raised to the position of overall national dances. (Sremac 2001, 44)

The dance was performed in Croatia until World War I as a social dance. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter states that: “the popularity of the ballroom kolo had disappeared around the First World War” (2008, 247), but according to Stjepan Sremac dvoransko kolo was still performed as a staged dance “almost as late as the Second World War” (2001, 49) and was still regarded as a national symbol and was performed in the National Theatre in

LADO   263 various plays. In all probability, Ruyter and Sremac are both correct. The use of salonsko kolo for social events faded and was replaced by newer, more modern dances before World War I, but salonsko kolo continued as a staged dance for purposes of theatrical representations of national dance and Croatianess.

First Attempts to Use Authentic Folk Dance in Urban Contexts: The Matica Hrvatska Theater Volunteers The first known instance of urban choreographers and dancers attempting to utilize actual folk dance movements and figures occurred in 1935, shortly before World War II. Following performances in 1925 and 1926 by peasants of Remete, a village just north of Zagreb in which one of their own people, Stjepan Novosel, staged their Christmas and St. George customs. Matica Hrvatska, a national cultural organization, capitalizing on the popularity of the village performers using authentic dances and music in the Croatian National Theater, organized a group of urban enthusiasts to learn authentic folk dances. They performed at an international dance festival held in Berlin in connection with Olympic Games in 1936 and won the first prize in the competition. The overwhelming success of this appearance assured the popularity of dances staged more authentically than salonsko kolo, and doomed salonsko kolo to near oblivion. The first dance that the Matica Hrvatska group performed in 1935 was balun from the region of Istria on the Adriatic coast. Balun is a complex dance in which the couples execute several intricate turns using a variety of handholds, among other figures. However, this attempt at staging authentic folk dances, utilizing authentic elements found in the field was flawed. “From the beginning this choreography of balun was imagined” (Sremac 2001, 116). However, Sremac acknowledges that although this specific choreography may have been problematic, the meaning of the attempt to include actual elements from authentic village dances, rather than western classical dance movements and concepts was a crucial moment in Lado’s future. This was an historical meeting: the meeting of the first choreographed urban dance from the Illyrian period, hrvatsko salonsko kolo, and after nearly 120 years, the first “real” choreographed peasant dance. This encounter was historical in the sense that it was the last outing of hrvatsko salonsko kolo on the dance stage, and the induction of a new form of theatrical presentation of staging folk dance, which began to spread fully right after the Second World War. (Sremac 2001, 116)

In the Berlin Festival, the group from Matica Hrvatska, which consisted of 11 couples, performed the balun from Istria, dučec and staro sito from Posavina, dances from the Prigorje, and Slavonia, accompanied by a military band. Most importantly, this new

264   Anthony Shay method of staging folk dance utilizing authentic steps, figures, costumes, and styling set in motion the new way that Croatian dance would be presented in the future. There is no doubt that this choreographic success represents not only the beginning of urban involvement with Croatian folk dance in a choreographed form… and the acceptance by the general public of this unique manner of presentation stimulated the spread of the well-​known “zagrebačka škola” [Zagreb School]. The founder of the Zagreb School, Zvonimir Ljevaković, then a student, who never participated in the work of Matica, nevertheless observed their work carefully. At the end of the Second World War, first founding and serving as artistic director of the folk ensemble “Joža Vlahović,” and then the state professional ensemble Lado, Ljevaković reinterpreted Matica’s concept. (Sremac 2001, 130)5

However, according to Hanibal Dundović, who was a close friend of Zvonimir Ljevaković, in fact, Ljevaković was a member of the Croatian Matica Theater Volunteer group and danced in the Berlin Olympics of 1936 (personal Interview May 1, 2008). Sremac notes that the amateur dancers of Matica participated in field work in the village to learn all the authentic elements of the dances that they were to perform. That Dundović is correct in his memory and that Ljevaković participated in the fieldwork of the Theater Volunteers is crucial because, significantly, many of the dances that were performed in Berlin by the Matica Hrvatska Theater Volunteers appeared in Lado’s first program. Thus, the earliest seeds of Lado’s future successes and the decision to use authentic dances, instead of following the Moiseyev model, were already planted in the 1930s.

The Seljačka Sloga and the Festival Circuit The third instance of staging folk music and dance in Croatia beginning at the end of the 19th century, which Sremac discusses in detail, was the political and aesthetic movement that continues today, in which organizations like the Seljačka Sloga, and later the Međunarodna Smotra Folklora, brought peasants to festival stages throughout Croatia, but ultimately to the capital, Zagreb, to perform their authentic music and dances, a practice that continues today. At first, the focus of these performances was singing, due to the linguistic impact that Romantic folklorists gave to the primacy of language as a marker of ethnic identity. Subsequently, tamburica orchestras made their appearance. The final component, dance, was added last. It is important to note that the singing on festival stages in the latter part of the 19th century and through the 1920s was not authentic peasant folk music but, rather, the imagined product of the Croatian Renaissance and the Illyrian movement. Specifically,

LADO   265 urban musicians took folk melodies and created four-​part harmony choral arrangements, which were sung not in the village traditional vocal style but in an imitation bel canto style. The formation of choral societies swept throughout Croatia. “Village singing societies which sang composed material, used sheet music and were led by a choir director were active since the late nineteenth century” (March, 1983, 190). These choruses, and later tamburica orchestra ensembles, became the forefront of the political awakening of the Croatian people: art in the service of politics. The ethnographers, ethnomusicologists, and folklorists, taking their most stringent, purist stance, attempted to “ ‘peasantize’ or ‘Croatianize’ the culture of the city” (March, 1983, 197). They hoped to accomplish this goal by cleansing the cultural presentations of the festival stages of foreign elements. From 1935: “It was agreed that henceforth only unarranged songs were to be performed and the use of a choir director was forbidden. Along with folk songs, each group should present traditional dances, instrumental music and customs. The performances were to take place in ‘original’ folk costumes and the entire program would be subject to prior approval by a panel of experts consisting of ethnomusicologists” (March 1983, 193). But what was meant by authentic? “The Peasant Union [Seljačka Sloga] built up a particular kind of image of ‘village culture’ … They sought to paint a picture of village life not as it was among their contemporaries of the 1920s and ’30s, but as they thought it ought to have been before the interference of urban ‘civilization.’ Their result was a romanticized model” (Dubinskas 1983, 25–​26). The result of this search for the authentic and the antique, was that many individuals imagined that the songs and dances were those performed by the original Slavic settlers, who began to arrive in the Balkans in the mid-​6th century, and this constituted a dream world. All this performance activity increased as the urban population began to adopt rural music and dance from the late 1930s. Lado’s performances constitute the apex of this period of two centuries of staged dance activity. These village groups continue to thrive in the 21st century, and their performances constitute an important aspect of contemporary village life. The festival schedule remains as active in post-​Yugoslav Croatia as it did before, culminating in the annual Smotra Folklora, in which peasants from all over the country, and international guests gather in Zagreb for a large festival that covers several days and that takes place on a number of stages throughout the city. However after the 1950–​1951 festival, the Seljačka Sloga lost its important position due to its Croatian nationalist orientation, which was frowned upon by the Yugoslav government, which was attempting to promote a new, imagined Yugoslav ethnicity at that time.6

The KUD movement Within a few months after the liberation of Croatia by Tito’s Partisans in 1945, a large number of amateur folk dance companies, popularly known as KUD appeared. In

266   Anthony Shay anthropologist Lynn Maners’ important study of the KUD in neighboring Bosnia Hercegovina he states: The Kulturno Umjetničko Društvo (Cultural Artistic Society) or, simply, the KUD, is the vehicle through which the ‘traditional’ dance component of expressive culture is presented in its most formal, albeit non-​professional context. The KUD is one of the points at which the state begins to intervene in controlling performance and which shapes the presentation of amateur ‘folklor’ not just in Bosnia but in all of Yugoslav society and, indeed, in Yugoslavia’s representation of itself internationally. (1995, 85)

For the first time, large numbers of young urban dwellers took an intense interest in folk dance and music. According to an official source, in the early days “there were some 2000 town groups of folk dancers with some 50,000 active amateurs—​dancers (Yugoslavian Folk Dancers 1950 (?), n.p.). The times were such that certain things, like folk dance, prospered. In our city [Zagreb] there were surely some hundred groups and smaller groups (later people began calling them ‘ensembles’), which grew like mushrooms after a rain. There was no trade union group that did not have its own dance company. They were among the first who traveled across the borders, along with athletes. It was the time of a slow opening toward the world, that is, the West, and the West loved it [our folk dances]. (Dundović, 1999, 153)

Among the newly formed companies was Joža Vlahović, founded and directed by Zvonimir Ljevaković. This group was one of several sent to Prague in 1947 to represent Yugoslavia.7 To everyone’s surprise, Joža Vlahović took the silver medal with Ljevaković’s choreography of “Posavski plesovi” (Dances from Posavina), still a part of the LADO repertoire, “by only a 0.64 points” (Sremac 2001, 178); to no one’s surprise, the Moiseyev Company won the gold medal. Miša Šokčić, one of the members of Joža Vlahović observed: Of course, it was almost a law that the first prize would go to Moiseyev. First, they were a professional company, but more than that, the Russians had to win everything. Still, for us to take home that coveted second prize, over all of the other thirty-​ four professional ensembles from eighteen different nations participating in that massive festival was a great thing. (Personal interview October 15, 1999)

Shortly after this appearance, Joža Vlahović appeared in an all-​ Yugoslav festival in Beograd, and competing against many other KUD organizations and professional ensembles—​that is, the newly founded Serbian State Ensemble and two Army ensembles—​and won first prize. These two events, winning the second prize in the Prague Festival of 1947, and then the performance in Beograd that was awarded first place, determined the Croatian Republic’s decision to select Joža Vlahović to form the basis for the newly formed state supported, fully professional national ensemble.

LADO   267

The Path Least Taken The first of Lado’s choreographies:  The Posavina dances, Balun, Slavonsko kolo, and Vrličko kolo, and other works were brought forward from the Joža Vlahović repertoire, and, in earlier incarnations in the appearances of the Matica Croatia Theater Volunteers. “Lado’s first concert given in February 1950, three months after its founding, was a repeat of the concert given by Joža Vlahović three months previously” (personal interview, Hanibal Dundović, May 1, 2008). The company performed as the State Ensemble for Folk Songs and Dances. The word Lado, appearing in Croatian kajkavian song refrains, was not used until 1954.8 “This program was the same one when we used when we went on our first tour, to Switzerland” (Dundović 2003, 7). Lado maintained a company of 45 dancers and musicians (today over 50), most of whom came from Joža Vlahović. The company was drastically reduced in size from Joža Vlahović, which had over 150 members in its theater, dance, music, and other artistic groups and activities; it was financially necessary to restrict the number of performers. For example, instead of separate dance and choral units, the dancers now sang as well as danced. One of the first major decisions facing the directors of Lado was how they were to stage Croatian folklore. The only existing professional model for staging folk was the Igor Moiseyev model. Founded in 1937, after World War II, the Moiseyev Dance Company (known officially as the State Academic Folk Dance Ensemble of the Peoples of the USSR) provided a major propaganda tool for the former Soviet Union. The Moiseyev model utilized the spectacularization of folk dance through choreographic strategies, the use of ballet technique, standardized costumes, large theatre orchestras, and other devices taken from classical ballet practices. Božo Potočnik, one of the first music directors of Lado observed of the beginnings of Lado: The idyllic enthusiasm so characteristic to amateurism gradually faded under numerous difficulties in organization. The ensemble began to be torn apart by internal disagreements on basic existential issues and the work. The choice between folklore and a national ballet weakened the ensemble and seriously threatened folklore art on the Croatian stage. Nonetheless, Ljevaković’s vision prevailed supported by the firm soil of authentic traditional heritage, and the ensemble soon recovered. (2009, 131–​132)

Zvonimir Ljevaković consciously rejected the Moiseyev approach. He had conducted considerable fieldwork for over a decade and was intimately familiar with folk dances in the field. Moreover, he was equally familiar with folk music and songs, and the costumes and customs of the Croatian people; his wife was a curator in the Ethnographic Museum. He is one of the only artistic directors of a major folk dance company who also arranged some of the music and personally purchased and oversaw the costume collection. Mira Tunuković, a former member of Lado, said: “Whenever Professor Ljevaković

268   Anthony Shay went to the field to purchase costumes, he always knew exactly which costume would be worn by which dancer” (personal interview, May 7, 2008). Further underlining his decision to avoid what Sremac calls the Eastern or Moiseiyev model was Ljevaković’s membership in an intellectual group known as Zemlja (earth), which profoundly believed in the purity and authenticity of the peasant as the repository of all that was truly the Croatian national spirit. In 1929 left-​wing painters, sculptors and architects founded Zemlja (Earth Group), through which they tried to document reality and express a critical attitude to the social order of the time. The government banned the group in 1935, but its members retained their influence. (Goldstein 1999, 127–​128)

Ljevaković founded what Stjepan Sremac called the “Zagreb School.” (2001, 179) Ljevaković insisted on the extensive use of every possible ethnographic detail in dance technique, singing technique, musical instruments wherever possible, and the use of authentic costumes, or carefully made copies. Ljevakovic stated that the choreographer and artistic director “must live and enter into the emotional content of the folk songs, instrumental music and dance and then feel the possible variations and their fine nuances” (quoted in Sremac 2001, 179). Thus, the Zagreb school, in which almost everyone who stages Croatian dances, in amateur groups in Zagreb and other centers in Croatia, immigrant dance groups, and even in mainstream American dance ensembles, followed the way in which Zvonko Ljevaković presented Croatian folklore. The Zagreb school was the anti-​Moiseyev, antispectacular philosophical stance of staging folklore by retaining all the authentic elements of dance and music in the field, but at the same time producing a professional level of artistry and a professional theatrical experience. Ljevaković was utterly convinced that it was possible to represent Croatia and “Croatianess” on the stage in a professional context through the use of accurate, nuanced, and detailed authentic elements of dance, music and costume (personal interview, October 1, 1967). For example, in contrast to Moiseyev’s maneuvering of masses of dancers frequently moving at breakneck speed, Ljevaković opens Ladarke, one of Lado’s signature choreographies with leisurely walking appropriate for a ritual scene, in which the dancers sing. Gradually the three-​part piece ends with a couple, a group of six dancers, and a larger group circling, all at a moderate tempo. Moiseyev does not use vocal music, employs a theater orchestra, and costumes that resemble uniforms. Lado uses traditional musical instruments, costumes purchased in the village, and traditional vocal production. The steps he employs clearly emerge from the research he conducted over his many years as artistic director. In his knowledge of folklore and his choreographic skills, Zvonko Ljevaković was recognized by almost everyone as a genius. Ivica Dabac, an early member of Lado, who entered the ensemble in 1963 stated: “For me Professor Ljevaković was tops; he was God. We all adored him and implicitly followed everything that he said. He was so knowledgeable and we stood in awe of his extensive data on every aspect of folklore. He was always a gentleman; very quiet spoken” (personal interview, May 3, 2008).

LADO   269 Ljevaković was not the only choreographer in the beginning of Lado. Ana Maletić, a ballerina from the Zagreb ballet was brought in to help train dancers and create choreographies. Her first work for Lado, was a Šiptar (Albanian) suite from Kosovo, created in 1952. “Her philosophic and choreographic approach was closer to that of Moiseyev and Olga Skovran of Kolo, than to Ljevaković” (Hanibal Dundović, personal interview, May 1, 2008).9 The suite was actually very good, very dramatic. It was fifteen minutes long, and therefore longer than anything we had ever attempted. But, it caused a storm of protest among many of the dancers who, rightly I think, protested against this style of presentation. Professor Ljevaković stayed away from the company for several weeks in protest. Finally Ljevaković won, and from around 1953; His style prevailed and continues to be influential fifty years later. (Hanibal Dundović, personal interview May 1, 2008)

Sremac notes that at some point in 1950 or 1951, The appearance of new Croatian creative names in the program proclaimed that there was a provisional reorganization of the artistic directorship. Along with Zvonimir Ljevaković, they placed Ana Maletić, a dance instructor, theoretician, and writer of the teaching of contemporary dance, and later the founder and long-​time director of the school of dance and rhythm in Zagreb and the composer and choral director Emil Cossetto to direct the music… The widening of the artistic directorship of the ensemble was an attempt to change Ljevaković’s concepts of presenting folklore on stage and draw closer to the other style, that is to draw closer to the Soviet and Beograd models. These two very diametrical opposed concepts could not exist under the same roof and in the same programmatic format. Ljevaković’s concept soon triumphed. (2001, 187)

Nena Šokčić observed that Ana Maletić attempted to bring her considerable pedagogic skills to give the new dancers a more professional and trained look (personal interview. October 15, 1999). However, Ljevaković, like Ivančan, Sr., after him, did not want the dancers to appear on the stage as if they had ballet or modern dance training. Thus, it appears that the struggles within the early leadership of Lado were based on a number of aesthetic issues, not just the manner of the presentation of folklore for the stage, but also dance training, the use of nonfolkloric dance movements, and musical arrangements.

From Amateur to Professional The change of status from amateur to professional takes more than an official announcement of professional status, an infusion of financial resources and spacious headquarters. More sophisticated and nuanced elements such as teaching dancers to stand or

270   Anthony Shay walk on the stage in the way in which peasants stood or walked was often more complex than the dances themselves. Frequently this meant not only learning, but internalizing new ways of moving, standing, and sitting that become un-​self-​conscious to the performer. However, it was these elements, the careful wearing of costumes so that they look like the dancers are wearing their own clothes rather than strange and uncomfortable costumes, the way in which they walk, how close to one another do the dancers stand, where they placed their hands, posture and demeanor, among other things, that give a professional patina to a performance, and these elements are frequently among the least noticed by the audience. Hanibal Dundović describes the first group of Lado dancers as “fresh baked professionals” (1999, 181). The company was comprised of a group of raw teen-​age enthusiasts who had to learn every step in a variety of regional styles. There were no professional dancers trained in folk dance. Moreover, they were city dwellers who, for the most part, knew nothing of peasants and their lives. For example, learning how to sing in authentic style took considerable time and effort. In the beginning of the ensemble we spent considerable time listening to field recordings or the peasants themselves in order to learn to sing in the authentic style that Professor Ljevaković wanted. This style was alien to us because we were city dwellers and we had to work hard and spend hours perfecting the singing. It was much harder than learning dance, but over the years we developed the style of singing for which Lado is famous. (Anđela Potočnik, Nevenka Šokčić, and Mira Tunuković, personal interview, November 5, 1989)

By the time that I saw Lado for the first time in 1967, the transition from amateur to professional was fully complete, and according to Ivica Dabac, an early member and later dance captain, the process was already complete in 1963 when he entered the company (personal interview May 5, 2008). In May 1968, I accompanied Lado on a short journey into the countryside where Lado performed for a very enthusiastic group of villagers. Ljevaković said blandly “It keeps us clean.” In a documentary on his life produced by Radio Televizija Zagreb, a Slavonian peasant remarked: “Lado dances our dances better than we do” (Portrejt Zvonka Ljevakovića).

LADO’s Repertoire Lado’s repertoire is based on a rich trove of authentic Croatian folk dances, songs, and instrumental music that has been intensively researched over several generations, but especially by a cadre of professionally trained folklorists after World War II. Because Croatia is spread over a relatively small territory, but possessing highly varied geographic contours that include the Dinaric Mountains, the Adriatic coast and its many islands, and the inland lowlands of the Pannonian Basin, the range of traditional dances and songs is dramatic, varied and colorful, exceptional for such a small area.

LADO   271 The dance culture of the Croats is quite heterogeneous. We cannot even approximately determine what part of its legacy came from the proto-​inhabitants of the Balkans such as Illyrians, Celts and others, what was brought by the Slavs, and what can be attributed to influences of the conquerors: the Romans, Turks and others. The influences of the Alpine culture sphere, the Mediterranean, Carpathians, Orient and cultural elements of the neighbouring peoples all found fertile soil on the territory settled by the Croats. (Ivančan 1996, 331)

The music and costumes that constitute the other elements of presentation show equally colorful variation.10 Using these raw materials in building a repertoire, which is approximately divided evenly between the three ethnographic regions:  the Adriatic, the Dinaric, and the Pannonian. In brief, the dances of the Adriatic region feature many urban dances with clear connections to Italian culture, as well as dances from villages. The dances frequently alternate between couple figures and groups either in circles of lines facing one another. The musical accompaniment is provided by several types of double-​reed instruments, bagpipes, and a bowed instrument called the lijerica. The wind instruments, often created in pairs, are tuned in minor sixths, producing a haunting, unique sound from what ethnomusicologist Vinko Žganec calls the Istrian scale (see Žganec, 1951 for musical examples). In the urban areas, small groups of men participate in klapa singing, similar to barbershop quartets and with a clear Italian provenance. The dances of the mountainous region that is situated inland from the Adriatic coast feature many of the so-​called silent dances, that is, dances in which the sound of the dancers’ feet and the coins and other elements of the clothing create the sound. The dances alternate with singing and walking steps and a series of heavy, thudding steps. The singing, too, utilizes nontempered, close harmonies and a series of glottal stops produced in the throat. The dances of the Pannonian region, accompanied by a range of instruments, are the most popular, consisting of orchestras of plucked instruments known as the tamburica. The dances consist of drmeš, or shaking movement created by performing tiny steps that create a shaking of the body, turning in circles, and some walking steps and singing. The directors of Lado created the order of the programs from this material, and, in general, shaped the ensemble’s image through programming, and they attempted to imagine new ways of presenting the company’s repertoire; in the process, they challenged and oversaw the artistic growth of the performers. This is the central and single most important duty of an artistic director. In most cases, it is an even more crucial task than creating choreography, and very different from the latter. I think that in my nine years of work in Lado as artistic director, that was my heaviest, most difficult task. In all of this business there are big problems (unexpected conditions: stages with major limitations, lack of changing room space for the dancers, health problems on tour when there is no possibility of finding substitutes, etc.), but these are concrete problems and one knows where one stands. Here [in program selection] I simply did not know where to begin and where it would all lead to. (Dundović 1999, 302)

272   Anthony Shay In folk dance companies, the artistic director must also take into consideration the issues of representation for which the company was created, and make selections from the repertoire to fit into the ensemble’s mission. State folk dance programs often reflect political priorities, such as the early inclusion of songs celebrating Marshall Tito and the Partisans in the beginning of Lado’s first decade, and then sporadically thereafter.

1945–​1959 I identify three crucial time periods in Lado’s growth and development, during which the various governments made economic and political decisions that had repercussions in national life, including the way in which the directors of Lado responded to these changes. The periods that I use in this essay relate to changes in Lado’s artistic directorship, changing repertoire, and the company’s history. The first period, I subdivide into two parts—​ 1945–​1959 and 1960–​1974—​because this was a period in which the company formed the basic programs and programming strategies that were to last for over 40 years. During the immediate post–​World War II period, Joža Vlahović performed an exclusively Croatian repertoire. The first program, performed under the name, Državni Zbor Narodnih Plesova I Pjesama (The State Ensemble of Folk Dances and Songs) presented an evening of folk songs and dances (veče narodnih plesova I pjesama) on February 4, 1950 in the Croatian National Theatre. That program, all choreographed by Zvonko Ljevaković, included many selections that are still performed by the company: Balun, Slavonsko Kolo, Posavski plesovi, Bunjevačko Momačko Kolo, Linđo (Dalmatinska poskočica), and Krĉki Tanac. (Lado Souvenir Program, 1949–​1979). Reflecting the political events of the first 15  years, Lado included in its repertoire “Opšajdiri I Pokupski svatovski drmeš (Opšajdiri [song title] and the wedding shaking dance from Pokupje [district south and west of Zagreb]), in which the lyrics of an old folk song, “S one strane Savice,” had been changed to Partizani (Partisan fighting forces under Josip Broz Tito) lyrics, extolling the valor of the Partisans and Tito’s leadership. This choreography was quietly dropped from the repertoire in the 1960s, but can still be heard on the old Monitor record album that dates back to the 1950s. The inclusion of this work shows how the political climate influences repertory choices (Shay, 2002)

The All Yugoslav Folk Dance Ensemble Experiment The Yugoslav government attempted an experiment in the beginning years when the professional dance ensembles of Serbia (1948), Croatia (1949), were newly established,

LADO   273 and gifted amateur dancers from the Macedonian village of Lazaropolje. Called The Folk Dancing Ensemble of Yugoslavia, it combined the three companies and sent them on tour both nationally and internationally for a period of one or two years, most likely in 1950 from the program notes (Yugoslav Folk Dances c. 1950). Each of the ensembles performed dances largely from their own republic and titular ethnic group. The exception to this was the performance of Kolo, the State Folk Dance Ensemble of Serbia, the first of the companies to be established in 1948, which also performed dances of Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia. This experiment was abandoned by 1952. The cost of sending a company of at least 150 members must have been exorbitant, and the government sent along a contingent of secret police, whose job was to prevent desertions, to accompany the ensembles. In keeping with the government’s stress on Yugoslav identity, a new era began in the early 1950s during which the professional and several amateur dance companies began to construct Yugoslav programs, instead of the formerly ethnically focused programs. The use of all-​Yugoslav programs quickly spread in both the professional and amateur ensembles. Stjepan Sremac states: “The term ‘Yugoslav program’ was followed among the practitioners of folk dance” (2001, 183). All the companies in the former Yugoslavia traveled abroad under the title: Yugoslav State Folk Dance Ensemble, or some variant name.

1960–​1974 The second period, 1960–​1974, was characterized by an abandonment of Soviet style social realism in the political realm and increasing freedom to identify on ethnic rather than national lines. Yugoslavism had quietly expired. During this period, Lado toured extensively, traveling to Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Their first tour of the United States occurred in 1967. Lado managed to retain a Yugoslav repertoire and, at the same time, for special occasions, Lado also maintained an all-​Croatian program. Marking the end of an era, at the end of this period, a major change occurred in Lado’s history: Zvonimir Ljevaković retired. To this day he is remembered for his vision, his genius, and his devotion to the authentic folklore of Croatia. In many ways, he not only established the format that characterized Lado’s performances for four decades, but he was the focal point of the ensemble’s existence. No matter what differences may have existed between members of the company, for over 40 years that I have heard about, discussed, or inquired about Zvonimir Ljevaković, every single person related to Lado never mentioned his name except in the most reverent way.

1975–​1992 In many ways, this period became a holding pattern period for Lado. The first director, the highly respected dance researcher and choreographer of the Joža Vlahović KUD,

274   Anthony Shay Dr. Ivan Ivančan, took the reins from 1974–​1980. Under Ivančan’s short six years, as well as the following period of three years without a functioning artistic director, and the nine-​year period, 1983–​1992 during which Hanibal Dundović was called out of retirement to take the helm, Ljevaković’s influence, choreographically and programmatically, prevailed.

1992–​2012—​L ado Transformed The disintegration of the former Yugoslavia in 1990 was reflected in several momentous changes in Lado’s artistic direction, which coincided with the appointment of Ivan Ivančan, Jr. as artistic director who was able to acutely size up the political and social situation. Through innovative and sensitive programming, he strategically positioned Lado to assume the role of icon of the Croatian nation and ethnicity. The single most important impact of Croatian independence for the ensemble is that Lado henceforth performed an entirely Croatian repertoire—​the non-​Croatian costumes and repertoire were consigned to mothballs, reflecting the painful experience of the Yugoslav experience, economic hardship caused by communist policies, and climaxed by the war between Serbia and Croatia, 1992–​1995 during which thousands of lives were lost. Lado currently has 82 Croatian choreographies in its current repertoire, about one-​fourth of which entered the repertoire during Ivančan, Jr’s tenure. (Lado Archives).11 Under the first three directors, Lado was primarily known as a dance company, subordinating both vocal and instrumental music to the needs of the dance. Ivančan dramatically altered this. Perhaps Ivančan’s most momentous, quietly dramatic, and crucial decisions regarding the development and artistic growth of Lado and its performing artists have been in the field of music. First, he has experimented with programming: in the past, Lado under its former directors had two types of programs: all Yugoslav and all Croatian dance programs. Ivančan has dared to take this a step further, programming the company to perform dances and music of a single region of Croatia. To highlight the Adriatic coastal region, he used a boat and fishing nets as a stage set, and arranged for a regional folk band from the region to begin the performance by marching and playing in the foyer of the theater as the audience entered. In the gala concert of 2005, Ivančan programmed a concert built around holidays and festivals which began with carnival traditions which then intertwined with those of Lent, which led into Easter, Ivanje (Midsummer Day) and then the customs dealing with harvests, wedding traditions and finally those of Christmas were shown. This new way of presenting the beauty of our traditional culture is, let us say, a new format, which highlights the everlasting, true, and contemporary inner worth. The spirit of Professor Zvonimir Ljevaković, the founder and visionary of Lado is always with us. (Lušić and Ivančan. Godišnjak 2005, 3)

LADO   275 Today, Lado has three types of programs:  dance, vocal, and instrumental programs. These are further subdivided into traditional and contemporary dance, music, and vocal performances. In the area of dance, while maintaining and expanding its traditional dance repertoire, the company has also performed a full-​evening narrative folk ballet. “At the beginning of 2006 we began to prepare a grand premiere of ‘Veronika,’ a folklore ballet with singing by Davor Bobić and choreographed by Dinko Bogdanić” (Godišnjak 2006, 3). The other area of dance experimentation is in the Lado Elektra choreography setting decontextualized traditional steps and movements from a variety of Croatian regions to contemporary electronic popular music. In the area of music, the greatest change occurred as a result of the war. Lado began to perform sacred and spiritual music in the National Cathedral and other religious venues. Under the socialist state of Yugoslavia, although religious observance was not prohibited, public expression of religion, such as the performing of religious music was not encouraged. This was especially the case for a state-​supported ensemble like Lado. I think that the sight of the ensemble performing in the cathedral regularly throughout the war created a positive image that resonated with a nation at war that felt the need for spiritual support. Lado has expanded its spiritual vocal repertoire, and currently several composers have written music in the form of folk-​inspired cantatas and oratorios that have been specifically tailored to Lado’s unique vocal qualities. Lado has been profiled as the top Croatian choral ensemble, which not only sings arrangements of traditional songs, but also newly composed songs for which tradition was only the beginning creative impulse and inspiration… Lado, especially in its sacred, clearly demonstrates that we are speaking of an ensemble that has recently outgrown its former, too narrow folkloric framework. (Derk 2003, 8)

Christmas music and carols alone account for over two hundred pieces in the repertoire (Ivančan. personal Interview. May 8, 2008). The rapid growth of the sacred-​music repertoire has been accompanied by a concomitant expansion of the performance schedule and new venues: churches and cathedrals. Ivan Ivančan says with pride: In the past, following our gala concert in the second week in November, the company took a rest. Now, no sooner does the gala concert season end than we have to prepare for the Christmas-​New Year season. It has become our busiest season. (Personal interview, May 7, 2008)

“Of the seventeen CDs that Lado has rapidly recorded over the past few years, six of them are sacred albums” (Derk 2003, 7). As the President of Croatia, Stjepan Mesić, in his article “Why I love Lado” points out Lado gives Croatia and Croats a sense of proper pride in their unique folklore, while showing how Croatian folklore is part of the larger European and even universal artistic expression. It gives Croatians a legacy for its youth. (Mesić. Godišnjak 2006, 42)

276   Anthony Shay The mayor of Zagreb, Milan Bandić stated: “Lado is more than just an ensemble. It has become a symbol of the complete treasury of Croatian culture and a national legacy as well as the most striking and loveable ambassadors of Croatia in the world” (Godišnjak 2006, 42). At a time when other professional dance companies are closing or losing audiences, Lado’s future seems assured for a number of reasons. First, the dynamic leadership provided by Ivančan and the Managing Director Ivana Lušić, both of whom fostered the growth of the ensemble by expanding the diversity of the ensemble’s repertoire and the performance venues bring Lado’s considerable artistry to new audiences. The touring schedule, both domestic and foreign, thanks to the efforts of Lušić and her staff, has expanded. The author translated both written materials and oral interviews from the Croatian. I thank the Trust for International Understanding of the Rockefeller Foundation for providing a fellowship to conduct the research for this essay. I also thank Ivana Lušić, Ivan Ivančan, Jr., and all of the members of Lado for their generosity and hospitality during the month of May 2008. They provided me access to their rehearsals, archives, and offices, which were so crucial in the writing of this essay.

Notes 1. This is not standard literary Croatian; the stanzas appear to be archaic. 2. Throughout its history, Lado has undergone several name changes. “In 1979 in the court in Zagreb the still official name ‘Državni zbor narodnih plesova I pjesama Hrvatske’ (State Ensemble of Folk Dances and songs of Croatia), was changed to ‘Lado’ Profesesionalni folklorni ansambl Hrvatske (Lado, the Professional Folk Ensemble of Croatia) and in the following year, 1980 a new name became Ansambl narodnih plesova i pjesama Hrvatske, ‘Lado’ (The Ensemble of Folk Dances and Songs of Croatia, Lado), the name by which it is known today” (Sremac 2001, 189) 3. Sremac notes that: “In 1999, hrvatsko salonsko kolo was also included in the repertoire of the Zagreb Folk Ensemble (known under the name ‘Joža Vlahović’ until 1990), and it was a reconstruction that was created from the Coronelli arrangement to Franjo Kuhaĉ’s music” (2001, 49). 4. Kolo means wheel and refers to the most popular form or circle and semicircle dance found in Bosnian/​Croatian/​Serbian language areas as well as Slovenia. Kolo can also refer to dance in general as well as to a dance event. 5. Ljevakovic utilized both Zvonko and Zvonimir in programs. 6. The large festival organized by Seljačka Sloga held in Zagreb in 1950 is fully documented by Vinko Žganec and Nada Sremec (1951). 7. Ivan Ivančan, Sr., the first professional Croatian dance ethnographer, and Hanibal Dundović, both future directors of LADO after Ljevaković’s retirement, were among the first members who participated in that performance. I thank Hanibal Dundović for providing me with a document that included the names and photographs of the performers who went to Prague in 1947, which included six men, 12 women, and 5 tamburica musicians.

LADO   277 8. In fact, language historians believe that Lada and Lado, which are featured in the oldest folk song repertoire in many areas, are most likely mythical sacral figures associated with the regeneration of vegetation and greenery in Spring (Bajuk and Botica, 2006, 137–​141). 9. Ana Maletić’s (1904–​1986) name appeared on programs as choreographer along with that of Zvonko Ljevaković as late as August, 1954, but in an undated English language program that must have been printed shortly after, Maletić’s name is covered with a tape showing only “Z. Ljevaković, Artistic Leader” (Lado Program, August 16 and 17, 1954; undated program entitled The Croat Ensemble for Folk Dance and Folk Song, Lado Archives) 10. However fascinating, the details that constitute Croatian folklore lie beyond the parameters of this chapter. Interested readers can consult Ivančan (1996); Zebec (2001) about folk dance, and for Croatian folklore in general Vitez and Muraj (2001). 11. In addition to the 82 choreographies in the Croatian dance repertoire, another 49 works represent other former Yugoslav regions. (Lado Archives).

Bibliography Bajuk, Lidija and Stipe Botica. “How Did Lado Get Its Name,” in LADO: Hrvatsko nacionalnog blago (Croatian National Treasure), edited by Zorica Vitez and Miroslava Vucic, 137–​141. Zagreb: Školska Knjiga, 2009. Bendix, Regina. In Search of Authenticity:  The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Buchanan, Donna A. Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in Transition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Cocchiara, Giuseppe. The History of Folklore in Europe. Translated from the Italian by John N. McDaniel. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981. Derk, Denis. “Porin u pravim rukama.” Lado Godišnjak (2003): 7. Dubinskas, Frank A. “Performing Slavonian Folklore:  The Politics of Reminiscence and Recreating the Past (Yugoslavia).” Unpublished PhD.  diss. Palo Alto, CA. Stanford University, 1983. Dundović, Hanibal. Dečki, Fajerunt: Sjecanja. Varaždinske Toplice: Tonimir, 1999. Dundović, Hanibal. “Moj Život s Ladom.” 5–​19. Godišnjak. Zagreb: Lado, 2003. Folklore Naroda Jugoslavije.. Zagreb: Grafički Zavod Hrvatske, 1963. Garafola, Lynn. “Introduction.” In Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on Romantic Ballet, edited by Lynn Garafola, 1–​10. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997.. Georges, Robert A. and Michael Owen Jones, eds. Folkloristics:  An Introduction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Goldstein, Ivo. Croatia:  A  History. Montreal and Kingston, Ont:  McGill-​ Queen’s University Press. Ivancan, Ivan. Narodni Plesni Obiičaji u Hrvata. Zagreb: Hrvatska Matica Iseljenika, Institut za Etnologiju i Folkloristiku, 1996. LADO. 1949–​1979. Trideset Godina. Zagreb: Lado, 1979. Lado. 1949–​1959. Souvenir Program. Zagreb: Lado, 1959. Godišnjak (Annual Report), 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007. Lušić, Ivana and Ivan Ivančan, Jr. “Introduction.” Godišnjak (2005): 3. Maners, Lynn. “The Social Lives of Dances in Bosnia and Hercegovina: Cultural Performance and the Anthropology of Aesthetic Phenomena.” PhD diss., Los Angles: UCLA, 1995.

278   Anthony Shay March, Richard Anthony-​ Daniel. “The Tamburtza Tradition.” PhD diss., Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1983. Neilsen, Erica. “Bulgarian Dance Culture:  From Censorship to Chalga.” In Balkan Dance: Essays on Characteristics, Performance, and Teaching, edited by Anthony Shay, 130–​ 144. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2008. Portrejt Zvonka Ljevakovića. Documentary film. Radio Televizija Zagreb. n.d. Potočnik, Bozo. “Zelen vencec ansambla LADO/​The Little Green Wreath of the LADO Ensemble.” In LADO: Hrvatsko nacionalnog blago (Croatian National Treasure), edited by Zorica Vitez and Miroslava Vucic, 129–​135.. Zagreb: Školska Knjiga, 2009. Ruyter, Nancy Lee Chalfa. 2008. “Dvoransko Kolo from the 1840s to the Twentieth Century.” In Balkan Dance: Essays on Characteristics, Performance and Teaching, edited by Anthony Shay, 239–​249. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Co., 2008. Shay, Anthony. Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Companies, Representation, and Power. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. Shay, Anthony. Choreographing Identities:  Folk Dance, Ethnicity, and Festival in the United States and Canada. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006. Shay, Anthony, ed. Balkan Dance:  Essays on Characteristics, Performance, and Teaching. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Co., 2008. Sremac, Stjepan. “Folklorni Ples u Hrvata od Izvora do Pozornice: Između društvene I kulturne potrebe, politike, kulturnog I nacionalnog identiteta.” PhD diss., Zagreb: University of Zagreb, 2001. Vitez, Zorica and Aleksandra Muraj, eds. Hrvatska Tradicijska Kultura:  na razmeđu svjetova I  epoha. Zagreb:  Ministarstvo kulture Republike Hrvatske, Ministarstvo Znanosti i tehnologije Republike Hrvatske, Zaklada Hrvatske akademije znanosti I umjetnosti, Ured za kuturu Grada Zagreba.., 2001. Whisnant, David E. All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Yugoslavian Folk Dances. Program of joint appearances of Lado (then the newly established State Ensemble of Folk Dances and Songs), the State Folk Dance Ensemble of Serbia, and the villagers of Lazaropolje, Macedonia. Belgrade: “Jugoslavija,” 1950(?). Zebec, Tvrtko. “Folklorni Ples.” In Hrvatska Tradicijska Kultura: na razmeđu svjetova I epoha, edited by Zorica Vitez and Aleksandra Muraj, 441–​449. Zagreb:  Ministarstvo culture Republike Hrvatske, Ministarstvo Znanosti i tehnologije Republike Hrvatske, Zaklada Hrvatske akademije znanosti I umjetnosti, Ured za kuturu Grada Zagreba.., 2001. Žganec, Vinko and Nada Sremec. Hrvatske Narodne Pjesme i Plesovi. Svezak I. Zagreb: Tisak Grafičkog Zavoda Hrvatske, 1951.

Chapter 12

Au thentic i t y a nd Ethnic i t y Folk Dance, Americanization, and the Immigrant Body in the Early Twentieth Century Jessica Ray Herzogenrath

In the May 1921 edition of The Neighbor, the self-​published newspaper of Northwestern University Settlement, an unnamed writer included a description of part of the Third Annual All-​Settlement Adult Party of the Chicago Federation of Settlements held at Hull-​House: “One of the prettiest was the group of Bohemian dances done by a group of little girls from Howell Neighborhood House. It’s a little sad to think that these little girls will soon lose the beauty of those rythmic [sic] dances in the ugliness of the modern American dance” (The Neighbor 1921).1 This observation reveals several particularities surrounding the practice of folk dance within settlement houses. First, it privileges the traditions of the folk dance of another region, in this case Bohemia, and in fact degrades the “modern American dance.” Second, it assumes that these girls will “lose” either their ability or their desire to continue to perform these Bohemian dances. Finally, its reference only to girls as performers, at least in this set of dances, raises the question of whether the absence of boys proved a common occurrence in the folk dance of the early twentieth century. This essay argues that folk dance in settlement houses traveled two paths: the ethnic clubs devoted to the practice and performance of their own traditions and the structured classes offered to girls and young women. These two developments of folk dance in settlement houses fulfilled both the project of Americanization prescribed by settlement movement and also provided a means for immigrants to continue the folk practices from their home countries, though in forms shaped by their changed circumstances. This analysis focuses on the conceptualization of folk dance and what it could do for new Americans rather than the steps and their execution. Three settlement houses and their extensive records make up the focus here:  Greenwich

280   Jessica Ray Herzogenrath House (New York), Hull-​House (Chicago), and Northwestern University Settlement (Chicago).2 Though not intending to stand in for the circumstances of all settlement houses, the differences in location, population composition, and leadership suggest that the trends of these houses likely apply to others. Hull-​House remains the most well-​known settlement, primarily due to the prominence of founder Jane Addams; however, both the head residents at Greenwich House (Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch) and Northwestern University Settlement (Harriet Vittum) contributed to the persistence of the settlement and Progressive movements. Sources include photographs, head resident and annual reports, schedule announcements, attendance records, and programs; speeches, books and pamphlets written by settlement workers; and the instruction in folk dance at the university level. This study covers the period from the establishment of Hull-​House, the first settlement house in the United States, in 1889 through World War II. By the end of the war, the head residents responsible for the character of the houses that shaped the circumstances for these developments of folk dance had either passed away or largely distanced themselves from directorial positions. Though settlement leadership, much like the writer in The Neighbor, praised the beauty and merits of immigrant folk dances, these sentiments applied primarily to their favored dances from western Europe, therefore lending an Anglo cast to the character of America and the process of Americanization (Gordon 2002, 238).3 Experts believed girls and young women needed noncompetitive physical exercise, and, thus, many of these same folk dances became popular in high schools and universities among native-​ born Americans during this period. These choices often reflected prevailing theories concerning race, which removed many American dances from consideration given their Africanist influences. Racial attitudes also extended to the minimal inclusion of southern and eastern European dances in the settlement houses. The context for the prevalence of settlement houses during the Progressive Era, the institution of cultural imperialism by settlement leadership, and the teaching methods behind folk dance classes prove integral to understanding these developments of folk dance in the settlement houses. Educated, middle-​class women acting within the social ideologies of the Progressive Era reform—​especially those concerning hygiene, vice, and education—​directed many settlement houses in the United States, including Greenwich House, Hull-​House, and Northwestern University Settlement. They represented a growing movement in which middle-​class women expanded their work world from the domesticity of the private sphere to the business of the public sphere. The houses provided institutionalized sites for this work, where through socialization and education, a variety of immigrant peoples could be inculcated by a process of Americanization. In particular, the manner and types of dance practices presented asserted the values of the settlement house directors, paradoxically privileging theatrical forms and Old World styles of folk dances over the new Americanized amalgamations of vernacular social dances practiced in the same immigrant neighborhoods.

Authenticity and Ethnicity    281 Between 1870 and 1900, nearly 12 million immigrants arrived on American shores. British, Irish, German, and Scandinavian peoples flooded into the United States through the 1890s; from the mid-​1880s those from Italy, Austria-​Hungary, Russia, Poland, the Balkans, and Greece appeared in greater numbers. By the early 1910s immigrants added another nine million souls to the population of the United States. Along with their scant belongings, immigrants brought their native dances:  from Italy the La Furlana and Tarantella; from Poland the Mazur, the Krakowiak, and the Polonez; from Germany the Ländler, Zwiefacher, and, of course, the polkas; and from Holland the Baanopstekker, Slaapmuts, and the Reipe Reipe Garste. Dances, like language dialects, varied among countries, regions within countries, and sometimes among tiny villages within the regions. Folk dances imported from the Old World fulfilled Progressive ideologies concerning proper moral and body behaviors; settlement workers dismantled and reassembled folk dances “collected” from Europe, creating a version of American folk dance that offered a mode of female exercise.4 At the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, Progressive Era settlement workers instituted a model of cultural imperialism in which native-​born Americans took personal responsibility for introducing newly arrived immigrants to “American” normative behaviors and cultural practices. Benevolent settlement matriarchs removed the Old World dances from their ritual folk contexts and refashioned them as nostalgic invented traditions, reflecting tensions between modernity and the agricultural past. This velvet application of cultural imperialism became the primary tool that settlement house workers used to Americanize new immigrants. Regulation of the immigrant body and the space it inhabited by settlement workers gently propagated the middle-​class ideology of individual pursuits for the betterment of all and instituted this life approach as the American way. This institutionalization of how to contend with bodies merits closer examination because all immigrants arrived with bodies, if little else. Several characteristics help delineate the distinct character of American cultural imperialism during the Progressive Era, including “rugged individualism,” the ideology of Manifest Destiny, and what historian John Whiteclay Chambers II calls the “progressive ethos.” Progressives redefined Victorian “rugged individualism” in terms of social responsibility; Manifest Destiny described the physical and cultural expansion of the settlement houses and established it as the American prerogative; and Chambers’s “progressive ethos” provides an explanation for the prevalence of equivocal terms, such as “progress” and “greater good,” that permeated the Progressive movement. Members of the middle class engineered the Progressive Era, though they eventually counted some of the upper class among their ranks.5 Their ideology refashioned their parents’ Victorian sentiments into a tentative socialism (though many reformers steered clear of that term). As historian Michal McGerr notes in A Fierce Discontent, Progressivism offered the promise of utopianism as the middle classes worked to recast a heterogeneous nation in their own image (McGerr 2003, xiv).

282   Jessica Ray Herzogenrath However, settlement workers did not promote conformity for the sake of uniformity, but instead for health and well-​being.6 Furthermore, Progressives attempted to temper what they viewed as the negative effects of rapid modernization that accompanied industrialization and urbanization. To accomplish this, reformers reformulated the quintessentially American “rugged individualism” that prevailed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and which led to unrestrained greed and monetary oppression.7 Contemporary theories about the effects of environment on economic situation undercut this Victorian vision of American individualism. Where the previous generation believed that the burden of poverty resulted from personal shortcomings, Progressives acknowledged the role of one’s surroundings as expressed through the body. This modified individualism focused on the environment as determinative of one’s moral and physical fitness, coupled with the obligation of the educated middle class to help the impoverished. Studies about the effects of environment on the person also undermined the concept of individual choice and action, which facilitated settlement movement action against vice, in particular the dance halls. Settlement workers enacted their ideals through regulations of bodies and spaces, many times through reinterpreted concepts from tenement housing reforms. In other words, by cleaning the structure and appearance of the physical space, the body and mind could also become clean—​and therefore moral. Like buildings, bodies required proper ventilation and light (space between bodies) in order to prevent indiscretion: those who danced in a bright, open space two-​stepped toward morally correct thoughts and behavior. Leaders of the settlement houses provided proper spaces for dance, largely in reaction against those commercial dance halls that facilitated close contact, slow dancing, greed of the business owners, and indiscreet behaviors, with the unfortunate results of pregnancy, drunkenness, and gambling (NUSA General Administrative Records 1913–​1929). Well-​lit, open spaces, on the other hand, encouraged adherence to the ideals of refinement, appropriateness, cleanliness, and sanctity of moral behaviors. Chambers notes that the goals of Progressivism generally, and the settlement movement specifically, remained abstract, which is apparent in its language:  “morality,” “greater good,” and “progress” (Chambers 2000, 280). He aptly describes this “progressive ethos” as, “[M]‌oral idealism with a sweeping vision of democracy and rejuvenated national community” (Chambers 2000, 279). These ideas reflected the secular evangelism that swept the country and imbued the Progressive movement with zealous fervor and a sense of urgency. While some reformers justified social reform in the name of Christianity, the settlement movement remained predominantly secular in practice. However, it also retained a bias toward conversion. If settlement workers brought immigrants through the doors of the settlement house, they could then impart to them the benefits of “moral” behavior as descended from Protestant Christian principles (Simkhovitch 1938, 12–​16).8 The Progressives acted out this secular evangelism through the pursuit of moral reforms, including crusades against alcohol, gambling, and dance halls (Chambers 2000, 105–​106).9

Authenticity and Ethnicity    283 The settlement workers’ middle-​class education qualified them for leadership and endowed them with a sense of “rightness” on issues of the “greater good.” The lack of any firm definitions of these terms allowed both for different interpretations by different groups within the Progressive movement and for changes in these views over time. As Harriet Vittum, the head resident of the Northwestern University Settlement from 1906 to 1947, explained, “More pronounced than any other characteristic of Settlements is their elasticity. They are and always have been experimental stations and are able and ready to adjust to all the changing needs” (NUSA General Administrative Records 1913–​ 1929). Certainly, this elasticity presented possibilities for settlement workers to adapt and reform dance practices, as evidenced by the dance choices and physical alterations over time. Settlement leaders posited their purpose as teaching civility, and they described the house itself as a haven from urban ills. Consequently, settlement workers ignored, or at least did not acknowledge, the positive aspects in the social structures already in operation in urban immigrant communities. In Cheap Amusements, Kathy Peiss details many of these immigrant social institutions, including saloons, dance halls, fraternal organizations, and movie theaters. For instance, saloons served as centers for the workingman’s public culture, supplying meeting places for immigrants as well as assistance in locating employment and nourishment. Fraternal societies provided social services, such as insurance, and organized social gatherings, including dances (Peiss 1986, 17–​18). Though Progressive reformers did not maliciously dismantle working-​class social structures, in the quest for a hegemonic middle-​class Utopia (and out of a sense of moral superiority), they sought to supplant what they saw as negative social institutions with middle-​class ones. Morality and duty pepper the language of the settlement movement writings that justified these actions. For example, the Right Honorable Sir John Gorst, who penned the introduction to the 1895 compilation The Universities and the Social Problem: An Account of the University Settlements in East London, wrote, “In the course of this book it is proposed to call attention to the obligations which the classes who possess culture and leisure have towards those who are less richly endowed” (Gorst 1895, 3). This restructuring of community out of a sense of responsibility calls into question whether settlement houses did in fact provide adequate substitutes for the spaces eliminated in the name of reform (Peiss 1986, 20–​26). Of all the dance practices presented through the settlement house, folk dance proved the most conflicted.10 Though the settlement workers aimed to assimilate immigrants to American ways and ideas of health, refinement, and respectability through the body, in folk dance they found a satisfying mode of nonsexualized dance, which could also act out their romanticized desire for simplicity in the midst of rapid modernization. Settlement workers saw Old World immigrant dances as representing something authentic. An advertisement in the May 1939 issue of the The Neighbor appealed to potential participants by explaining the differences between folk and social dancing: Many have heard the term folk—​dancing and are likely to have associated this term with social—​dancing. A relationship may be seen between the two but there

284   Jessica Ray Herzogenrath is a definite distinction between them. Social—​dancing includes all of our popular American ballroom dances while folk—​dancing covers a much wider scope and probably a more interesting one.

Folk dances of other lands, difficult as they may seem to execute, offer a great deal of pleasure to those who master them. Each one portrays the temperament of its people” (The Neighbor 1937).According to this writer, folk dance offered an opportunity to learn and embody the characteristics of people of other nations. Though ostensibly offering a path to understanding of and empathy with other cultures, partaking in the pleasures of folk dance could risk essentialization of peoples based on the perception of comprehension grounded in an application of universal meaning to the movements. It also provided a more “interesting” and, one can infer, superior form of dance to American vernacular dances, a continual source of contention for settlement movement leadership. Social dances as found in the dance halls did not embody the values that Addams and her colleagues considered the better class of Americans, with whom they wished immigrants to come into contact. Jane Addams of Hull-​House complained vociferously about the style of American social dances, claiming that the “waltzes and two-​steps are purposely slow, the couples leaning heavily on each other barely move across the floor, all the jollity and bracing exercise of the peasant dance is eliminated, as is all the careful decorum of the formal dance” (Addams 2002, 181). As a result, discussion of the negative influences of the dance halls filled newspapers, settlement publications, and speeches. It was the topic of several research projects, including at least one at each of the settlement houses discussed here.11 Instilling moral fortitude through dancing remained a crucial goal for all the houses throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Northwestern University Settlement devoted an entire edition of The Neighbor in 1903 to the perils of dance halls. In this issue, contributor Alderman John F.  Smulski proposed an ordinance denying permits to saloons holding “Saturday Night Dances” and decried the saloon owners as, “[U]‌nscrupulous men, who care little as to what influences these dances have upon the morality of the young people who attend” (The Neighbor 1903). Immorality was synonymous with the greed of the business owner, illustrating the belief during the Progressive Era in the individual’s responsibility to society. The Evanston Press corroborated the condemnation of the dance hall, declaring that, “Among all the 65,000 neighbors of ours who crowd the Seventeenth ward there is not a single hall suitable.” The article gives an eye-​witness account of 2,500 young dancers, “some of them girls as young as twelve, who were found whirling in drunken embrace at 3 o’clock in the morning in a single dance hall” (Evanston Press 1905). In 1922, Vittum wrote, “While records show few moral cases directly traceable to the dance halls, we know from our own experience with unfortunate young people how many indiscreet things happen in connection with these dances” (NUSA General Administrative Records 1913–​1929). This somewhat euphemistic and indirect expression about the immorality of certain manifestations of physicality is emblematic of the constant, moral struggle about heterosexual dancing, especially over the increasing popularity of “touch” and, later, “jazz” dancing.

Authenticity and Ethnicity    285 Kathy Peiss notes that dance hall dances, particularly “tough” dancing, functioned for working-​class women similarly to the settlement houses for middle-​and upper-​class women: they empowered women. In tough dancing, part of the dance scene by 1905, “The dancer’s movements ranged from a slow shimmy … to boisterous animal imitations that ridiculed middle class ideas of grace and refinement” (Peiss 1985, 102). Most objectionable was the extensive physical contact between men and women who performed tough dancing. Early Thomas Edison films that documented tough dancing do not suggest the animal dances, but they do show parity in the relationship between the man and the woman as both slap and throw each other around. Furthermore, the 1902 film, A “Tough” Dance, ends with the couple rolling on the floor, a confirmation of the fears of settlement workers of the effects of close dancing.12 These trends would continue with what became generally known as “jazz” dancing in the late 1910s and early 1920s. An article in the November 27, 1921, Chicago Herald-​ Examiner, reprinted by The Neighbor for the benefit of its readership, titled “Jazz Dance May Be Ousted by Law” hypothesized about the moniker “jazz”: “[P]‌erhaps it can be said that its application to music and the dance came from its use in the red light district and that when young men desired to use one word to indicate the kind of music and dancing indulged in places of the old segregated district, they referred to them as ‘jazz’ dances” (The Neighbor 1922).13 Earlier in the twentieth century, “segregated district” referred only to the separation of vice areas from residential neighborhoods. However, by the 1920s, which coincided with the migration of many African Americans from the South to the North, jazz became an intersection where class met race. “The middle-​ class activists and their political representatives eagerly led some of the campaigns to draw new social boundary lines dividing different groups.” This certainly included black Americans (McGerr 2003, 183). 14 In fact, Progressivism often provided the cover and the language required to separate groups. The suggestive jazz dancing that so disturbed the middle class was grounded in the Africanist aesthetic, which included initiating movement from the pelvis. Jazz dancing included close-​clutching and the Charleston, in which participants acted out sexual instincts, movements the middle class certainly discouraged. It was seen as essential to control youths’ sexual behavior by regulating their physical behaviors, such as while dancing. Here existed the most physical “danger” of touching and acting out sexual desires. Settlement workers continued to attempt to clean up social dances through the 1930s; meanwhile, encouragement of folk dance provided a safe alternative to these dangerous dances. Chambers argues in Tyranny of Change that some progressive intellectuals, including Jane Addams, promoted cultural pluralism through their reforms and institutions. However, though she promoted immigrant traditions, even her Hull-​House revealed an imperialism that extended to dance (Chambers 2000, 83). Cultural pluralism persisted—​ often in spite of Progressive movement reformers. What could have functioned as a place for exchange acted more as a forum for Americanization of immigrants into middle-​ class ideas of the body. If immigrant girls adopted a pan-​American identity, which defied American individualism but fulfilled the Progressive program of social consciousness, they learned an Americanized distillation of Old World dances as a healthful

286   Jessica Ray Herzogenrath activity. Even though settlement workers encouraged folk dance as practiced by ethnically segregated groups, the classes aimed at girls instilled particular ideas concerning Americanized folk dance, which included dances from many different countries. Jane Addams encouraged the retention of folk culture, explaining that she did not aim to erase immigrants’ ties to their homeland but wanted, “[T]‌o preserve and keep for them whatever of value their past life contained and to bring them in contact with a better type of Americans” (Addams 2002, 33). While acknowledging the possibility of immigrant cultures’ worth, Addams also insinuated its limitations and the superiority of a certain class of Americans. Interestingly, Addams’s original argument for the establishment of settlement houses did not extend to lower, working-​class native-​born white or black Americans. Most settlement houses explicitly focused on assisting immigrants who had newly arrived, though second-​and sometimes third-​generation Americans would continue to attend settlement activities into the 1950s. Middle-​class Americans did not typically participate in the classes with the immigrants (they taught them) nor did lower-​and working-​class native-​born Americans, despite the fact that they often lived near the houses and the immigrant communities. Both appropriation and acculturation occurred in dance forms in the settlement house. The definition of acculturation as articulated by Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton, and Melville Herskovits proves most applicable to this topic: “Acculturation comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-​hand contact with subsequent change in the original patterns of both groups” (Redfield, et al. 2002, 253). Settlement workers may have intended for immigrants to assimilate into their white, middle-​class American culture, but, in reality, hybrid forms emerged for both groups. The settlement matriarchs appropriated dances that suited their purposes of Americanization, which resulted in a new American style of folk dance that immigrants learned. Immigrants, on the other hand, continued to practice and perform their native dances, adapting them to their new homes. Settlement houses acted as the venues for this interplay of folk traditions and the continual processes of appropriation and acculturation. Because social dances, such as the Charleston or any of the “animal dances,” challenged middle-​class images of propriety, many reformers undertook the sanitation of these popular social dances. On the other hand, folk dance did not require similar cleansing. As Elizabeth Burchenal explained: We cannot hope to dictate to adults, but for children we can and should with care and intelligence choose dances which appeal to the instinct for play and self-​expression. It is here that we can turn to folk-​dances and know that we are on safe ground, for they are spontaneous, genuine and sincere. They are the wild flowers of the dance world, unspoiled by the hand of man. They have sprung naturally from the hearts of simple, wholesome country folk in response to the human need for self-​expression (Burchenal 1913, Preface).

The safety and authenticity of folk dances, though in their Old World contexts they included coeducational dances, did not pose the same sexual risk in the minds of

Authenticity and Ethnicity    287 settlement workers as they did not place dancers as close to one another as in the modern social dances. As a result, settlement workers initially provided space for folk dances through foreign club nights and, later, public performances. However, the encouragement and acceptability of folk dance did not exempt it from adaptation. Instead, two distinct trajectories of folk dancing in the settlement houses developed from the beginnings of the settlement movement in the United States and throughout the first half of the twentieth century. First, the early clubs fostered the ethnic forms practiced within a single, culturally specific intergenerational group of men and women, largely without regulation or manipulation by settlement workers. A  second path began in the early twentieth century and became increasingly popular following World War I: an Americanized and essentialized version of several Old World folk dances taught in classes by white middle-​class native-​born Americans and performed by a multiethnic group of young females. Photographs and schedules indicate that immigrants continued to practice their native dances in the settlement house, once having arrived in the United States, under the umbrella of so-​called foreign clubs or foreign nights.15 A German Club existed from the beginning of Northwestern University Settlement in 1890; the Polish Club followed in 1898 (Northwestern University Settlement 1895–​1905). A  1925 Greenwich House Annual Report still listed four “Foreign Born Groups”: the Italian Society, which met monthly; the Spanish Circle; the German Group, which met weekly; and the Cermesi Society (Polish), which met on a semi-​monthly basis. The people participating in these clubs and evening activities had arrived directly from their homelands, and, therefore, they did not require instruction in their own dances. Intermingling of the various nationalities seemed negligible; indeed, they closely reflected the early national enclaves that formed in urban neighborhoods. However, clubs were more likely than the classes to be intergenerational and coeducational. At least into the interwar period, then, the settlement house provided a space for the practice of ethnic folk dances. Acculturation among immigrants and middle-​class Americans was minimal. Classes in folk dance did exist in the settlement houses prior to World War I, though they did not reach the height of their popularity until the early 1920s. The senior division of the Girls’ Department advertised folk dancing classes in 1918, though they did not begin at Greenwich House until 1924 (NUSA General Administrative Records 1918–​ 1919; Greenwich House 1916–​1937).16 By the time folk dancing classes gained traction in the settlement houses a new generation of Americans had come of age. Folk dance education turned its focus from the early segregated ethnic clubs and nights to interethnic group classes. Ethnic clubs persisted, however, even as the participation in interethnic group classes grew. The rise of group classes changed the composition of folk for youth more than the older generations. As a result, cultures increasingly brushed up against one another, facilitating the process of acculturation, especially among the young. Therefore, settlement workers presented folk dance in ways to mold these children—​the new Americans. Several factors contributed to this increasing incidence of acculturation among the youth. As a condition of urban America, immigrants’ children interacted with people beyond their ethnic group, either through public school, the settlement house, or on the

288   Jessica Ray Herzogenrath street. The restrictions of urban living may also have simply deterred teaching immigrant youth the dances in the home, therefore disrupting the traditional transmission of folk dance from one generation to the next. Resistance to learning the practices of the older generation in favor of those of their own age also probably contributed. Additionally, as settlement workers bemoaned, many other activities competed for the attention of America’s youth. Vice, particularly in the form of the dance hall, proved an almost insurmountable adversary to the intentions of the settlement. The Friday night social dances for young men and women, which Harriet Vittum described as, “a source of much apparent pleasure to them and source of interest and some apprehension to us” averaged a weekly attendance of 150 to 250. Estimated yearly attendance at the dance halls, however, topped 60,000, an average of over 1,100 per week (NUSA General Administrative Records 1913–​1929). In response, houses offered programs and clubs to occupy their time and folk dance figured prominently as a healthy, safe option for young girls and women by the early 1920s. Immigrants did not teach their native dances in the settlement house classes; instead, trained teachers—​usually young upper-​and middle-​class women—​determined what and how dances were taught. Though opportunity for exchange among middle-​class teachers and immigrants existed, the extent to which this occurred remains unclear. Similar to the physical culture and Delsarte classes from the early years of the settlement houses, young, single women typically taught folk dance classes. In an article on folk dance in New York City, Linda Tomko explains that the predominance of women as instructors and the higher numbers of girls taking dance classes fostered the feminization of folk dance. Also, Tomko states that folk dance provided a noncompetitive physical activity for young girls and women that complemented the rise of athletics among young men (Tomko 1996, 171; The Neighbor 1901).17 Though folk dance provided girls and young women with a fun, healthy activity, settlement leadership implemented it primarily as a mode of shaping the physical behavior and ideas of what constituted American-​ness. In the absence of curricula of the folk dance classes at the settlements, the methods of how folk dance teachers learned illuminate the development of an American brand of folk dance intended to function as an agent of Americanization. In June 1924, The Neighbor announced “A New Club” intended for young women over the age of seventeen. It met on Friday evenings and, “has for its purpose the learning of the various national dances and it is directed by a trained instructor, Miss Julia Kloss” (The Neighbor 1924).18 Nationally known teachers, such as Elizabeth Burchenal, Mary Wood Hinman, and Agnes Jones (later Cashman) facilitated this shift to the trained female folk dance teacher throughout the country in the early twentieth century.19 All of these individuals conducted extensive research of several folk dances and then taught them in settlement houses and other venues. They acted as folk dance collectors who disseminated their knowledge to the immigrant and native-​born American public.20 Elizabeth Burchenal wrote eleven books on folk dance between 1908 and 1938, including Dances of the People (1913), Folk Dances from Homelands (1922), and Five Folk Dances (1929). She traveled primarily in western Europe, living with the communities she researched and notating the

Authenticity and Ethnicity    289 dances she learned (Tomko 1996, 165). Dances of the People, for instance, provides the dance steps and music for twenty-​eight dances from the United States, Ireland, England, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, and Switzerland (Burchenal 1913). Burchenal also served from 1906 to 1916 as the executive secretary of the Girls’ Branch of the New York Public School’s Athletic League, where she introduced folk dance into the public school curriculum, and her efforts served as a model imitated throughout the country. Mary Wood Hinman, a renowned researcher and teacher of folk dance forms, began her employment at Hull-​House around 1898. Hinman worked similarly to Burchenal, studying dances in Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Ireland, and England (Tomko 1999, 153–​ 154). In addition to teaching at Hull-​House through 1907, Hinman founded the Hinman School of Gymnastic Dancing and Folk Dancing in 1904, graduating the first class from her “Hinman Normal School” the same year. “Normal school” described those institutions that instructed and certified students in teaching—​most often to women in the field of physical education, including physical culture, gymnastics, and dance (Tomko 1999, 17). Agnes Jones taught folk dance (among other classes) in the College of Liberal Arts at Northwestern University between 1927 and 1941. Investigation of her papers provides an example of how folk dance teachers learned their craft. She largely carried on the methods taught to her during her undergraduate study at the University of Minnesota from 1920 to 1924. In addition to teaching the dance steps, Jones instructed and tested her students on the characteristics of the various nationalities. For instance, item four on her folk dance final required the student to write on the following: “From your comparison of the different Scandinavian, Slavic, and Southern European countries, make a comparison between the characteristics of these three different types of countries” (Agnes Jones Cashman 1901–​1989). Jones’s notes on the characteristics of each group provide some possible answers they might have given. For example, she described the Russian people as “stubborn, fatalistic,” yet “easy-​going” and “more capable of absorbing what told,” and she labeled Russian folk dances as “very vigorous” and “quite acrobatic” in “very unnatural positions” (Agnes Jones Cashman 1901–​1989). She depicted the Italians as “very frugal” in addition to “very easily aroused” though “very courteous” (Agnes Jones Cashman 1901–​1989). Her course notes reveal greater attention to those characteristics of Slavic and southern European countries and much less on their dances as reflected in her curriculum. The syllabus for her advanced folk dance class indicated that she taught ten English dances; three Irish dances; two Scotch dances; and one dance each from Russia, Poland, Bohemia, Italy, France, Spain, Scandinavia, and Native America (Agnes Jones Cashman 1901–​1989).21 Ironically, few notes appear on the characteristics of the English, Irish, and Scottish people though their dances dominate the repertoire. This approach to teaching folk dance highlights both the predominance of western European forms in the process of Americanization and the biases of teachers and the middle class generally concerning particular groups of people.22 The codification of American dance teachers’ training gave the middle class the tools to teach new Americans and to shape the character of American folk dance practices.

290   Jessica Ray Herzogenrath Once immigrants left their homelands, and especially once immigration to the United States ceased with the onset of World War I, they no longer contributed to nor received the influence of their native dances, which remained fluid in their absence. Instruction of European folk dances in America flattened this dynamism in the clubs but particularly in the classes. This practice of training teachers to teach folk dance privileged certain regions and often “national” dances. Regarding Burchenal’s attempts to learn and teach the contemporary folk dance practices of western Europe, Tomko states, “the materials she collected and taught seemed to make only limited reference to the originals” (Tomko 1996, 167).23 A brief examination of the dizzying complexity of Polish folk dance provides one example of what non-​native teachers encountered when distilling and disseminating ethnic dances. In Polish Folk Dances and Songs, Ada Dziewanowska writes that Polish dances fall into regional and national categories (Dziewanowska 1997, 27). Poland recognizes five regions, each with their own dances. These further subdivide into five classifications: 1. Ritual dances, 2. Dances that accompany a particular song, 3. Dances that imitate work, 4. Game dances, and 5. Dances that share characteristics with bordering nations. According to Dziewanowska, Poles regard five Polish dances that originated in particular districts of Poland as “national” because of their popularity throughout the country. Together these dances reflected the intricacies of Poland’s national character. Each region adopted and adapted these national dances, adding its own variations (Dziewanowska 1997, 28–​29). Instructors such as Burchenal, Hinman, and Jones chose which dances to teach in the United States. As a result, the version of the ethnic dances taught in the settlement house could have conceivably been unknown to native dancers. Futhermore, all the members of the class, whether Polish, Italian, or Irish, learned the same dances. It therefore remains difficult to discern what was actually “folk” about settlement folk dance. Folk dance as encouraged and performed in the classes of the settlement houses removed the dances from their original contexts. Immigrants danced in the Old World for a variety of reasons—​celebration, harvest, and socialization, among others. However, many of the original purposes had been nullified in the urban United States. The term folk dance in the settlement house, therefore, increasingly became an umbrella term for a group of dances that promoted healthy activity, a kind of “jollity and bracing exercise” for young girls and women (Addams 2002, 181). In one respect it fulfilled the American ideal in which multilingual bodies represented many different cultures. Though ethnic clubs continued to perform dances, the classes greatly outnumbered the clubs by the 1920s. Absence of boys from folk dancing classes further altered the traditional practice and intention of folk dances. Classes offered only through the Girls’ Departments suggests that girls either learned girls-​only dances or only the girls’ roles within the dances (Tomko 1996, 169).24 This further encouraged a feminization of folk dance specifically and reflected the growing dominance of women in dance generally. An account from Greenwich House’s November Social Report in 1937 hints at why settlement houses did not insist on folk dancing for boys. A new coeducational folk dancing group had turned

Authenticity and Ethnicity    291 disastrous. The fourth attempt at class “was disrupted by the interference of a large crowd of boys killing time until the boxing show. They refused to participate, were hostile in their comments.” Temporarily, workers resolved to not schedule any other classes during that time (Greenwich House 1937). These boys’ reactions fit the rising popularity in the late nineteenth century of organized boys’ athletics as an outlet for aggression and competition. Though Greenwich House and other settlements encouraged girls’ athletics, these activities remained second to noncompetitive and domestic ones. Groups from both clubs and classes performed at a variety of events both within and outside of the settlement house. In 1924, The Neighbor advertised the dress rehearsal for folk dancing for the Homecoming performance (The Neighbor 1924). By 1935, Northwestern University Settlement sponsored an annual Polish Harvest Festival and Bazaar, including Christmas shopping, a Friday night dinner, gypsy fortune telling, and dancing. In 1941, it centered on a wedding dance, in which, “Each guest may dance with the bride and toss a coin into the bowl provided. Dancing continues until the setting sun proclaims the time for the good night song and the departure of the guests” (NUSA General Administrative Records, Series 41/​5). The resounding success of this festival and the folk dancing classes impressed head resident Harriet Vittum, who declared, “During the last two or three years the folk dancing and folk festival have seen the ranking achievements” (NUSA General Administrative Records 1940). Though many of the folk dance performances presented students from the girls’ classes, other events, such as festivals, included men and women, boys and girls. Because boys did not take folk dancing class, they probably learned from ethnic clubs. Photographs of folk dance from Hull-​House and Northwestern University Settlement show both young boys and older men from 1905 through the late 1940s, in which (unlike the folk dance stagings through the Girls’ Branch in New York City that Tomko describes) performers retained their traditional costumes. The situation of the settlement house as a site for the dissemination of dance, as practiced and shaped by girls and women, implies that the performance of ethnicity took on a female character in the early twentieth century. It agitates conceptions of what constituted the performance of Americanness, since to this point Americans lacked a distinct folk dance of their own, or at least middle-​class Americans did not recognize extant American folk dance. The settlement workers chose what they liked from other cultures and, through transformation and conversion, they made it “American.” Immigrant girls therefore danced out the ideals of women settlement workers—​large groups moving together for health and happiness. The erasure of men and boys from folk dance practices as taught by settlement workers within the settlement house proved the most significant change in the nature of folk dancing over time. As the evidence shows, men and boys participated in folk dance clubs at least through the late 1940s. Folk dance therefore traveled two different paths: one, the structured classes offered primarily to girls and women, and the other, male and female club members practicing together on their own time, using the settlement house as a rehearsal space. The hybridization of folk dancing, then, developed not from the influence and exchange among immigrants and middle-​class Americans but through the artificial

292   Jessica Ray Herzogenrath construction of homogeneity by settlement workers who taught folk dance. In other words, the middle class created a pan-​American identity by teaching ethnically heterogeneous groups of girls a variety of ethnic dances. There were, however, limits to the parameters of this pan-​identity. African-​influenced dances were not integrated into settlement house dance practices. Western and northern European folk dances dominated the collections of teachers such as Hinman and Burchenal. Instructors also did not adapt traditional American dances, such as those descending from the French quadrille and English country dances, as part of the Americanization process. Therefore, folk dance in the settlement house illustrates acculturation and appropriation because immigrants did not completely abandon their native dances and because settlement teachers adopted certain dances for the folk dance curriculum. Immigrants retained their own dance traditions while absorbing American customs, which they also helped to shape.25 As with other forms of dance taught in the settlement house, settlement workers exercised positions of power in determining the kinds of folk dances chosen for dance education. Settlement workers also believed in the inherent health and goodness of folk dance. Folk dance required less sanitation than ballroom dance for this reason. The absence of boys from the classes and the structure of folk dance eliminated the physical connections that reformers feared would disintegrate into immoral behavior. This also dovetails with the Progressive goal of social improvement; for immigrants to acculturate into the dance practices of the United States required interaction with native-​born Americans. However, instruction by the middle class in the dances chosen by the middle class reinforced the middle class agenda in imposing middle-​class ideas of health and morality onto the immigrants. Choice exercised by immigrants distinguished the American settlement movement from totalitarian cultural imperialism. Though many immigrants cited hardships in their homelands as the motivating reason for coming to the United States and, likewise, the settlement houses, in most cases they voluntarily relocated. However, rather than abandon all traditions from the Old World, newly arrived immigrants maintained and readjusted their respective cultures in the ways they saw fit. Still, the influence of the settlement house extended outward into their respective neighborhoods through their attempts to regulate immigrant spaces, including the saloon, dance halls, and tenement houses, by means of reforms that workers justified primarily through concern for corporeal and mental health.26 After World War I, folk dancing developed as a structured physical activity for young women and girls. This affected the perceptions and the practices of performed ethnicity, changing the nature of the dances themselves. Settlement leaders encouraged the retention of folk dances. However, by the time second-​generation Americans learned them, the “trained” teachers had already distilled the folk dances, resulting in essentialized ethnic portraits. Ironically, in a rare recognition of the value of immigrant culture, Addams, Simkhovitch, and Vittum validated the beauty and merits of immigrant folk dances while also subjecting the dances to the settlement leaders’ ideals of health and beauty. These women recapitulated the views of their class and social status in what they

Authenticity and Ethnicity    293 elected to include in their instruction. As benevolent matriarchal cultural crafters, they promoted folk dance as one way for immigrants to embody Americanness. Conversely, immigrants did not passively accept the direction of settlement leadership; rather, they both adapted their folk practices and allowed youth to participate in the Americanized versions of folk dance. Those beautiful “rythmic [sic]” dances witnessed by the writer for The Neighbor in 1921 followed two distinct, though complementary, trajectories of folk dance practices in the settlement houses, illustrating the desire to both Americanize and maintain Old World traditions by both immigrants and settlement workers.

Notes 1. Thank you to the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research for their generous funding that helped make the research for this piece possible. My colleagues and mentors at Texas A&M University and Florida State University generously read and commented on early drafts through both the Graduate Colloquium at the Glasscock Center and independently, contributing greatly to this essay. To Janet Olson at the Northwestern University Archives I owe an especial debt of gratitude for introducing me to Agnes Jones Cashman and for her unflagging hospitality over the last five years. Modern American dance here refers to the social dancing (often African-​American influenced) done in dance halls rather than the concert performances of artists such as Martha Graham or Ruth St. Denis. 2. Northwestern University Settlement is not an extension of Northwestern University. The Worn Doorstep, a centenary study of Northwestern University Settlement, explains that a group including Hugh and Alice Wilson, Henry Wade Rogers (president of Northwestern University from 1890 to 1900) and his wife Emma, and Charles Zueblin (a sociology professor at Northwestern) and his fiancée Aurora Fisk founded the settlement over dinner one night while visiting the Wilsons, electing to name it Northwestern University Settlement because of their affiliations with the university. However, the settlement did not then, nor does it now, receive the bulk of its monetary support from Northwestern University. Rather, it relies, as do most settlement houses, on fundraising (Wukas 1991, 7–​8). 3. As Lynn Gordon has noted, “Most historians have found white middle-​class women professionals culture-​bound and lacking empathy” (Gordon 2002, 238). 4. “Folk” as employed in this essay refers both to those practices considered indigenous to particular ethnic groups and to those constructed by the settlement leadership to represent their ideas of folk. 5. The upper class did not embrace the Progressive movement from the outset as it threatened their way of life, in particular the residual extravagance from the Gilded Age. Middle-​ class reformers criticized this conspicuous consumption of goods by the upper class and believed the wealth of the upper class should have benefited those of the lower and working orders. Though some members of the upper class later turned to philanthropy, including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, this trend occurred slowly and by no means comprehensively. 6. Though reformers did work for increases in wages, they never overtly pushed for workers to amass wealth but, rather, focused on improving the body.

294   Jessica Ray Herzogenrath 7. It seemed that the products of Victorianism—​individualistic leaders such as John Jacob Astor, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt—​cornered the United States into a condition of extreme wealth inequality. However, as already mentioned, some of these industrialists would later become active philanthropists. 8. Rumor claims that Jane Addams grew up in the Quaker faith (though she declared herself not religious), and most settlement workers hailed from Protestant upbringings. For instance, Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch writes extensively about her family’s involvement in the Congregational Church in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, which they joined because her father had obtained the position of its senior warden. 9. It is also important to note the differences in evangelism from earlier Protestantism. Though religious revivals had occurred before the turn of the twentieth century, a rift between fundamentalists and modernists occurred in American religion during the Progressive Era. Modernists lay the groundwork for evangelism as intimately linked to the cult of personality of a particular minister, who often spoke with the sense of urgency that reformers adopted. Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist minister who figured prominently in the Social Gospel movement, explained: “In the last resort the only hope is in the moral forces which can be summoned to the rescue. If there are statesmen, prophets, and apostles who set truth and justice above selfish advancement; if their call finds a response in the great body of the people; if a new tide of religious faith and moral enthusiasm creates new standards of duty and a new capacity for self-​sacrifice; if the strong learn to direct their love of power to the uplifting of the people and see the highest self-​assertion in self-​sacrifice—​then the entrenchments of vested wrong will melt away; the stifled energy of the people will leap forward; the atrophied members of the social body will be filled with a fresh flow of blood; and a regenerate nation will look with the eyes of youth across the fields of the future” (Rauschenbusch 1908, 285). The social gospel relates to the progressive ideals enacted in the settlement house in that they both encouraged social responsibility, though the settlement houses usually maintained secularism. 10. Other dance and gymnastic practices in settlement house rubrics included Delsarte, elocution, gymnastic drills, ballroom dance, tap and modern interpretative classes. 11. That these studies were done are mentioned but no results have been found to confirm their completion at either Hull-​House or Northwestern University Settlement. 12. A “Tough” Dance, American Mutoscope & Biography Company, December 9, 1902. Bowery Waltz (Apache Dance), Thomas A. Edison, September 24, 1897. 13. Emphases mine. 14. McGerr notes later in the same chapter that discrimination also extended to nuances among “the white races,” as William Z. Ripley, mentioned earlier in this essay, demarcated in his book The Races of Europe (1899). 15. Similar arguments have been made about the retention of dance and other aesthetic forms as more resistant to assimilation than other cultural elements, such as language, food preparation, and clothing styles. See especially John Thornton’s book: Africa and Africans in the Formation of the Atlantic World, 1400–​1800. 16. Folk dancing for young women and girls became the most popular form of dance offered by the settlement houses outside of the weekend social dances. According to a Greenwich House Girls’ Work Report from 1922–​1923, a weekly combined “Folk dancing and story-​ telling” class boasted thirty-​four girls of predominantly Irish and Italian ancestry (the roster includes children with the names MacDonnell, Flynn, DeStefano, and Antonelli). This

Authenticity and Ethnicity    295 was twice as many students as the weekly sewing class. Though the ages of the girls were not listed, the inclusion of storytelling with the class implies a younger group (Greenwich House 1922–​1923). 17. Of the New York City Girls’ Branch park fetes, Tomko writes, “[F]‌etes were structured to assert female presence without dissolving into male modalities. Thus, as the culminating event of a year’s work, park fetes were structured as celebrations rather than competitions. This was in decided contrast to boys’ work, which featured competitive athletic meets as early as 1903.” The earliest instance of an organized athletic club among these settlement houses is at Northwestern University Settlement in 1901. It was for boys only. 18. Emphases mine. 19. Agnes Jones married Northwestern University physics professor Robert Cashman in 1940; she left her post in the College of Liberal Arts at Northwestern the following year. Though her papers refer to her by her married name, I use her maiden name here as that would have been how she was known during her teaching career. 20. Folk dances were shared with the native-​born Americans; however, not in the context of settlement houses. Burchenal’s and Hinman’s work also included public school systems, which broadened the dissemination of this brand of folk dance to lower-​and working-​ class Americans born in the United States. This bolsters the argument that these curricula provided a basis for an American understanding of folk dance among girls across the country. 21. Though “Scottish” may seem more appropriate to our eyes and ears, both Jones and the dance manuals of the period list the dances from the northern part of the United Kingdom as “Scotch.” 22. Jones also noted on her syllabus that she utilized Burchenal’s Dances of the People, supported by the similarity of her list of dances taught to those detailed in that book. William Z.  Ripley’s The Races of Europe, first published in 1899, presents one example of the prevalence of the ideas concerning the classification of people. He organized Europeans into three categories (in order of superiority): Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean, based on phrenology and measurements of other physical features (Ripley 1899, 103–​130). 23. Upon arrival in the United States, these diverse nationalities—​similar to the coalescing of languages of diverse African slaves on the middle passage—​created new dance traditions within their new working environments. The exchange among lower-​and working-​class Americans and immigrants resulted in the refashioning of Old World dance traditions with a New World lifestyle. 24. Tomko’s investigation of the Girls’ Branch in New  York City suggests that instructors focused on the girls’ parts in folk dances only. 25. Jane Desmond suggests that people may develop “body bilingualism” in much the same way one adopts another language. It seems this may have been the process at work with folk dance in the settlement house. See Desmond’s chapter “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies” in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance. 26. Examination of the recirculation of folk practices among American and European practitioners extends beyond the scope of this essay; however, see Daniel Walkowitz’s City Folk:  English Country Dance and the Politics of the Folk in Modern America (New York: New York University Press, 2010) for an example of how folk dance practices change over time in relationship to place and politics.

296   Jessica Ray Herzogenrath

Bibliography Addams, Jane. 2002. The Jane Addams Reader. Edited by Jean Bethke Elshtain. New York: Basic Books. Agnes Jones Cashman. 1901–​1989. Papers. Series 25/​5, Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, IL. Syllabus and Curriculum Notes for Advanced Folk Dance Class at Northwestern University, 1927–​1941. Box 11, Folders 21–​22.

A “Tough” Dance. 1902. American Mutoscope & Biography Company. Accessed through [http://​memory.loc.gov/​cgi-​bin/​query/​r?ammem/​varstg:@field(NUMBER(1894))], July 18, 2012. Bowery Waltz (Apache Dance). 1897. Thomas A. Edison. Accessed through [http://​ memory.loc.gov/​cgi-​bin/​query/​D?papr:45:./​temp/​~ammem_​v4LU::], July 18, 2012.

Burchenal, Elizabeth 1913. Dances of the People: A Second Volume of Folk-​Dances and Singing Games Containing Twenty-​Seven Folk-​Dances of England, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Switzerland. New York: G. Schirmer. Chambers, John Whiteclay, II. 2000. The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890–​1920. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press. Desmond, Jane C. 1997. “Embodying Difference:  Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies.” In Meaning in Motion:  New Cultural Studies of Dance. Edited by Jane C. Desmond, 29–​54. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dziewanowska, Ada. 1997. Polish Folk Dances and Songs:  A  Step-​ by-​ Step Guide. New York: Hippocrene Books. Evanston Press. January 21, 1905. Gordon, Lynn D. 2002. “Education and the Professions.” In A Companion to American Women’s History.. Edited by Nancy A. Hewitt, 227–​249. . Malden, MA: Blackwell. Greenwich House. 1916–​1937. Women’s and Girls’ Reports. Bobst Taiment Archives, New York University, New York, NY. Greenwich House. 1937. Social Department Report. Bobst Taiment Archives, New  York University, New York, NY. Gorst, Right Honorable Sir John. 1895. “Settlements in England and America.” In The Universities and the Social Problem: An Account of the University Settlements in East London. Edited by John M. Knapp. 1–​30. London: Rivington, Percival & Co. Hinman, Mary Wood. 1922. Hinman Gymnastic and Folk Dancing in Five Volumes: Gymnastic and Folk Dancing, Vol. 1, Solo Dances with Descriptions. New York, A.S. Barnes. Keller, Kate van Winkle, and Cyril Hendrickson. 1998. George Washington:  A  Biography in Social Dance. Sandy Hook, NJ: Hendrickson Group. McGerr, Michael. 2003. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–​1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Northwestern University Settlement Association General Administrative Records, 1892–​2000. Series 41/​1, Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, IL. Announcement for Polish Harvest Festival and Bazaar, 1941. Box 53 Folder 1. Northwestern University Settlement Association General Administrative Records, 1892–​2000. Series 41/​5, Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, IL. Attendance Records, 1895–​ 1905. Box 25, Folder 1.

Authenticity and Ethnicity    297 Northwestern University Settlement Association General Administrative Records. 1918–​ 1919. Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, IL. Girls’ Department Schedule Announcement. Box 24, Folder 10. Northwestern University Settlement Association General Administrative Records. 1913–​1929 Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, IL. Head Resident Reports. Box 4, Folders 5–​6. Northwestern University Settlement Association General Administrative Records. 1940. Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, IL. Vittum, Harriet. “Those Fifty Years: A Brief Story of Northwestern University Settlement Association for Its Organizers, Supporter, Workers and Friends.” Box 67, Folder 20. Peiss, Kathy. 1986. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-​of-​the-​Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Rauschenbusch, Walter. 1908. Christianity and the Social Crisis. New York: MacMillan. Redfield, Robert, Ralph Linton, and Melville Herksovits. 2002. “Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation.” In American Anthropology, 1921–​1945: Papers from the American Anthropologist. Edited by George W. Stocking Jr., 257–​ 262. Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press. Ripley, William Z. 1899. The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner. Simkhovitch, Mary Kingsbury. 1938. Neighborhood:  My Story of Greenwich House. New York: W.W. Norton. The Neighbor. 1899–​1926. Chicago: Neighborhood Guild. Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, IL. Northwestern University Settlement Association Thornton, John. 1998. Africa and Africans in the Formation of the Atlantic World, 1400–​1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tomko, Linda. 1996. “Fete Accompli: Gender, ‘Folk-​Dance,’ and Progressive-​Era Political Ideals in New  York City.” In Corporealities:  Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power. Edited by Susan Leigh Foster, 159–​182. London: Routledge. Tomko, Linda J. 1999. Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890–​1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Walkowitz, Daniel. 2010. City Folk: English Country Dance and the Politics of the Folk in Modern America. New York: New York University Press. Wukas, Mark. 1991. The Worn Doorstep: Informal History of Northwestern University Settlement Association, 1891–​1991. . Chicago: Northwestern University Settlement Association.

Chapter 13

A Folkl ori st ’ s View of “F ol k” a nd “Ethnic” Da nc e Three Ukrainian Examples Andriy Nahachewsky

For many people, “folk dance” and “ethnic dance” are roughly synonymous, used vaguely to identify colorful but marginal dance traditions. Notions and assumptions vary widely, causing confusion and misunderstanding among practitioners and academics alike. Outdated stereotypes and biases often persist unquestioned. This chapter explores the conceptual terrain of this field and proposes definitions that differentiate between the two terms and can be used cross-​culturally. I argue that it is sometimes desirable to associate the term “folk dance” specifically with dances of the peasantry (people in rural agricultural societies existing in many variations around the world), as well as dances inspired by peasant dancing. I propose that “ethnic dance” should be used to denote any dance in which cultural boundaries are actively engaged. Examples illustrate the implications of these suggestions.

Folk Dance The cultural baggage and multiple meanings connected with “folk dance” are infamous. Problems are evident, for example, in Gertrude Prokosch Kurath’s seminal article “Panorama of Dance Ethnology,” in which she attempts to survey the understanding of “folk” and “ethnic” dance among her colleagues (1960, 234–​236). Many of the definitions she reports are inconsistent and are simply indefensible today from a cross-​cultural perspective. In another important early article, “Folk Dance,” Joann Kealiinohomoku

Folkorist’s View of “Folk” Dance    299 explores a variety of descriptions and definitions of the term published in general surveys of dance history. She then observes wryly: We can summarize our findings by saying that, variously, folk dance is traditional, but that not all traditional forms are folk dance; we learn that it is nonvocational, but that sometimes it is vocational; we realize that it is communal, but that this is not always so; we are instructed that it is and that it is not ritually based. We have seen that the most widespread form of recreational dance in the United States—​modern popular dance—​fulfills all the basic criteria, only it is not considered folk dance. Strangely, in the United States, it is considered folk dance if a group of people perform the dances of some group other than their own, which eliminates the criterion of “national” or “racial.” Also, we cannot consider the degree of competence to distinguish folk dance from some other dance form, because many folk dances are difficult to do, may require much rehearsing, and there are gifted folk dance performers who qualify as artists. By this time we might well wash our hands of the whole affair, and say that if no one can agree on what constitutes folk dance, maybe the phenomenon is but an illusion and does not really exist. (1972, 385)

Consensus has probably not developed in the decades since these reviews were originally published. “[W]‌hat is meant by ‘folk dance’ among native English-​language speakers is not at all clear…. European and American dance scholars have debated varying definitions in their efforts to arrive at consensus on what that the term means, but no common definition has emerged and many avoid using the term” (Van Zile 2001, 37). Much of the discussion of these issues took place from the 1970s to the 1990s, and thus many of the sources referenced here were published during that period. The fact is that the term “folk dance” is used widely in popular speech, as well as by many dancers who claim to perform it. We explore here a historical core definition of folklore and folk dance, looking at several challenges and responses to them. I then elaborate on a number of features of a proposed solution. One basic definition is that “folk dances” are dances performed by peasants. This sense of the term is relatively common in older dance history surveys (Kirstein 1969 [1935], 115, 140, 176, 258; H’Doubler 1957 [1940], 17, 22; de Mille 1963, 46–​47; Raffé 1964, 185–​186; Sorell 1967, 45, 1981, 36). “Folk dance,” according to this definition, is roughly parallel to classic definitions of “folk song,” “folk medicine,” “folk art,” “folk architecture,” and many other genres of folklore (see Dorson 1972, 1–​5ff.).1 Peasants were the lower-​class village agriculturalists who generally produced the raw materials consumed by the nobility and city dwellers. Their cultures and dance traditions became very significant to intellectuals during the period of romanticism (in the late 1700s and early 1800s in Europe). Romantics perceived the lore of the peasantry as natural, ancient, and rooted in the land. For romantic intellectuals, these were all positive qualities. It was believed that peasant culture preserved the clearest remnants of the true primordial national spirit of their people, which city dwellers and members of the upper classes had unfortunately lost. The academic discipline of folklore originated in

300   Andriy Nahachewsky this nineteenth-​century context in Europe, as the study of peasant culture and “popular antiquities” of the lower classes. Folklore researchers’ overall goals were often connected with nation-​building projects. The customs and traditions of peasants became interesting to early anthropologists as well, whose discipline was also emerging at that time. Theories of social evolution popular at that time suggested that dance could be sorted into “primitive,” “folk,” and “art” as hierarchical categories. Primitive dance was reputedly danced by “savages,” folk dance by peasants, and art dance by people in civilized societies (see Dundes 1980 [1977], 2–​6; Jowitt 1985, 241; Kealiinohomoku 1997 [1970], 33–​37). These theories have all been seriously challenged over the past hundred years, though echoes remain.2 Academics generally now realize that the dances they study are not necessarily devolving survivals of more primitive stages of social evolution, not necessarily representations of some essential spirit of a nation, not always old, not unsophisticated, and not always performed by homogeneous and unself-​conscious racial groups (see Youngerman 1974; Buckland 1983; Oring 1986, 7–​15). “As scholars of dance and movement explore new ways of thinking through and with the body, there is no doubt that they will continue to challenge conventions …. critiquing evolutionary, colonial, and nationalist typologies (e.g.[,]‌classical, folk, ethnic)” (Reed 1998, 527). As discussed below, some schools of dance anthropologists and ethnochoreologists (scholars who study dances in their cultural contexts) have responded to these challenges by strongly adjusting their spheres of research and their terminology. Many other dance research communities, however, have changed more subtly. Soviet perspectives, for example, long included specific aspects of the evolutionary and colonial values that Reed rejects, and some publications by post-​Soviet authors continue to reflect these views. Further, most research across Europe (and beyond) has been funded by government-​run institutions, fostering an academic environment that supports continued nationalist thinking. Stronger continuity with historical paradigms is more characteristic of academic circles working in languages other than English, though not exclusively. The concept of peasantry has been updated in the twentieth century and stripped of its overly positive romantic mystique (and hopefully its pejorative connotations as well, at least in academic usage). Much of this work has been undertaken in the field of sociology. Peasant societies can be contrasted with other major social formations, such as hunter-​gatherers, nomads, and city dwellers. Teodor Shanin, for example, proposed an influential list of main characteristics of peasant societies. Peasants are family-​based agriculturalists using relatively low technology. They participate in relatively conservative cultures that are quite elaborate, with many specific beliefs and traditions. Peasant societies are generally situated in an underdog position compared to the elite and urban societies nearby (Shanin 1987 [1971], 2–​5). Agriculture developed some 10,000 years ago in human history and has employed the majority of this planet’s population for much of the time since then. Some one-​third of humanity today continues to till the land with relatively low levels of technology, living in somewhat tradition-​bound societies with varying features. “The spread of modern industrial society as a world-​wide phenomenon is

Folkorist’s View of “Folk” Dance    301 changing the conditions of life for the peasantry every day. It may be unwise, however, to expect any early disappearance of the peasants from the international scene” (Thorner 2008 [1968]). It remains very important to achieve increased understanding of the peasantry and of the complex transitions from peasantry to other social formations. Scholars interested in the actual dances of peasants may also use the term “peasant dance.” In the early conceptualization of folklorists, folkloric “texts” did not change over time, or changed very slowly.3 They believed that these texts were communally created and held, belonging to the whole group rather than any individual. They were convinced that folklore was transmitted directly and unself-​consciously from one generation to the next by observation and imitation. The early folklorists recognized that folkloric texts existed in variants rather than in any official, set form (Oring 1986, 1–​22). It was assumed that folk dances shared all these features with the other genres of folklore (Freidland 1998, 29–​32). Each of these core romantic assumptions grew into a rich theme of critical analysis in folklore studies over the twentieth century, effectively helping to reveal a wide range of characteristics of diverse traditional phenomena in various settings. Productive trends in folkloristics internationally have problematized group unity and communal action in contrast to individual agency. Furthermore, it is now normal for scholars to visualize cultural groups as more or less unstable, constantly interacting and mutating internally as well as in relation to others. Folklorists have critically examined issues of transmission and small group networking, increasingly exploring traditional lore in relation to official culture and commercial culture. Folklore has also been reexamined in the context of new technologies that allow and amplify personal communication. Folklorists have examined issues of variability, continuity and change, creativity, and psychology, among others, in the context of an expanding list of diverse kinds of lore that can be seen as traditional. English-​language academic circles have tended to be more radical in their rethinking of the older definitions of folklore and folk dance. On the one hand, some scholars argue that the term should be severely restricted or abandoned altogether. They are unsatisfied with the more subtle and incremental developments in the schools of folkloristics described previously. “Perhaps the word ‘folk’ is, as Charles Keil and Dave Harker have argued, … too loaded with nineteenth-​century misconceptions to be retained as part of scholarly vocabulary” (Buckland 1983, 329; cf. Keil 1978; Harker 1980, 1982). LeeEllen Freidland argues that the term is almost unusable today: “The term folk dance … is inextricably tied to the nineteenth-​century view of the folk as guardians of the pure national soul and folk culture as the repository of customs descended from ancient religious ritual … it is a historical term that refers to a particular interpretation of the history of human culture and expression” (1998, 32). Indeed, during the “explosion of dance studies” over the past twenty years, the limited use of the term “folk dance” in English-​language academic publications suggests that many scholars agree. For example, Susan Reed reviews numerous dance studies of the 1990s that engage with issues of politics, colonialism, class, nationalism, and gender. She rarely uses “folk dance” except in quotation marks, suggesting her discomfort with the term, or when describing it negatively (Reed 1998, 503ff.).

302   Andriy Nahachewsky In addition to complaints about lack of clarity and consistency (see the first quotation from Kealiinohomoku above) and inappropriate ideological connotations, a third problem with the early definition of folklore is that many items described as “folk” are actually not centrally based in peasant lore. In one example related to songs, Dave Harker analyzes the “folkloric” materials of Cecil Sharp, a monumental leader of the folk revival movement in England. He demonstrates in detail the scandalous fact that the performers from whom Sharp recorded his materials were not peasants and generally not even farmers; as singers, they were not particularly preserving ancient tunes at all, but rather mostly townsfolk heavily influenced by broadside song sheets, chapbooks, and music halls (1972, 223–​234). Harker does not propose to change the corpus of materials to be studied by folklorists, but rather the definition of folklore. I am not convinced by these arguments that we should always avoid the term “folk dance,” or that it must be universally decoupled from the concept of peasant culture. First, even if Cecil Sharp misrepresented his informants because of his romantic ideology, or parts of the New World never really had a peasant society, this does not mean that peasant societies don’t exist, or that peasant culture is less vital as a research field. Second, use of the term “folk” does not necessarily imply supporting romantic nationalist ideas. Most contemporary folklorists, like anthropologists and other social scientists, understand nations using some version of the concept of “imagined communities” popularized by Benedict Anderson (1991 [1983]) and others. They are well aware that various levels of group identity may be significant in any particular tradition. Some examples of lore are quite personal, others communicated and performed within family groups, communities, particular subcultures, regions, nations, and more global groupings. Major conceptual reformulations such as this are not unique to folklore studies, but are characteristic of most or all academic disciplines. Third, I agree that using the word “folk” does imply power structures and hegemony in the cultural formations involved in any social context, peasant or otherwise. However, use of the term does not imply endorsement or replication by the researcher (beyond issues of power inherent in all research engaging with other humans). Indeed, naming and studying marginalized groups is necessary to reveal their true situation, and folklorists may be unusually well prepared for counterhegemonic sensitivity and activism. A contrasting response to critiques of the old folklore concepts is to radically expand the sphere of “folklore” and “folk dance” to additional social groups and a wider range of texts. This approach is also designed to eliminate the historical preoccupation with ancient origins, national representation, and colonized classes. It is most characteristic of American folklore studies. Alan Dundes famously declared that “the folk” includes “any group of people whatsoever who share at least one cultural factor” (1965, 2, 1980 [1977], 1–​19; see Kealiinohomoku 1972, 381). In response to Charles Keil’s exhortation to abandon the concept of “folk” (1978, 264), Richard Dorson quickly rebutted with an argument that folkloristics has now grown to incorporate all social groupings, including agricultural villagers but also steelworkers, preachers, businessmen, tourists, the Supreme Court, and even folklorists themselves:  “No one is folklore free” (Dorson 1978, 267). These folklorists recognize that peasant societies are not the only ones with

Folkorist’s View of “Folk” Dance    303 interesting, informal, local expressive traditions. Relevant cultural (sub)groups can be defined by a wide variety of factors: location, history, shared experiences, ancestry, age, class, religion, customs, language, occupation, habits, health conditions, gender, ideology, hobbies, social networking preferences, and others. Any of these groups may well have distinct and significant traditions. Such groups may be large or small, compact or geographically dispersed, intensely integrated or linked by only a few shared factors (Dundes 1980 [1977], 1–​19; Oring 1986, 1; Georges and Jones 1995, 171). This broad approach to folklore is valuable in that it encourages the speaker to consider the cultural context and the community that participates in any kind of dancing. Generally, however, it is so inclusive that it doesn’t help us as an analytical category. All dances are performed by groups of people who share at least that particular dance, so it follows that there is no dance that isn’t folk dance. The term “vernacular dance” is recommended by some folklorists as a more equitable and open contemporary replacement for “folk dance” (see, e.g., Freidland 1987, 1998). I agree. Vernacular dance is that which is actually performed by the general population of a certain locality on a normal and informal basis. For many researchers interested in culturally specific dance, “vernacular dance” is a useful concept because it suggests a focus on traditional and popular dance in its cultural context, rather than the otherwise common biases toward formal, elite, mediated, professional choreographic activities. It is bound up less with the ideological assumptions of romanticism and is potentially unencumbered by the evolutionary, colonial, and nationalist biases to which contemporary cultural studies scholars are so sensitized. I am convinced that the concept of “vernacular dance” has great utility for many researchers.4 I agree enough with the previously mentioned critics of the term “folk” to discourage use of this term for new cultural contexts in which the lingering echoes of romanticism do not apply. In particular, I prefer the term “vernacular dance” rather than “folk dance” for many of the rich urban dance traditions experienced and documented around the world. In short, I propose a middle-​ground response to the debate about “folklore” and “folk dance.” I believe that it is possible to define these terms in a way that is conceptually useful and also linked to popular perceptions. The proposed solution is a use of “folk dance” that refers to the dances performed by the peasantry plus any dances actively derived from them. This last definition expands upon the first one and adds peasant-​inspired dances, even if they are performed in cities and by nonpeasants. This conceptualization is not new, but was expressed or implied by dance writers throughout the twentieth century (Kinney and Kinney 1936 [1914], 164–​165; Martin 1965 [1939], 167; H’Doubler 1957 [1940], 24–​26; Terry 1956, 214–​215; de Mille 1963, 166–​172; Clarke and Vaughan 1977, 144; Sorell 1981, 255, 397; Cass 1993, 43), including in literally hundreds of “folk dance” manuals for teachers. A great deal of nonpeasant dance activity has been actively inspired by peasant dance over the past 200  years. Starting in the1800s, enthusiasts and researchers in Europe didn’t only study peasant traditions; they also learned the dance forms themselves and imitated them in new contexts. In many cases the established peasant dances seemed to be mutating or dying away, and the activists felt it was important to

304   Andriy Nahachewsky try to save them from extinction. Since then folk dance preservation movements have been organized in practically all countries across Europe, in North America, and on other continents (see Lange 1980; Freidland 1998, 32–​36). Today some have a strong national orientation, other revival movements are recreational or educational, and still others are committed to producing spectacular art (Nahachewsky 1995, 2006, 2008, 2011). Because participants in these movements generally want to emphasize continuity between their activities and those of the peasants, they use the same term to refer to both the original traditions and their revivals/​recontextualizations. For them, all of this is “folk dance.” Indeed, participants in these traditions may well be the strongest proponents anywhere of continued use of the term. I argue that this is appropriate, because even though their reflective folk dance may be a relatively new phenomenon and is typically urban, it necessarily carries with it some flavor of romantic ideology. Even while academics have generally moved on, nineteenth-​century romantic worldviews have had a deep, lingering impact on popular culture in the West. Sensitivity to those historical concepts is essential to understanding the meaning and the forms of hundreds of thousands of these dance events worldwide over the past century and today. My proposed definition of “folk dance” combines two halves: peasant dance and reflective folk dance. Elsewhere I have proposed the term “reflective dance” for dances during which the participants are engaged with the past:  they make reference to earlier performances in the tradition (Nahachewsky 2001, 2006, 2009, 2011). It is intended as an umbrella concept to include “revival,” “recontextualization,” “reconstruction,” “revitalization,” and numerous related processes. In reflective folk dance traditions, the participants are inspired by peasant dancing, though they are often not peasants themselves. To a greater or lesser degree, the dancers are pretending to be peasants. Numerous techniques are used to invoke a peasant context in these performances: costumes, movement, music, stage sets, program notes, and so forth. In addition to the actual setting of the performance, we can speak of an “imputed setting” in these dances, the peasants’ earlier location and time (Nahachewsky 2009). Another important characteristic of the concept “folk dance” is that it should be understood as a fuzzy set, rather than as a discretely bound category. The term accommodates many gray areas. One of the potential sources of this fuzziness is the concept of peasantry upon which it is based. Scholars of peasant cultures generally make it clear that the theoretical concept of peasantry is an idealized model, and many societies in the world exist that exhibit some of the characteristics of “pure peasants,” but not all (see Shanin 1987 [1971], 5–​9). The second half of the concept “folk dance” also has graduated boundaries. Reflective dance activities can vary in the intensity of the inspiration from a peasant source. In some reflective dances all the participants are deeply focused on carefully reconstructing a peasant dance. In other situations only a few of the people are concerned with this goal, or they only want to revive certain limited aspects of some earlier setting, or the idea is relevant only part of the time. “Folk dance” is a matter of degree. When considering the various preferences of various circles of researchers, it is interesting to note a connection with their environment in each case. Romantics were

Folkorist’s View of “Folk” Dance    305 working during an era of large empires and the beginning of powerful nation-​building projects. Scholars in Central and Eastern Europe support use of older definitions because these continue to be relevant in the particular cultural contexts they study. Correspondingly, scholars based in regions where the peasantry is insignificant prefer to adjust the definition of “folklore” to center more on cultural phenomena observable in their midst. Each of these responses can be seen as generally appropriate. I recognize that my own proposed definition is also situational, reflecting the character of the phenomena that I work with and my training. I remain convinced that this definition is useful for understanding many cultural contexts. Ukrainian dance is but one example of these. It is important to note that the proposed definition for “folk dance” is linked with emic perspectives, particularly in the case of reflective folk dance. Whereas the definition once expressed the armchair perspectives of nineteenth-​century ideologues, confident in their own wisdom and uninterested in the worldview of their subjects, it now points increasingly to the perspectives of the participants in the folk dance movements themselves. Unlike most peasants, reflective folk dancers are often interested in questions of authenticity, antiquity, representing pure cultural traditions, connection with the true spirit of a people, finding a more natural way of expressing themselves, and close community connections, all concerns echoing romantic perceptions. This conceptual move to include the dancing communities’ views when defining terms is not coincidental. It is consistent with important developments in the social sciences over many decades: the eclipse of “realist ethnography” (Van Maanen 1988, 45–​72; Spradley 1979, 3–​5), modernist increases in “reflexivity” (Giddens 1991; Aull Davies 2008; Wolcott 2008, 137–​173), “indigenous ethnography,” and cross-​cultural perspectives in general. As discussed in the following section, concern for participants’ perspectives is important in our treatment of “ethnic dance” as well.

Ethnic Dance Like “folk dance,” “ethnic dance” is understood differently by different people.5 In our usage, we often see an overlap among “folk dance” activities and “ethnic dance” activities. I argue that the two terms should be based on different foundations, and the overlap is only partial. A key to defining “ethnic dance” for our purposes is to connect it to the concept of “ethnicity” in general. A specialization has evolved in the social sciences since the mid-​ twentieth century, called “ethnic studies,” which has produced a large literature. There is no absolute consensus on the definition of ethnicity, but the core meaning is fairly well established. An “ethnic group” is generally acknowledged to be a number of people who think of themselves as a cultural group and perceive a shared ancestry, homeland, history, and culture. The latter typically emphasizes language, religion, and traditions (see Schermerhorn 1970, 12, cited in Sollors 1996, xii; Isajiw 1985 [1974]; Parsons 1975, 53–​63;

306   Andriy Nahachewsky Driedger 1996, 2–​24).6 “Ethnic dance” can be the dance component of these shared cultural traditions. Some ethnic groups are small, whereas others are large; some are relatively discrete and isolated, whereas others exist in close contact with neighbors. Some of those neighbors live in adjacent homelands, while others might share the very same space, so that their populations intermingle geographically. The populations of some ethnic groups live in their homeland, whereas others have moved away and thus live in a diaspora. Because all humans are part of one culture or another, according to this definition, all dance is ethnic dance. This is precisely the point of Joann Kealiinohomoku’s famous and controversial article “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance” (1997 [1970]). She argues that ballet belongs primarily to Western culture, and since Western culture is an ethnicity—​a specific cultural group based on elements of shared ancestry, homeland, history, and culture—​then ballet is ethnic dance: Consider for example, how Western is the tradition of the proscenium stage, the usual three part performance which lasts for about two hours, our star system, our use of curtain calls and applause, and our usage of French terminology. Think how culturally revealing it is to see the stylized Western customs enacted on the stage, such as the mannerisms from the age of chivalry, courting, weddings, christenings, burial and mourning customs … . Our aesthetic values are shown in the long line of lifted, extended bodies, in the total revealing of legs, of small heads and tiny feet for women, in slender bodies for both sexes, and in the coveted airy quality which is best shown in the lifts and carryings of the female … . The ethnicity of ballet is revealed also in the kinds of flora and fauna which appear regularly. Horses and swans are esteemed fauna. In contrast we have no tradition of esteeming for theatrical purposes pigs, sharks, eagles, buffalo or crocodiles even though these are indeed highly esteemed animals used in dance themes elsewhere in the world … . The question is not whether ballet reflects its own heritage. The question is why we seem to need to believe that ballet has somehow become a-​cultural. Why are we afraid to call it an ethnic form? (1997 [1970], 30–​31)

The ballet community, however, has generally been very uncomfortable with being described as “ethnic.” The answer to her rhetorical last question is that ethnicity has long been associated with lower status. “Dominant groups rarely define themselves as ethnics” (Royce 1982, 3; Sollors 1996, xiv). Kealiinohomoku actively challenges the hegemony of ballet with her question. I share Kealiinohomoku’s cross-​cultural anthropological perspective, though I continue to aspire to a conceptualization of “ethnic dance” that allows us to usefully differentiate certain dance activities from others. One promising solution lies in additional insights from ethnic studies. Earlier scholars of ethnicity concentrated mostly on the actual cultural content that was shared by the members of any given cultural group. Increasingly since the 1960s, however, scholars have appreciated the fact that the

Folkorist’s View of “Folk” Dance    307 perception of shared culture is at least as important for group formation as any actual shared forms. Typically only a few elements of cultural content are selected from the entire cultural repertoire of a group to become symbols of intragroup unity and intergroup differentiation. Furthermore, these symbols can and do change over time. Frederick Barth (1969), in a very influential article, observed that the perceived cultural boundaries between groups in contact are often more important for defining them than actual cultural traits. Though the similarities and differences may shift as the cultures change, as long as they continue to maintain symbolic boundaries between themselves, the two cultural identities will remain distinct, and their ethnicity will remain salient (see also Sollors 1996, xxi–​xxv). Barth’s concern for boundaries is particularly relevant in the many dance traditions that communicate identity among people of different groups. Indeed, this is the key to the definition of ethnic dance proposed here. For our purposes, “ethnic dance” is dance that makes explicit reference to any specific culture in a cross-​cultural situation. It is dance that engages cultural boundaries. The focus on symbolic cultural boundaries is particularly relevant for dance, because the actual content of dance traditions changes so easily and dance is so notoriously ephemeral. The proposed definition is very inclusive, and a huge variety of dancing can be called “ethnic.” Importantly, this concept of “ethnic dance” does not make reference to the peasantry.7 Also, this definition specifically avoids any mention of high or low status (appreciating that cultural boundaries are often loaded with a variety of status implications). Though much dance in the West reflects a specific culture in a cross-​cultural context, certain dancing activities are engaged more centrally with this issue than others. In other words, “ethnic dance” is a matter of degree, rather than a discrete category. The degree of importance of this factor can be called the “ethnic salience” of the dance. To imagine the various ways a dance can be ethnically salient, we might proceed by envisioning the opposite:  a dance that makes as few references to cultural boundaries as possible. This would have to be a dance event in which all aspects and references are contained within one particular culture. George Balanchine’s Agon might be proposed as an example, performed by the New York City Ballet at the Lincoln Center. The dance is usually experienced entirely within dominant Western culture in its contemporary American variant. “It is a plotless exploration of the musical structure created by Stravinsky. In it we see one of the truest images of the classic academic dance in the later half of our century … it belongs, essentially, to New York itself ” (Clarke and Crisp 1981, 67). The dance content focuses on the beauty of abstract line, shape, and rhythm.8 We can imagine that this dance is part of an indigenous artistic style of Western culture, performed by dancers trained inside this same culture, watched by spectators who are also insiders, and reviewed by later analysts who are likewise comfortably and unself-​ consciously situated inside Western culture. When performed in this situation, Agon is not ethnically salient. Many other Western elite choreographies, however, do make specific references to some other culture, whether its imputed setting is ancient Greece, as in Martha Graham’s Night Journey, Renaissance Verona in Romeo and Juliette, or a Polovtsian camp on the

308   Andriy Nahachewsky steppes of Central Asia in Fokine’s Prince Igor. This type of reference in the dance content pushes it somewhat into the realm of ethnic dance, even if the dancers, spectators, and later analysts are all Western insiders. On the other hand, if Agon were to be performed at the Lincoln Center by guest artists from a ballet company from China, the dance experience would feature a different flavor and interest that increases its ethnic salience. Again, if the same choreography was performed by the New York City Ballet, but while on a tour to Nairobi, cross-​cultural issues would come into play. Using similar logic, the purpose for dancing, the dance type, the cultural identity of the performers, the cultural identity of the spectators, the context for remembering a performance, and even the identity of later analysts can increase ethnic salience if they introduce consideration of cultural differences into the overall dance experience. Figure 13.1 represents the various factors that may intensify the ethnic salience of a dance event. In practice, each factor operates independently, and a typical scenario includes some combination of two, three, or more factors that make the dance more or less ethnically salient. Furthermore, each factor operates as a continuum, with multiple intermediary stages between the two extremes. For example, a fraction of the spectators may be outsiders, or the goal of symbolizing national identity might be a secondary purpose rather than a dominant one, and so forth. The most intensely ethnically salient dance events are potent sites of interaction involving two or more cultures. Such situations do not require all factors to be engaged, but often two or three, far down the continuum into cross-​cultural territory. Other examples of ethnic dance in Western culture are a wedding dance in Chicago at which the Greek American celebrants dance specifically to mark their particular identity to themselves and their non-​Greek guests. The Chinese dance in the Nutcracker ballet is clearly an ethnic dance, because the choreographers, performers, and audience all ritual, recreational or artistic meanings dominant

non-ethnic dance

(entirely inside one culture)

national meaning dominant

PURPOSE

dance type indigenous performers insiders spectators all insiders later analysts insiders

FORM

CONTEXT

dance type foreign performers outsiders

CONTEXT

spectators all outsiders

CONTEXT

later analysts outsiders

Figure 13.1  Factors intensifying the salience of ethnicity.

ethnically salient dance

(cultural boundaries highlighted)

Folkorist’s View of “Folk” Dance    309 agree that the dance represents a distant cultural group (albeit in a very stylized way). The same is true when a local traditional dance group performs for foreign tourists in Guadalajara City in Mexico. In this last case, it may be that many of the participants think the audience is distant and exotic, rather than the dance. The concept of ethnic salience does not have to be anchored in our dominant Western culture, but can operate in either direction. If the world’s populations lived in isolated cultures that rarely interacted, then it would be easy to imagine that ethnic dance would be a minor concern. Conversely, if globalization ever becomes fully realized, ethnicity will cease to exist. However, because cross-​cultural contact has been very prevalent and continues to grow in frequency and intensity, it can be argued that ethnic dance is becoming increasingly important in our world.

Examples This section describes three Ukrainian dances that have different positioning within the categories we are exploring. A hutsulka in a Ukrainian village is proposed as a folk dance that is not particularly ethnic. A stage choreography portraying a soccer game is proposed as an ethnic dance that is not folk. A Hopak performed during an international concert tour is presented as both folk and ethnic. (Links to videos of these dances can be found at www.ukrdance.ca. Many other Ukrainian dances can be seen on the Internet by going to YouTube and typing “Ukrainian dance,” as well as at www.ukrainiandance. org.) The first example is a hutsulka danced at a wedding in the village of Molodiatyne in the Ivano-​Frankivs’k Province in western Ukraine in 1992.9 The hutsulka was performed at the home of the bride’s parents. They rented a large tent for their yard for the wedding. About 60 of the wedding guests and the musicians fit inside. A wooden floor made the dance area cleaner, more level, and better for dancing. Music and dance continued for two days. Neighbors and family members helped prepare several large meals for the festivities during this period. On Saturday about midnight, several of the cooks had finished their work for the evening. They were also wedding guests and came out from the kitchens to dance for a while. The musicians played a hutsulka melody, and about 10 dancers joined in a circle to start the dance. After rotating to the left and the right for some time, the circle broke up and the dancers joined in smaller circles and couples. Clasping both arms, they continued to turn in pairs, sometimes quickly, other times more slowly, depending on their energy level and focus. Children danced nearby. The dance lasted for some 15 minutes, while other wedding guests sat, drank. and socialized. The Molodiatyne hutsulka is clearly a folk dance, for the simple reason that the villagers of Molodiatyne fit Shanin’s definition of peasantry quite well. For the villagers, it was a normal part of having fun and celebrating the marriage of their loved ones. They were thinking about the bridal families and how good it is to celebrate with them on this

310   Andriy Nahachewsky important day. They blessed the marriage with their participation and were seen dancing by the family. The participants were not particularly interested in authenticity at this event, and the dance form looked similar to previous hutsulky mostly as a matter of inertia (Harasymchuk 2008, 200–​222, 477–​545). For them, the dance was “normal” and the “natural” thing to do. This is a fine example of vernacular dance in that area. The hutsulka was not an ethnic dance in this context, because it did not engage any cultural boundaries. All the wedding guests lived within that local culture, a western Ukrainian rural community. They were not thinking about representing their culture as they danced. It is perhaps only because I, an outsider from Canada, attended the wedding and recorded the dance on my video camera (and because I describe the dance to other outsiders) that the dance has now become part of any cross-​cultural experience. The dance event itself is not so much ethnic as our perspective is ethnicizing. In cases like this, clearly, ethnic salience is “in the eye of the beholder.” The second example is The Match, performed onstage by the grade 8/​9 Ukrainian dance class at the Dance Unlimited studio in Edmonton, Canada, in 2010. Choreographer Doug Rachinski based the choreography loosely on The Soccer Match by Igor Moiseyev (Moiseyev 1989 [1980]). In Rachinski’s dance the performers portray a referee and two soccer teams during a game. Girls play on one team, boys on the other. After the coin toss, the dancers move energetically around the stage, sometimes in team formations, at other times engaging individually with their opponents. The choreography involves many pantomimic elements and numerous dance moves suggesting the sport. After a penalty, a goal, and the awarding of a trophy to the girls’ team, the dancers and the referee dash off the stage. The Match does not qualify as a folk dance because it is not performed by peasants, but rather by urban adolescents in a Canadian city. Neither is it inspired by peasant tradition. The dance is not marked by costumes imitating peasant dress, and the imputed setting is a soccer pitch somewhere in contemporary Ukraine. Perhaps a few of the dance motifs make reference to the staged folk dance tradition, but this connection is relatively weak. On the other hand, The Match was created to be quite ethnically salient. Moiseyev’s earlier choreography presented Soviet (Russian-​centered) culture, though the dance is very actively Ukrainianized in Rachinski’s rendition. Soccer is a very popular game in Ukraine, and winning teams can be strong national symbols. In the Dance Unlimited production, the teams wear blue and yellow uniforms, respectively. These are the colors of the Ukrainian national flag (banned during the Soviet period) and strong national symbols. The sound track used for the dance features a number of well-​recognized Ukrainian tunes. On one occasion The Match was danced during the year-​end concert for the dance studio, performed among choreographies in jazz, tap, ballet, and other dance styles (Dance Unlimited 2010). Even though this group was specifically designated as a Ukrainian dance class, and in spite of the intentions of the choreographer, it is possible that some of the Canadian audience members were not very sensitive to its ethnic symbolism. The concert announcers introduced the dance simply as a soccer match. In this situation, the ethnicity of the performance was perhaps not dominant. On another occasion, however,

Folkorist’s View of “Folk” Dance    311 the ethnic salience of the dance was clearer. It was performed at the grandstand show of the Ukrainian Pysanka Festival in Vegreville, Alberta, a popular, highly ethnic celebration. The audience members reacted strongly and positively to the dance, partly because it was performed well, but largely because they enjoyed its novel, contemporary, playful, and very Ukrainian symbolism. The third example is a hopak, the “national dance of Ukraine.” I focus here on the Hopak choreographed by Pavlo Virsky and performed by the Ukrainian State Folk Dance Ensemble bearing his name during their Canadian tour in 2010. This composition has been performed literally thousands of times by this ensemble and has been imitated by others. Videos of the dance are periodically posted on YouTube. The hopak is thought to have evolved in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an improvised dance performed recreationally by Cossacks in their military camps. It seems hopaks were most often performed as solos or in pairs, involving jumps, squats, spins, and untold other moves. “The Cossacks were especially merry as they returned from their military campaigns. When they returned to their base at Sich, they walked around the streets for several days, enjoying endless cannon and musket blasts, dancing and singing happily, leading a throng of musicians and singers, everywhere telling stories of their military feats and prowess, and endlessly dancing—​and in those dances performing all kinds of figures” (Evarnitskii 1892, 295)…. And they danced like no-​one else on earth: all day the music would play, and all day they’d dance, and urge the musicians on: Play [musicians] play! See, I’ll throw my feet up way behind my back So the world will be amazed at what a Cossack I am! (Humeniuk 1963, 93–​94)

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the hopak shifted from the exclusively male military encampments to villages and became a mixed gender dance of the peasantry. Verbal references to the hopak as well as occasional information about its music and general character date back to its first centuries. The first relatively complete ethnographic description of the dance form was not written until 1911 and was published several years later by Vasyl’ Verkhovynets’ (1968 [1919], 97). This particular hopak example, however, is not a peasant dance. It is part of a reflective folk dance event, staged for nonpeasant contexts by trained urban performing artists. The hopak was first performed on stage in plays portraying life in Ukrainian villages in the first part of the nineteenth century. These dramas were mounted in a spirit of romanticism and connected with the Ukrainian nation-​building movement that was growing in momentum at that time. By the end of the 1800s the hopak was established as the most popular staged folk dance in Ukraine. It was performed countless times in dramatic productions and sometimes in other theatrical contexts. The hopak was connected with the ethnographic region of Poltava, or more generally with Central Ukraine (Humeniuk 1963, 199–​213). “Virsky’s Hopak,” as it is commonly known, has become a classic Ukrainian staged dance. Creating the work around 1957, Virsky built upon the well-​established staged

312   Andriy Nahachewsky tradition of the hopak, which invariably involved a large number of couples (24 pairs in Virsky’s standard performances). The dance typically starts at a fast tempo, featuring the dancers swirling around the stage as they enter, followed by a mass couple section. The central part of the dance involves male group segments and female group segments. Hopak choreographies invariably involve a long series of acrobatic tricks, performed mostly by male soloists and small groups. Various fast spins by males and females are characteristic, as well as diverse male squatting steps and leaps, including the signature “split jumps.” These “solo steps” are visually supported by the remainder of the cast in a large semicircle or other formations behind the soloists. The dance typically ends on a very fast tempo, with a frenetic combination of moves in unison by the entire cast, leading to a sudden, climactic final pose facing out at the audience. Virsky’s innovations in the choreography included an interesting asymmetrical entrance, beautiful flow and dynamics in the composition, crisp transitions, uniform costumes, and brilliant technique and polish by the corps. As a fully professional ensemble with advanced ballet training, the Ukrainian State Folk Dance Ensemble is famous for its technical precision as well as its virtuosic solos. The troupe has performed in dozens of countries over many decades, has survived the fall of the Soviet Union, and continues to make successful international tours today (cf. Boryms’ka 1974, 48, 116–​133). Figure 13.2 shows the Hopak performed by the Cheremosh Ukrainian Dance Company of Edmonton, Canada. Regardless of its spectacular components and its long and significant theatrical legacy, Virsky’s Hopak is rightfully called a folk dance, because the choreographer’s intention was to make reference to Ukrainian peasant dancing, and audiences generally continue to view the dance with this understanding. The male costumes include red and black embroidered shirts and wide pants called sharovary. The women wear embroidered blouses, wreaths of flowers on their heads, characteristic split skirts called plakhty, and sleeveless jackets called zhupany, all reflecting nineteenth-​century peasant festive clothing in central Ukraine. Peasants wore red, black, brown, green, or yellow dyed boots, but red ones became characteristic for hopaks on stage over a hundred years ago. The

Figure  13.2  Hopak performed by the Cheremosh Ukrainian Dance Company, Edmonton, Canada, 2005. Artistic Director, Mykola Kanevets. Cheremosh also continues to include Virsky’s Hopak as part of its repertoire.

Folkorist’s View of “Folk” Dance    313 core melody for Virsky’s Hopak also clearly reflects documented peasant melodies for this dance (Humeniuk 1972, 42–​51). In this case the music is orchestrated and played by a small symphony orchestra. Many of the movements for the dance are also connected with village culture, though the link here is much more tenuous. In spite of the lack of historical documentation and a very strong stylization in movement, many performers and audience members are comfortable in their belief that the squatting steps, turns, stamps, and leaps have traditional roots. Virsky’s Hopak should be considered a folk dance insofar as some of its physical features have peasant origins, but especially because they are experienced by performers and audiences through lingering romantic perceptions about authenticity, peasant heritage, national spirit, antiquity, and de-​emphasis on change.10 The same is true for hundreds of other hopak choreographies performed around the world every year, watched by Ukrainian and non-​Ukrainian audiences alike. Choreographers have some latitude when creating a new hopak composition, but if they stray too far from the general format and the accepted costumes, music, or lexicon, they are vulnerable to audience criticism. Such a hopak may be challenged as not “authentic.” Insofar as Virsky’s Hopak is performed in contexts in which some audience members have non-​Ukrainian identity and/​or people receive the dance in a comparative frame of reference, then it can be considered an ethnic dance. The hopak enjoys wide recognition internationally as an exciting and colorful Ukrainian dance. As a national symbol, the dance communicates positive energy, youthfulness, joy, virtuosity, discipline, and pride. Virsky’s Hopak, performed in concert halls in the United States and Canada, certainly has strong ethnic salience. The significance of differences between folk dances and ethnic dances can be seen when imagining an audience’s reactions after watching both The Match and Virsky’s Hopak. Audiences may well consider technique, virtuosity, and presentation when evaluating both dances. When they think about the Hopak, however, they are likely to add references to some imagined peasant original, engaging with questions of authenticity and fidelity to the tradition. These factors may strongly influence their appreciation of the dance. Such important issues for the folk dance are simply not relevant to The Match.

Notes 1. Freidland notes, however, that the term “folk dance” appeared somewhat later than these other “folk” compound terms (1987, 213–​214). 2. It is important to remember that early definitions of “folklore” and “folk dance” were created by intellectuals rather than by the people whose dances were being described. There was always a sense of “otherness” to the concept (and also a feeling of condescension). Here, “folk dance” can foreground this characteristic to cover all kinds of dancing by people in other cultures, rather than ours. This is related to a lingering common notion of “folk dance” as the dance of anyone except members of Western elite culture (see, e.g., de Mille 1963, 166–​172; Cass 1993, 49). It is associated with lower classes and extended more generally to “lower cultures.”

314   Andriy Nahachewsky “Apparently, one pan-​human trait is to divide the world into “we” and “they.” The Greeks did this when “they” [non-​Greeks] were called barbarians. Similarly, the Romans called [non-​Romans] “they”, i.e. pagans, Hawaiians call “they”, kanaka’e, and Hopis call [non-​Hopis] bahana. All of these terms imply not only foreign [beings] but creatures who are uncouth, unnatural, ignorant and, in short, less than human. The yardstick for measuring humanity, of course, is the “we.” “We” are always good, civilized, superior. (Kealiinohomoku 1997 [1970], 32–​33)” In practice, people in Western culture who use “folk dance” in this way often mean to separate ballet and modern dance into a separate and higher category. This ethnocentric usage is not viable as a scholarly or cross-​cultural concept. 3. Agnes de Mille expresses a belated romantic view of the peasants and peasant dance when she makes these assertions: “The peasant dances in existence throughout Europe today are probably more or less what they were a thousand years ago, and use the same basic patterns” (1963, 46); “We know exactly what these old dances were like. Folk dances change very slowly” (1963, 47). Similarly, Arnold Haskell is confident that the East European kolo tradition is 3,000 years old (1960, 30). Many other remnants of romantic perspectives can be found in the literature. Such claims should be treated with skepticism by specialists today. 4. The word “vernacular” has Latin roots (vernaculus = homeborn, native). It has traditionally been used in linguistics: “using a language or dialect native to a region or country, rather than a literary, cultured or foreign language” (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary,). The adjective has also been commonly adopted in the field of architecture to identify buildings that are (locally, traditionally, noncommercially) constructed by the people who will use them (Oliver 1997). It has also been used in numerous other spheres of culture, including dance (Stearns and Stearns 1964, xiv; Freidland 1987, 214–​215). Vernacular dance implies “the local tradition.” Vernacular culture is “native” in that it either actually originates locally or has become well internalized. Vernacular dance is “integral to the everyday life and beliefs of a given group of people” (Freidland 1987, 215). It refers to common types of dancing in a specific local culture, in a particular place and time. These groups may be peasants, urbanites, or other social groupings. From the perspective of insiders in this culture, this type of dancing is seen as “normal,” “natural,” “unmarked,” and “unremarkable.” 5. See Raffé’s dictionary for a survey of definitions of “ethnic dance” in which the author himself seems confused about and critical of its use (1964, 169). In other publications touching on the general subject, authors avoid the terms “ethnic” and “folk” dance entirely (Kinney and Kinney 1936 [1914]; Haskell 1960; de Mille 1963; Sorell 1967, 1981; Clarke and Vaughan 1977). “Ethnic dance” is also often (mis)used to identify dance of others as opposed to our dances. The implication is almost always that ours are somehow better. “As a catchall term, ‘ethnic dance’ carries a heavy load of condescension. In America, it’s often used to mean ‘other’—​in other words, not part of the predominantly white mainstream of Western theatrical dance” (Jowitt 1985, 241). In our attempt at a cross-​cultural perspective, we must reject this ethnocentric bias. 6. Sollors 1996 is a good introductory survey of the discipline, with an American focus. 7. Many peasant events are not cross-​cultural experiences. Rather, all the participants live inside the same culture. According to our definitions, these situations are “folk” but not “ethnic” dances. On other occasions, peasant celebrations do involve intercultural contact.

Folkorist’s View of “Folk” Dance    315 8. Admittedly, however, even Agon is not a perfect example. The title refers to an ancient Greek concept, and Stravinsky’s music was inspired by a seventeenth-​century French dance manual. 9. More complete video documentation of the wedding of Ivan and Halia Zhupnyk is preserved in the Bohdan Medwidsky Ukrainian Folklore Archive, University of Alberta, UF1998.22.v1030. 10. A video produced for a North American tour of the Virsky Ensemble is entitled The Spirit of Ukraine, aptly illustrating the continued use of the romantic idea of “national spirit” when marketing the dance (Oleksiuk-​Baker 1998).

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Folkorist’s View of “Folk” Dance    317 Symposium Proceedings: Traditional Dance and Its Historical Sources: Creative Processes in Dance, edited by Irene Loutzaki and Frank Hall, 125–​143. Istanbul: Dans Müsik Kültür Folklore Dogru, Bogazici University Press. Republished in Yearbook for Traditional Music 33 (2001): 17–​28. Nahachewsky, Andriy. 2006. “Shifting Orientations in Dance Revivals: From ‘National’ to ‘Spectacular’ in Ukrainian Canadian Dance.” In Narodna umjetnost: Croatian Journal of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 161–​178. Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 43/​1. Nahachewsky, Andriy. 2008. “Folk Dance Revival Strategies.” Ethnologies: Journal of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada 30, no. 1: 41–​57. Nahachewsky, Andriy. 2009. “The Concept of ‘Imputed Setting’ in Heritage Dance.” In Proceedings of the 25th Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology, edited by Mohd Anis Md Nor, Elsie Ivancich Dunin, and Anne von Bibra Wharton, 100–​106. Kuala Lumpur: Cultural Centre University of Malaya, Ministry of Information, Communication and Culture of Malaysia, International Council for Traditional Music Study Group on Ethnochoreology. Nahachewsky, Andriy​. 2011. Ukrainian Dance: A Cross-​Cultural Approach. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press. Oleksiuk-​ Baker, Myroslava, producer/​ director. 1998. Virsky Ukrainian National Dance Company: The Spirit of Ukraine. VHS. Toronto: Encore Productions. Oliver, Paul, ed. 1997. Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Oring, Elliott. 1986. “On the Concepts of Folklore.” In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction, edited by Elliott Oring, 1–​22. Logan: Utah State University Press. Parsons, Talcott. 1975. “Some Theoretical Considerations on the Nature and Trends of Change of Ethnicity.” In Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, edited by Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, 53–​83. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Raffé, W.G., assisted by M. E. Purdon. 1964. Dictionary of the Dance. New York: A.S. Barnes. Reed, Susan. 1998. “The Politics and Poetics of Dance.” Annual Review of Anthropology. 27: 503-​532. Royce, Anya Peterson. 1982. Ethnic Identity:  Strategies of Diversity. Bloomington:  Indiana University Press. Schermerhorn, R. A. 1970. Comparative Ethnic Relations:  A  Framework for Theory and Research. New York: Random House. Shanin, Teodor. 1987 [1971]. “Introduction: Peasantry as a Concept.” In Peasants and Peasant Societies:  Selected Readings. 2nd ed., edited by Teodor Shanin, 1–​11. New  York:  Basil Blackwell. Sollors, Werner, ed. 1996. Theories of Ethnicity:  A  Classical Reader. Washington Square: New York University Press. Sorell, Walter. 1967. The Dance Through the Ages. New York: Grosset and Dunlap. Sorell, Walter​. 1981. Dance in Its Time: The Emergence of an Art Form. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/​Doubleday. Spradley, James P. 1979. The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Stearns, Marshall, and Jean Stearns. 1964. Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance. New York: Macmillan. Terry, Walter. 1956. The Dance in America. New York, Evanston, and London: Harper & Row. Thorner, Daniel. 2008 [1968]. “Peasantry.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. http://​www.encyclopedia.com (accessed October 20, 2012).

318   Andriy Nahachewsky www.ukrainiandance.org www.ukrdance.ca Van Maanen, John. 1988. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Zile, Judy. 2001. Perspectives on Korean Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Verkhovynets’, Vasyl’. 1968 [1919]. Teoriia ukrains’koho narodnoho tantsiu [Theory of Ukrainian folk dance]. 4th ed. Kyiv: Mystetstvo. Wolcott, Harry F. 2008 [1999]. Ethnography: A Way of Seeing. Lanham, New York, Toronto, Plymouth, UK: Altamira Press. Youngerman, Suzanne. 1974. “Curt Sachs and His Heritage:  A  Critical Review of ‘World History of the Dance’ with a Survey of Recent Studies That Perpetuate His Ideas.” CORD News 6, no 2: 6–​19.

Chapter 14

The Jar abe Tapatío Imagining Race, Nation, Class, and Gender in 1920s Mexico Gabriela Mendoza-​G arcia

Introduction The stage was set. The curtain was rising. The China Poblana, a symbol of the ideal, virtuous Mexican woman, was ready to perform. She gently held either side of her heavily, sequined skirt that was adorned with images and colors of the Mexican nation. Her braids were pinned upon her head, while a red-​toned Mexican shawl or rebozo was wrapped around her shoulder. She wore a peasant blouse delicately embroidered along the collar and sleeve. Her partner smiled at her as he stood dressed as the Mexican cowboy, the Charro, who was the symbol of the ideal Mexican man. His hands were held behind his back with his right fist covered by the palm of his left hand. He wore a vest, jacket, and pants adorned with silver button-​like clasps. His wide, brimmed hat had detailed embroidery along the edges. They were standing facing each other on either side of the stage, posed, waiting for their cue to perform. Then, the audience began to applaud enthusiastically as they heard the familiar sounds of a slow, rising violin signaling the beginning of the Jarabe Tapatío. The China Poblana and the Charro took a deep breath and smiled widely. They began to dance. The China Poblana bent her torso slightly forward and gently pinched the front of her skirt on either side with her hands. The Charro leaned his torso forward as if always trying to reach for the China Poblana. Meanwhile, the couple performed footwork sequences that changed in rhythm, tempo, and speed as they accompanied the music. As they danced, the Charro yelled a loud lasting grito or yell to show his affection for the China Poblana. She responded by smiling demurely. The Jarabe Tapatío, the national dance of Mexico, is performed by the Charro and the China Poblana as a courtship dance. It is also known as the Mexican hat dance because

Photo 1.  This is a photo published in 1923 announcing the fact that the Jarabe Tapatío was performed in Paris, France. Here, we see the men dressed as the Charro and the women in wearing the China Poblana costume. Photo courtesy of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin. (“El Jarabe Tapatío Bailado en Paris”)

The Jarabe Tapatío   321 of a part in the dance where the Charro throws his hat on the floor and the couple dances around it. In my writing, I will give a brief history of the Jarabe Tapatio showing how this dance has aligned with the nationalistic policies of the state. I analyze early twentieth century ideas of nation and the cultural nationalist movement to demonstrate the manner in which the Jarabe Tapatío was intertwined with educational policies designed to culturally and racially unify the diverse nation. Noticing that not everyone was in agreement with the cultural unification policies of state, I give examples of the manner in which indigenous and peasant people negotiated these state inspired movements. A study of three performances by public school students at events sponsored by the Secretaría de Educación Publica (SEP), Mexico’s Federal Education Governing Board, reveals how the Jarabe Tapatío passed racial and class lines. During this time period, the SEP encouraged teachers such as Alura Flores de Angeles “The Godmother of Mexican Dance” who were part of the Cultural Missions program to collect, disseminate, and codify the music and folkloric dance traditions so that they could be taught in the public school system. The Jarabe Tapatío, was one these codified dances that taught people how to imagine the nation as comprised of a homogenous mestizo (having Spanish and Indigenous blood) population. However, I must note that this was not a top-down approach but a multi-faceted process whereby the indigenous and peasant people, as well as, public school teachers many of whom were of the lower class status found ways to negotiate the collection, transmission, and performance of folkloric dances. I argue that in the 1920s the Jarabe Tapatío, along with many folkloric dances, was purposely reinvented by the SEP and disseminated by school teachers throughout Mexico to aid in the civilizing project of the state.

Brief History of the Jarabe Tapatío To begin my analysis, I interweave the stories of the jarabes and the Jarabe Tapatío with historical narratives to demonstrate the manner in which this dance has been continuously re-​created and re-​invented to legitimize the efforts of those seeking or having political power. Throughout my writings, I utilize the theories of Benedict Anderson as a framework for understanding the nationalistic underpinning behind the Jarabe Tapatío. For Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities (2006), nationalism is as an “imagined political community. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-​members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). Furthermore, he argues that an imagined community is limited in size and sovereign in rule. These factors are what make it possible for people to “think” the nation (6–​7, 36). Writings by Anderson enable me to consider how and why the Jarabe Tapatío was utilized by the nation throughout its history as a method of imagining the country of Mexico in the 1920s.

322   Gabriela Mendoza-Garcia In addition, Eric Hobsbawn, in The Invention of Tradition (1983) argues that nationalism is constituted by the invention of traditions. He describes this term as “traditions actually invented, constructed, and formally instituted, and those emerging in a less easily traceable manner with a brief datable period” (1). Hobsbawn explains that invented traditions consist of a series of fixed practices directed by normalized rules and symbolic rituals that through repetition address perceived values and norms of behavior that are governed by an implicit permanence with a historical past (1). He argues that what we consider ancient traditions are in actuality very recent and invented. Thus, he suggests that it is important for nations to envision themselves as having different traditions. This sets them apart from other nations. I utilize Hobsbawn’s ideas surrounding invented traditions to demonstrate the manner in which the Jarabe Tapatío has been continuously re-​created and intricately interwoven with politics and imaginings of Mexicanness to envision the nation. Utilizing these theories as an underlying theoretical framework, I now begin my analysis of the history of the Jarabe Tapatío. The term jarabe is defined as a potpourri of different melodies of sones from a particular state of Mexico or from a variety of regions (Robledo n.p.) Sones are musical melodies rooted in Mexico that have a highly rhythmic metric sequence (Malmström 55). Scholars have debated whether the jarabes have an indigenous past.1 Yet, scholars do acknowledge that the jarabes were danced during the Spanish colonial period (1521–​1810) in Mexican history.2 In addition, the precursor to the Jarabe Tapatío called the Jarabe Gatuno was a peasant dance that like many jarabes was outlawed by the Spanish Inquisition (Fernández 169). The jarabes accompanied the many wars of Mexico. They were utilized by insurgents as a rallying cry for independence from Spain (1810–​1821), rejuvenated weary soldiers throughout the Mexican American War (1846–​1848), and were used by Mexican Independence fighters against the French in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862 (Saldívar 14; Houston, Problem Solver 1996 28). By the time of French Intervention (1862–​1867) many jarabes had been arranged to be played by piano or orchestra (Casanova 23). It is at this time that the Jarabe Nacional gained popularity and acceptance by the Emperor of Mexico, Maximilian Von Hapsburg, at his royal balls at Chapultepec palace (Corti 432). Ironically, these very same melodies accompanied Benito Juárez and opposition forces against the French (Pill 13). Sometime during the regime of Porfirio Díaz (1877–​1880 and 1884–​1911), the Jarabe Nacional became known as the Jarabe Tapatío and was performed at diplomatic functions, at world fairs, and in theatres catering to all classes of people (Jáuregui 52–​ 55; Lavalle 47–​57, 79; Toor 31–​32). In 1918, Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova staged a balletic rendition of the Jarabe Tapatío on pointe shoes. She was taught this dance by Felipa López, a renowned dancer from the city of Guadalajara, Mexico. Pavlova performed the Jarabe Tapatío as she toured Mexico and the world to great acclaim. (Lavalle 74–​77; Saldívar 23; Toor 32–​33). The Jarabe Tapatío was played and performed by soldiers in battles during the Mexican Revolution (1910–​1920) (Saldívar 9). Throughout his term as the Secretary of Public Education (1920–​ 1924), José Vasconcelos promoted the teaching and performance of the Jarabe Tapatío by public school children throughout Mexico (Vasconcelos1:1452–​ 1445; Vasconcelos

The Jarabe Tapatío   323 2:1261–​1262;). In fact, it is during this time period that the Jarabe Tapatío became closely associated with Mexican patriotic festivities as celebrated by the SEP. Records from 1924 to 1928 listed eight patriotic festivals sponsored by the SEP and held in the national stadium after its inauguration. These festivals were organized by the SEP to celebrate Mexico’s Independence from Spain (Sept. 16th) and the Battle of Puebla (May 5th). SEP records indicate that the Jarabe Tapatío was listed as the most salient number performed (“Esfuerzo Educativo en Mexico” 2: 408).3 Josefina Lavalle in El Jarabe … El Jarabe Ranchero o Jarabe de Jalisco (1988) argues that by late 1925, the Jarabe Tapatío had become a fixture within the public education system of Mexico (97). I have noticed a discrepancy surrounding the historical discourse of the Jarabe Tapatío in 1920s Mexico. Period scholar Gabriel Saldívar in El Jarabe: Baile Popular Mexicano [The Jarabe: Popular Mexican Dance] (1937) credited Vasconcelos and his development of the Department of Aesthetic Culture for incorporating the Jarabe Tapatío into the public school system (16). Period scholar Frances Toor in “The Old and the New Jarabe” (1930) adds that the SEP “adopted the staged form of the Jarabe and taught that together with other Folk dances in the Federal public schools. Since that time it is called the ‘official Jarabe’ ”(33). Thus, both these scholars credit the incorporation of the Jarabe Tapatío within the public school system as having exerting influence on its consideration as the national dance by the people of Mexico. On the other hand, Lavalle credits Pavlova’s performance of the Jarabe Tapatío in 1918 as having boosted its impact so that it eventually became to be known as the “official Jarabe” that was incorporated in the public school system (97). To date, I have not discovered a formal record of a Federal proclamation designating the Jarabe Tapatío as the national dance of Mexico. Nonetheless, the Mexican people and the folkloric dance community consider it to be the national dance of Mexico. Another discrepancy concerns the manner in which the music and dance movement of the Jarabe Tapatío that is performed today was derived. Alura Flores de Angeles “God mother of Mexican Dance” (1905–2000) indicated to folklorist Ron Houston that in 1924 the SEP established a committee to standardize the Jarabe Tapatío. This committee chose the steps, music, and sequence of motifs of the Jarabe Tapatío which would be taught to school children. Houston discloses that Flores de Angeles had served on this committee, but he stated that he might have “misunderstood” her because she would have been only 19 years of age at that time (Houston, Problem Solver 1993 38–​39; Houston). Furthermore, in her accounts of the history of the Jarabe Tapatío, Flores de Angeles states that in 1924 the Mexican government commissioned the SEP to synthesize the much shorter 2 ½ minute Jarabe Tapatío from the six minute version of the Jarabe Largo Ranchero (Houston, Problem Solver 1996 28; Houston El Jarabe Tapatío n.d., n.p). On the other hand, Frances Toor and Lavalle argue that the staged version of the Jarabe Tapatío as performed in theatres throughout Mexico was the version that was incorporated in the public school system. Lavalle does acknowledge that this rendition was frowned upon because it was performed on stage by chorus girls, yet it was the most readily accessible to educators (Toor 33; Lavalle 96–​97). I postulate that there was more than one method of transmission of the Jarabe Tapatío with more than one version learned. This is evident

324   Gabriela Mendoza-Garcia in the many different renditions of the Jarabe Tapatío performed in the twenty-​first century. It is important to note that, according to Flores de Angeles, the SEP standardized the Jarabe Tapatío for instruction within the public school system. Therefore, the SEP in 1920s Mexico played an important role in the re-​contextualization, codification, and transformation of the Jarabe Tapatío, so that through its performance this dance could effectively teach the country how to imagine itself as a racially and culturally unified nation.

Twentieth Century Ideas of Nation and the Cultural Nationalist Movement Educational policies were aligned with theories of nationalism that defined the early twentieth century. According to Ricardo Pérez Montfort, in Avatares del Nacionalismo Cultural [The Intricacies of Cultural Nationalism] (2000), the government of Porifirio Díaz (1877–​1880 and 1884–​1911) utilized eighteenth century notions of nationalism (37). In eighteenth century Mexico, the country began to think of itself in terms of a nation when the criollos wanted to differentiate themselves from the Spanish and indigenous people (Villegas 390).4 In “El Proyecto Educativo de José Vasconcelos Como Programa Politico” [“The Educational Project of José Vasconcelos as a Political Program”] (1982) José Joaquín Blanco writes that during this time period a nation was thought of in terms of sharing a common language, religion, custom, and geography (84). The national culture was defined by the criollos as mestizo because they thought that this was the only way to achieve unity amongst the different ethnic groups (Pacheco 14). Criollo nationalism was based upon principal themes of the exaltation of an indigenous past, the denunciation of the Spanish Conquest, resentment against the gachupines, and devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe (Brading 13).5 Ironically, this tenet of criollo nationalism which was characterized by the glorification of an indigenous past while simultaneously negating the present plight of the indigenous people would serve as the foundation for twentieth-​century cultural nationalism (Hellier-​ Tinoco 54). Pérez Montfort argues that Díaz wanted to unite the country of Mexico so that the people shared one language, religion, culture, and geography by modernizing it (Avatares 37). This philosophy was reflected in his governmental policies which promoted the elimination of peasant landholding and cultural repression. During this time period the peasants and indigenous people were regarded as one and the same. This presidency promoted foreign immigration as a key for modernization while indigenous people were seen as obstructions to achieving progress (Knight 237). The scientific rationale for the inferiority of the indigenous people enabled the nation state to promote the concept of mestizaje as a method to achieve a homogenous, national identity so that the

The Jarabe Tapatío   325 working poor could replace the indigenous people in the work place (Gonzalez, 12).6 It must be noted that Mexico’s Independence from Spain (1810–​1821) had not produced a unified nation. Instead, the Porfirian intellectuals complained that the many in Mexico still identified themselves along regional lines feeling loyalty to their pueblo instead of the nation.7 Some people did not have any idea of a nation. Peasants were described as “idle, ignorant, sottish, and thieving” (Knight 237). The Díaz government could not prevent the revolt that took place against his regime. Throughout his terms in office, he promoted the development of Mexico into an industrial nation. He gave land, oil, and mineral concessions to European and United States businesses so that they could modernize Mexico. It is true that railroads were built and agricultural, oil, and mineral production increased, yet at a great cost to the peasant and indigenous communities. The loss of communal land and substandard pay and working conditions alongside abject poverty created an unbearable situation (Hamilton 29–​32). Thus, the Mexican Revolution began in 1910 with the overthrow of the Díaz regime and continued until 1920. According to Alan Knight in “The Revolutionary Project, Recalcitrant People: Mexico, 1910–​1940” (1990), the middle classes and peasant people overthrew the government of Porfirio Díaz due to cultural and class conflicts. Proponents of the revolution sought agrarian reform and opposed the social and cultural abuses of the state. During the revolution, class hierarchies and cultural norms were overturned (227–​239). At the conclusion of the revolution, the government was controlled by a combination of Porfirian supporters and the liberal middle class (230). Ricardo Pérez Montefort argues that after years of political and economic instability, the government sought to re-​build itself by re-​defining the nation. He postulates that the post-​revolutionary nationalistic sentiments of Presidents Alvaro Obregón (1920–​1924) and Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–​1928) were not much different from those during the Porfirian era. Yet, the post-​revolutionary government sought to differentiate itself from the Porfirian regime in order to legitimize the economic policies of the state. Revolutionary ideals were used by the state to invoke imaginings of rural Mexico to justify political and economic policies (Pérez Montfort, Avatares 38–​39; Pérez Montfort, Estampas 139–​140). The early twentieth century views of nation were also influenced by a cultural nationalist movement that was initiated by José Vasconcelos. Vasconcelos was appointed the Secretary of Public Education from 1920–​1924. Pérez Montfort argues that this cultural nationalist movement continued the work of President Porfirio Díaz, who encouraged the unification of the country along racial lines in an attempt to modernize it. However, Vasconcelos started this movement on a grander scale. Cultural nationalism with regards to education, art, and cultural spaces in 1920s Mexico was used to justify the social, economic, and educational policies of a post-​revolutionary government. These policies included land re-​distribution and educational reform. Here, the national culture defined “Mexicanness” as coming from the pueblo. In the 1920s, the pueblo was thought of as being rural, provincial, poor, marginalized, yet experienced by the majority. Education was the key to consolidate and modernize the pueblo, and thus the nation itself. In addition, Pérez Montfort suggests that the use of the image of the pueblo

326   Gabriela Mendoza-Garcia became synonymous with a stereotyped image of “Mexicanness,” which was invoked by the political leaders of Mexico to legitimize public policy (Avatares 35–​45; Estampas 113). Rural Mexico was invoked in the music of the Mariachi band, as well as in popular songs such as huapangos, corridos, and sones that are accompanied by indigenous and folkloric dances (Sáenz, México Integro 20–​23).8 The two central figures in the Jarabe Tapatío, the Charro and the China Poblana, embodied “Mexicanness” in dress, dance, and portrayal.

Implementation and Negotiation of Folkloric Dance in Mexico’s Public Education System As the Secretary of Public Education, one of Vasconcelos’ goals was to promote a Mexican cultural movement along nationalistic lines. Josefina Vásquez de Knauff in Nacionalismo y Educación in México (1970) argues that throughout history, education has been used to create feelings of nationalism. Education is used by the government to influence and develop a collective conscious while awakening loyalties to the nation state (7–​9). Carlos Monsivais in Mexican Postcards (1997) suggests that the Mexican education system was used by the “post-​revolutionary hegemonic bloc” to instruct the entire public on the myths, images, and rendering of the newly configured nation (xvi). In his writings, Vasconcelos described his educational approach as utilizing Mexican culture as a foundation to “civilize” the lower classes (Vasconcelos 2:1515). He thought that the prime function of education was to raise the cultural level of every citizen. According to Vasconcelos, the world no longer characterized people along intellectual lines, but along cultural ones. So, to him, it was very important that primary school children be taught a basic set of ideas that could be used to ensure that they belonged to a specific culture (de Beers 320, 327). As with many intellectuals during this time period, Vasconcelos considered a country to be united by a common language, religion, and race (2: 873–​874). Thus, Vasconcelos utilized nationalism to help bridge the racial, cultural, socioeconomic, and geographic differences among the Mexican people (Encinas 3). Vasconcelos envisioned education as vital to preparing individuals to serve a social purpose. The cultural unification of the country was very important, since during the turn of the century, many Mexicans continued to identify themselves along regional lines instead of national ones. To unify the country culturally, Vasconcelos stressed the importance of looking toward the cultures of Europe and Latin America for inspiration instead of those derived in North America for inspiration. The promotion of Fine Art performances that had European influences was one method of doing this. He developed Mexico’s educational program so that physical education was taught parallel with art and music. An academy was developed by Mexican educators to produce men and women who would serve as

The Jarabe Tapatío   327

Photo 2.  Elementary school children are pictured performing the Jarabe Tapatío for a Mother’s Day program at a school function in 1923. As pictured, the Jarabe Tapatío was an integral part of Mexico’s public school system teaching children and families how to imagine the nation. Photo courtesy of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin (“El Jarabe Nacional Bailado por Una de las Alumnas”)

physical education teachers. These specialized teachers absorbed a variety of teaching responsibilities, including the instruction of dance (Vasconcelos 2: 857, 783–​784, 1684, 1268). Vasconcelos not only incorporated dance, but for the first time ever, the teaching and performance of the Jarabe Tapatío was included in the school system. He once boasted that because of his work, “Not only popular songs permeated public schools but the teaching and performance of the National dance” (Vasconcelos 2:1261). I suggest that for Vasconcelos, the Jarabe Tapatío, as the national dance of Mexico, was one of the most important folkloric dances taught. What better way to foster the bodily performance of “Mexicanness” than requiring school children to learn and perform the national dance? Here, physical education teachers taught dance as part of the educational curriculum (Vasconcelos 2: 1268). Even Vasconcelos’ successors within the SEP in the 1920’s followed the tenets of the cultural nationalist movement. Rafael Ramírez, who directed the Cultural Missions, wrote in 1926 that the purpose of education was to extend and popularize fundamental aspects of culture to the peasants and indigenous people who made up the majority

328   Gabriela Mendoza-Garcia of the population in the country (“Memoria” 243). In addition, Moisés Sáenz, who served as a high ranking administrator of the SEP and was Secretary of this organization in 1928, wrote in La Educación Rural en Mexico [Rural Education in Mexico] (1928) that education was used as one method of “civilizing” the peasant and indigenous peoples. Sáenz noted that educators taught the symbols of the nation, such as recognition of the pictures of the presidents, celebration of national heroes, and singing of the national hymn with the presentation of the flag (Educación Rural 24–​25). They also taught students to dance and perform the Jarabe Tapatío as the national dance of Mexico. Thus, the state saw the teaching and performance of the Jarabe Tapatío as a way to “civilize” the indigenous and peasant people. To “civilize” in 1920s Mexico meant that the people would no longer culturally or racially identify with their specific locality or ethnicity, but instead with the country of Mexico. Once they were culturally and racially assimilated, the indigenous and peasant people would identify themselves as mestizo. In her doctoral dissertation, Sanjuanita Martinez-​Hunter paraphrased the remarks of Alura Flores de Angeles who spoke about the Jarabe Tapatío in her 1979 lecture entitled “Mexican Dance,” which was held at the University of Texas at Austin. “The adoption of the Jarabe Tapatío as Mexico’s national dance was significant for it symbolized the acceptance of the blend of the Spanish and Indian, and the acceptance of the true Mexican, the mestizo” (179). I argue the Jarabe Tapatío bodily demonstrated to the country that the mestizo ethnicity was best suited to represent the nation. “True Mexicans” were those who abandoned their indigenous identities and identified themselves as mestizo. With cultural nationalism the music, songs, and the dances of the indigenous and peasant people no longer represented a locality but came to define “Mexicanness.” By the early twentieth-​century, all elements of the Jarabe Tapatío, including the history, costuming, music, central figures, and body movements represented “Mexicanness.” It is no accident that the Jarabe Tapatío was used in the public school system since this dance functioned as a method of incorporating the indigenous and peasant people into the nation. Through the teaching and performance of the Jarabe Tapatío, the school system became a method of universalizing difference so that the country could be envisioned as a homogenous, heteronormative, mestizo population that adopted the ideals of modernity. However, the indigenous and peasant communities did not merely comply with civilizing projects to incorporate them into the nation. There were intense negotiations on both sides. Mary Kay Vaughn in Cultural Politics in the Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico 1930–​1940 (1997) urges scholars to depart from analyzing nation-​building using a top-​down approach. She critiques the arguments of Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities (2006) in that he focuses entirely on the transmission of symbols, myths, history, and legends, all essential to nation-​building, as solely influenced by the elites over the peasants and lower classes. She argues that in Mexico, since the peasant classes had mobilized to begin the Revolution, they had earned a space in nation-​building. Here, post-​revolutionary nation-​building by the state was characterized by negotiations between players within national, regional,

The Jarabe Tapatío   329 and local sites, where power structures were developed. Vaughn asserts that nation building in Mexico was characterized by a constant negotiation by its people about the manner in which the state carried out its ideas of modernization (9). Vaughn notes the methods used by these communities to fight nationalism. Educators noted that oftentimes, parents withdrew their children from school when they disagreed with the school’s political policies. Communities frequently negotiated with the SEP over the teachers assigned to their school (18, 61). All these instances reveal how the indigenous and peasant communities negotiated with the SEP concerning their civilizing tactics.

Performances of the Jarabe Tapatío in 1920s Mexico First Performance of the Jarabe Tapatío at an Elementary School As the Jarabe Tapatio began to be taught and performed in public schools, it slowly began to cross social and racial class lines. The Jarabe Tapatío was an essential part of the educational program in rural and urban schools. I have noticed that period scholars point to three significant performances of the Jarabe Tapatío at events organized by the SEP. The first performance is undated and was described by Vasconcelos in his autobiography. Vasconcelos gave himself credit for encouraging the first public performance of the Jarabe Tapatío by school children. In his writings, he described the manner in which the performance of European dances had been preferred over Mexican folkloric dance traditions. He remembered watching a school festival where the children of indigenous descent performed the minuet wearing wigs of the Louis XV era. He felt this to be a ridiculous injustice. Instead, he resolved to encourage the use of the “most beautiful” traditional costumes of Mexico, such as the China Poblana, within the public school system. Vasconcelos related the very first time that two children from the Escuela de Comercio Lerdo de Tejada performed the Jarabe Tapatío in public. He indicated that this performance was held at the University auditorium where in the past only classical ballet had been performed10. Vasconcelos noted that some of his colleagues hoped and even expected this performance of the Jarabe Tapatío to fail. Yet, this was not the case. Vasconcelos described the reaction of the audience as enthusiastic. Poetically, he detailed how every musical melody sung and every unfolded bodily movement raised a clamor throughout the room. This first presentation of the Jarabe Tapatío was met with such success that it was to be accepted by the SEP as a “natural” implementation in the school system. Vasconcelos noted that the Jarabe Tapatío won over the public because it was not a dance of the upper classes but of the “humble” lower-​class people (Vasconcelos 2:1261–​1262).

330   Gabriela Mendoza-Garcia

Performance of the Jarabe Tapatío at Chapultepec Park The second important performance of the Jarabe Tapatío occurred on September 16, 1921 in the woodlands of Chapultepec Park in Mexico City. The bodily performance of the Jarabe Tapatío was a big part of the patriotic celebration commemorating Mexico’s one hundred years of independence from Spain. Period scholar Gabriel Saldívar in El Jarabe: Baile Popular Mexicano [The Jarabe: Popular Mexican Dance] (1937) described this picturesque scene wherein three hundred couples performed the Jarabe Tapatío beside the edge of the lake and beneath the foliage. Thousands of people who wanted to celebrate this patriotic event attended from all over the country (16). Period scholar Frances Toor, in “El Jarabe Antiguo y Moderno” [“The Old and New Jarabe] (1930) noted that this was the first time a folkloric dance had been performed at what she described as the “aristocratic” Chapultepec Park. Most importantly, the “people from the streets” were allowed to watch this performance (33).

Performance of the Jarabe Tapatío as Part of the Inauguration of the National Stadium By the third important performance of the Jarabe Tapatío, I argue that this dance was rapidly becoming a central component to the unification of the country in 1920s Mexico. There were a total of three inaugurations of the national stadium. All followed the initial inauguration on May 5, 1924 and were conducted before the building was entirely complete to raise monies for its construction (Rubenstein 72). Vasconcelos chronicled that this inauguration highlighted the accomplishments of the departments of Physical Education and Fine Arts within the SEP. At the inauguration, Vasconcelos recounted that children played sports and exercised to music. Twelve thousand children sang as part of a choral group and one thousand couples in the national costume performed the Jarabe Tapatío (Vasconcelos1:1452–​1445). At this inauguration, Vasconcelos allowed only the performance of Spanish and Mexican dances, because these dances were most representative of the type of work accomplished by the SEP. Here, the performance of the Jarabe Tapatío was a fundamental component of an event sponsored by the SEP, a program that featured the synthesis of music, dance, art, and physical education (Vasconcelos1:1452–​1445, Crawford 188). Jane Desmond in “Embodying Difference:  Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies” (1997) argues that the dancing body is an ever changing marker for gender, race, ethnic, class, and national identities. She suggests that dance is a performance of cultural identity whose meanings transform as dance styles are transmitted from one group to another (31–​32). Desmond asserts that bodily renderings are aligned with “the social construction and negotiation of race, gender, class, and nationality and their hierarchical arrangements” (34). She asserts that many dances that were created and performed by the lower classes or non-​dominant groups are presented as “upwardly mobile” (34).

The Jarabe Tapatío   331 These dances are defined as having been “refined,” “polished,” and “desexualized” in order to climb the racial-​and social-​class hierarchy. She argues that many improvised dances are codified so that they can better travel across racial and class lines, especially when transmitted by dance teachers. In addition, these transmissions do not occur monolithically, so that as the dances travel across racial and class lines, their meanings change in the process (34–​35). By the 1924 performance of the Jarabe Tapatío at the national stadium, this dance had undergone many changes. Using Desmond’s approach, I argue that the Jarabe Tapatío had successfully crossed race, and class lines. There was no longer any anxiety concerning its reception, as in the case of the performance at the university. Also, it is telling that the Jarabe Tapatío was the first Mexican folkloric dance chosen to cross these social and racial lines through performances at the university auditorium and Chapultepec Park. I suggest that, as the Jarabe Tapatío crossed racial and social class boundaries, it conjured up this vision of the rural, mestizo Mexican pueblo. This feeling of the Jarabe Tapatío as coming from the pueblo was an essential element that enabled it to appeal as representative of the nation. In this way, I suggest that through dance the SEP demonstrated to the citizens what it meant to embody “Mexicanness.” Over the course of a few years,

Photo 3.  On May 5, 1924 one thousand public school children performed the Jarabe Tapatío for the inauguration of the national stadium in Mexico City. The program sponsored by the Secretary of Public Education featured the synthesis of music, dance, art, and physical education by Mexico’s school children. Photo courtesy of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin. (“Mil Parejas Bailaron el Jarabe Tapatío”)

332   Gabriela Mendoza-Garcia through performances sponsored by the SEP, the Jarabe Tapatío became firmly situated as the national dance and not the dance of the mestizo people from the state of Jalisco, Mexico. Although the Jarabe Tapatío had been described as derived from the rural, mestizo people in its historic discourse, by the late 1920s this dance had been re-​classed and racially refined so that it could represent the entire country of Mexico.

Flores de Angeles “Godmother of Mexican Dance” (1905–2000) and the Cultural Missions The life story of Alura Flores de Angeles as a teacher within the public school system demonstrates how folkloric dances, as well as, the Jarabe Tapatio were deliberately collected, disseminated, and re-created by the SEP to assist in the cultural unification of the country. Flores de Angeles attended high school and college while Mexico was undergoing this period of educational, cultural, and national movements. Gabriela Cano and Verena Radkau in Grandes Espacios: Historias de Vida: Guadalupe Zúñiga, Alura Flores, y Josefina Vincens, 1920–​1940 [Great Spaces: Life Stories of Guadalupe Zúñiga, Alura Flores, and Josefina Vincens, 1920–​1940] (1989) interviewed Flores de Angeles and published a brief biography on her life. This publication states that she attended the elite National Preparatory School in San Ildelfonso as a high school student from 1920–​1924. It was at this time that Vasconcelos and the directors of the school developed a new program for physical education teachers. Thus, the directors encouraged physical education students to enroll in the University School of Physical Education before finishing high school. Flores de Angeles was enrolled as a student at the National University of Mexico majoring in physical education. After 1929, the National University of Mexico became known as the National Autonomous University of Mexico. During her three years at the university, Flores de Angeles took courses in rhythmic gymnastics, calisthenics, sports, and everything related to the physical education discipline. As a university student, she was immersed in athletics (63–​65). According to the dance program entitled 50 Veranos Alura Flores de Angeles, Flores de Angeles earned the title of Professor of Physical Education from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and Profesora Normalista from the national School of Teachers.11 Through physical education, Flores de Angeles would discover her passion for the teaching and research of Mexican folkloric dance. Then, in the late 1920s or early 1930s, while a teacher within the Department of Physical Education, Flores de Angeles was hired by the SEP as a Physical Education teacher to teach in Mexico’s Cultural Missions (Canu and Radkau 69).12 Based upon the work of the Spanish missionaries, Vasconcelos conceived of the Cultural Missions program as a method of promoting cultural nationalism. The purpose of the Cultural

The Jarabe Tapatío   333 Missions was to train rural teachers and socially integrate the peasant and indigenous peoples into a national culture. Many of the peasants and indigenous people were illiterate and thought to have an inferior culture unconnected to Mexico’s history. To create a nation, educators thought it was imperative to teach these people about the country of Mexico (“Esfuerzo Educactivo en Mexico” 1:120–​123). The Cultural Missions consisted of a team of educators who traveled to rural areas populated mostly by indigenous peoples (Vasconcelos 1: 1328–​1331). In the SEP report entitled Memoria that was presented to the Mexican Congress in 1927, it described the Cultural Missions as follows: Each Cultural Mission had a Director of the Mission who was in charge of educational classes, administration and organization; a Physical Education teacher whose responsibilities included teaching gymnastics and sports; an Agriculture teacher who also helped raise domesticated animals; Trades Teacher; and a Social Worker who was responsible for teaching dietary and hygiene practices, childcare, as well as giving suggestions on how to resolve social issues (Memoria: Que Indica el Estado, 244). Although not directly stipulated in this report, many Cultural Missions did employ Music and Art teachers. (Memoria: Que Indica el Estado 269), Cultural Mission teachers worked alongside rural teachers to augment classroom instruction. Spanish was the official

Photo 4.  This photo was published in 1927 and shows students posing with their teacher as part of the Cultural Missions program. Photo courtesy of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin. —​(Las Misiones Culturales en 1927: Las Escuelas Normales Rurales).

334   Gabriela Mendoza-Garcia language used in instruction. Efforts were made by the SEP to target illiteracy, hygiene practices, as well as to increase agricultural and technical abilities. The June 1926 SEP publication entitled Boletín de la Secretaria de Educacion Publica [Bulletin of the SEP] referenced the fact that sports, music, art, and dance were important cultural components (“Boletín”). Flores de Angeles left her young son in the care of her mother while she traveled as a Physical Education teacher in the Cultural Missions to rural areas such as Tuxtla Gutiérrez and San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico (Cano and Radkau 69; Guerrero Drury).

Training of Rural and Cultural Mission Teachers as Disseminators of Dances As a teacher, Flores de Angeles and many other women entered a profession where they were taught specific folklorico dances by the SEP and encouraged to present them at public school events. According to the 1921 Mexican census, the total population of Mexico was 14,334,780. Of this population, 51 percent were women and 49 percent were men. However, men outnumbered women in all fields requiring advanced degrees except for teaching. The census figured recorded that there were a total of 23,143 elementary school teachers. Of this figure, 69 percent were women and 31 percent were men. In addition, a total of 911 people were employed as middle school and business school teachers. 65.4 percent were women and 34.6 percent were men. It is clear that women more than doubled the number of men employed in the teacher profession. The SEP sponsored teacher-​training courses in which Cultural Mission teachers were taught a repertoire of dances by the SEP. This repertoire of dances increased over the years by Cultural Mission teachers who had collected information about the regional music and dances at the communities they visited (Marin 107). In SEP reports on training courses for Cultural Mission teachers published in 1928, a chart outlined the manner in which these teachers were trained according to specialties. The SEP training curriculum included teaching physical education teachers regional dances for two hours a week by Professor Luis Villarreal. In this training curriculum regional dances were given the same time allotment as baseball, swimming, basketball, and other sports. Only tennis and frontón were allotted three hours a week. These trainings lasted for four weeks (“Las Misiones Culturales en 1927”).14 Then, the Cultural Mission teachers taught their students and rural teachers the folkloric dances at in-​service trainings held as part of the Cultural Mission curriculum. The SEP closed rural schools for a short period of time so that rural teachers from the outlying areas could attend six-​week trainings held from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. (Miller 26). Fortino López R. in his 1927 report on the Cultural Missions held in the state of Mexico wrote that the rural teachers of Texcoco, Cahuacán, Atlacomulco, Tenango del

The Jarabe Tapatío   335 Valle, and Valle de Bravo were taught classical and regional dances by Cultural Mission teachers. He listed the following as the most important dances learned: Gavota, Greek dance, Scottish dancing, Classic Waltz, folkloric dances from the state of Michoacan, Jarabe Tapatío, and “Sones Costenos” (sones from the coastal regions) (104). A mixture of European and Mexican folkloric dances were listed in this repertoire, indicating what the SEP taught to Cultural Mission teachers for dissemination to the rural schools. Flores de Angeles credited learning her rendition of the Jarabe Tapatío from the SEP (Houston, Problem Solver 1996, 28–​35). Quite possibly, she learned this dance as part of her training by the SEP before participating in the Cultural Missions. Since the main purpose of the Cultural Missions was to racially and culturally unify the indigenous and peasant communities, the teaching and performance of the Jarabe Tapatío fit neatly with this goal. The teaching of the Jarabe Tapatío alongside European dances coincided with the vision of Vasconcelos to culturally integrate the nation based on artistic inspiration drawn from Europe, Latin America, and Mexico. I surmise that the Jarabe Tapatío was a key component of the repertoire of the dances taught by the Cultural Mission teachers in early twentieth-​century Mexico.

Folk Dance Collection by Cultural Mission Teachers Not only were teachers trained on the many folkloric dances but those such as Flores de Angeles who participated in the Cultural Mission programs were asked to collect the dances as performed by the indigenous and peasant people of Mexico so that they could be taught in the public schools. The SEP supported folkloric dance and music collection as an important purpose of the duties of the Cultural Mission teachers. The Memoria of 1929 indicated that within the first week of arrival of a Cultural Mission to a rural area, Cultural Mission teachers were instructed to investigate the general conditions of the pueblo, economic necessities, customs, way of life, and to devise an educational plan with the data collected (263). These Cultural Mission teachers were not specifically trained in anthropology nor in the collection of music and dance traditions (Nájera Ramírez 19). Music educators were specifically instructed by the SEP to teach the national anthem to the students as an effective method of teaching the Spanish language, to study with the rural teachers the music and folk dances of the regions of Mexico, and to collect in the community the most important regional songs, music, and dances to distribute to the neighboring populations. The art teacher’s duties also included the study of the local folklore of the region and the collection of local art for exposition in an art show. Here, the SEP specifically relegated the study and collection of folk dance to the music and art educators. Reports in the Boletín and Memoria from the SEP in early twentieth-​ century Mexico do not list dance as an academic discipline, nor is dance mentioned specifically in the duties of the physical education teachers who participated in the Cultural

336   Gabriela Mendoza-Garcia Missions (Memoria: Que Indica El Estado, 1929 268–​27; Boletín). Yet, because the educational structure had been created by the SEP so that the physical education, art, and music teachers worked together, in actuality the teaching and collection of dances was a shared function (Marin 108). When describing her experiences as a physical education teacher in the Cultural Missions as written by Cano and Radkau, Flores de Angeles mentioned collaborating with two prominent musicians, Luis Felipe Obregón and Carlos Robledo. She taught ball games, gymnastics, and basic recreational games. She stated that as part of her physical education training she learned Mexican folkloric dances. Flores de Angeles declared that she was instructed to observe and collect the customs, traditions, attire, and dances of the rural and indigenous people. She accomplished this task by observing the people as they celebrated in their community festivals. Typically, in Mexico each community

Photo 5.  Photo of Alura Flores de Angeles “Godmother of Mexican dance” (1905–​2000) taken in the 1970s during one of her visits to the University of Texas at Austin to teach Mexican folkloric dance. Flores de Angeles taught the Jarabe Tapatio and many other dances to students in Mexico, the United States, and abroad. Photo courtesy of Michael Carmona.

The Jarabe Tapatío   337 celebrates a patron saint with a festival of music, song, and dance. Flores de Angeles would wait until the community celebrated the feast day of the Saint to observe the music, dances, attire, and customs of the people. She indicated that she had to memorize the dances observed, since she could not take notes or photographs. If the people caught her they would become reluctant to share their knowledge (70). Friends and colleagues of Flores de Angles, Ron Houston, and Nelda Guerrero Drury concur that she was famous for having collected and staged many folkloric dances, most especially the dance called El Bolonchón, which she learned as a Cultural Mission teacher when stationed in Chiapas, Mexico (Houston: Guerrero Drury).

Transmission of Folkloric Dance Public school teachers many of whom were of the peasant or lower class social status not only collected folkloric dances but used their own artistic control to transmit them. However, just as the indigenous and peasant people found ways to negotiate around incorporation into the cultural nationalist movement, my research shows that that they also determined who could observe and document the dances that they performed. In 1920s Mexico, the elites influenced the collection and dissemination of folkloric music dance over the peasant classes, but the peasant classes had some forms of artistic negotiation. Flores de Angeles was one example of a Cultural Mission teacher who was described by her colleagues as having been well connected, with a social standing above a teacher (Guerrero Drury). Flores de Angeles had attended an elite high school in Mexico City alongside Frida Kahlo and the children of influential families. She graduated from college in Mexico at a time when few people even received an elementary education, much less women. As seen by the experiences of Flores de Angeles, the books written by teachers of the Cultural Missions, musical arrangements created by music teachers, and concerts derived from folkloric traditions, a great number of teachers were from the middle and upper classes. Yet, due to a severe shortage of teachers, it is difficult to ignore the fact that, unlike Flores de Angeles, many teachers were from the lower and peasant classes. The SEP even organized teacher training programs to “civilize” the lower and peasant class rural teachers. However, the SEP gave teachers a great deal of leeway as far as deciding which dances were to be collected and performed at school festivities. Often, the collection and performance of dances was made by teachers who were in the same or slightly higher social standing than the peasants themselves, so that they could negotiate which dances were capable of representing the nation. I echo Vaughn’s arguments and concern with scholars using a top-​down approach as the sole method of analyzing the educational approach of the state. I suggest that scholars must utilize both the top-​down approach, as well as its antithesis to fully comprehend the transmission of folkloric music and dance by the teachers of the SEP. I argue that the indigenous and peasant people knew that the teachers of the Cultural Missions were present to observe the Saints Day festivals and determined the shape of this festival program based on this knowledge. As a form of negotiation, the indigenous and

338   Gabriela Mendoza-Garcia peasant people determined which dances and musical traditions were to be performed. They also had rules of behavior governing the observation of their music and dance traditions. The taking of written notes and photographs was a nonnegotiable act. This is one example in early twentieth-​century Mexico in which the indigenous and peasant peoples determined which types of music and dance traditions were to be visibly recognized. I postulate that even though much of the folkloric materials were collected and disseminated by educators from the upper and middle classes, teachers employed by the SEP from the lower and peasant classes also participated in this collection and dissemination process. Therefore, the lower and peasant class teachers influenced which dances were to be performed and collected. In addition, the peasant and indigenous communities were well aware of the efforts of the SEP to collect and disseminate folkloric materials. Yes, it is true that the elites held the political and economic power in Mexico. Yet, utilization of both the top –​down approach and the bottom-​up approach recognizes that the peasant and indigenous communities were not simply passive recipients of nationalistic culture. There was a degree of negotiation between the two groups. Ultimately, the elites determined which songs were to be disseminated and how. However, the peasants were active agents in this process. Thus, the propagation of folkloric materials by the SEP was not strictly a top-​down approach but a more multi-​faced one whereby articulations of nation via folkloric dance were negotiated at multiple levels.

Performances of the Jarabe Tapatío in the Cultural Missions Teachers also coordinated performances of the Jarabe Tapatío which were oftentimes intertwined with the images of the nation. Since one of the main tenets of the Cultural Missions was to culturally unify the country, the Jarabe Tapatío was closely involved in this process. Each Cultural Mission ended with closing festivities. During these festivities, music, poetry, sporting events, gymnastics, and dances were performed by the Cultural Mission participants15 The Jarabe Tapatío was one of the most important dances showcased in the closing festivities of the Cultural Missions. For instance, the report Las Misiones Culturales en 1927 includes clippings of articles that were submitted from the newspaper entitled La Prensa. This article described the closing festivities in San Cristóbal Las Casas in the state of Chiapas on October 12, 1927 where a music and dance program was held by the Cultural Missions to honor El Dia de la Raza [Columbus Day]. The program had a few piano pieces, rhythmic gymnastics, the recitations of an essay about the life and work of Christopher Columbus, a contest of regional costumes accompanied by piano music, and a number of songs. The last two numbers on the program were a performance of the Jarabe Tapatío followed by the singing of the national anthem of Mexico by all the people present (429–​430). Here, the closing program deliberately linked the Jarabe Tapatío as a bodily movement with the nation since it was

The Jarabe Tapatío   339 performed immediately before the Mexican national anthem. This presentation of the Jarabe Tapatío before the singing of the Mexican national anthem became common in the closing ceremonies of the Cultural Missions (“Las Misiones Culturales”). In conclusion, I have demonstrated that throughout its historic discourse, the Jarabe Tapatío has been used by political figures and entertainers alike to continuously redefine the politics of those in seeking or having power. Although the indigenous and peasant community and the teachers themselves had some say in the collection and transmission of folkloric dances, performances of the Jarabe Tapatío were designed to aid in the racial and cultural unification of the country. Thus, as I have shown the teaching and performance of the Jarabe Tapatío was implemented in the public school curriculum in 1920s Mexico to align with nationalistic discourse which envisioned the nation as a country comprised of an entirely mestizo population.

Notes 1. Period scholar Gabriel Saldívar in La Historia de Mexico (1934) and practitioner Flores de Angeles in “The Dances” in Mexican Folkways attest to the Jarabe Tapatío having indigenous influences, while period scholars Nellie and Gloria Campobello in Ritmos Indígenas de México (1940) deny the indigenous influences of this dance, citing its mestizo heritage instead. 2. There is a great deal of historical scholarship on the Jarabe Tapatío. To learn more about the history of the Jarabe Tapatío, read Roberto Franco Fernández El Folklore de Jalisco; Marta Heredia Casanova in El Jarabe: Baile Tradicional de México; Josefina Lavalle in El Jarabe: El Jarabe Ranchero o Jarabe de Jalisco; Gabriel Saldívar in El Jarabe: Baile Popular Mexicano; Frances Toor in “El Jarabe Antiguo y Moderno,” Mexican Folkways. In addition, Ron Houston compiled a brief history of the Jarabe Tapatío as told to him by Flores de Angeles. It can be found in the Folk Dance Problem Solver (1996) and numerous dance syllabi from folk dance workshops held at the Society of Folk Dance Historians Collection in Austin, Texas. 3. These documents simply use the word Jarabe to refer to the Jarabe Tapatío. Many scholars and even practitioners today refer to the Jarabe Tapatío by calling it the Jarabe. 4. Criollos was the name given to people who were of Spanish descent but were born in the Americas during the Spanish colonial period in Mexico. 5. Gachupines were people who were born in Spain and immigrated to the Americas during the Spanish colonial period in Mexico. 6. The term mestizaje refers to the intermingling of Spanish and indigenous races. 7. Porfirian is the name used by scholars to describe the government led by Porfirio Díaz. In addition, the word pueblo has a direct translation of village, town, or people. I use the word pueblo to denote the people, culture, and lifestyles of those living in the rural countryside of Mexico. 8. A Mariachi is a group of musicians who perform the traditional folk songs of Mexico. They are known for wearing a charro costume that includes a wide brimmed hat, and performing with a variety of instruments (guitar, trumpet, flute, guitarrón, bajo sexto, and harp, among others). A huapango is a distinctive music and dance style derived from the Huasteca region of Mexico. A corrido is a ballad popularized during the Revolutionary period in Mexican history. The corridos sing stories of love lost and won, revolutionary heroes, and other related themes.

340   Gabriela Mendoza-Garcia 9. La patria chica literally means “small homeland.” This refers to the perspective whereby the people identified with their locality instead of the nation. The word paisanos means “countrymen,” and santo means “saint.” Here, the author is referring to the custom whereby each individual community had a patron saint that protected it. 10. A direct translation of the name of this school would indicate that it is a business school. Yet, in Mexico schools with this name were vocational schools. Here, students would have learned to type, the duties of a secretary, how to work in a bank, and other subjects related to this vocation. 11. The title Profesora Normalista refers to the fact that Flores de Angeles graduated from a college that specialized in the training of teachers. 12. There is a discrepancy as to the exact date that Flores de Angeles taught in the Cultural Missions. Folklorist Ron Houston cites the year as 1928 in his biography of Flores de Angeles, while in her interview with Mexican scholars Gabriela Cano and Verena Radkau, she states that it was in the early 1930’s. 13. Although, the Cultural Missions as a department was first established in 1926, Vasconcelos began the Cultural Missions during this term as Secretary of the SEP. 14. Frontón is a sport similar to racquetball in which there is a court with one or two walls to bounce the balls off. 15. Even though Vasconcelos did not specifically mention the secularization of religion as an objective of the programs devised by the Department of Aesthetic Culture, the fact that they were held on Sunday gives a clue to the motive. Scholar Hubert J. Miller cites a complaint by one Catholic priest who disagreed with festivals and Cultural Mission activities being held on Sundays. Vasconcelos is said to have responded that any decline is Church attendance is the fault of the church since it was not meeting the needs of the people. Vasconcelos also didn’t see any need for people to attend a boring Church service when interesting Cultural Mission activities were happening instead (28). In addition, scholar Mary Kay Vaughn notes the creation of a SEP school calendar in 1925 which was published to replace the calendar of the Catholic Church (175). Raby argues that educational reform in Mexico was held back by the Catholic Church and the hacienda system. Schools thrived in areas where the influence of the Catholic Church was weak, where peasants owned land, and where there were progressive political leaders. Most importantly, success depended on the ability of the teacher to win the confidence and cooperation of the locals (17). During the presidential term of Plutarco Elías Calles from 1924 to 1928, he established a number of laws which were considered by many to be directed against the Catholic Church. In the late 1930s, Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–​1940) earned the wrath of the Catholic Church by enforcing the Mexican Constitution which stipulated that elementary schooling could not be taught by priests or nuns. (Boletin 19) Cristioneros, groups of people who threatened and killed public school teachers, retaliated against this law.

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The Jarabe Tapatío   341 Brading, David A. Los Orígenes del Nacionalismo Mexicano. Trans. Soledad Loaeza Grave. Mexico: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1973. Campobello, Nellie and Gloria Campobello. Ritmos Indígenas de México. México: n.p., 1940 Carmona, Michael. n.t.n.d. Photograph. Private Collection, Austin. Casanova, Marta Heredia. El Jarabe:  Baile Tradicional de México. Mexico:  Secretaria de Cultura, 1999. Cavendish, Richard. “The Ousting of Porfirio Díaz.” History Today 61.5 (2011): 8. Academic Search Complete. Web. 6 Sept. 2012. Corti, Egon Casear Count. Maximilian and Charlotte. 2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928. de Beer, Gabriela. Jose Vasconcelos and His World. New York: Las Americas Publishing 1966. Desmond, Jane. “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies.” Meaning in Motion. Ed. Jane Desmond. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. 29–​54. Encinas, Rosario. “Jóse Vasconcelos (1882–​1959).” PROSPECTS 24.3–​4 (2002): 719–​729. Print. Flores Barnes, Alura and Jeanne Maisonville. “The Dances.” Mexican Folkway. 3.15. (1934): 16–​17, 39. Franco, Jean. Plotting Women:  Gender and Representation in Mexico. New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1989. Gonzalez, Michael J. “Imagining Mexico in 1910:  Visions of the Patria in the Centennial Celebration in Mexico City.” Journal of Latin American Studies 39 (2007): 495–​439. Hamilton, Nora. Mexico:  Political, Social, and Economic Evolution. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2011. Hellier-​Tinoco, Ruth. Embodying Mexico:  Tourism, Nationalism, and Performance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Hobsbawn, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Houston, Ron. Folk Dance Problem Solver. Austin, Texas:  Society of Folk Dance Historians, 1993. Houston, Ron. Folk Dance Problem Solver. Austin: Society of Folk Dance Historians, 1996. Houston, Ron. El Jarabe Tapatío. 1967. Stockton Folk Dance Camp Syllabus. Society of Folk Dance Historians Collection, Austin. Houston, Ron​. El Jarabe Tapatío. 1972. Stockton Folk Dance Camp Syllabus. Society of Folk Dance Historians Collection, Austin. Houston, Ron​. El Jarabe Tapatío. 1976. Notated Score. Society of Folk Dance Historians Collection, Austin. Houston, Ron​. El Jarabe Tapatío. 1981. Notated Score. Society of Folk Dance Historians Collection, Austin. Houston, Ron​. El Jarabe Tapatío. N.d., Notated Score. Society of Folk Dance Historians Collection, Austin. Houston, Ron. “El Jarabe Tapatío (Dance of the Tapatíos).” International Folk Dancing U.S.A. Ed. Betty Casey. New York: Double Day and Company, 1981. Houston, Ron. Personal Interview. April 14, 2011. “El Jarabe Nacional Bailado por Una de las Alumnas.” Jueves del Excelsior. 12. Julio. 1923: n.p. “El Jarabe Tapatío Bailado en Paris.” Jueves de Excelsior. 15 March. 1923: n.p. Jáuregui, Jesús. El Mariachi:  Symbolo Musical de México. México:  Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2007. Knight, Alan. “Revolutionary Project, Recalcitrant People:  Mexico 1910–​ 1940.” The Revolutionary Process in Mexico:  Essays on Political and Social Change 1880–​1940. Ed.

342   Gabriela Mendoza-Garcia Jaime E. Rodríguez O. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1990. 227–​266. Lavalle, Josefina. El Jarabe:  El Jarabe Ranchero o Jarabe de Jalisco. Mexico:  Centro de Investigación, Documentación e Información de la Danza “Jose Limon,” 1988. Print. Los Maestros y la Cultura Nacional 1920–​1952. 4 vols. Mexico, D.F.: Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares, 1987. Malmström, Dan. Introduction to Twentieth Century Mexican Music. Uppsala: The Institute of Musicology, Uppsala University, 1974. Marin, Noemi. La Importancia De La Danza Tradicional Mexicana En El Sistema Educativo Nacional (1921–​1938): Otra Perspectiva De Las Misiones Culturales. 2004. CD-​ROM. McClintock, Anne. “No Longer in Future Heaven.” Imperial Leather:  Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. 352–​289. Mexico. Departamento de Estadística Nacional. Resumen del Censo General de Habitantes, de 30 de Noviembre de 1921. México: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1928. Mexico. Secretaria de Educacion Publica. Boletín de la Secretaria de Educacion Publica. Vol 5. Mexico, D.F.: Talleres Graficos de la Nacion, 1926. Mexico. Secretaria de Educacion Publica. Boletín de la Secretaria de Educacion Publica. Vol 10. Mexico, D.F.: Talleres Graficos de la Nacion, 1926. Mexico. Secretaria de Educacion Publica.​El Esfuerzo Educativo en Mexico (1924–​1928). Vol 1. Mexico: Secretaria de Educacion Publica, n.d. Mexico. Secretaria de Educacion Publica. El Esfuerzo Educativo en Mexico (1924–​1928). Vol 2. Mexico: Secretaria de Educacion Publica, n.d. Mexico. Secretaria de Educacion Publica.​Memoria: Que Indica el Estado Que Guarda el Ramo de Educacion Publica. Vol 14. Mexico, D.F.: Talleres Graficos de la Nacion, 1927. Mexico. Secretaria de Educacion Publica.​Memoria: Que Indica el Estado Que Guarda el Ramo de Educacion Publica. Vol 22. Mexico, D.F.: Talleres Graficos de la Nacion. 1929. Mexico. Secretaria de Educacion Publica.​Las Misiones Culturales en 1927: Las Escuelas Normales Rurales. Mexico: Secretaria de Educaction Publica, 1928. “Mil Parejas Bailaron el Jarabe Tapatío” El Excélsior. 6 Mayo. 1924, sec.2: 1. Miller, Hubert J. Jose Vasconcelos: A Man for All Americas. The Tinker Pamphlet Series for the Teaching of Mexican American Heritage, 1977. Miñano Garcia, Max H. La Educacion Rural En Mexico. Mexico:  Talleres Graficos de la Nacion, 1945. Monsivais, Carlos. Mexican Postcards. Trans. John Kraniauskas. New York: Verso, 1997. Print. Najera-​Ramirez, Olga. “Social and Political Dimensions of Folklorico Dance: The Binational Dialectic of Residual and Emergent Cultures.” Western Folklore 48.1 (Jan. 1989): 15–​32. Pacheco, José Emilio. “La Patria Perdida:  Notas Sobre Clavijero y la ‘Cultura Nacional.’ ” El Torno a la Cultura Nacional. 1976. Mexico: Fondo de la Cultura Económica, 1983. 11–​50 Pérez Montfort, Ricardo. Avatares Del Nacionalismo Cultural:  Cinco Ensayos. Mexico, D.F.: CIDHEM, 2000. Pérez Montfort, Ricardo​. Estampas Del Nacionalismo Popular Mexicano: Ensayos Sobre Cultura Popular Y Nacionalismo. Mexico,D.F.: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios, 1994. Pill, Albert S. “The Jarabe, Regional Dance of Mexico.” Folk Dance Scene. 21:8 (December 1986), pp. 12–​13. Press Release: El Patronato and San Antonio College Mexican Folk Dances. San Antonio: Private collection of Nelda Drury Guerrero, n.d.

The Jarabe Tapatío   343 Raby, David L. Educación y Revolución Social en Mexico (1921–​1940). Trans. Roberto Gómez Ciriza. Mexico,D.F.: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1974. Redfield, Robert. “Folkways and City Ways.” Reminiscent Mexico. Eds. Herbert Herring and Herbert Weinstock. New York: Friede Publishers, 1935. 30–​48. Robledo Gonzalez, Carlos. Coleccion de Danzas y Bailes Regionales Mexicanos. Mexico City: n.p., 1948. Rubenstein, Anne. “The War on ‘Las Pelonas’ Modern Women and their Enemies in Mexico City 1924.” Sex and the Revolution:  Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico. Eds. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughn, and Gabriela Cano. Durham:  Duke University Press, 2006. 57–​80. Sáenz, Moisés. La Educacion Rural En Mexico por el Professor Moises Saenz Subsecretario De La Educacion Publica. Publicaciones De La Secretaria De Educacion Publica. Vol. 19. 20 vols. Mexico, D. F.: Talleres Graficos de la Nacion, 1928. Sáenz, Moisés. México Integro. Peru: Imprenta Torres Aguirre, 1939. Saldívar, Gabriel. El Jarabe:  Baile Popular Mexicano. 1937. México:  Gobierno del Estado de Puebla, 1987. Toor, Frances. “El Jarabe Antiguo y Moderno.” Mexican Folkways. 6.1 (1930): 26–​37. Print. Universidad Nacional Autónomo de México. 50 Veranos: Alura Flores De Angeles. Mexico: n.d. Vaughan, Mary Kay. Cultural Politics in the Revolution:  Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico 1930–​1940 Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. Vasconcelos, José. El Desastre. Mexico: Libreros Mexicanos Unidos, 1958. Print. Vol. 1 of Obras Completas. 4 vols. 1907–​1958. Vasconcelos, José​. Indologia. Mexico: Libreros Mexicanos Unidos, 1958. Print. Vol 2 of Obras Completas. 4 vols. 1907–​1958. Vasconcelos, José. “Las Escuelas Rurales Educan a las Masas.” El Maestro: Revista de Cultura Nacional. Aug. 1921: 25—​28. Vasconcelos, José​. José Vasconcelos: A Mexican Ullyses, an Autobiography. Trans. Rex W. Crawford. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. Vásquez de Knauth, Josefína. Nacionalismo y Educación in México. Mexico D.F.: El Colegio de México, 1970. Vásquez Valle, Irene. La Cultura Popular Vista por las Elites. México D.F.:  Universidad Autónoma de Mèxico, 1989. Villegas, Abelardo. “El Sustento Ideológico del Nacionalismo Mexicano.” El Nacionalismo y el Arte Mexicano. Mexico: Univeridad Nacional Autónoma Mexico, 1987. 387–​400.

Chapter 15

Pe rcep tion, C onne c t i ons , and Performed I de nt i t i e s in American -​G ha na ia n Dance Enc ou nt e rs Jennifer Fisher

Nation-​building is not always the first topic that comes to mind when you think about what dance does, at least not if you are in a country where dance and national identity have not been explicitly linked in any consistent way. Religion is another category that does not spring to mind for practitioners of Western dance forms such as ballet, jazz, or modern dance. Nation and God may have an inherent place in the practice of some ballet or modern dancers, but it is not often articulated. In most places where contemporary dance traditions flourish onstage, individual creativity and artistic achievement dominate the discussion. In other words, when dance is defined as an art form, a main topic is not why we dance (for instance, to appease the gods, or because “our people” have handed down meaningful traditions), but what we dance (who has choreographed it, who dances it, and if it’sny good). In the West, individual creators and artistic groups thrive and rarely see themselves as national or cultural ambassadors. In Ghana, however—​and in many locations around the world—​staged dance has been interwoven closely with national identity, time-​honored traditions, and spiritual belief, while at the same time, there is a growing interest in contemporary dance.1 As I visited Ghana and met dancers and choreographers in the summer of 2010, I started thinking about the ways in which the categories of “national dance” or “traditional dance” circulate, how they are framed, and, in particular, how they are viewed by outsiders and different practitioners in Ghana. I was also thinking about stereotypes and preconceptions, not unusual for someone traveling to Africa for the first time, or for the young dancers I traveled with, who attended an American university where ballet, modern, and jazz are separated from all other forms. In North American schools, African dance—​along with forms like bharatanatyam, Afro-​Brazilian, or flamenco—​is most

Perception, Connections, and Performed Identities    345

Figure 15.1  Feeling newly confident and international on the road in Ghana, dancers improvise in costumes of traditional fabric; from left, Darina Littleton, Shannon Leypoldt, and Katie Montoya. (photo courtesy of Montoya).

often labeled “world dance.” It’s a familiar and problematic term shadowed by “the West and the rest” assumptions. Scholars like to be more specific about dance genres; they don’t want to rely on categories like “African dance,” but labeling inevitably arises, as do limitations that accompany it. Something called “Ghanaian dance,” for instance, as it is viewed by the rest of the world, might be limited by the idea that it always embodies nation and beliefs. This essay presents reflections on a series of first encounters in Ghana in order to explore the notions of stereotypes, expectations, tradition, commonalities, and the challenges that arise when points of view are limited. Theoretically, it rests on assumptions arising from reception theory (much expanded from its German roots) and rhetorical hermeneutics, which puts great emphasis on the way people argue for meanings.2 As well, it acknowledges a more current discourse on “multicultural” notions, one recognizing that cultural identities are not fixed but always in motion (Bhabha and Appadurai) and that dances “are involved in structures of power on a local as well as global scale” (Hammergren 2009: 17). The group I traveled with in August of 2010 had come together quickly and enthusiastically at the University of California, Irvine, with the best of intentions—​edification gained from cultural exploration, dance practice, and cultural exchange. It resulted in

346   Jennifer Fisher many fascinating experiences, some of which launched further interaction between Americans and Ghanaians, all of which are vividly remembered by participants. Inspired by jazz dance students’ interest in their professor’s Ghanaian experiences, the trip aimed to explore the African roots of jazz. It attracted a few other students and faculty who had their own research connections.3 Enthusiasm ran high, money was raised from eager supporters of “embodied knowledge” and “global citizenship,” and reservations were made for a three-​week exchange at the University of Ghana, Legon, to study with one of the national dance companies based there. In the end, we also liaised with the Dance Department at the University of Ghana, Legon, a separate entity with overlapping interests. Our group was comprised of 18 students (mostly dance majors, but a few others), one budget director, and six faculty members who specialized, respectively, in dance studies, the history of slavery, political science, music, and computer science.4 The project was named “Collaborative Conversations on the Continent,” with the hope that an exchange would evolve, although the initiation and funding came from our side only.

Imagining Ghana Without the “Single Story” Before leaving, our group had embarked on an education program, reading history and even a few language books. We knew that Ghana gained independence from British rule in 1957, and that one of the first enterprises that aimed to create a national unity out of diverse ethnic groups and to represent the new country was a national dance company, the Ghana Dance Ensemble, founded in 1962. Dance, then, was central enough to the Ghanaian enterprise to warrant governmental support, something we did not experience in the United States. During the weeks before embarking, we gathered for a few lectures about slavery and Ghanaian history, as well as one from a study-​abroad representative about cultural sensitivity, culture shock, and what to expect. At an evening gathering, we also enjoyed Ghanaian food prepared by a friendly émigré who told us stories about her homeland. But even though we knew something of the multi-​ethnic history of the nation, as well as its diverse religions and artistic traditions, it was perhaps hard not to imagine we were going to encounter a monolithic place called Ghana, where we would learn about “Ghanaian dance and music,” as a course on such things would invariably be called. We knew there would be Western dance influences there, but the major idea was to encounter indigenous traditions with deep roots. I suggest, inevitably, that we anticipated meeting something we thought of as ancient and historically venerable. In this way, we were prepared to see “nation” as a category much more intertwined with dance than it was at home. One of the most impactful bits of preparation turned out to be a lecture by Nigerian poet Chimamanda Adichie, which we could see on YouTube (2009). She introduced us

Perception, Connections, and Performed Identities    347 to the traps of “the single story,” or the tendency to see an unknown person in a limited way, based on stereotypes or fear. Dancers like to see ideas embodied, and the grace with which Adichie delivered her message gave it more resonance than words on a page. Adichie had left Nigeria to study in the United States and quickly encountered people who were shocked to find she could speak fluent English (ironically, the official language of Nigeria). They were surprised she listened to pop music, not tribal drums. She felt she was the recipient of stereotypes we were all trying to avoid, the ones in which Africa is “a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner” (Adichie). There it was—​the inevitable reminder that we were from the privileged “first world” and that most of us were bound to be somewhat ignorant of other realities. Perhaps we would be the latest explorers who, though we tried not to, still retained some “antiquated notions of social evolution of nations” (Osumare 2012: 121). In other times, “Europe and the West were projected as the socioeconomic pinnacle that exported its advanced cosmopolitan modernity to ‘underdeveloped’ societies mired in ‘tradition’ ” (121). Would our assumptions about modernity and dance tradition undermine our ability to see where Ghana was today? I risk speaking for all of us when I say that we only knew that we wanted to go and learn what was to be learned—​to be careful while doing it, but to be enthusiastic and open, as well. It helped us to know that Adichie admitted she herself had stereotyped others in the past. In her own country, she realized, she had made assumptions about less fortunate people, defining them in terms of economic need and perhaps ignoring their individual talents; she found herself in Mexico once, surprised that life went on “normally” when the news had led her to expect nothing but strife there. Her message was about power—​ how it’s misused when you only see stereotypes, and how empowering it feels to understand that we are all multifaceted. Adichie’s warning about not settling for the “single story” became a watchword for our group. In terms of ethnicity and cultural tradition, who among us had a single story? Our group consisted of people who identified as black, white, Latino, Euro-​American, and Asian, to name only a few categories; some were connected to recent immigration, some had deep roots in the United States. Yet these differences were often eased when dance provided a common meeting ground. It’s not that ethnic allegiances and stereotypes do not exist in diverse Southern California—​of course, they do—​but I suggest that national or religious associations are often subordinate to other daily identifications in the academic and artistic worlds. For one thing, the identity of an artist can trump any “stable or cohesive” national identity for American dancers, as dance scholar Clare Croft found when interviewing New York City Ballet dancers about a Soviet Union tour during the Cold War (Croft 2009).5 For NYCB members, she found, national identity was only one part of how they defined themselves. Instead of championing American identity, they tended to see themselves as citizens of a “larger ballet world,” where they had, in fact, inherited much of their practice from Russian roots, “[forging] a connective tissue” between Russians and themselves (422). In our group, something similar might have been going on. Jazz dance, with

348   Jennifer Fisher its strong connections to African diaspora traditions, had been the motivator. Young dancers might not have known about the Middle Passage and the evolution of diaspora dance and music forms in great detail, but they carried some of this history in their bodies. They were ready to encounter new information and new directions, while hoping they could trace some familiar rhythmic pathways and find firm connections to a new continent. In other words, they were ready to encounter the embodied results of tradition in Ghana—​and perhaps less prepared to encounter what is contemporary there.

Encountering Themes of Religion and Nation A lively conversation that set the stage for contrasting world-​views took place during my first hour after arriving in Ghana. On the grass of a courtyard in a compound adjacent to the university where we were renting rooms, I joined our graduate student filmmaker and a young woman from nearby Accra, who served as an informal local guide, as they were talking about religion.6 Was it true that so many Americans didn’t go to church, our new Ghanaian acquaintance wanted to know, turning to me—​did I believe in God, in Jesus? Having just arrived, I worried about giving offense somehow, or maybe I just worried about the shock of her encountering two seeming infidels first thing. But I answered honestly—​no, Jesus was not accepted as my savior and no, my California friend agreed, we were not Christians, though we were not saying there wasn’t a god. We echoed a common response in the post-​baby-​boom generation, declaring that we were to some degree “spiritual,” but not religious. Our curious new acquaintance was wide-​ eyed—​but why did we not believe? How did we get through life? Where did we look for strength in a crisis? Hmmm, where, indeed? we asked ourselves, not displeased with the challenge. It was the kind of question we both liked, because we did believe in things and liked to talk about it. One way I found strength, I explained, was through dance and other kinds of art, which could suggest and comfort with optimism, commonalities, hope, and beauty. I can’t remember how much I was able to explain that afternoon; it was clearly a new idea for this Ghanaian—​which it might be to anyone on my home turf as well. But in Ghana, as in much of Africa, I knew, the gods danced, the gods might possess you, or you might dance to give glory to and gain favor with the gods—​or to praise Jesus in particular in this southern region where Christianity has had such an impact. To find meaning and support in dance that didn’t mention god … this was a challenge for our first Ghanaian contact to understand. In Ghana, we could clearly see, if we had not known already, religion was everywhere, whether in tales and customs from traditional religion, still practiced by a few, or in the Muslim culture that thrived further north, or in the south where we were, now dominated by Christianity. There were many different Protestant denominations, we found out quickly, many of them evangelical and charismatic.7 We were fascinated with the

Perception, Connections, and Performed Identities    349 way religion circulated around us every day on business signs and painted on the sides of cars and buses: “Devotion” or “God’s Love” might appear on the back of a truck ahead of us, and we never tired of reading the names of shops along the side of the road—​“God First Battery Service,” “Thank you Jesus Spare Parts,” “Our Father Herbal Soap,” and “The Lord is My Shepherd Saw Sharpening Shop.” The university Dance Department and the professional companies in Ghana were set up as secular enterprises, but religion clearly had a strong presence for most of the people we met. It was a different atmosphere for American dancers who were virtually all trained in secular institutions. “Nation,” too, was a big topic, since we visitors were at once cast as “the Americans,” or “the Californians,” and our hosts were “the Ghanaians.” After all, we were going to study with the country’s first national dance group (some of whose members formed another group that moved to the National Theatre, while this one retains a home at the University of Ghana, Legon). The formation of a national dance company became a priority in postcolonial Ghana to help solidify a collective national identity. The new country included dozens of ethnic groups, each with different and sometimes overlapping cultural customs in which dance and music figured prominently. As anthropologist Katharina Schramm expertly chronicled (2000), Ghana’s initial dual projects of throwing off British colonialism and drawing together the disparate Ghanaian groups received rhetorical and practical support very prominently from Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and from the founders of the first national dance company, choreographer Albert Mawere Opoku and musicologist J.H. Kwabena Nketia (342). Pretending that a unified cultural identity could instantly exist was never an option, and, “The concept of ‘unity in diversity’ thus became one of the key expressions in Ghanaian political discourse and remains valid up to this day” (341). In other words, the national dance company in Ghana would serve more than one purpose:  to collect, demonstrate and share traditional dance, and to forge a united Ghanaian identity from many disparate parts. In aid of this latter goal, the various traditions from many tribal and ethnic groups would be learned by each company member, not remaining the special property of particular performers connected intimately with them. Nor was the idea of theatrical success neglected. From the start, as Schramm recounts, “political considerations had to be subordinated to artistic quality and aesthetic excellence” (344) and “creative innovation” was to go “hand in hand with preservation” (345). Thus, staged Ghanaian dance had a somewhat stable identity, even though its theatricalization and the modern innovations that crept in over the years were often debated. Versions of traditional dances took center stage in this country, providing a state-​supported performance of nation that fell well within the tradition of “national dance companies” in many parts of the world, a history expertly chronicled by dance scholar Anthony Shay (2002). To some degree during our trip, we would remain on the level of encountering each other as national representatives. Our dancers arrived in Ghana ready to learn about “Ghanaian dance,” and they did learn dances rooted in various ethnic groups and regions, now adapted and staged as part of the national dance company’s repertory. On the other hand, no one would even try to agree on an overall identity for “American

350   Jennifer Fisher dance.” Our student dancers specialized in ballet, modern, jazz, salsa, and bboy, with plenty of European, Latin, and African influences feeding those forms. What was American dance? When the U.S. State Department practiced cultural diplomacy during the Cold War era—​one of the few times supporting dance became a national priority—​ the decisions about what image of the nation should be exported revealed many agendas. As other nations had done before when looking for positive press, U.S. government committees chose images of happy, industrious, noble Americans, but popular forms like tap, or dances reflecting racial strife were not funded (see Prevots for a detailed account of this history).8 Appropriately, the American Indian Dance Company received government support to tour abroad—​I once heard its director argue that it was the only dance company that could reasonably call itself “national.” The idea that America had ancient dance roots came up in Ghana after one of my lectures to UG Legon undergraduates and graduates of their MFA program. I was asked whether Americans revered their Native American dance legacy; did they use it as inspiration for new dance? Ghanaians respect their ancient traditions and beliefs as part of their heritage, the questioner said, and they build on this past to create future dance, so that contemporary forms contained recognizable dance vocabulary. Why not do the same with the ancient dance of the Americas? It was an excellent question, pointing out that in North America (and in Europe), the tradition of modern dance was to rebel against established dance forms and invent something seen as miraculously new. This was not the Ghanaian idea of inventing contemporary dance, we learned. They saw themselves as creating new dances without throwing out old traditions, which was something I would eventually see in one of their performances.

Choreographic Encounters and Connections Our first day in the studio provided an excellent introduction to the way “Ghanaian dance” was shared by the national company. As we arrived in a small, warm studio, our faculty and staff sat on the sidelines, assuming we would watch the accomplished professionals teach our university dancers. Instead, we were rapidly invited, then coerced, to join the circle. This is not something that would occur if a professional American company was hosting serious dance students from another country. For me, it related to the “national ambassador” role of the Ghana Dance Ensemble, as well as, perhaps, the inclusive tradition of dance in Africa, where people of all ages and abilities participate. Led by company director Ben Ayettey, we made a circle with members of the company interspersed between us and launched into games that emphasized multiple rhythms, concentration, and human connections. We heard more than once the African saying, “A bad dance will not harm the earth,” which is meant to encourage the timid. These games, involving polyrhythms, repeated patterns, and shouting out our names,

Perception, Connections, and Performed Identities    351 had evolved from their being asked so often to introduce their dances to outsiders—​the themes, symbols, stories and meaning. As an effective practice, it was also used in the dance department’s general curriculum, because not every modern Ghanaian grows up with traditional knowledge.9 At first, we could not “read” the Ghanaian dancers’ level of interest in this “collaboration,” which was not a collaboration at all at the beginning. It was clearly going to take much time for our dancers to learn anything significant about “their dance,” whereas they were pretty well informed about the contemporary dance our students knew. The lines that separated us seemed clearly drawn. The company dancers were not just cultural ambassadors; they were working professionals who had been asked to host African-​dance beginners who came to discover Ghana. Reasonably, they might have preferred to be working on their own repertory or touring across America, rather than hosting a curious university group. They seemed a bit withdrawn at first, and it was easy to imagine they might be bored teaching the basics. Because of the economic disparity, some of us felt ourselves cast as customers who had paid them to help us learn, and we worried about their interest in the enterprise. Still, the environment was seductive, and we agreed that “it was what it was,” in that we had knocked on their door and asked to learn. It would take a while before real collaborations would take place. Once the students started to learn steps and repertory without their professors trying to keep up, I started to see many ways they had to connect to the rhythmic structures. I also observed them struggling with the required balance between looseness and control. The African “aesthetic of the cool” required nuanced shifts between energy and attack, all the while mastering a deceptively laid-​back indirectness that turns into vitality in an instant.10 Knowing our only bboy in the group was searching for his embodied connections to African dance, I caught his delighted eye as he was learning a step-​tap-​ rebound movement that strongly resembled the “top rock” of bboy circles. Though he was least familiar with learning choreography in a formal studio setting, he could embrace the feeling of community and “coolness” he related to the ethos of his Southern California bboy culture. But hip hop-​derived dances, while giving practitioners a strong feeling of “getting down,” and rebounding in African style—​as well as helping dancers develop improvisational skills—​do not prepare you to follow a studio class. He struggled with choreography, often finding more collaborative energy in jamming with musicians. His moment of movement collaboration came when he encountered local bboys on the group’s trip to Cape Coast, where he had a rich exchange of battling energies (Knox 2011). Our students learned Ghanaian dances in sections, picking them up quickly, repeating and correcting, as choreography is taught all over the world. In this respect, the dance majors felt at home, with “counted” step combinations and ballet terms such as “demi-​plié.” But even when steps became familiar, the African sense of “ongoingness” was still elusive, involving many intricate isolations and shifting rhythms. Drum lessons took place under the trees each day, helping instill an understanding of rhythmic complexity, but while dancing, it was hard for many of our dancers to surrender their vertical stance, to mobilize their torsos, and allow movement to travel through

352   Jennifer Fisher

Figure 15.2  Daily drumming class under the trees with Darina Littleton (partly visible), Hope Bataclan, Martha Zepeda, and Katie Montoya. (Photo by author)

their bodies. Modern dance had given some of them the ability to “feel the floor,” and jazz had made many familiar with isolations and pelvic mobility; but Ghanaian dance seemed to require looseness and control at the same time, in every part of the body. Energy and rhythm had to travel throughout the body—​it looked spontaneous, but required practice and skill. I saw a few excellent salsa dancers release ribs and hips boldly and easily, but often they looked too loose, and I tried to figure out what didn’t​ “look right.” American dance scholar Odette Blum, studying dance in Ghana in the late 1960s and early 1970s, identified many of the challenges for the Western-​trained dancer, using her practiced eye for dance analysis. She noted that the way quickness, lightness, strength, and subtle rhythmic alterations came together in the Ghanaian version of “connectedness,” and how her Western dance sense of being “lifted” needed loosening (Blum 1973: 23). Blum also described the African version of “unison,” which acknowledges much more individuality. Ghanaian dancers, I could see, each had the same qualities of movement and executed the same choreography, but with a lot of room for nuanced individual style. On the other hand, I could see our dancers striving to imitate shapes and steps uniformly, instead of, perhaps, learning impulses and pathways from within, without

Perception, Connections, and Performed Identities    353

Figure 15.3 Author with Terry Ofosu, and Oh!Nii Sowah in the dance department of the University of Ghana, Legon.

regard for matching others exactly. For me, these different versions of group identity both coalesced with and contradicted the essentialized notions both groups might have had about each other. Americans are stereotyped as extreme individualists, without as much value for group solidarity as, say, Ghanaians, who learned to dance out a collective identity, and whose pride in country seems merged with pride in their dancing. Our dancers, presumably fiercely independent, identifying themselves more as dancers than Americans at times, often focused on exact uniformity of movement, like a corps de ballet, an army battalion, or a cheerleading team. Our dancers gradually made progress in understanding West African dance, and relationships with their professional mentors started forming, as they do in any studio enterprise where the goals and interactions lead to shared performance. In one particularly successful interaction, a talented tapper jammed with a master drummer, each respecting the other’s complex riffs (Littleton 2011). On the other hand, when the groups performed repertory for each other, the Ghanaians were perplexed by our dancers’ lack of emotion or sense of story in their choreographies. This conversation revealed a difference in theatrical history and aesthetics—​for decades, Euro-​American contemporary dance had not relied on specific stories or emotional displays for it to be meaningful. Yet, I related to the Ghanaian complaint that they couldn’t tell why our

354   Jennifer Fisher performers were dancing. With our performers, there did not have to be a particular story, and their faces did not have to portray emotion overtly, but something vital was often missing. Coaches of university dancers, as well as many professionals, struggle to get this elusive performance quality, for dancers to be “lit from within,” or similarly bring special life to dance. Was the Ghanaian pride or spiritual commitment contributing to the masterful performance qualities we saw? Our dancers envied it and no doubt had many thoughts about how to become professional and what to take from the short course on Ghanaian dance they were having. They had conversations with our hosts about religion and customs in Ghana, but the focus every day was on the dance, which provided a kind of connective tissue. The passion for movement and expression was something dance majors can share to a large degree with working professionals, no matter what their experiences and circumstances may be outside the studio, or where they are in the world.

Encountering Contemporary Ghanaian Dance Because this original Ghana Dance Ensemble (GDE) specialized in traditional dance, I had expected to see only traditional dancing. I knew there was a dance institute called Noyam, founded by dance-​theater innovator Francis Nii-​Yartey, where all kinds of dance experimentation and training went on, but I expected some degree of specialization in one category or the other—​perhaps a “single story” assumption, even though the strict divides between practitioners in the West had started to erode more than ever in 21st century contemporary dance. Still, one thing you rarely find in American dance is a company that features theatricalized folk or ritual dance and contemporary experiments. So, when our group and the GDE were exchanging performances one afternoon in the largest of the studios, it took me a few minutes of watching a Ghanaian piece we hadn’t been told about to see that this was contemporary dance. Or was it? I could see traditional steps; perhaps I just didn’t recognize that older dances can resemble new ones? No, I decided quickly, it was contemporary; it had variable dynamics and use of stage space that departed from theatricalized traditional dances, or rituals and ceremonies. Eventually, the piece started to remind me of Alvin Ailey’s iconic modern dance work, Revelations, because of its sculptural groupings, dynamic shifts, and dramatic affect. Themes of struggle, release, and pride emerged clearly in curved backs, flowing patterns, and lifted chests. As an audience perhaps not prepared to be swept away in such a familiar way, we were full of breathless praise for the dance, which we found was called “Map,” choreographed by Ayettey. But it was not “Ghanaian dance,” I found myself thinking, using the paradigm that describes and limits “national dance,” it was simply “good dance,” of the kind we recognized as contemporary. It was an interesting distinction of the moment.

Perception, Connections, and Performed Identities    355 Later, when Ben Ayettey showed me and a few colleagues a filmed version of “Map,” my reaction to the piece changed, because its costumes and sets anchored it in a kind of “flag-​waving” extravaganza. I suggest that my previous experience with American flag-​waving provided a limitation when it came to “seeing” the fully produced dance as contemporary. I also, somewhat automatically, knew that an American dance audience might not see the costume or set choices as sophisticated. In the filmed performance, the choreographer explained to us apologetically, a few compromises had been made. One was crucial. Instead of the multi-​drum accompaniment, some kind of flat electronic orchestral music was used, a choice made by presenters at a festival. And whereas I had seen the dancers in rehearsal clothes, which conjured up an “everyman” engaged in struggle that could be universal, they wore some kind of stylized traditional gear in the film; it located them in a specific way that called up many unflattering images for me (I seem to remember fringes). Moreover, at the end of the work, there was a stage effect we had missed altogether in the studio performance. Each dancer carried a large flat cardboard piece and circled in patterns throughout the stage, then all the dancers came together at the back of the stage to assemble a literal “map” of Ghana. Although it was hard to judge from a video of a compromised performance of this piece, I felt myself wondering if the mandate to represent “nation” had limited the scope of the dance, and whether a Western audience (I knew the troupe longed to tour) would be able to see it as the strong contemporary work it was, or if they would receive it as a “cultural performance” meant only to tell them about Ghana. Were the limitations mine? The choreographer’s? The imagined American audience’s? Or was it just what occurs when cultural diplomacy sets the tone for a dance company? This is not to say that patriotism or national solidarity precludes good dance, of course. Sometimes, they coexist, as in George Balanchine’s over-​the-​top Souza fest called “Stars and Stripes,” in which a large American flag unfurls as dancers in uniforms and pointe shoes leap and prance in formation. Perhaps my moment of doubt about “Map” had more to do with my deciding what contemporary Ghanaian choreographers should do, worried that their partial isolation from the contemporary dance scene elsewhere made it hard for them to find the appropriate tone for larger audiences. Recounting the early years of choreographer Frances Nii-​Yartey’s notable dance-​theatre experiments, when he was challenged for not being sufficiently Ghanaian, Schramm notes that, “The appropriation of the opportunities offered by the global market goes hand-in-hand with a certain degree of conformity with the conventions and expectations of that very market” (352). Departing from many traditional elements of dance and music, Nii-​Yartey had much success with expanding what might have become “a museum approach to the art,” as Schramm points out (353), kick-​starting new ways for Ghanaians to reflect new realities. Attacked for using Bolivian music, he answered that his own African sensibilities and creative vision made its inclusion appropriate, in effect pointing out that artists have always done creative borrowing (351). From her research in the 1990s, Schramm was already recording the worries that traditionalists had over what “hybridization” might

356   Jennifer Fisher do to what they consider “authentic,” and how thorny those debates could be. What I saw was just one choreographer’s work with a national dance company, only a suggestion of the current expansion of creative endeavor in Ghana alone, not to mention other parts of Africa. Still, what it suggested to me was the distance that has to be covered in order for members of one artistic community—​in Europe or America—​to be able to “see” dance from another. Looking back, I could see that our Ghanaian hosts face complex challenges in being themselves, creating new work, and being well received at home and abroad. I could not determine what my limitations were all the time, but I could question them. Nadine Siegert, from the Bayreuth International School of African Studies, has pointed out that European reception of African dance reveals many partial viewpoints, seemingly intertwined with notions of “tradition,” and “authenticity,” and also mixed up with stereotypes of “wildness” and the “archaic.” She calls for clarity about African dance in the context of “global productions of contemporary art” (Siegert 2010). Nigerian choreographer Qudus Onikeku also worries about stereotypes in an essay he calls “My Trouble with Contemporary African Dance,” noting that Africa is always being reduced to one “geographical, moral, and cultural pod” (Onikeku 2010). As a performer, he says, he is expected to define himself in relationship to colonialism or slavery—​whereas European artists, who share this history, are not. Onikeku, who has trained and toured in the West, concludes that his personal context needs to be well-​explored and given a larger context. He now explores identity and exile with a dance vocabulary that includes Yoruba movement, hip hop, acrobatics, and other influences. On my return from Ghana, I encountered the writing of researchers such as Siegert and Onikeku, who are part of an ongoing effort to present, address, and dance through the issues of evolving African dance. They confirmed my idea that encounters between dance in the West and West Africa continue to be complex.

Fruits of the Journey My trip to Ghana led me to ask questions both about my own artistic and experiential territory and theirs. I was no longer an observer from afar, though still an outsider; I had been there and started to perceive the depth of the tradition and the scope of potential innovation, as well as the layers of understanding that have to be traversed for the outsider. The first step was to abandon “imagined Africa,” of course, and to watch and listen to some of its heartbeat, its intellectual expression, and its stories. At this later moment in time, I chronicle a few peak moments that represent points of connection for me. One of them has to do with performance quality and commitment to dance; another was an ecstatic, immersive moment among Ghanaian dancers when their dance became contagious. One afternoon, I was watching a rehearsal of a jazz piece our dancers had performed at home and were going to repeat for the Ghana Dance Ensemble. I liked the moody,

Perception, Connections, and Performed Identities    357 well-​constructed dance I  had seen a few times before and watched as a recent UC Irvine graduate—​an accomplished dancer I knew to be totally taken with her Ghanaian experience—​start the piece with a few slow gestures center-​stage. One arm traveled slowly behind her to reach out, followed by a few other reaching gestures that looked to me completely lifeless. Her face was blank, her body listless. Having become used to the commitment and embodied energy of our hosts’ dancing, perhaps I was expecting something more along the lines of African dance. I wanted to see our dancers looking as if they had a reason to move, whether or not there was emotion or a story involved. I saw clearly then what our hosts were missing from our university dancers. I might have been tempted to think the Ghanaians got that performance quality from their national or religious enthusiasm, but I suspected the reasons had more to do with artistry and the myriad mysterious sources of it. Whatever the causes, our dancers looked listless in the context of Ghana, where I saw so much bold dancing. When they stopped to make some adjustments, I asked the dancer why she was making those gestures—​did she have an idea what the dance was about, was there some animating force she could recall? Yes, come to think of it, several of the dancers recalled, choreographer Tracey Bonner had told them why the title was “Crossroads,” that it was about isolation and seeking connections. Then it made sense that the opening gesture came from a lone individual center-​stage, being pulled in different directions, feeling incomplete. Bonner told me later that she had worked with them on ways to develop focus and show emotion, but by the time I saw them in Ghana, they had clearly forgotten their motivation. Could Ghanaian dancers afford to forget their motivation? Even in the other repertory piece UC Irvine performed for the Ghanaians, a lively jazz romp called “Nommo,” with many African movement motifs, the dancers often looked as if they were concentrating on the steps alone. You could say that the Ghanaian professionals were just that much more experienced; or you could wonder about the way having a stake in “national dance” might provide a setting for dancers to remain invested in performance. The other strong memory, the ecstatic one, occurred at what was called the “Friday night performance lab,” when every dance class in the school gathered to show what they were learning and to jam further with the material. There were eight or ten drummers, and over a hundred dancers, with the UC Irvine group integrated into much of the activity. There were dances we recognized from the national company repertory, with experts breaking into creative improvisation and beginners giving it their best. I could feel the dozens of drum patterns reverberate in my chest, saw the vitality of the attack, the ongoing energy. Several teaching assistant lecturers—​virtually all male MFA graduates—​broke into specialty solos that brought to mind diasporic images of Earl “Snake Hips” Tucker, James Brown, and Michael Jackson. At one point, about three hours into constant dancing, dance department head Oh!Nii Sowah called on the UC Irvine dancers to perform for everyone assembled. Exhausted and wrung out in the heat, our dancers rallied, as they knew they had to, and set up their CD accompaniment for “Nommo.” I had seen the work a dozen times and loved the enthusiasm my colleague Sheron Wray had coached into them for her

358   Jennifer Fisher piece, but I still wondered how it would compare with the overwhelmingly committed Ghanaian dance, with its irresistible wall of sound from a phalanx of drummers. After all, our careful, sometimes shy university dancers were passionate, but so often couldn’t bring that passion into their dance, as I had seen at the previous rehearsal. But I was wrong. Inspired by their surroundings, jacked up by live drumming, or just loosened into the exciting realm of Ghanaian dance, they performed the piece with committed fervor, paying more attention to being in the moment than I had ever seen before. “How can we bottle this, how can we take it back with us?” they asked afterward. For a few brief moments, and for perhaps much of the three-​week exchange, we had all seemed to inhabit the same dancing nation, or, rather, a tiny corner of a hopeful “United Nations” of our own. I hoped some of that embodied knowledge would stay with the participants.

The Outsider’s Africa How did we encounter Ghana? Our university dancers had inherited many bodily practices from West Africa in their own social dance as well as concert dance. As Brenda

Figure 15.4 Ghana Dance Ensemble member Christopher Ametarnyo teaches repertory to dancers from the University of California, Irvine. Visible to his right, Krystal Pires- Patch, Darina Littleton, Hope Bataclan; on his left, Jason Poullard.

Perception, Connections, and Performed Identities    359 Dixon Gottschild has detailed (see especially 1996), American life in general and dance in particular have been affected by Africanist practices. They show up in hip language trends and in hip-​swinging social dance, and also in concert dance forms, changing whatever came before. It’s easy to see Africa in the Charleston, Lindy, swing, jitterbug, up to the age of bboy and hip hop. Not so well-​known is the link between Africanist practices and the inventor of American ballet, George Balanchine. Balanchine’s renovation of his classical Russian roots took ballet off-​center and gave it angles, attack, and isolations clearly gleaned from African-​American collaborations and influence (Dixon Gottschild 1996; Banes 1994). After Balanchine, contemporary ballet would not mean a thing if it didn’t have that swing. Jazz, obviously, had a less-​hidden link to Africanist aesthetics. With the African diaspora having made such inroads into the American dance world, it’s not surprising that Southern California dancers looked forward to connecting with the source in Africa. Just as the New York City Ballet dancers touring during the Cold War found resonant connections to Russian ballet culture, our California dancers found ties to Ghanaian dance, in movement and spirit. Afterward, we all agreed we could not tell what our Ghanaian counterparts gleaned from the brief exchange, and that future trips would be designed with their needs driving the schedule and a feedback mechanism employed.11 I can only report that, from a scholarly perspective, ties with emerging dance scholars at the University of Ghana, Legon have started to build; that our computer expert embarked on a collaboration to mount a website exploring Ghanaian slavery history;12 that our bboy made life-​long friends to whom he still keeps connected; and that various of our dancers discovered cultural enrichment and dance connections by turns. In an essay she wrote later, UC Irvine dance major Katie Montoya called the innovative Noyam institute, where our dancers spent a day, “A Home Away from Home.” She described a choreographic exercise our dancers and Ghanaian students did, starting with a traditional dance and expanding it with newly improvised movement. The dance vocabulary varied, she said, but they had in common their goals—​attention to tempo, movement quality, body part initiation, and in general, a passion for personal expression as well as using dance as “a tool for betterment of society” (Montoya 2011). A high point for her came during a break in choreographic exercises, when she and her new Ghanaian collaborators let loose to Michael Jackson in “a mesh of hip hop and African styles,” using call and response as a way of embodied exchange. Another California student pointed to what she shared with her Ghanaian counterparts, the fact that dance is therapeutic, effective for telling stories, and irresistible as a way to live (Tatone 2011). Although my stay in Ghana was brief, it was impactful, and I use it here as a suggestion of the issues that circulate around nationalism, dance, spirit, and hybrid identities, both for the Ghanaians I met and the California visitors. We started out and ended as people with passports, advantages, limitations, and differences—​and also a common interest in dance, tradition, and art. If you asked our students about the label “Ghanaian” now, they would probably use it more as a convenient way to indicate geographic location, specific nationhood, and inherited traditions, as well as emerging new ones. They would speak of it as something varied that that they respect, not as a limited “single story” categorization,

360   Jennifer Fisher

Figure 15.5  Filmmaker Ash Smith with Ghanaian guide Selina Laryea at an Asante shrine, now a small museum that commemorates traditional religion on the road from Accra to Kumasi. (Photo by author)

but one anchored in many realities and also floating aloft with myriad individual dreams and goals. “Ghanaian dance” clearly is a label pointing to a proud set of traditions and people, and also a term that has expanded to mean “contemporary artist,” if the world is willing to see it. For an outsider’s multifaceted definition of “American dance,” I look forward to Ghanaians and others who may do a similar kind of musing.

Notes 1. An overview of traditional Ghanaian dance and music can be found in Younge, 2011; mention of the emergence of African contemporary dance is made in a foreword, by prominent Ghanaian choreographer Francis Nii-​Yartey (5–​6). An excellent history and discussion of the national companies and controversies relating to preservation and evolution are found in Schramm, 2000. I use the term “contemporary dance” here, as many in the dance field do, to label currently emerging theatrical concert dance that tends to include aspects of forms such as ballet, modern, and postmodern dance. There is little consensus when it comes to a definition of “contemporary dance,” but I believe the term is used in Ghana to indicate an expansion of aesthetics and trends that brings them into a relationship with the West and current realms of concert dance.

Perception, Connections, and Performed Identities    361 2. My own adaptation of German reception theory and American reader-​response theory can be explored more in the “Theory” chapter of Fisher 1998. I use Stephen Mailloux’s term “rhetorical hermeneutics,” which he says focuses on “how specific interpretive practices function within sociopolitical contexts of persuasion” (Mailloux, 1990, 52). 3. Assistant Professor Sheron Wray was responsible for galvanizing the interest of her jazz ensemble students, raising funds for the project, gathering interested participants, and making preliminary arrangements with the Ghana Dance Ensemble (GDE) at the University of Ghana, Legon. She had choreographed for the GDE the year before. 4. Our group was dominated by dance majors and also included a few dancers not in the Dance Department. Two Dance MFAs from UC Irvine came, one of them taking charge of the dancers in the absence of Professor Wray during our first week in Ghana. Our one bboy had just graduated with a Music MFA, having explored for his thesis relationships between Southern California bboy crew dancing and live music. A representative from the UC Irvine Study Abroad Center, Marcella Khelif, was with us for the first part of the trip. The only non-​UC-​Irvine participant was Ash Smith, at the time an MFA student in film at University of California, San Diego. Smith took film footage throughout the trip, often handing the camera to Ghanaians around her in the spirit of collaboration. Most faculty members were not present all three weeks; I was there for the first two. 5. In her 1998 ethnographic study of three ballet companies in different countries, Helena Wulff (1993) acknowledges that standards for ballet are agreed-​upon internationally (37), thereby pointing to the fact that actual citizenship is rarely debated in what she calls the “transnational ballet world” (37). A long tradition of peripatetic dance masters and dancers mitigates debates about there being “national styles” or such a thing as “a national dancer” (40–​42). In this way, she seems to agree with Croft about ballet dancers belonging more to an imagined community of artists, not to specific nations or ethnic groups. 6. Our rooms were in a compound adjacent to the university, belonging to the Institute of African Studies. It is now the “old” compound, a new facility having opened shortly after we left in early September 2010. 7. While in Ghana, one of our lectures from University of Ghana faculty, Dr.  Stephen Akyeampong, gave us a brief overview of traditional religion, missionary activity and established churches in various denominations. I  was also informed by Omofolabo Soyinka Ajayi (1994) on contrasting religious attitudes toward the dancing body; and on the topic of African Independent Churches by Brigid M.  Sackey (2005), who explores Ghanaian history of Pentecostal and charismatic practices. I  thank Professor Akosua Ampofo for her correction in an earlier draft regarding the fact that evangelical and charismatic religious practices occur in many Protestant sects. 8. The complex issues and debates that surrounded the selection of dance works sent abroad to represent “America” during the Cold War are explored in fascinating detail by Prevots, during a time period, historian Eric Foner comments in the introduction to Prevots’ book, when “the government believed that artistic achievement ought to be viewed as one of the glories of American life” (quoted on Prevots, 6). 9. An MFA thesis written by Oh!Nii Sowah in 1995 at the University of California, Irvine, Dance Department seemed to me to have laid the groundwork for the system used for beginners we encountered in Ghana. The thesis lays out a plan to teach Ghanaian dance to outsiders, emphasizing the aspects of community and confidence in games that involve complex rhythm. Sowah now heads the Dance Department in the Performing Arts School at the University of Ghana, Legon, and although it operates separately from the

362   Jennifer Fisher professional Ghana Dance Ensemble, there appeared to be much overlap in philosophy. Our group had the advantage of liaising with both dance entities. Sowah made his office feel like home and offered not only a lecture, but much mentoring and many connections to anyone in the dance community we wanted to meet. Our group owes him profound thanks for his knowledge and generous spirit. 10. Hallmarks of the African aesthetic, especially as it is described in the work of Robert Faris Thompson, appear in relation to dance in several works by Brenda Dixon Gottschild. In general “the aesthetic of the cool” is the umbrella term encompassing many qualities that are admired in West African dance and music. They include a youthful attack, a “get-​ down” attitude, as well as elements of contrariety described by the phrases “embracing the conflict,” and “high affect juxtaposition” (Dixon Gottschild 1996). 11. We had all read “Nine Problems That Hinder Partnerships in Africa” (Holm and Leapetsewe 2010), which emphasizes the importance of finding out what’s needed from the African perspective before designing projects, yet several members of the faculty agreed some of that knowledge got lost, given the speed with which the trip came together, and the exigencies of on-​the-​ground arrangements. As an enthusiastic first foray into such a dance partnership, the trip had much potential and yielded some fruitful results, but if another of its kind were to take place, a formal assessment at the University of California, Irvine concluded, many improvements could be made. 12. This was Professor Magda El Zarki, who made connections that enabled her to embark on construction of a website for Ghanaian colleagues who will provide the content on the topic of slavery history inside Ghana.

Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda. 2009. “The Danger of the Single Story.” Ted Talks, Oxford, England, July. http://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg Ajayi, Omofolabo Soyinka. 1994. “In Contest: The Dynamics of African Religious Dances,” in African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, ed. Karimu Welsh Asante. Trenton, N.J., Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press: 183–​202. Banes, Sally. 1994. “Balanchine and Black Dance,” in Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism. New England: Wesleyan: 53–​69. Croft, Clare. 2009. “Ballet Nations: The New York City Ballet’s 1962 U.S. State Department-​ Sponsored Tour of the Soviet Union.” Theatre Journal 61: 421–​442. Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. 1996. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Fisher, Jennifer, 1998. “The Annual Nutcracker: a participant-​oriented, contextualized study of The Nutcracker ballet as it has evolved into a Christmas Ritual in the United States and Canada,” dissertation, University of California, Riverside. Hammergren, Lena. 2009. “The Power of Classification,” in Worlding Dance, ed. Susan Leigh Foster. Hampshire, England: Palgrave MacMillan: 14–​31. Holm, John D, and Leapetsewe Malete. 2010. “Nine Problems That Hinder Partnerships in Africa.” 2010. The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13. Knox, Joe. 2011. “A White Bboy in Africa,” in Dance Major Journal, ed. Jennifer Fisher. Irvine, CA: Dance Department, University of California, Irvine website. http://​dance.arts.uci.edu/​ sites/​default/​files/​DMJ%202011%20Online%20Version%20Final.pdf

Perception, Connections, and Performed Identities    363 Littleton, Darina. 2011. “Tapping in Africa,” in Dance Major Journal, ed. Jennifer Fisher. Irvine, CA: Dance Department, University of California, Irvine website. http://​dance.arts.uci.edu/​ sites/​default/​files/​DMJ%202011%20Online%20Version%20Final.pdf Mailloux, Steven. 1990. “The Turns of Reader-​ Response Criticism,” in Conversations:  Contemporary Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature, Charles Moran and Elizabeth F. Penfield, eds. Urbana, Illinois:  National Council of Teachers of English: 38–​54. Montoya, Katie. 2011. “A Home Away from Home,” in Dance Major Journal, ed. Jennifer Fisher. Irvine, CA: Dance Department, University of California, Irvine website. http://​dance.arts. uci.edu/​sites/​default/​files/​DMJ%202011%20Online%20Version%20Final.pdf Onikeku, Qudus. 2010. “My Trouble with Contemporary African Dance,” blog entry Sept 8, from Diary of a Modern Tuareg. Osumare, Halifu. 2012. The Hiplife in Ghana:  West African Indigenization of Hip-​ Hop. Hampshire, England: Palgrave MacMillan. Prevots, Naima. Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War. 1998. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England. Sackey, Brigid M. 2005. “Charismatism, Women, and Testimonies:  Religion and Popular Culture in Ghana,” in Ghana Studies 8: 169–​195. Schramm, Katharina. 2000. “The Politics of Dance: Changing Representations of the Nation in Ghana.” Afrika Spectrum 35: 339–​358. Siegert, Nadine. 2010. Contemporary dance from Africa as creative opposition to stereotypical images of Africanity, May 16. http://​www.buala.org/​en/​stages/​contemporary-​dance-​from-​ africa-​as-​creative-​opposition-​to-​stereotypical-​images-​of-​africanity Shay, Anthony. 2002. Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Companies, Representation, and Power. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press). Tatone, Jenna. 2011. “Dancing with Purpose in Ghana,” in Dance Major Journal, ed. Jennifer Fisher. Irvine, CA:  Dance Department, University of California, Irvine website. http://​ dance.arts.uci.edu/​sites/​default/​files/​DMJ%202011%20Online%20Version%20Final.pdf Wulff, Helena. 1993. Ballet Across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers. Oxford, New York: Berg. Younge, Paschal Yao. 2011. Music and Dance Traditions of Ghana: History, Performance and Teaching. Jefferson, N.C. and London: McFarland.

Pa rt  I I I P E R F OR M I N G E T H N IC I T Y

Creating New Identities through the Dances of the “Other”

Chapter 16

Orientalism a nd t h e Am erican Belly Da nc e r Multiplicity, Authenticity, Identity Andrea Deagon

“I feel almost like I’m appropriating my own freakin’ culture”—​Roula Said, Palestinian Canadian belly dancer

On New Year’s Eve 1990 I went with a friend to perform at Cleopatra’s, a restaurant in San Francisco with a largely Arab clientele, where she was the regular belly dancer. It was four months after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and it was daily more obvious that America was on the brink of war. Carrying our costume bags, we walked into the palpable tension of a room in which every table buzzed with anxious, intense, and even angry debates. The two of us—​red-​haired, fair-​skinned, Anglo/​Irish women—​seemed not only out of place but completely irrelevant. My own knowledge of the Middle East centered on dance technique and musical interpretation, extended through familiarity with well-​known singers, songs, and dancers, and included substantially more cultural background than the average American’s, but in a roomful of passionate political discussions in Arabic by people who may well have had family or community ties with the endangered areas, it had never been plainer how much an outsider to the Arab world I really was. As midnight approached I went out to perform, with some trepidation. But a little way into my dance the feeling in the room began to change. By the time my friend completed her performance, half the audience was dancing with her, having pushed aside their burdens and crossed into an almost reckless commitment to celebration. At some point the two of us became irrelevant again, collected our pay, and left. Although we were clearly outsiders, in our capacity as belly dancers we had been designated as catalysts through whom the clashing national, cultural, and personal differences within our audience could coalesce into an experience of community that

368   Andrea Deagon was only available to or comprehensible by Arabs. What belly dance meant to me, and whatever Orientalisms I had absorbed and expressed in my own practice, did not much matter. Three years earlier I had been offered the opportunity to do a rather different sort of performance when, having just returned to the United States after a long stay overseas, I went to a booking agency looking for dance work. The proprietor offered me a job doing “bellygrams” and explained the routine: “You sit the birthday boy on a chair in the middle of the room, wrap your veil around him and do a little private dance, and then make him a turban out of your veil. You kneel on the floor and salaam to him, and then you sit in his lap and sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ ” Stunned by this litany of sexist and Orientalist degradations, I could only stammer out, “I don’t sing.” “That’s all right,” she told me. “You can play a kazoo.” I juxtapose these two experiences to illustrate the chaos of American belly dance and the impossibility of monolithically interpreting its uses of the Orient. Belly dance has been a recreational pastime for middle-​class women in North America since the mid-​ 1960s. During this time it has become a pop culture marker for sexy seduction as well as for matriarchal empowerment. It has developed a solid (if often fad-​driven) niche in ethnic restaurants, street festivals, birthday parties, and the fitness trade. There are women (and men) for whom the lifelong identity of “belly dancer” by far overshadows their ethnic identity. At the same time, American belly dance has developed in a host of idiosyncratic and sometimes mutually incomprehensible ways. “Belly dance” in America can mean anything from “an elite performance style expressing Egyptian aesthetics and musical interpretation” to “any transgressive dance done by a woman.” For the purposes of this chapter, I define “belly dance” broadly to include the widespread solo-improvised social dance of the Middle East and its recreational and performance aspects, both Eastern and Western. Almost everything I say about “American” belly dance is true of “North American” belly dance. I use the term “Arab” to describe people of Arab ethnicity, whether resident in the Middle East or elsewhere, although I also use the terms Arab American and Arab Canadian for more specificity. By no means do I intend to imply that any of the groups I discuss here are monolithic; all are of course made up of individuals with different personal, political, ethnic, and national experiences and perspectives. I use the terms “Arabia” and “Arabian” for fantasies about the Arab world. The thoroughness as well as the variety of appropriation in American belly dance has made it problematic as an ethnic art. For the first twenty-​five years of its American tenure, its popularity developed largely through the appealing Orientalist tropes of a valorized, fantasy Arabia that offered an open (if already well-​inscribed; Shay 2008, 127) vista for American rediscoveries of the self. Belly dance is most clearly Orientalist in the classic sense that in its practice, the East (fancifully invented or sensitively interpreted) becomes a territory (demeaned or valorized) through whose alterity the Western subject can create a self that exceeds both the journeying ground of the East and her own previous limitations. The Orientalist paraphernalia of belly dance, from its veils and harems to its staged scenarios and spiritual sensuality, continues as strong today as ever,

Orientalism and the American Belly Dancer    369 though perhaps in even more creative ways (see, e.g., Dox 2005, 2006; Sellers-​Young 1992, 2005; Shay 2008, 144–​147; Shay and Sellers-​Young 2003). My goal here is to define some of the clashing varieties of Orientalist thought and practice in American belly dance as they developed in the twentieth century and manifest in the diverse belly dance cultures of the twenty-​first. Two historical moments—​the creation of raqs sharqi (“eastern dance”) in Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s,and the beginnings of its 1970s American fad phase—​established the Orientalist framework through which belly dance developed in America. Orientalism has manifested rather differently in the tangle of interrelated American practices defined as belly dance; I focus on three disparate ones from the 1980s through the 2000s: fitness, tribal, and Egyptian style, with attention to the ways in which their practitioners conceive and construe “authenticity.”

The Trouble with Belly Dance The depiction of provocative, sexualized belly dancers1 has been a staple of Orientalist art and travel narrative since the eighteenth century and of Hollywood since its earliest days. The colonial conflation of public dancers with all Arab women symbolically violated women’s privacy, implying the subjugation of even domestic space (see Yeğenoğlu 1998 61–​62, 72–​94). some Arab and Arab American women today feel that Western belly dance intrudes similarly on their own privacy, perceived identity, and personal choices (e.g., Abood 1994; Fakraie 2007). American belly dance today, embroiled in gendered and racial power dynamics and epitomizing the colonial commodification and aesthetization of non-​Western cultures, may be seen as enacting Western scopic and symbolic penetration and possession of Arab women, and by extension, domination of a feminized Arab world. In the wake of 9/​11, and in the midst of a long-​standing pattern of often vicious, seldom censured calumny against Arabs in American popular culture, it is increasingly necessary for Arab Americans to actively advocate and enact identities that break down oppressive and even dangerous stereotypes. Belly dance in its many forms—​especially those displaying American varieties of sexuality and stereotypical Orientalist paraphernalia—​can be an abrasive reminder of unwanted identities. For most belly dance hobbyists, critical readings of belly dance as a remnant or perpetuation of imperialism seem bizarrely out of alignment with their own practice. After forty-​five years belly dance, however steeped in Orientalism, has an enduring, confirmed, and stable place in American popular culture as a locus for women’s fellowship, fulfillment, and personal growth. Its exoticism and mild transgressions are by now thoroughly domesticated and contained. It is surely (after decades of tongue-​in-​ cheek press coverage and Hollywood whitening of belly dancers) by now apparent to its American audiences that the dance’s erotic, exotic allure is encased in safely white (or white enough) bodies (Keft-​Kennedy 2005, 135–​159; see Koritz 1997, 138–​144; Shay 2008, 127). Meanwhile real Arab women, who have been maligned and demonized during this same period as potential terrorists or oppressed “bundles in black” (Shaheen 2001, 22),

370   Andrea Deagon have been relegated to a different place in popular culture and have become less amenable objects of fantasy. Still, belly dance appears in civic festivals and ethnic restaurants that implicitly define it as a product of the Arab world, and it is nearly always performed by white (or at least non-​Arab) women, some of whose performances share almost nothing with the cultures they appear to represent. More than any other ethnic dance form, it is commercial, in that most of its manifestations involve the exchange of money. The American public’s acquaintance with belly dance is wide, but often limited to inexpert performers in modest venues. Belly dance is erotic, and the eroticism projected by American dancers is often different from that of elite Middle Eastern performers (Fraser 2010; el Safy 2005). Although belly dancers contextualize their eroticism as self-​owned, fertile, and holistic expressions of the deeper self, neither the American public nor Arabs understand belly dance as only or primarily that, and the sensual/​sexual empowerment rhetoric of belly dance is clearly the imposition of an American construct onto an Arab art. In any case, Arabs (reasonably enough) typically do not want to be represented by erotic dances performed by non-​Arabs. The ambivalence, disapproval, or lack of respect many Arabs feel toward belly dance and its practitioners, so different from the dancers’ own positive assessments, leads many recreational dancers to believe that belly dance is more appreciated in the West. Therefore belly dance is an ethnic dance whose American practitioners—​at least some of them, and in some ways—​may reject or minimize the importance of the originating cultures to the dance’s proper performance and dignified preservation. Despite its uses for Arab consumers, and regardless of the dancers who seek meaningful interchanges with Arab people and culture, belly dance in America is a troubling phenomenon. Yet American belly dance—​at least some of it—​has evolved through continuing interaction with the Middle East. Practices (such as hyperfemininity and heterosexist performance) that are sometimes attributed to its Orientalist bent are actually accurate representations of elite Arab belly dance styles. Some long-​standing Western Orientalist practices (such as dancing with “veils”2) have experienced complex reinscriptions in the Middle East before or while evolving further in America. Orientalism is pervasive in American belly dance, but it is only the backdrop for a complex series of performed communicative, commodified relationships in which Arabs—​although sometimes disconcertingly absent—​speak as well as being spoken for.

Oriental Orientalism: The Exotic West and Commodifying the Erotic A theatricalized performance dance form spearheaded by the Syrian Badi’a Masabni, created during the Cairo renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s and labeled by its practitioners raqs sharqi (“eastern dance,” probably a translation into Arabic of the French

Orientalism and the American Belly Dancer    371 “danse orientale”), is the origination point of all American belly dance and in fact all elite professional belly dance in the world today. Its incorporation of Western elements (e.g., ballroom and Latin dances, two-​piece costumes similar to those used in Western theatrical Oriental dances) was one means by which the eroticism of professional dance, typically a product of the lower classes, was commodified for elite Egyptian audiences, and later, in popular Egyptian films of the 1940s–​1950s, as escapism for a general public throughout the Arab world (Armbrust 2000b; Shafik 2007,163–​165; Shay 2008, 129–​137). Both popular and scholarly sources have sometimes described raqs sharqi as arising from unconscious absorption of Western Orientalist images (Buonaventura 1994, 148–​ 149), or more commonly, as a capitulation to tourist markets, “a highly sexualized, nightclub performance that was [created in America] then exported back to Cairo and other Arab cities to be performed as ‘local’ culture for tourists” (Maira 2008, 322; see Karam 2010, 89).3 Such readings, casting Egyptian women as naïve followers of fashion, passive objects of the Western gaze, or vessels of static “authentic” traditions, obscure the character of their artistic and commercial choices in the creation of this embodied and sensual hybrid form. The adoption of Western (or perhaps, “cosmopolitan”) elements in raqs sharqi was not so much a capitulation as its opposite: an exoticizing “impress of power” (Said 1993, 159) by Egyptian artists, achieved through appropriation and reinscription of both Western popular entertainment generally and Orientalizing readings of the Middle East specifically. Orientalism, with its tropes of passive, sexualized Eastern women, was inverted by real Eastern women, through their parallel exoticizing of the West itself, in a way that established raqs sharqi on the world stage and confirmed it as a quintessentially Egyptian product, whose authenticity derived from its expression of the Egyptian spirit (Fraser 2010; Said 2010). That uniquely Arab cultural products arose from the incorporation of Western elements reflects the increasingly metropolitan consumerism of Egypt’s elite at this crucial political and cultural time (Badran 1995, 189–​191; Dougherty 2000; Danielson 1997, 13–​14, 42–​51, 63–​69; Said 2010, 228–​230; Shay 2008, 129–​137; Armbrust 2000b). Raqs sharqi offered a new variety of commodification and exoticization of feminine erotic display, locating the dancer’s “voice” wholly in an expressive, individual, actively pleasurable body.4 The eroticism of raqs sharqi was both the platform for this embodied, highly individual voice and the basis on which the dancer could be objectified (e.g., through cinematic mise-​en-​scène) for erotic consumption (see Shafik 2007, 165). As raqs sharqi expanded throughout the Middle East, local variations emerged. The Turkish version, for example, which influenced American belly dance particularly on the East Coast, was not only fused with Western techniques, but often “Orientalized” with visual motifs and settings reminiscent of the Ottoman era. Consequently, belly dance came to America as an already multiple, mutable, hybrid, international phenomenon. Despite its “elevation” through exoticism, professional belly dance, regarded as shameful in the Middle East, still violated and challenged propriety (e.g., van Nieuwkerk 1998; Shay 1999; Siegel 1995; Young 1998). Ethnic difference is traditionally one of the ways in which belly dancers have been marginalized and their threat contained. Most belly dancers there are Muslim women of modest origins, but others were and are

372   Andrea Deagon Christians, Eastern Europeans, Jews, or Nawari (Dom) and increasingly since the 1980s, Western foreigners (Badran 1995, 189; Marre 1992; Lazregh 1994, 29–​36; Salome 2010; see also Lane 1860 [2003], 377–​382; Hichens 1904, 108–​113). Therefore, when belly dance became popular in America in the 1950s and later, the practice of Arabs employing non-​ Arab dancers was “authentic” in the sense of preserving long-​standing cultural practice, even though the middle-​class social position and usually white race of American recreational dancers directly contrasted with the “outsider” position of non-​Muslim or non-​ Arab dancers in the Middle East. This inherent intercultural contradiction contributed to the ease and thoroughness with which American recreational belly dancers appropriated the dance in the 1970s.

Exoticism and Masquerade in America: Setting the Stage Belly dance by Arab and Turkish dancers, backed by the “pan-​Arabic music” of emerging Arab clubs (Rassmussen 2005), was a feature of mainstream American variety entertainment by the mid-​1950s. The Arab and Turkish belly dancers of this first wave, together with the film stars of classic Egyptian cinema, were the authors of the stage presence, audience interactions, costuming, techniques, demeanor, and self-​presentation that non-​Arab professional dancers of the period learned to enact in their performances for both Arab and non-​Arab audiences. As Arab and Turkish dancers shaped the American construct of “the belly dancer,” a variety of “Arabia” developed along with it in the restaurants and nightclubs where belly dance was performed. Characterized by “the sensual images of Orientalism: dark lighting, pulsating rhythms, enticing aromas, exotic women, and erotic dancing” (Rassmussen 2005, 192, 177), this pleasant (and commercially successful) Arabia stood in contrast to the negative aspects of what Jack Shaheen calls “Arab-​Land,” the Hollywood construct of the East, which includes luxury and sexual excess, but more centrally, unreasoning hostility, oppression, and violence (Shaheen 2001, 7–​8, 2006). As political tensions between America and the Middle East increased from the late 1960s onward, “Arabia” became the hostile “Arab-​Land’s” conciliatory aspect, a place where attractive, although increasingly outmoded, tropes of Oriental luxury could be indulged. By the 1960s and 1970s demand for belly dancers had attracted non-​Arabs to the field, drawn in by good pay, the option of working nights and staying home with children during the day, or the desire to further a stalled career in more mainstream entertainment. By necessity, these non-​Arabs learned their trade with the help and instruction of Arab and Turkish employers, musicians, and dancers, and at times through exposure to social dancing by nonprofessionals (Bonanza 2002; Gamal 1999, 2; Goodyear 2004). Belly dancers of this period participated in a fascinating, ever-​evolving, continually challenging masquerade of Arab mystique. While many Arab and Turkish dancers stood out

Orientalism and the American Belly Dancer    373 for their eccentricity as well as their dancing (Asmahan 2004; Delgado n.d.; Goodyear 2004; Salimpour n.d.; Shay 2008, 141–​144), non-​Arab dancers were molded into more stereotypical images. Gamila el Masri, who performed at The Ibis, a New  York club largely patronized by Arabs, in the 1970s, recalls, “At Ibis. … [We] had phony publicity stories and press releases. … I think the first week I worked there I was supposed to be from Morocco. … I know a dancer who tried for years to get into Ibis … but she didn’t look “Egyptian” enough” (el Masri n.d.). Other dancers describe being pulled into professional dance because they had “the look” and creating exotic fictional backgrounds (Asmahan 2004; Awayshak n.d.; Aziza 2000; Goodyear 2004; Rassmussen 2005, 178). This masquerade of exotic Arabian identity, formed through collaboration with Arab as well as non-​Arab employers, was part of an evolving formula accepted by Arab patrons, while it drew in non-​Arabs seeking an exotic consumer experience. As both Arab American and non-​Arab dancers of this period describe it, “playing Eastern” was central to their commercial usefulness (see Nance 2009, 11–​14). The constructed “Arabia” of the nightclub apparently satisfied the desire of audiences—​often of men, but also including women—​to enjoy the erotic display of marginalized women. For non-​ Arab audiences, the dancers’ supposed Arabian identity evoked both the excitement of “walking on the wild side” and the dated but still intriguing scopic pleasures of empire. For Arab audiences, and for Arab employers in particular, belly dancers were marginalized both by both their non-​Arab ethnicity and their profession. Even as the belly dancer mimed Arab identity on stage, she did so in a situation that defined and limited her in part because of her ethnic difference: real to Arabs, perceived (or willfully imagined) by non-​Arab Americans. The dancers of this period were dependent on male restaurateurs, who could well be Middle Eastern or Greek, for employment and other professional opportunities, and were in sometimes contentious relationships with male Arab musicians, who could make or break a performance. Even friendship within their circle of Arab entertainers might involve morally and racially based exclusions (Gamal 1999, 3). Consequently, the dancer’s immediate experience reflected not the feminized Arab world of imperial Orientalism, but one in which men held the power and the dancer’s ethnic difference emphasized the gender-​related reductions to which women, whatever their ethnicity, were often subject. This dynamic, which continues in professional belly dance today, inevitably defines the American belly dancer’s perceptions of herself as situated more in the contentions of gender than of race, and is one factor that steers many performing dancers away from the broader issues of racial difference and cultural appropriation in belly dance. The marginalization of Arabs and Arab-​“owned” belly dance was firmly established by the early 1970s, when the first wave of the belly dance fad swept through North America. Belly dance was largely co-​opted by middle-​class, mostly white women, as a form of exotic self-​realization of both body and spirit. A scene in Daniella Gioseffi’s 1977 novel The Great American Belly Dance illustrates the increasingly appropriative redefinition of belly dance by American recreational dancers. The novel’s heroine, Dorissa Femfunelli, horrified by a restaurant dancer’s solicitation of body tips, rips the money

374   Andrea Deagon from her costume and cries, “ ‘This dance is a sacred ritual to the Earth Mother Goddess, not a cheap burlesque!’ ” (45). Gioseffi not only rejects the conventional belly dance of Arab restaurants, she also vilifies Arab men as perpetuators of its reductive and exploitative aspects. In this view, it is only through rejecting the dance’s primary cultures that the empowering aspects of belly dance can be enjoyed (see Keft-​Kennedy 2005, 176–​ 178). Gioseffi’s is only one of many narratives of this period that either ignore Arabs or situate them as appropriators of an ancient, matriarchal dance whose true purpose is the empowerment of women. Such narratives are still powerful today, reflected most noticeably in the pervasive media habit of referring to belly dance as “ancient” before “Middle Eastern.” They relegate the supposedly sexist, patriarchal, and tradition-​bound Arabs, as well as those belly dancers who align their practice with Arab culture and aesthetics, to “historically” justified exclusion from a leading voice in the practice of American belly dance.

Fitness: From Domestic Harems to Belly Dance Without Arabs Belly dance in America was initially marketed primarily to men, but by the mid-​1960s the target market had shifted to women, with fitness as a key selling point. Early texts portrayed belly dance as a path from slovenly habits to a state of exotic sexual allure from which to manipulate one’s husband and subvert his domestic and economic mastery (Lester 1968; Nyeela and Thomas 1970). By the time of the first spate of how-​to books of the early 1970s, the fitness rewards of belly dance had escaped the imprisonment of the “harem marriage” and been redefined as a means to physical and personal confidence that would result in more pleasure and satisfaction in sexual relationships (e.g., Russo Mishkin and Schill 1972, 20; Turkbas 1976, 26–​7; Wilson and Wilson 1972, 16–​18). The Orientalist East emerges in these texts in contradictory guises. It still sometimes manages to be wise, offering a reinscribed harem (e.g., Dahlena and Meilach 1975, 4–​5; Turkbas 1976, 12; see Dox 2006, 58–​60); a more forgiving view of heavier, “real” women (e.g., Wilson and Wilson 1973, 48); or a natural, holistic vision of womanhood (e.g., Russo Mishkin and Schill 1972, 15–​21). The East may be virtually absent, or at least left behind, such as when Serena Wilson describes the self-​actualized potential for true sexual mutuality that her own fusion style offers its students (Wilson and Wilson 1973, 54–​57). It may simply offer an orientalist variety of vending-​machine fantasy, helping the dancer “create an Arabian-​nights atmosphere for one favorite sultan” (Dahlena and Meilach 1975, 2). The pervasive motif of “seduction through self improvement” rests on the assumption that the (female) body is subject to inherent or self-​inflicted failures and must be freed of inhibition before “natural” beauty and sensuality may assert themselves. The Orientalist East, with its intuition, sensuality, and liberating distance, offers belly dance as a supposedly “natural” way to a new self, or at least an improved one.

Orientalism and the American Belly Dancer    375 By 1980 video technology had become widely accessible, and aerobics videos reached a thriving women’s fitness market. In the 1980s to early 1990s belly dance instructional videos were produced on a small scale for belly dance hobbyists by American dancers such as Delilah (1983) and Jamila Salimpour (1983–​1984). By the late 1990s popular market videos, such as those of the Indian American Neena and Veena Bidasha (e.g., Bidasha 1999), visually re-​created the 1970s books’ promotions of belly dance as a pleasant, natural, enjoyable, and exotic way to get in shape (see Keft-​Kennedy 2005, 192–​199). By the mid-​2000s, however, it was becoming more common for fitness belly dance to erase or at least obscure the Middle East—​though not necessarily Orientalist stereotypes. Arguably the most influential presentation of belly dance in North America is the fitness program Shimmy, which reaches thousands of casual viewers on the Fit TV cable network. Its opening credits begin with a scene of sand dunes, the quintessential visual stereotype of “Arab-​Land” (Shaheen 2006), then bring the sweeping terrain into fetishistic focus on a woman’s foot, decorated with a tinkling anklet, kicking up sand as she dances. But that is the last one sees of the Middle East, although the viewer is assured that belly dance is “ancient.” In a typical show, three dancers at a time perform in front of a blue screen, onto which are projected scenes such as a rugged Pacific Northwestern landscape, a zen-​like minimalist room, the street in front of a double-​staircased government building in a snowstorm, and of all things, a parking garage. Seven dancers rotate throughout the show: two blonde, five dark-​haired, only one with clearly other-​ than-​European ancestry. The music is standard New Age fare with the occasional Arabic rhythm or riff. The dancers move silently in unison to a soothingly seductive voice-​over; like its sister show Namaste Yoga, and in fact almost every workout video ever made, Shimmy is flush with appeal for the voyeuristically inclined. There are, of course, pressing commercial reasons to explain the exclusion of the Middle East. Although the “Arabia” of incense and veils still retains some appeal, there have been forty years of a media barrage of terrorists, fanatics, and oppressed “bundles in black” to pry the Middle East loose from the pleasant sensual associations of the days of more confident imperialism. The Middle East per se (even if it is safely “ancient”) is not likely to sell fitness. The promise of sex stands a far better chance, and apparently belly dance still signifies “seduction” even when the harem is rinsed out. One of the blonde California girl Dolphina’s Goddess Workout belly dance DVDs offers a section on how to dance for your man; a number of consumer reviewers on Amazon.com of Dolphina’s series and Blanca’s Sensuous Belly Dance express hopes that their seductive dancing will win them masculine attention. In popular interest articles, belly dance may be offered as a way to improve one’s sex life (often through losing weight), without a mention of Arabs anywhere (e.g., Functional News 2009); where the Middle East is mentioned it is almost inevitably buffered by antiquity or declawed as a caricatured I Dream of Jeannie Arabia (e.g., Gwynn 2009). The deletion or obscuring of the Middle East, and the blatantly American flavor of fitness belly dance, may (one hopes) offer real Arabs some protection from its gendered and cultural diminishments. Not all fitness belly dance DVDs erase the Middle East, and some actually offer a well-​ informed kinesthetic base in Middle Eastern dance styles. But even here, “authenticity,”

376   Andrea Deagon however one defines it, is not an issue. Even in the 1970s how-​to books, in which the Middle East was less ambivalent in its exotic appeal, it was clear that the reader was engaging in an American practice for which the Middle East provided only the raw material and the charm. Fitness, with its purpose of shaping Western bodies (if only to imprison them in the “size six harem”; Mernissi 2001, 208–​219), claims a “positional authority” (Said 1978, 7) in its uses and definitions of the East, and for that matter, everywhere else. Belly dance is only one patch of the endless prairie of worldwide physical practices ripe for appropriation. However Arab-​free (or at least Arab-​light) fitness belly dance may be, its vague and displaced exoticism still has its hidden home in Arabia. Though the terminal point on the Shimmy trail may be the bland neverland of the blue screen, that trail still leads inexorably back to the Middle East. Its caricatures, whitening, and erasures, whatever their distance from more hostile media images of Arabs, still hamper the possibility of the American public’s recognizing the multiple realities of Arab culture and experience.

Atavistic Authenticity: Tribal Belly Dance Tribal belly dance is an American style that fuses dance vocabulary and musical elements derived from the Middle East with other ethnic and urban music and dance styles. Its practitioners often dance in troupes; their costumes are often an elaborate but not especially shiny pastiche of evocative elements from various (usually) Eastern cultures. They accurately define it as a modern form and use it consciously to express personal and relational styles they understand to exceed Western conventions. From its roots in San Francisco Renaissance Faires of the 1960s–​1980s (Sellers-​Young 2005), by the late 1990s and 2000s it had become nationally, and soon internationally, popular. It now holds a substantial share of the belly dance market, primarily younger dancers who are not attracted by either the hyperfeminine glamour of nightclub belly dance or the cultural challenges of working within the aesthetics of a foreign form. Even while eschewing the Orientalism of veils, harems, and odalisques, it embraces that of nomads, caravans, “Gypsies”, and goddesses. Because tribal is an American construct, its practitioners typically situate its authenticity in the artist’s right to create (through fusion) statements that reflect individually and immediately relevant tensions and realities. They also (like the goddess dancers of Gioseffi’s 1970s) locate its authenticity in its supposed evasions of the patriarchal capitulations of other forms of belly dance. Palika Benton expresses common sentiments: conventional belly dance is “objectifying to women, sadly reduced from [its] origins as a dance in which the dancer is a medium for divine reflection and intervention for the community.” In contrast, in tribal dance, “Belly Dance is being returned to its rightful owners—​women” (Benton n.d.). Tribal belly dancers and those of its more extreme offshoots (e.g., gothic industrial belly dance) are likely to dismiss less overtly subversive

Orientalism and the American Belly Dancer    377 forms (see Frühauf 2010) and define their own authenticity through their presumed evasion of the repressive dynamics they feel have historically infiltrated and diminished belly dance in both its home cultures and the West. The tribal dancer Sharon Moore observes that both raqs sharqi and tribal “are the product of fused cultural elements combined through shifts in borders, political and religious leadership, and migration over time,” emphasizing that “Tribal relies heavily on the modern, purposeful fusion of these elements, while Raks Sharki’s blendings are more deeply entrenched in historical changes we today have no control over” (2002–​ 2006). Moore perceptively moves both raqs sharqi and tribal belly dance to the “culture” side of the West’s favorite dichotomy, in contrast to the majority of popular texts on belly dance, which locate it in “nature.” On the other hand, she places raqs sharqi in the chaotic space of unwitting, perhaps ossified results of choices made by others and long ago. Therefore the authenticity of tribal belly dance is situated in part in the active consciousness with which its practitioners fuse its constituent forms. Yet Moore (like many tribal dancers) also posits a historical authenticity for tribal belly dance, situating the “spirit and focus behind Tribal belly dance” as “more closely tied to history than some other forms.” Tribal is a modern manifestation of “a long line of traditional gatherings going back through centuries of dance” that has been obscured or repressed over time (2002–​2006). Yet appropriation of “lost” tribal dances does not necessarily translate into an interest in existing ones. The Algerian dancer/​scholar Amel Tafsout recently observed that tribal belly dancers rarely attend her workshops on Berber or Ouled Nail dances, and the “feminine solidarity” of modern American tribes does not reflect real tribal experiences: “If this is a tribe, then where are the men?” (Tafsout 2010a). In a 1995 interview, Carolena Nericcio, the founder of the influential tribal troupe Fat Chance Belly Dance (see Figure 16.1), articulates a view of tribal authenticity that bypasses both historical and current practice and steers straight for archetype: “We are often commended, especially by Arabs, that our dance and costumes are ‘just like home,’ but in fact they’re not. That’s just the feeling it gives. Also, the music we use is not always authentic ‘bellydance’ music, but again, the feeling is one of authenticity.” The interviewer, Mira Zussman, who has done research in rural Tunisia, adds, “When you dance you make me homesick for the village” (Zussman 1995). As Nericcio (in Zussman) sees it, the level on which tribal style dance is authentic is not that of fidelity to actual “folk” practice, but rather a connection with an atavistic sense of the “tribe” that supposedly bridges racial and cultural lines.5 The archetypal, primitive “village” becomes an imaginative locus of cross-​cultural communication through a shared longing for roots. Archetypes only work if the realities of the cultures that inspire them are erased to make room for the insertion of images and meanings that, while feeling ancient and primal, resonate with modern experiences and preconceptions. Western audiences are often quite willing to look through this archetypal lens toward a primitive and “tribal” Middle East; consequently tribal belly dance often ends up in contexts in which more traditional performances—​or for that matter, none at all—​would be more appropriate. For many years tribal dancers were featured at the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, reportedly because the organizers found their turbans and tattoos more Arab-​like than

378   Andrea Deagon

Figure 16.1  Fat Chance Belly Dance

the beaded costumes and orchestrated music of raqs sharqi performers (personal communications 2000–​2001; Shay 2006, 187–​194). A tribal group hired to perform at the opening of a Stanford museum exhibit on the Tuareg, presumably because they (like the Tuareg) were “primitive,” caused the attendee Margari Aziza to comment pointedly on Muslimah Media Watch, “[W]‌hat does Tuareg culture have to do with Belly dancing? … I wondered what tribe [the belly dancers] came from? Qabilat Hippies in Berkeley?”6 Tribal dancers performing at an Asian cultural event also inspired Sunaina Maira’s stringent critique of non-​Arab dancers’ complacent uses of Arab culture (2008). Tribal Orientalism, less old-​fashioned and kitschy than the veils and incense of restaurant Arabias, is increasingly more convincing to Americans whose projections of violence and unreason onto Arabs place them securely in the realm of the primitive. It is ironic that the form of belly dance so adamantly defined by its practitioners as a specifically American art is so often positioned to create more substantial misrepresentations of the Middle East than do the beaded belly dancers of “Arabia.”

Looking Toward Egypt The video technology that put aerobics into every suburban home also gave American belly dancers, especially those outside of large urban centers, a view of belly dance that had been inaccessible to most of them before. A series of Egyptian dance videos released

Orientalism and the American Belly Dancer    379 in the 1980s featuring Soheir Zeki, Nagwa Fouad, Mona Said, and Fifi Abdo spurred the first widespread “looking East” of the recreational belly dance scene; sparked a kinesthetic revolution; and split the belly dance community—​gently, but increasingly noticeably—​into dancers for whom the novelty of the videos seemed to open doors into new cultural, technical, and artistic vistas, and those for whom the videos’ Egyptian style was distant, incomprehensible, and ultimately irrelevant to the values of the American practice of (by then) some two decades. Although Egyptian technique and musical interpretation are now taught widely in recreational classes, only a minority of belly dancers are what might be called “Arab centered”: they study and travel in the Middle East, develop working relationships and friendships with Arabs, understand and strive to meet the aesthetic criteria of a particular region of the Middle East (usually Egypt), and center their training around a hub of Middle Eastern master dancers and teachers (based both in the Middle East and outside it) who disseminate their techniques and choreographies through international seminars. Among such dancers, issues of cultural appropriation, (mis)representation, and inevitable and even insurmountable cultural difference find their way into a discourse that evolves in classrooms, workshops, Internet forums, performances, and critiques. Part of this discourse has as its aim defining the ways in which a Western dancer, through sensitivity to Arab culture and incorporating Middle Eastern techniques and aesthetics, can intellectually, emotionally, and kinesthetically understand and embody the artistic and cultural potentials of belly dance. This discourse is nevertheless based on the conviction (shared by both Western and some Arab dancers, especially those working outside the Arab world) that belly dance has a potential for artistry beyond that of its most common manifestations in the Middle East. The issue of dela’a is representative of this discourse. Dela’a is a key element of the Egyptian dancer’s persona; it is (to the extent it can be translated) a variety of engaging, playful flirtatiousness that arises from being treasured, indulged, and even “spoiled” (see Fraser 2010). In the 1980s American dancers could see that Egyptian dance in the videos did not contain either the vigorous sexiness or the Orientalizing “vamping-​ over-​the-​veil” (el Safy 2005) common in American belly dance. What they did see was dela’a, which to many appeared trivial, disconcertingly hyperfeminine, and essentially untranslatable into American experience. Yet in time, Arab-​centered dancers recognized it as a powerful cultural construct of performed femininity. Whether a Western dancer should try to enact dela’a, or this would even be possible, remains an issue.7 Understanding and trying to enact dela’a might help pry American belly dancers away from more Orientalist brands of sensual expression. But is the American dancer capable of more than an imitation of dela’a? In trying to find her way to this important aspect of Egyptian dance performance—​an element that might well please her Arab audiences—​is she presuming to speak for Arab women, performing an “Arab Face” imitation (Maira 2008) of a concept beyond her own immediate experience? Dela’a as displayed in dance performance is an artificial construct even for Egyptian dancers; is enacting it therefore a matter of skilled performance rather than appropriation or imitation? Dela’a is not a central element of Lebanese belly dance and is virtually

380   Andrea Deagon absent in Turkish; is the American dancer more “authentic” (and in what sense) if she enacts only her own culture’s constructs of sensuality—​which may be either Orientalist or abrasive to Arab audiences? A non-​Egyptian dancer’s expressing dela’a is certainly an Orientalist practice, in that the dancer restructures her performing self through the adoption of Arab alterity. But is she really speaking for the Orient, if the Orient also speaks and she tries to do what it says? Follow such questions long enough and, like climbing an Escher staircase, we find ourselves in the same place, only upside down. Dela’a is one of a number of concepts (tarab, enchantment or ecstasy through music, being the best known; Racy 2003, 6) that are becoming part of an evolving, informal canon of knowledge embraced by serious recreational belly dancers in Arabic styles. By general agreement, the Western dancer should know standard Arabic rhythms, recognize a number of classic Arabic songs, and understand musical interpretation that aligns with Arab aesthetics. She should be familiar with influential musicians, dancers, and choreographers. She should know a variety of regional styles, in particular saidi (from upper Egypt) and khaleegy (from the Persian gulf area); this is important not only because it allows for belly dance to be contextualized through folkloric dance, but because the typical raqs sharqi magensi (opening piece) often contains a “folkloric” section that adept dancers are expected to acknowledge. She must be able to both interpret choreographies and improvise. She should have a complex movement vocabulary with a kinesthetic base in Arab, usually Egyptian, dance, and be able to articulate it well enough to teach. In part, the competencies this knowledge confers are of use to Western dancers who find themselves in the position of “representing” the East to the West. Typically this is not something even Arab-​centered dancers want to do. In an Internet discussion about representing the Middle East,8 “indigostars” expressed a common sentiment: “I don’t think of myself as a representative of Arabs/​Arab culture, but I also know that sometimes you get grouped into those categories, regardless of what you think.” In the same discussion, “nadira82” volunteered, “no belly dancer wants to be seen as a representative of Arabic culture—​it’s reductive and wrong—​but at the same time, whether I am performing for Arabs, ‘white’ Americans, teaching class &c I am representing some aspect of that culture. So I have decided for this reason to try to be as specific as possible about what I do.” This specificity, enabled by the canonical knowledge, is necessitated by the realities of belly dancing in the West that oblige the non-​Arab dancer (however unwillingly) to represent a culture she may want to speak with, but not for. Codification (it should be obvious) is as much a feature of Eastern as of Western thought, but a canon of knowledge about the East in a way that lets it be enacted by Westerners may be considered a Western subject’s “way of knowing” and speaking for the East. At the same time, whatever its appropriative and imitative purposes, for many dancers the canon is an attempt to evade the Orientalist dynamic that the “value, efficacy, strength and apparent veracity of a … statement about the Orient … relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend, on the Orient as such” (Said 1978, 21). Some belly dancers do depend on the Orient, however flawed their understanding or representation. The canon is derived from observation of Arab (usually Egyptian) dancers and instruction by Arab teachers; it is understood as evolving rather than static, and it results in performances by non-​Arabs

Orientalism and the American Belly Dancer    381 that are in better alignment with Arab aesthetics and therefore likely to be more pleasing to Arab consumers. Because Orientalism is as pervasive and unavoidable in American culture as, say, sexism or heterosexism, every belly dancer in the West, of whatever ethnicity, will inevitably fail to evade it. All one can do is complicate the discourse, and the positioning of the Arab world as an actual source of the canon at least does that. Elite Arab dancers may represent their dance as something hard won and reinforced through personal commitment and labor (e.g., Kamal 2008), but it is more common for them to define their own unique style as self-​taught and inherent, impossible for others to attain or imitate (e.g., Antar 1971; el Safy 1996, 3–​4, 1997, 4). The reasons for this emphasis are complex and culturally specific. At the same time, these claims of natural, interior origins of a uniquely personal style of dance are immediately comprehensible to Westerners in terms of the twentieth-​century ideal of authenticity as inherent in the individual, as articulated by Charles Taylor: “being true to my own originality, which is something only I can articulate and discover … and realizing a potential that is properly my own” (1992 [1994], 31). In American belly dance, this variety of authenticity is given creative embodiment in what Cynthia Novack describes as the “responsive body,” a Western construct that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s “in which the underlying wisdom of the natural body is thought to be recognized and followed, free of the dominance of the artificial mind” (1995, 178). This “natural” path to experiencing dance and body wisdom, clearly claimed by dancers from within the primary cultures (although through different cultural dynamics), comfortably aligns with the construction of belly dance as “natural” that has fueled recreational belly dance since its American inception. At the same time, it is increasingly acknowledged among serious recreational belly dancers that the movements of belly dance are not in fact natural, nor are Middle Eastern styles of musical interpretation or artistic choices based on culture (e.g., dela’a), to those who learn belly dance outside its primary cultures. As the Arab world has become more available to those dancers who wish to see it, the rhetoric of Arab-​centered belly dance has begun to describe a dual authenticity: learning and internalizing the cultural authenticity of the “canon” in order to actuate individual authenticity, recognized and followed through a responsive body imbued with another culture’s underlying wisdom. In this view, not only knowledge, but also the pursuit and integration over years of its living manifestations in Arab culture, are the activating factors for a personally authentic practice of the dance that reflects multiple truths learned through human and artistic contact. Amina Goodyear comments: “[Egyptian dance] is not just a dance of steps; it is a dance that must emerge from within … in order to learn (and maybe someday come close to mastering) Egyptian dance, one must totally immerse oneself in the land, the culture, the language and the music. It must become a way of life” (2007). Similarly, Rahma Haddad, a Lebanese Canadian belly dancer, emphasizes process in urging belly dance teachers to attend cultural events, ask knowledgeable people about things they don’t know, and immerse themselves in a culture they necessarily represent, in order to understand and convey “the tools so that they can express themselves in that form” (2007).

382   Andrea Deagon At a panel on cultural appropriation at the 2010 International Bellydance Conference of Canada, a biennial event featuring academic sessions as well as dance workshops and performance, the Palestinian Canadian belly dancer Roula Said spoke about her own experience learning belly dance as an adult: It was really hard for me to get a linear path to belly dance, and to even feel culturally situated … and to feel that I was doing it in a way that was authentic and not derivative. … [T]‌his stuff has had to go in and literally bring me home, to myself. … I’m in love with all of it, I go to workshops, I watch, I drink it in, I listen and I study and I sing and I play drums and I play kanun, I come at it from all these different angles. … Ultimately as an artist [all this] must become inside me such a real experience that I actually have something to say about who I am today in the world. (Said 2010)

Like Haddad, Said describes a holistic immersion into culture that opens the dancer’s potential for expressing the truths of her experience “today in the world” through a living, evolving, original (rather than derivative) art (see Figure 16.2).

Figure 16.2  Palestinian Canadian belly dancer Roula Said

Orientalism and the American Belly Dancer    383 Other Arab or Arab-​centered dancers articulate variations of this immersion toward individualism. Shareen el Safy (see Figure 16.3), an American teacher of Egyptian-​style dance who has performed and taught in Egypt, emphasizes that immersion occurs through a kinesthetic base in Egyptian movement and posture that enables the dancer to speak in ways authentic to both culture and self (2005). Amel Tafsout describes Western dancers’ respect for and active learning about Arab culture as central to their ability to express a personal identity through belly dance—​an identity that evolves most powerfully in community (Tafsout 2010b). These and many other Arab and Arab-​ centered North American belly dancers regard themselves as working within a living tradition that respects, hears, and heeds the Middle East. In this view Western dancers (whatever their ethnicity) can only culturally achieve a legitimate subject position through informed, empathetic artistry. Orientalism is not so much evaded as made

Figure 16.3  European American belly dancer Shareen el Safy performing in Cairo

384   Andrea Deagon less oppressive by ways of knowing, performing, and experiencing that arise in a living, evolving, yet culturally grounded practice and that are free to take shape in the artistic and theatrical constructs of the artists’ own world.

Belly Dance “in the Arab Way” The significance of shared social dance to women’s communities in many parts of the Middle East and the Arab diaspora is well documented (e.g., Adra 2005; Campbell 1998; Deaver 1978; see Halaby 2003). Among the functions of women’s shared social dancing may be reinforcing communal ties, establishing and confirming status distinctions of varying sorts, demonstrating desirability, consolidating family and generational relationships, symbolically expressing unacceptable and necessarily suppressed feelings, and of course personal enjoyment. Although women in the Middle East certainly dance alone and may formally study belly dancing, social dancing primarily forms and enacts identity within community. For younger Arab American women, whether or not they have experienced it, shared social dancing may be a hallmark of Arab women’s empowered communal expression. Social dancing in its primary cultures is not a performance of ethnicity; on the other hand, in the West the assertion of its centrality to Arab women’s experience can be a way through which ethnic identity may be (re)defined. Social “belly dancing” played such a role at the November 2009 Arab Heritage Celebration at Marquette University. A “Women’s Belly Dance Workshop” advertised: Join the women of the Arab Student Association and learn how to belly dance in the Arab way. Great music and a fun atmosphere. Due to cultural custom, we can have only women attending this workshop.

The reference to dancing “in the Arab way” simultaneously acknowledges that some belly dance is not Arab and distances such dances from Arab practice. The women-​ only atmosphere is obviously not the stereotypical seclusion and oppression projected onto Arab women, but rather an all-​girl party in which exclusion of men leads to a particularly feminine variety of cross-​cultural fun. The homosocial atmosphere of this implicitly “authentic” belly dance effectively severs it from the (hetero)sexuality (see Karayanni 2004, 141, 177–​182) so pervasively enacted in belly dance performance. The description further emphasizes the agency and authority of the real, approachable, and friendly Arab women who run the workshop. This variety of outreach effectively challenges destructive stereotypes of Arab women and attempts to mitigate the effects upon Arab Americans of sometimes very un-​Arab belly dance. Yet even here Arab women’s dance, as a “stylistically marked expression of otherness” (Kapchan 1995, 479), may be vulnerable to Orientalist readings. The subjectivity of the Arab women is challenged by their representation as the bearers of an embodied and static authenticity; they are collective rather than individual, natural rather than

Orientalism and the American Belly Dancer    385 cultured, and therefore defined through the objectifying essentialisms of both Oriental and female alterity. Western belly dancers would recognize their own Orientalizing varieties of sisterhood and concepts of the benevolent harem in this description. This only demonstrates the unavoidable impress of Orientalism on American culture: one can do everything right, but there it is. For anyone, even Arabs seeking to redefine belly dance in Arab terms, opposing the classic binaries and erasures of Orientalism shifts rather than evades the discourse.

Worlding Since its American resurgence in the 1960s, belly dance has been effectively “worlded,” in that, separated from its home cultures, it “expands the market of sanctioned and practiced pleasures, offering disciplined movement techniques of the body, access to the spectatorship and the embodiment of the beautiful and the exotic, and even options for the care of self ” (Savigliano 2009, 165). After ten years of rapid expansion, it now performs these functions not only in the traditional colonial powers but throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific Rim, even where (as in Indonesia and Taiwan) populations have suffered their own varieties of colonial oppression (Bandib 2009; Chao 2006; Yaven 2010). The Orientalizing construct of American (and in fact more general Western) belly dance, with its valorization of female companionship, self-​ confidence, self-​expression, and the release of hidden (often sensual) potential, is a factor in its worldwide appeal. Across the industrial world, recreational belly dancers find the dance empowering for women; experience its contentions as those of gender; often feel alliance with and claim legitimacy from a romanticized Arab culture; and argue the legitimacy of belly dance within their own societies, where it may be—​however it got that way—​as Orientalist a marker of Eastern excess as it is in the imperialist West. Whether or not the majority of Arabs want belly dancers to be representatives of their culture in the eyes of the world, elite Egyptian performers and choreographers currently travel the world as precisely that. As belly dance has spread across the non-​Arab industrial world from the 1990s into the 2010s, these dancers and teachers have appeared to non-​Arab audiences as proponents of an art acknowledged as requiring technical expertise, artistic sensitivity, and grounding in a complex, rich, and creative cultural tradition. Professional belly dance may be as distant as terrorism from the experience of ordinary Arabs throughout the Middle East. Yet both through and despite its Orientalist appeal, worlded belly dance creates a tenuous thread of alliance between its practitioners and an only partly imaginary Arab world. It even provides, for the minority who seek it out, the potential for deeper personal and cross-​cultural connections of the sort that creative involvement in the performing arts can offer. The worldwide expansion of recreational belly dance is certainly furthered by Orientalist constructs, both those inherited from American belly dance and those developed through the permutations of Orientalist thought in many world cultures. But it depends on the complex musical and

386   Andrea Deagon artistic traditions of the Middle East and the cultural capital behind them. It remains to be seen whether, in its many new homes, belly dance furthers cross-​cultural communication, hinders it, or simply renders it irrelevant. Notes 1. Because Western belly dance is overwhelmingly and insistently a women’s dance form, I focus on women’s discourse and experience in this chapter. 2. The Arabic word for the dance “veil” in Arabic means “chiffon” and is not related to any of the words for modest female covering (el Safy 2005). 3. Western/​cosmopolitan influences certainly appear in twentieth-​to twenty-​first-​century Arab raqs sharqi, but this is different from the unsupported idea that anyone in the West has ever succeeded in “repackaging” a new style of belly dance and imposing it on its home cultures. 4. Anthony Shay observes that the dancers of this period, as dancers only, constituted a “conceptual break” with previous practice, in which performers incorporated dance with other performing skills (2008, 136–​137). 5. In my experience, few Arabs find tribal belly dance evocative of “home.” 6. http://​muslimahmediawatch.org/​2007/​11/​the-​belly-​of-​the-​beast-​belly-​dancing-​as-​a-​ new-​form-​of-​orientalism-​2/​. 7. One such discussion may be found at http://​www.bellydanceforums.net/​dance-​styles/​ 3367-​dalaa.html. 8. I  began and participated in this discussion:  http://​www.bhuz.com/​forum/​belly-​dance-​ traditions-​styles/​40335-​do-​you-​represent-​arab-​culture.html.

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Orientalism and the American Belly Dancer    389 Rassmussen, Anne. 2005. “ ‘An Evening in the Orient’:  The Middle Eastern Nightclub in America. In Belly Dance:  Orientalism, Transnationalism, and Harem Fantasy, edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-​Young, 172–​206. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers. Safy, Shareen el. 1996. “Mona el Said: Moving in Mysterious Ways”. Habibi 15, no. 1: 2–​5, 31. Safy, Shareen el. 1997. “Amani’s Magic Mirror.” Habibi 16, no. 2: 2–​5. Safy, Shareen el​. 2005. Interview with the author, February 17. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Said, Edward. 2010. “Farewell to Tahia”. In Colors of Enchantment: Theater, Dance, Music and the Visual Arts of the Middle East, edited by Sherifa Zuhur, 228–​232. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Said, Roula. 2010. Comments at panel, “Belly Dance:  Honouring or Exploiting—​Issues of Cultural Appropriation,” at International Bellydance Conference of Canada, Toronto, April 25. Salimpour, Jamila. n.d. “The History of Belly Dancing in the United States”. Suhaíla Salímpour. http://​www.suhailainternational.com/​Pages/​Articles/​DanceHistory.htm (accessed July 21, 2010). Salimpour, Jamila. 1983–​1984. Self-​published video series. Salome. 2010. “Prostitution, the Eastern Bloc, and Belly Dance”. http://​www.orientaldancer. net/​articles/​prostitution-​the-​eastern-​block-​and-​bellydance.shtml (accessed September 1, 2010). Savigliano, Marta Elena. 2009. “Worlding Dance and Dancing Out There in the World”. In Worlding Dance, edited by. Susan Foster Leigh. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sellers-​Young, Barbara. 1992. “Raks el Sharki:  Transculturation of a Folk Form.” Journal of Popular Culture 26, no. 2: 141–​152. Sellers-​Young, Barbara​. 2005. “Body, Image, Identity: American Tribal Belly Dance”. In Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism, and Harem Fantasy, edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-​Young, 277–​303. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers. Shafik, Viola. 2007. Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Shaheen, Jack. 2001. Reel Bad Arabs:  How Hollywood Vilifies a People. New  York:  Interlink Publishing Group. Shaheen, Jack​. 2006. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. DVD. Northhampton, MA: Media Education Foundation. Shay, Anthony. 1999. Choreophobia. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers. Shay, Anthony. 2006. Choreographing Identities: Folk Dance, Ethnicity, and Festival in the United States and Canada. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Shay, Anthony​. 2008. Dancing Across Borders: The American Fascination with Exotic Dance Forms. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. Shay, Anthony, and Barbara Sellers-​Young. 2003. “Belly Dance: Orientalism: Exoticism: Self-​ Exoticism.” Dance Research Journal 35, no. 1: 13–​37. Shay, Anthony, and Barbara Sellers-​ Young, eds. 2005. Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism, and Harem Fantasy. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers. Shimmy. 2006–​2007. TV series. Vancouver, BC: Omni Film Productions. Siegel, Barbara. 1995. “Belly Dance:  The Enduring Embarrassment.” Arabesque 21, no. 4: 11–​13.

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Chapter 17

Bl ack Er ase d The Tango de Negros in Spain’s Romantic Age Kathy M. Milazzo

Out of flamenco’s many palos, or forms, the tango flamenco is easily recognizable by its binary rhythms, making it particularly accessible and widely practiced among aficionados and professionals alike. Yet it had the misfortune of being brought to Spain during the Romantic Age when nationalist agendas were concerned with transforming dances into icons of national identity. Within a few decades, the tango, introduced from Cuba as the tango de negros or tango de americas, was transformed into the tango de gitanos and the tango flamenco, an action which was to disassociate it from its Africanist roots, until recent studies located the musical correlation between the tango from Cuba and its Spanish versions (Ortiz Nuevo 1998), (Navarro García 1998), and (Pablo Lozano 2006). Research addressing correlations between dance movements is scarce, however (Milazzo 2012). In order to illustrate the consequences of omitting negro references to the tango, this chapter begins with a short review of significant flamenco narratives which comprise the flamenco canon. Documentation of the tango is traced from Cuba to the Spanish port cities of Cádiz and Seville, where it was stylistically appropriated and subsumed into the flamenco dance repertoire. Dance movements comprising the tango are extracted through analyses of nineteenth-​century travelogues and sketches. I will argue that despite the open acknowledgment of negro influences in southern Spanish dance in the early nineteenth century, negotiations during the development of Spain’s national identity affected the eventual denial of the tango as “negro” because concepts of negro were not conducive to the image of Spain that hegemonic powers wished to project.

Introduction Flamenco, as a recognizable art form comprising song, dance, live music, and jaleo,1 first came to the public awareness in the 1850s2, when the expanding marketplace was

392   Kathy M. Milazzo influenced by commercial desires. It developed in the Romantic imagination as an identifiable set of practices and ideas encouraged by the publications of Richard Ford’s 1836 Handbook for Travellers in Spain and Merimée’s Carmen in 1845, which elevated the Spanish gypsy as an icon of the pure, untainted soul of Spain. As histories reflect the thoughts and ideas inherent in the times in which they are written, they become “portraits of the age” that index texts in selective fashions, relying on interpretations of “prejudgment” (Burke 2007, 7–​12). Through a review of flamenco’s significant narratives, “prejudgment” becomes apparent in efforts that emphasize the role of the Spanish gypsies to the detriment of other cultures and ethnicities residing in southern cities of Andalusia where flamenco developed. One of the first flamenco histories, written in 1881 by Antonio Machado y Alvarez (Demófilo), the Colección de cantes flamencos is an anthology of flamenco lyrics annotated with the author’s personal opinions. At this early date in flamenco’s history, Demófilo already bemoans the commercialism of flamenco and states that flamenco “cafés will completely kill cante gitano [gypsy song] before long, despite the gigantic efforts made by the cantador of Seville [Silverio, a non-​gypsy singer] to bring it out of the obscure sphere where it lived and from which it should never have been taken if it aspired to keep itself pure and genuine” (Mitchell 1994, 146–​147). Timothy Mitchell considers that what Demófilo “imagines to have been “pure and genuine” [Spanish gypsy] was in reality the hybridized urban underclass youth style of folk singing that gitanos hastened to capitalize on (to their credit) under the auspices of the romantic/​ nationalistic gentry” (Mitchell 1994, 147). I want to point out, however, that this “urban underclass” also included negros who mixed with the Spanish gypsies both socially and genetically, a manifestation which undermines the concept of the gypsy as sole agency within Spanish dance. It is in the multiplicity of ethnicities comprising lower-​class neighborhoods where flamenco developed that my claims of negro influences in flamenco dance are based.3 Issues of purity were again at the forefront when the poet and playwright Federíco García Lorca, together with other members of the Spanish intelligentsia, sponsored a flamenco contest, the Grand Concurso of 1922. The goal was to locate the true voice of flamenco, which was perceived as being eradicated by bastardizations that had become a part of its style since its rise as a commercial commodity, an outcome of presenting flamenco in cafés cantantes from the 1880s into the 1920s. Lorca was committed to elevating the Spanish gypsy to a mythological status, exemplifying all that was pure and honest in Spanish culture.4 In Lorca’s view, only Spanish gypsies could express “lyrical channels through which escape all the suffering and ritual gestures of our [“our” referring to Spanish] race” (Stanton 1978, 5). Flamenco narratives continued to maintain the gypsy trope during the Franco years when Antonio Mairena (1909–​1983) published Mundo y formas de cante flamenco in 1963, in which he “unhesitatingly credits the gitanos of Southwestern Andalusia with the invention of deep song and postulates a ‘hermetic age’ in which gitano cantaores carefully guarded their art from outsiders” (Mitchell 1994, 203). Mairena “restored” the

Black Erased   393 history of flamenco, in his own words, which in actuality did not represent the sum of the possibilities of representation in the plurality of Andalusian society. Through these key representative voices of flamenco’s history, flamenco’s narrative was distorted in order to neglect influences of other ethnicities who not only lived in southern Spanish cities where flamenco developed, but also those who contributed from Spanish colonies overseas. In his sociological research on Andalusian peoples, Gerhard Steingress argues that flamenco became “flamenco” on the commercial stage and was never an articulation of one isolated ethnicity (Steingress 1998). In truth, “pure” and “genuine” never existed except in retrospect, yet this representation continues in many narratives. These three selective narratives cited above present deliberate choices on the part of the authors that display intentions of rhetorical persuasion based on strategy (and ideology) rather than an interpretation based on accountability. It is therefore necessary to recognize that these constructions prevail in flamenco literature in order to understand the mechanisms that affect the story of negro people and dances whose influences, I argue, remain apparent in flamenco dance.

The History of the Tango de Negros The tango has a labyrinthine history, which Marta Savigliano, in her concise synopsis in her work on the Argentinean tango, attempts to unravel: The story goes like this: In Cuba, the African slaves developed new music and dances intermingling their traditional rhythmic sounds with a variant of the French contre-​ dances already appropriated by the Spaniards; the resulting habanera (from Havana) made its way into Europe local styles. The tango andaluz (Andalusian tango), the Brazilian maxixe, and the tango rioplatense (from the Río de la Plata region in Argentina and Uruguay) were the offsprings of this process; the last in particular was nurtured by the milonga, a local product itself of a certain Spanish troubadour style. When the milonga, carried by the gauchos, moved to the developing urban harbors …, it collided with the tangos de negros (tangos of the African slaves) and the tango andaluz that was performed by the Spanish theater companies touring South America.

(Savigliano 1995, 60)Savigliano’s twisting path of the tango emerging from the contradance is substantiated by eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century newspapers, travelogues, dance treatises, and sketches and paintings. Jill Lane, in her work on the practice of bufo in Cuba (blackface theatre popular in the nineteenth century), concurs with the European contradance connection, but notes that this dance was a site of “Africanization” in Cuba. As evidence, she cites a letter from 1837: “Who does not see in the movement of our young men and women when they dance contradanzas and waltzes an imitation of the gesticulation of the blacks in their cabildos? Who does not know

394   Kathy M. Milazzo that the rhythm of the dancers of the country is the echo of the drums of the Tango? Everything is African, and the innocent and poor blacks, without intending to … avenge our treatment of them” (Lane 2005, 86). Thus the contradance was hybridized when it was introduced across the ocean which enabled subsequent experimentations with numerous Afrocuban dance forms. Moreover, these developing dances continually crossed back and forth across the Atlantic to create a genre of dance acknowledged as the ida y vuelta flamenco forms. In a publication emanating from a conference on this topic at the 1992 Bienal de Arte Flamenco in Seville, Romualdo Molina and Miguel Espin argue that enslaved Africans were influential in the genesis of all ida y vuelta dances, and that African rhythms affected dances in the colonies as well as in the Spanish port cities of Cádiz, Málaga, and Seville (Molina 1991, 20). This implies that the tango de negros which emanated from Cuba and was transformed into the flamenco tango exhibits negro characteristics. Before the flamenco tango developed, however, it went through various incarnations. An 1818 newspaper article, one of the first references of a tango in Spain, mentions a dance in 3/​8 time (Núñez 2008, 237), not the typical 4/​4 time, which indicates tango’s position as a site for contesting conceptualizations moving through diverse hybridizations. Other evidence reveals that the word tango had diverse connotations in the early nineteenth century. In a citation of an 1836 Cuban dictionary, the word tango was defined as a “gathering of [Bozales] African-​race Negros to dance to the sound of Tambores [congas] and other instruments” (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 14). Note that the definition is not of a dance, not a music, but a gathering. This is an important distinction because juergas, the gatherings of practitioners who meet to socialize and play flamenco in informal settings, often incorporate the tango which subsequently suggests that Afro-​Cuban aesthetics infiltrated both movements and practices in flamenco art. The term tango had an unusual hybrid connotation in an 1834 Cuban article from the Diario de la Habana, which announced a performance of a “boleras del tango” (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 17), a presentation that suggests fluidity both in tango terminology and dance movements. Professional bolero dancers in Spain were highly trained at this time and were considered the upper echelon of dance performers.5 This does not necessarily mean that the dancers in Cuba were of the same calibre, but the title of this presentation suggests that they had had some classical training. As Steingress notes, an action such as this “includes its opposite tendency, namely the ‘deconstruction’ of “place” as the consequence of conflictive relations within the artistic field … induced by a transgressive (transcultural) musical attitude which creates a peculiar context where new meanings are generated, controlled and negotiated” (Steingress 2002, 299). This incarnation of “boleras del tango” implies that the tango was a site for experimenting and contesting established dance forms by trained Cuban dancers within a different vocabulary expanded by Africanist movements. Throughout the nineteenth century, Cuba was trying to create its own independent mestijaze culture separate from Spain and would not achieve independence until 1897. Benedict Anderson, in his discussion of Spanish creole populations, notes that creole communities developed their conceptions of nation-​ness well before most of Europe

Black Erased   395 (Anderson, 2006, 50). Boleras del tangos, as a name of a dance, intimates glimpses of struggling Cuban identity against its Spanish colonizer by relocating the bolero in a Cuban context which renders it as different. The boleras de tangos that was performed in 1834 Havana was featured in an escenario (scenic performance) that depicted both Sevilla and Havana. It could refer to a gathering of bolera dancers set in a traditional Sevillian scenic design, but the use of “tango” also implies that Africanist sensibilities emanating from negro dance in Havana were incorporated into the movements and made manifest on the Cuban stage. This action was just a few short years before the tango americano or the tango africana, as it was also known, arrived in Seville. On the 6th of January 1839, a tango de negritos was danced by various young children (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 18). “Negritos” is usually a derogatory term, with its diminutive ending denoting “childlike,” but the newspaper article specifically states “un tango de negritos por varios niños de corta edad” [a negrito tango by various children of a young age]. A similar production featuring this dance had also been performed in Havana, so it is likely that this was a travelling troupe (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 19). This citation reaffirms the “negro” connection with the tango when it was introduced in Spain. Identifying the tango is problematic, however, because it was associated with or confused with the habanera, as noted by Molina and Espin, who state that tangos and habaneras were twins except for timing of the execution (Molina & Espin 1991, 63). Sublette offers that when the habanera travelled to Spain, “it was known there as the tango americano, with lyrics that often expressed a nostalgia for Cuba” (Sublette 2004, 138). The “habanera traveled everywhere out of the port city from which it took its name … as the form diffused throughout Latin America and Spain” (Sublette 2004, 137). Furthermore, there was sufficient opportunity for cross-​cultural transferences in the ports. According to Sublette, a “mariner’s layover [in Havana] could last for weeks or months” (Sublette 2004, 87)  which would offer plenty of time for dance movements to be learned, absorbed, and developed before being transported to the next port of call. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the habanera continued in Cuba, but the tango began to disappear (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 59) in favor of the rumba. In Spain, however, the tango continued its ascent. After 1850, the Cuban tango de negros seems to have exploded in popularity in Spain. In Seville, on August 15, 1850, “La Negra,” María Martínez, a singer, caused a furor with her rendition of the American song “El Tango.” According to the press, she was showered with applause, bravos, flowers—​“finally everything that can be done to fill the hands of such an eminent artist” (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 35). Martínez was from Havana, which is illustrative of the Cuban-​Spanish connection (Navarro García 1998, 164). Therefore, between mariners and Cuban artists, evidence indicates that the tango that was introduced in Spain came from Cuba. Furthermore, Martínez had taken her tango throughout Europe, because the press article states that she was a famous negrita [black woman] singer who had previously triumphed in Paris and Madrid (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 34). The use of negrita in this case probably did not have a negative connotation in this capacity, nor did it suggest that Martínez was a child. Lane states that

396   Kathy M. Milazzo negrito was originally a racist caricature of black people by whites, yet over time, it came to reflect a national sentiment for racial diversity (Lane 2005, 3). The Cuban tango was quickly adopted by native Sevillians. A few months earlier, on April 16, 1850, an accredited dance academy presented a public rehearsal of national dances attended by the best female bolero dancers of the city who danced, among other forms, the tango de los negros (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 35). This was not like the 1834 boleras de tangos in Cuba because, in this instance, the most highly trained theatrical dancers in Seville, who were most likely white Spanish dancers, were publicly performing a dance that was still clearly associated with black Afrocuban dance at this time. It is important to observe that Spain, through the cultural offerings of its colonies, was noted for nurturing dance and absorbing stylistic influences to enhance its own dances. Estébanez Calderón, a Spanish Romantic writer, wrote in 1847 that “Sevilla is a workshop where dances are tweaked, modified, and retaken in other old dances … It is a depository for dance, the workshop, the university, where one learns the inimitable grace and salt of baile andaluz. The West Indies return to Cadiz again and then they arrive in Sevilla where they are dressed in Andalucian” (Calderón 2007, 181). Calderón specifically cites the dances from the Indies, or the Spanish Americas, and implies that it was common practice for dancers in Seville to reconfigure these dances into Spanish stylizations. It is significant that the shaping of dances from other cultures is openly avowed by Calderón because this point is not mentioned by subsequent flamencologists. When Demófilo wrote his flamenco song compilation in 1881, he chose to ignore tangos because he could neither make a claim that they were gypsy songs or ascribe other palos to tango lyrics, according to Arcadio Larrea in El Flamenco en su Raiz, a work written in rebuttal of Mairena’s theories of ethnic purity (Larrea 1974, 229–​230). Tweaking and modifying dances from other places is an act of appropriation. As Jane Desmond in the introduction to Meaning in Motion notes, through appropriation, “mediated images flatten the complexities of the dance style (as a social practice) into a ‘dance’ (transported as a series of steps to music) removed from its context of origin and its community of performance” (Desmond 1997, 43). Because appropriation acts as exchange of unequal power economies, members of the hegemonic group, which in the case of the tango were the dancers who were performing at the academias and commercial events in Seville, built on the success of the tango and claimed it as their own. The tango was given what is called a propio sello (an artist’s personal stamp) in Spanish dance terminology by various artists performing it as its relationship with negros slipped away. James Young, who classifies types of appropriation, differentiates a stylistic appropriation, defining it as an action which maintains identifiable, distinguishable traits from the original form, but is “something less than an entire expression of an artistic idea” (Young, 2008 #107, p. 6). The tango that was appropriated seems to have retained certain Africanist characteristics but it became another entity than the Cuban dance; graceful displays of immodesty were retained, but it was imprinted on different Andalusian bodies and paraded as a commodity. After 1850, the tango was incorporated into several Spanish-​ penned zarzuelas (Spanish light operas), such as “El Nuevo Zapateado de Cádiz” in 1853 (Ortiz Nuevo &

Black Erased   397 Núñez 1998, 40); “Los diamantes de la corona” in 1854 (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 60); and “La reina del Perchel” in 1856 (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 60). As the tango proliferated, its popularity cut across all class and racial barriers on both sides of the ocean in various guises. In Cuba, it was danced by a wide range of participants. An 1863 Cuban newspaper informs us that: In one of the principal ports of the capital, on Bernaza Street, between Obispo and Lamparilla, every night and all feast days, a happy multitude of sailors, soldiers and blacks unite to happily adore the joyful women who occupy the localities of the neighborhoods and little houses, executing, as is natural, out-​of-​the-​ordinary and indistinguishable movements, impeding traffic and hurting the ears of the most susceptible people.(Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 48) [My translation]

Wild spontaneity was not relegated solely to Cuba. An 1848 Madrid article mentions an event that occurred in the Café del Correo in Cádiz: upon hearing a habanera, some sailors and others who knew it jumped up and performed two dances to wild applause (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 29). Paul Gilroy rightfully warns against underestimating travel in the process of mediation and movement (Gilroy 1993, 19). The easy familiarity with this dance highlights its circulation across the Atlantic. The adoption of the tango continued as it was appropriated, fused, and transformed into a Spanish articulation. The Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz wrote a tango in 1889 for his collection of Spanish national songs. Tangos were written by other classic composers including de Falla and Granados. The first “tango flamenco” was written in 1886 by Javier de Burgos, who specifically used this name in one of his pieces for the zarzuela entitled “Cádiz” (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 85). This does not mean that the tango’s Cuban roots were yet denied, but memories fade and become garbled. By the late 1880s, Cuba was confused with Puerto Rico as the home of the tango (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 96), which suggests that the roots of the tango were no longer as important in Spain as the dance itself. The Spanish press in 1886 remarked that the “tangos, which were born on American soil, here have been given their naturalization letter” (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 83) [My translation].

An Analysis of the Tango So what did the tango look like and what qualities could be identified as having Africanist aesthetics6 during this age? In speaking of dances popular in his day, Calderón attests that dances in southern Spain had myriad influences that separated them from northern Spanish dances: These dances can be divided into three great families according to their condition and character; they can be of Moorish, Spanish, or American origin. Those of

398   Kathy M. Milazzo Spanish origins can be recognized for their compás of two for four, lively and fast, that have an ancient air and can be sung in eight-​syllable verses of four or five lines much like the jota of Aragon and Navarre. Those of the American lineage reveal for the most part a grace and ease as is seen in the provenance of people in which chastity holds few or no laws; but among those Moorish dances and songs … the affiliations with Arab and Moorish roots are preserved. They show the sweet melancholy.

(Calderón 2007, 182) [My translation]

Unfortunately, Calderón does not expound on his descriptions with more visible characteristics, but his acknowledgment of American, and by extension, negro characteristics in Spanish dance is significant. Dances with this American lineage had unchaste movements which were openly recognized, acknowledged, and practiced. Other accounts offer a few glimpses of qualities. Charles Davillier, a French travel writer, saw the tango in 1862 and recorded A young gitana with copper skin, fuzzy (kinky) hair, and jet black eyes danced the tango Americano with extraordinary grace. The tango is a dance of negros that has a marked, strongly accented rhythm. One can say the same about most of the sounds with the same origin, especially the song that begins with the words “!Ay que gusto te que placer.” Which is a song that for some years has been as popular as the tango. Another popular song in the Port of Havana is used to accompany the dance.

(Doré & Davillier 1988, 81)Davillier reaffirms that the tango is indeed an Afrocuban dance and adds that the rhythm of the music is strongly obvious. His observation that the dancer, the gitana (gypsy girl), had copper skin and kinky hair is perhaps indicative of the centuries of black and gypsy populations cohabitating and intermixing in the same neighbourhoods of Andalusia. The copper skin compounds her appeal by symbolizing an eroticized imperial conquest in an act of colonial desire in which “blackness evokes an attractive, but dangerous, sexuality, an apparently abundant, limitless, but threatening, fertility,” as Young points out in “Sex and Inequality” (Young 1995, 97). That she was a girl from Cádiz dancing for foreigners in Seville implies that the tango was a commercial articulation in this event. Another description of the tango from the Cuban press in 1864 notes that celebrants of the Feast of the Assumption in Havana were “dancing with desperation as the fury of pleasure dominates the multitude who imprints the dance with its own particular stamp of Africa, which is visible in the contortions of the snake and God knows what other things” (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 50). Snake-​like movements can denote undulations or swaying up and down or side to side. Flamenco dancers noted for their extreme back and side bends might also be described as snake-​like indicating a link between Cuban and Spanish tangos. A more succinct description of the dance itself appears in 1903 when a Spanish newspaper article stated that “In the tango, there is much movement of the hips and much weaving of the hands, but the feet scarcely move which clearly indicates our Olympian qualities and lazy majesty” (Ortiz Nuevo & Núñez 1998, 114). This description assumes,

Black Erased   399 like the tangos written by the classical composers, that the dance was already embedded in the repertoire of Spanish dance because of references to “our” qualities and majesty. But this description is similar to what one sees in today’s tangos when feet move in small marking steps which facilitate strong hip actions while the arms circle and the hands twirl. “Olympian qualities and lazy majesty” could be another reference to the way flamenco dancers lean back when executing their port de bras. These descriptions from the press imply that familiar movements in flamenco dance were witnessed in the negro tangos from Cuba throughout the years that flamenco was crystallizing as a performative art form in Spain. Romantic travelogues are also valuable sources for describing Spanish dances, and although these accounts are not necessarily citing tangos, it is possible to extrapolate more clues regarding the non-​European or Afrocuban aesthetics of the dance. In his 1853 Wanderings in Spain, Theóphile Gautier, a staunch Orientalist and Romantic writer, confirms a difference in Spanish dance by comparing it to French ballet. As a critical judge of dance, albeit from a very male perspective, he offers observations worth noting: Although the Spanish danseuses do not possess the correct and accurate precision, or the elevated style of the French danseuses, they are, in my opinion, vastly superior to them by their graceful and fascinating appearance. … they resemble women dancing and not danseuses, which is a very different thing. Their style has not anything in common with that of the French school. In the latter, immovability and perpendicularity of the upper part of the body are expressly recommended, and the body never takes part in the movement of the legs. (Gautier 1853, 230)

In short, he is seeing a less rigid body than that in French ballet. If the body is not held in an elevated, perpendicular position, it would be more grounded and the hips would move more freely. He continues using descriptions that seem to follow the line of Africanist aesthetics: In Spain, the feet hardly ever leave the ground; there are none of those grand pirouettes or elevating of the legs, which make a woman look like a pair of compasses opened to their fullest extent, and which, in Spain are considered revoltingly indecent. It is the body which dances, the back which undulated, the sides which bend, the waist which moves with all the suppleness of an Almee [Indian dancing girl] or a serpent. … voluptuous langor is succeeded by the activity of a young African lion. (Gautier 1853, 230)

While Gautier is not necessarily describing the tango, it is worth noting that he witnessed movements such as the undulations, the suppleness, and the movements of the entire body. Gautier also observed languid qualities and feet not moving much, observations which appear in the 1903 description of the tango; however, his odd allusion to an African lion adds a certain animalistic or primal element to his account which is in accordance with his Orientalist penchants. It follows Said’s interpretation of Orientalism—​on one hand it deals with learning, discovery, and practice, and on the

400   Kathy M. Milazzo other, it is the site of dreams, images, fantasies, myths, and obsessions (Bhabha 2006, 102–​103). Gautier’s descriptions scientifically analyse the difference between French and Spanish dancers and situate the movements in other, fanciful, cultures. The copper-​skinned dancer from Cádiz mentioned earlier was witnessed by Davillier in his Spanish travelogue, Viaje por Espagna. This work is complemented with sketches by his traveling companion, Gustave Doré, although, unfortunately, the copper-​skinned tango dancer was not depicted. Another dance, the zorongo, also thought to have Afrocuban links (Navarro García 1998, 218) was captured by Doré, however. Sublette notes that in eighteenth-​century Santo Domingo, most enslaved Africans were from Congo, whose influence he suggests was dominant in emerging Afro-​Caribbean culture (Sublette 2004, 99–​100). The descriptions mention a rocking of the body and hip movements and its lyrics state “you [the zorongo] have come from Congo and like a strong African go, for your health, from being a Moor to a Christian” (Navarro García 1998, 218–​219). Note the body positioning of the central dancer with the tambourine. The body spirals and has a certain angularity. Such a pose suggests a gentle swaying of the skirt as the weight shifts from one foot to another in the open stance. The dancer is also holding the skirt with her left hand, which implies use of it in the choreography. Teresa Martinez de la Peña, in her analysis of Doré’s work, notes that the way the skirt was moved up and down was related to dances coming from the Americas (Doré & Davillier 1988, 24) and as such, could mark another Africanist characteristic inherent in flamenco dance. Other discernible Africanist aesthetics in the nineteenth century can be identified in Cuba, which can clarify some of the obtuse observations of Romantic writers in Spain. The tango had its own day in Cuba where Día Tango was another name for El Día de los

Figure 17.1  GustaveDoré’s sketch of Gipsies Dancing at a Court of Sevilla

Black Erased   401

Figure 17.2  Fernando Mialhe’s Día de los Reyes

Reyes (January 6th) [Day of the Kings], a feast day that had been celebrated since the 1600s in Spain. In Cuba, however, celebrations reached major proportions in Cuba in the nineteenth century. This 1848 lithograph by Fernando Mialhe is his depiction of the Día de los Reyes in Havana. This lithograph is significant because it illustrates a variety of costumes and dances at the event. Sublette cites a contemporaneous 1851 eyewitness account by a French writer, Xavier Marmier, who observed that “On Kings’ Day each tribe appears in Havana in its national dress and with its musical instruments” (Sublette 2004, 114). In Mialhe’s depiction, it is possible to see this array of diversity. Because Día de los Reyes was also known as the Día Tango, some of these dancers might either be performing a tango or they could be depicting gestures that were incorporated into the dance form. In the static movements, negro dance positions are noted in the bent postures, weighted or seated bodies, looseness, and open stances of the legs. Dynamism is exhibited by a key dancer in the center who is accompanied by gesticulations, shouts (open mouths are visible), and rhythmic percussion provided by those around him. The female dancer on the far left is intriguing. While she is not clothed in Africanist costuming, the lift of her body and the torquing of her torso suggest a body unfettered by a corset. There is an ease and grace in her posture. Her back is not rigidly held and its spiraling is a signature move in flamenco dance, which was also apparent in the zorongo sketch. It recalls Gautier’s words cited before: “It is the body which dances, the back which undulated, the sides which bend, the waist which moves” (Gautier 1853, 230). Lastly, more descriptions of the tango de negros are found in José Otero’s 1912 treatise on dancing. Otero was a second-​generation flamenco dancer who learned his craft

402   Kathy M. Milazzo from the first professional flamenco dancers of the cafés cantantes in the late nineteenth century. He had been a dance educator in Seville for 35 years when he wrote his book. Otero states that the tango was really no more than eighty to one hundred years old at his time and notes that it was danced in Cádiz and in the cafés cantantes in Seville. Otero observes two classes of tangos: the tango gitano, which was very flamenco and could not be danced everywhere because the body positions did not follow rules of decency, and the tango de las vecindoras or de las corraleres (tango of the neighbourhoods) which could be danced by everyone (Otero 1912, 223). However, Otero did not attribute this dance to Cuba; nor did he mention any allusion to the tango as negro. While Otero’s own choreography sought to avoid indecent movements, he mentions the element of skirt work as a component of the dance form. Most of his movements for his version of the tango can be pictured as charming, medium-​sized steps based on steps from the old Spanish dance of the seguidillas7 simply presented, although his choreography specifies that the dancer should “take the skirt and give a little salty movement without letting the skirt fly between the knees” (Otero 1912, 226). That Otero stresses the need to present a “decent” tango implies that it had a history of movements he considered indecent or low class. This action appears to be a deliberate attempt to distance it from dancers and styles he considers distasteful, which were probably characteristics of negro versions. As Jill Lane, in Blackface Cuba: 1840–​1895, observes, in Cuba, it was thought that if a white woman dances an African dance she whitens it—​“even the tango can be danced with decency” (Lane, 2005, 154). Significantly, Otero’s admonitions display the agency which guides competing discourses between lower-​class and theatrical conceptualizations of flamenco dance. Thus, the tango de negros that was transformed into a mainstay of today’s flamenco repertoire has elements of recognizable Africanist aesthetics. These characteristics include feet working closely to the floor; a preponderance of hip movements driven by an upper body that vacillates between leaning back and bending forward; widely-​placed feet; groundedness; and undulations. Other movements include sways side to side, skirts moving up and down, spiralling, and graceful and languid qualities. And, lastly, the tango is still spontaneously performed in juerga settings, which are organized, as in the early concepts of tango, as a gathering.

The Tango and the Romantic Age The Bourbon Regime in Spain ended with the Napoleonic Wars as the Spanish, who had risen up in defiance, staged one of the first guerrilla wars in modern western history. The heroics of their daring subversive maneuvers captured the imagination of the rest of the western world, propelling Spain to become a popular tourist destination for European travelers, especially Romantic writers. As a staggering numbers of travel writers wrote about Spain8, selected perceptions of Spain were reiterated continually in print. These perceptions created new narratives which, through widespread

Black Erased   403 distribution, engendered repercussions that affected emerging Spanish nationalism. Indeed, “print-​capitalism … made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways” (Anderson 2006, 36). One result of the pervasive publications was to solidify Spain’s image as an exotic country. Spain was particularly conducive to being portrayed as exotic because it is considered as somehow being outside of Europe. This concept was succinctly expressed in the nineteenth century by Alexandre Dumas, who remarked that Africa began at the Pyrenees (Josephs 1990, 7). This viewpoint removes Spain from the rest of Europe and increases its appeal as an exotic travel destination. Spain’s exoticism was compounded by the period’s reigning movements of Orientalism and Romanticism. Said observes that conditions after the Napoleonic Wars allowed Orientalism to be created as a science, exemplified by its mode of reconstruction and repetition (Said 1994, 122). Like Gautier’s scientific analysis of French versus Spanish dancers, persistent reiterations of Spain as “other” shaped its narrative of identity to reflect the dreams and fantasies of travel writers. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the infatuation with the gypsy as the epitome of Spanish exoticism was reinforced in print. Such a passion is “the currency through which exotics negotiate their identity with other exotics and with exoticizers” (Savigliano 1995, 166). The passions of Romantic authors, however, did not always reflect reality. Gautier was a clear-​eyed example of such a writer in search of the exotic oriental in Spain. As a dance critic in Paris, his observations of Spanish dance reveal that he had long been an admirer of classical, theatrical Spanish dance as performed by highly trained professionals. The dance he was used to seeing in Paris did not prepare him for what he saw in Spain. Gautier was appalled when he first arrived in Spain. He was dismayed when the first dancers he saw were “more used-​up, more worn-​out, more toothless, more bleer-​eyed, more bald, and more dilapidated” (Gautier 1853, 23) which quickly made the Spain of the “Romancero, of the ballads of Victor Hugo, of the tales of Merimée, and the stories of Alfred de Musset, fade before [him]” (Gautier 1853, 13). The dancers in northern Spain did not even look Spanish (Gautier 1853, 22) and the Spanish themselves “most strenuously disavow the Spain of the Romancero and the Orientals; they almost invariably assert that they are neither poetical nor picturesque, and their assertion is, alas! but too well founded” (Gautier 1853, 54). He bemoaned that the only Spanish costume that remained was the mantilla and dresses in Madrid were French (Gautier 1853, 74). Said observes that the ultimate expression of Orientalism is manifested through female dancers who exhibit sensual, delicate, mindless, emotional carelessness (Said 1994, 187). Therefore, if a Carmen as fantasized by Merimée did not really exist, she needed to be invented. The shaping of the Andalusian dancer as an exotic entity needed a stronger frame of reference upon which to build flights of fancy than what reality suggested. This was accomplished by creating a mythical history for the dancers of Spain, particularly the women, based on Roman interpretations of the famous dancing girls of Gades, present-​day Cádiz. According to Allen Josephs, in his work on the myths of

404   Kathy M. Milazzo Andalusia, these puellae Gaditanae were mentioned by several ancient Roman authors who both adored and denounced them. Pliny “revealed the extent of the popularity of the puellae Gaditanae at Roman dinners in a letter to Septicius Clarus, complaining that his friend had preferred someone else’s hospitality, which included oysters, sea urchins, and Gaditanae” (Josephs 1990, 69). Martial, a Roman poet, wrote of his mistress, Telethusa, in the first century C.E.: She who was cunning to show wanton gestures to the sound of Baetic castanets and to frolic to the tunes of Gades, she who could have roused passion in palsied Pelias, and have stirred Hecuba’s spouse even by Hector’s pyre—​Telethusa burns and racks with love her former master. He sold her as his maid, now he buys her back as mistress. (Josephs 1990, 70)

Telethusa was the most renowned of the dancing girls of the Roman age and her name is still remembered in Spain. It was Richard Ford, however, who, “with his own mixture of salt and gall, turned Telethusa into the most interesting andaluza of antiquity” (Josephs 1990, 70). Ford was steeped in the classical literature from the Greeks and Romans and was quite erudite in finding links between ancient times and his present-​ day Spain. In the 1830s, Ford also found poverty pervasive throughout Spain, and especially in Andalusia. However, in Cádiz, he was able to fulfill his fantasies of Spain: This is the spot for the modern philosopher to study the descendants of those “Gaditanae,” who turned more ancient heads than even the sun. The “ladies of Cadíz,” the theme of our old ballads, have retained all their former celebrity; they have cared neither for time nor tide. Observe, particularly … the Gaditanian walk, El Piafar, about which everyone has heard so much … The Gaditana has no idea of not being admired … Her “pace” is her boast … Her meneo [“wiggle”] is considered by grave antiquarians to be the unchanged crissatura of Martial. (Josephs 1990, 71)

Ford’s work is liberally peppered with references to the Gaditanae. He was widely read by other Romantic travelers and inspired many travelers to seek out such dancers in their own journeys. And, of course Merimée’s Carmen strongly contributed to the construction of the flamenco dancer’s image. The character of Carmen is arguably the most appealing and exotic female figure in Western literature. Her independence, sensuality, courage, mendacity, and ultimate unattainability have intrigued the public since she was created. Once Carmen was invented, thousands of travelers went to Spain to find her. Yet, once, again not everyone was enthralled. Mrs. Villiers-​Wardell, in her 1909 travelogue, stated that: “I think Bizet’s delicious Carmen has a great deal to answer for when travelers rail at the shortcomings of Spain” (Villiers-​Wardell 1909, 218). She considered that most people were disappointed to not find what they expected in Spain (Villiers-​Wardell 1909, 211), which suggests that much of the Romantic literature was indeed based more in fantasy than reality.

Black Erased   405 Nevertheless, Carmen and Telethusa placed the Spanish dancer squarely within the ideals of Romanticism and the realm of Orientalism, which was conceptually associated with “sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies” (Said 1994, 188). This sketch by Doré depicts an academic dancer (by virtue of her shoes)9 and a bolera (by virtue of her balletic costume, squared hips, and body in fourth position). But this sketch speaks most eloquently of the proclivities of the male gaze during the Romantic Age. It is almost impossible for an audience to decipher choreography when they are sitting so close to the performer, and indeed no eyes are looking downwards to the dancer’s feet. It appears that the men were more infatuated with her hourglass figure than with her castanet work from their lascivious leers and their mutterings made apparent through the visual communication between patrons. Orientalism held its subject in a vise—​like a butterfly on a pin (Said 1994, 149). This dancer is examined as if she were in a collection and not on a stage, as if the exotic female Spanish dancer was created as a fantasy appearing as a recurring figure in the literature like the puellae Gaditanae. The patrons in this figure consist of both Spaniards and foreigners as is suggested by the variety of hats and attire. Davillier states that patrons included Andalusian artisans and foreigners from Germany, England, France, and Russia (Doré 1988, 67) which indicates the commercial aims of these establishments. Although this portrayal of exotic attributes was ascribed to white or “copper” Spanish dancers, negros were present in Romantic Age Spain. While the evidence speaks of negras performing tangos in the middle of the nineteenth century, most references to “negro” are derogatory. When black skin in Spain was noted by Romantic travel writers, it was usually mentioned in terms of oddities or some striking characteristic or event. The first dark-​skinned woman Gautier saw had “something strangely African in the general formation of her face” (Gautier 1853, 78). The gypsies he saw in Sacremonte in Granada had skin darker than Havannah cigars; they had swarthy complexions and African mouths (Gautier 1853, 192–​193). These statements imply that he considered the evidence of negro facial characteristics to run counter to his pre-​conceived notions of Spanish women and observations of elite Spanish dancers who toured Paris. That the mixing of bloods is so deeply embedded in Spanish people, however, seems apparent in his observations. Later, Gautier observed a poor negro helper in a bullfight who, while sprinkling sand over blood, was attacked by a bull and thrown twice into the air. He died and was carried out: Gautier wrote: The circumstance did not interrupt the proceedings. Nada; es un mozo; “It is nothing, he is only black;” such was the funeral oration of the poor African …. [But the monkey who was part of the show uttered piercing moans and tried to break his chain.] Did he look upon the negro as an animal of his own race, a brother monkey who had got on in the world and who was the only friend worthy of understanding him? However this may be, it is very certain that I never beheld an instance of deeper grief, than that of this monkey bewailing this negro; and the circumstance is the more remarkable, as he had seen the picadors unhorsed and their lives in danger without manifesting the least uneasiness or sympathy. (Gautier 1853, 288)

406   Kathy M. Milazzo

Figure 17.3  GustaveDoré’s sketch of A Dancing Academy, Sevilla

Gautier verbally portrays the black servant as being a brother monkey in a manner that suggests that this way of thinking was normal for the time instead of degrading. He observes the black body dispassionately and relegates it merely as a curious entity which seems to imply that black entertainers were disposable. Ford, for all he has been emulated and cited as an observant, inspirational travel writer, does not once mention seeing negros in Spain. The closest he comes is when he

Black Erased   407 noticed that people are not so “tawny” outside of Andalusia (Ford 1855, 262). Perhaps he did not look too closely. In the collection of sketches from his travels in the early 1830s, his drawings and views are from a distance—​“la distancia entre los artistas y el “aficionado” que es en realidad” [the distance between the artist and the aficionado that is in reality] (Ford 2007, 117). It is hard to see people in his sketches as they are usually situated in far-​off panoramas, ruins, and geological formations. When he does observe people, he shows more attention to the costumes, which are more highly detailed in his sketches than the faces. Attitudes such as those expressed by Gautier and the omission of negro Spaniards from Ford’s account suggest that negros were not valued in nineteenth-​century Spanish society as much as their dances. A  pretty mulatta singer might receive notice for a lovely rendition of the tangos de negros, but it seems that she herself was discounted as Spanish composers, dancers, and musicians quickly appropriated and adopted the form to produce their own interpretations. The lessened value of negros could not be reconciled with tantalizing images of Carmen and Telethusa in the views of the Romantic Orientalist. While the tango continued to rise in popularity, its associations with Cuba and black performers declined. The female Spanish dancer, in order to be alluring, could not have black skin. She could be sensual, deceitful, fiery, and amoral, but she was not black. The subsequent denial of a Cuban and ultimately African heritage in the tango can also be attributed to the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century. The fall of the Napoleon and Bourbon Regime in the beginning of the century left the bourgeoisie without a culture of their own (Steingress & Baltanás 1998, 29), which made Spain vulnerable in the reshaping of its narrative of identity. The result was that Andalusian culture was partially utilized as a symbolic representation of Spanish nationalism and the nationalistic image of the Spanish dancer came to be exemplified by the fiery gypsy of southern Spain to the detriment of negro people. As Anderson notes, such an action is endemic in the creation of nationalism: “All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives” (Anderson 2006, 204). Negro references to the tango were erased in favor of other, more marketable narratives. Allusions to negros in Spanish dance fell prey to the emerging nationalist movement throughout Spain as Madrid sought to create a collective national identity. Generalized local ethnicities such as Andalusians are present in Spain’s inherent fabric, but there is no nationalism without exploiting characteristics that form the basis of collective identity. Deliberately selected characteristics, such as are exemplified by the Romanticized gypsy, made Andalusian, and ultimately Spanish, identity different (Steingress 1998, 85). Steingress expands his analysis and avers that Spaniards converted themselves to more fully become the image constructed by Romantic writers (Steingress 1998, 67). That is, they began to imagine themselves as they had been presented in the Romantic literature. Savigliano also notes this phenomenon occurred in regard to practitioners of the tango in Argentina: “Western imperialist discourses and technologies of exoticism had already mapped the world so thoroughly that the very exotics themselves

408   Kathy M. Milazzo could hardly find ways to identify themselves or other exotics outside of that discourse and those practices” (Savigliano 1995, 175). The nineteenth-​century marketplace that existed during the flamenco’s developmental stages offered its practitioners, particularly Spanish gypsies, a lucrative image. Many performers were able to capitalize on Romantic images by embellishing the story of flamenco with the fantastical mythology that was desired by the public. Gitano came to refer to elaborate practices of certain people to better their economic situations as it also became no more than a facet of a process that amplified an ethnic invention (Steingress & Baltanás 1998, 60). So if travelers sought out a Carmen or Telethusa, then that is who these performers became.

Conclusion The new collective identity deemed crucial for Spain’s emerging national ethos became exemplified by what Spanish and foreign travelers thought had value. Ironically, in spite of the abject poverty that was often the norm for Spanish gypsies, their perceived image suited the ideals of the Romantic Movement and the aims of the rising commercial market; therefore, they became the symbol of Spanish purity, freedom, daring, and soul. Allusions to Carmen and Telethusa were more marketable than negros to romantically-​ inclined travel readers. Negros did not have the same value as imperial commodities in Romantic discourses, so they were eventually erased from historical narratives by the twentieth century. The tango, with identifiable different qualities emanating from negro dances in the Cuba, continues its prominence in the repertoire of flamenco. It engendered distinct characteristics that differentiated observations of southern Spanish dance from dances in the north of Spain. Molina and Espin note that the tango spread to a wide range of locations after its introduction in salónes and academias; moving first into the theaters and fiestas, and then into flamenco’s first commercial venues, the cafés cantantes (Molina, 1991, 177). Its binary rhythms gave rise to other flamenco palos such as the garrotín, farruca, tientos, tanguillos, and the marionas. Flamenco tangos proliferate today and are also differentiated by city—​the tangos de Cádiz have a different feeling and tempo than the tangos de Málaga. The tangos in Jerez de la Frontera, southwest of Seville, are enthusiastically embraced by local artists. But the tango de negros disappeared as the tango acquired a new provenance in the forms of the flamenco family.

Notes 1. Jaleo comprises the rhythmic clapping, encouraging shouts, and verbal markers of change, which accompany live performances. 2. José Luis Navarro García cites the first reference to “flamenco” in speaking of specific performers on the 19th of February 1853 in the daily publication, La Nación, in an article

Black Erased   409 written by Artie Sneeuw (2002, 237). On the 9th of May 1858, La Andalucía published in Seville announced a performance of “el jaleo flamenco,” (2002, 240) in which “jaleo,” in this instance, was a specific old Spanish dance, but the addition of “flamenco” as an adjective suggests something different. For the next decade, “flamenco” continued to be used in the Spanish press as an adjective describing other, recognized dances in Spain or in reference to gypsy and other performers before it came to identify the specific art form. 3. Isidoro Moreno’s 1997 La Antigua Hermandad de los Negros de Sevilla: Etnicidad, Poder y Sociedad en 600 años de Historia published in Seville in celebration of the 600 year anniversary of the oldest negro fraternity in Spain details the demographics of the negro contingency inhabiting Seville since the late fourteenth century. 4. In his essay on “Deep Song” in Federico García Lorca’s In Search of Duende (New York: New Directions Books, 1998), p. 7 Lorca states: “When they arrived in Andalusia the Gypsies combined ancient, indigenous elements with what they themselves brought, and gave what we now call deep song its definitive form. So it is to them we owe the creation of these songs, soul of our soul. We owe the Gypsies the building of these lyrical channels through which all the pain, all the ritual gestures of the race can escape.” 5. See Grut, M.  (2002) The Bolero School, Dance Books, for a discussion on the history of the bolero and biographies of the elite dancers who took their art throughout Europe. 6. The characteristics I am qualifying as Africanist aesthetics have been identified first by R.F. Thomson (1979) in African Art in Motion, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press and have been subsequently expanded upon by B. Dixon (1988) in S.H. Fraleigh (ed.), Dance and Culture Toronto, Canada; K. Agawu (2003), Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions, New York, Routledge; J. Malone (1996), Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance, Urbana, University of Illinois Press; and Y. Daniel (1995), Rumba: Dance and Social Change in Contemporary Cuba, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. 7. The seguidillas is considered to have originated in the province of La Mancha. Cotarelo y Mori (1911) mentioned it dated back to the end of the sixteenth century. Today’s sevillanas, the national dance of Spain, inherited most of its form and movements. 8. T. Mitchell (1994), Flamenco Deep Song, New Haven, Yale University Press., p. 111, cites Manuel Bernal Rodriguez’s statistics that there are more than eight hundred travel narratives written by foreign tourists. 9. In Doré’s work, academic or trained dancers are depicted wearing shoes, and untrained or popular dances are portrayed by barefoot dancers. In the copy of the previous sketch, the dancer performing the zorongo is barefoot.

References (2007) La Sevilla de Richard Ford 1830–​1833, Sevilla, Pinelo Talleres Gráficos, S.L. Agawu, K. (2003) Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions, New York, Routledge. Anderson, B. (2006) Imagined Communities, London, Verso. Bhabha, H. (2006) The Location of Culture, London, Routledge Press. Burke, P. (2007) What Is Cultural History? Cambridge: Polity Press.

410   Kathy M. Milazzo Calderón, E. (2007) Escenas andaluzas, Bizarrias de la tierra, alardes de toros, rasgos populares, cuadros de costumbres y artículos varios, Madrid, Extramuros Edición, S.L. Daniel, Y. (1995) Rumba:  Dance and Social change in Contemporary Cuba, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Desmond, J.C. (Ed.) (1997) Meaning in Motion, Durham & London, Duke University Press. Dixon, B. (1988) Introduction. In Fraleigh, S. H. (Ed.) Dance and Culture. Toronto, Canada, Cord. Doré, g. & Davillier, C. (1988) Danzas Española, Seville, Bienal de Arte Flamenco y Fundacion Machado. Ford, R. (1855) A Hand-​book for Travellers in Spain. 3rd ed. London, John Murray, Albemerle Street. Gautier, T. (1853) Wanderings in Spain. London, Ingram, Cooke, & Co. Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Grut, M. (2002) The Bolero School, Dance Books. Josephs, A. (1990) White Wall of Spain: The Mysteries of Andalusian Culture, Gainesville, FL, University Presses of Florida. Lane, J. (2005) Blackface Cuba, 1840–​1895, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. Larrea, A. (1974) El Flamenco en su Raiz, Madrid: Editora Nacional. Malone, J. (1996) Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance, Urbana, University of Illinois Press. Milazzo, K. (2012) Unlocking the “Hermetic Age”: Excavations of Negro in Spanish and Flamenco Dance, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Surrey. Mitchell, T. (1994) Flamenco Deep Song, New Haven, Yale University Press. Molina, R. & Espin, M. (1991) Flamenco de Ida y Vuelta, Sevilla, Guadalquivir, S.L. Ediciones. Navarro García, J. L. (2002) De Telethusa á La Macarrona: Bailes andaluces y flamencos, Seville, Portada Editorial Navarro García, J. L. (1998) Semillas de ébano: El elemento negro y afroamericano en el baile flamenco, Seville, Portada Editorial. Núñez, F. (2008) Guía comentada de música y baile preflamencos (1750–​1808), Barcelona, Ediciones Carena. Ortiz Nuevo, J. L. & Núñez, F. (1998) La Rabia del Placer: El origen cubano del tango y su desembarco in España (1823–​1923), Sevilla, Diputacion de Sevilla, Área de Cultura. Otero, J. (1912) Tratado de Bailes, Sevilla, De Sociedad, Regionale Española, Especialmente Andaluces, con su Historia y Modo de Ejecutes. Pablo Lozano, E. (2006) Jales y tangos: Vengo de mi Extremadura, Spain, Editorial Almuzara. Said, E. W. (1994) Orientalism, New York, Vintage Books. Savigliano, M. E. (1995) Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, Boulder, CO, Westview Press. Stanton, E. F. (1978) The Tragic Myth: Lorca and Cante Jondo, Lexington, KY, The University Press of Kentucky. Steingress, G. (1998) Sobre Flamenco and Flamencología, Sevilla, Signatura Ediciones de Andalucía, S.L. Steingress, G. (Ed.) (2002) Songs of the Minotaur–​Hybridity and Popular Music in the Era of Globalization, New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers. Steingress, G. & Baltanás, E. (eds.) (1998) Flamenco y Nacionalismo: Aportaciones para una sociología política del Flamenco, Sevilla, Signatura Ediciones de Andalucía, S.L.

Black Erased   411 Sublette, N (2004) Cuba and its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Chicago, Chicago Review Press, Incorporated. Thompson, R. F. (1979) African Art in Motion, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press. Villiers-​Wardell, M. (1909) Spain of the Spanish, London, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd. Young, J. O. (2008) Cultural Appropriation and the Arts, Chichester, West Sussex, Wiley-​Blackwell. Young, R.J.C. (1995) Colonial Desire:  Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London and New York, Routledge

Chapter 18

English-​C a na dia n Ethno cen t ri c i t y The Case Study of Boris Volkoff at the 1936 Nazi Olympics Allana C. Lindgren

“Perhaps all good Canadians are bound to have something of the Indian in them having inherited this country and so put themselves in contact with that earth memory of hers at which our mystics hint.”—​ (“ West Coast Indian Art” 1928, 525)

In July 1936, Boris Volkoff, a prominent Toronto dance teacher and choreographer, took 14 of his students to Germany to represent Canada at the Internationale Tanzwettspiele, one of the arts competitions staged in conjunction with the infamous Summer Olympiad held in Berlin under the auspices of the Nazis.1 It was the first time a Canadian dance group had been asked to represent the country officially at an international event.2 The rules required entrants to perform “Ballet Dances, Dances for the Concert Stage, Historical and National Dances” (Pape 1936, 103). For the third category, many of the dance ensembles staged traditional folk dances from their respective countries. Volkoff opted to define Canada by combining his understanding of aboriginal cultures and traditions with his classical ballet training to create Mala, a solo, and Mon-​ Ka-​Ta, a group piece. Highly theatricalized and only tangentially related to the First Nations and Inuit cultures that Volkoff claimed to have accessed, these choreographic works demonstrated the primitivist ethos that motivated many modernist artworks at the time.3 To date, most of the scholarship in English addressing the inclusion of dance at the 1936 Olympics, and dance and Nazi Germany more generally, has focused on the impact of the Games and the Third Reich on the careers of the key figures in the Ausdruckstanz movement such as Rudolph Laban and Mary Wigman, while also analyzing how these

English-Canadian Ethnocentricity   413 choreographers’ works aestheticized or contravened Nazi ideology (Berson 2007; Burt 1998; Fischer-​Lichte 2005; Franco 2007; Guilbert 2007; Kant 2004; Karina and Kant 2003; Koegler 1974; Manning 1986, 1989, [1993] 2006, 1995; Manning and Benson 1986; Moss 1988; Partsch-​Bergsohn 1994; Partsch-​Bergsohn and Bergsohn 2003; Preston-​ Dunlop 1988; Servos 1990). The participation of non-​German dance artists in the International Tanzwettspiele has received comparatively little consideration by historians. To this end, this contribution examines the case study of Volkoff, specifically seeking to understand why he created Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta to represent Canada and its heritage, and what their presentation in Nazi Germany illuminates about the intersections of ethnicity, race, and national identity operating in dance during the 1930s.4 The Nazis based their agenda of race-​based nationality on scientific racism—​the view that there was scientific evidence proving the existence of distinct and hierarchically ordered races. Even before the commencement of World War II, however, this theory was contested. For instance, although they did not oppose the claim of discrete racial categories, in their book We Europeans (1935), Julian Huxley, a biologist, and A.C. Haddon, an ethnologist, challenged the Nazis’ politicized use of science by promoting the concept of “ethnic groups” as a means of denying that Europeans could be divided into different races and, in particular, that Jewish people constituted a separate race.5 When examined in the context of this debate of biological versus ethnic national identities, the Canadians’ participation in the Internationale Tanzwettspiele reverberates in interesting ways. What did it mean for white dancers to present themselves as aboriginals in Nazi Germany? More to the point, what did it mean for white dancers dressed as Aboriginals in Nazi Germany to claim that the “Nativeness” they embodied represented Canada? To a certain extent, the argument can be made that Volkoff was opposing the Nazis’ racialized definition of nationalism and the contention that racial purity was possible. Clearly, Mon-​Ka-​Ta and Mala did not animate the Ayran nationalism the Nazis venerated. In this way, Volkoff and his dancers can be viewed as trying to define Canadian identity in terms that blurred and minimized racial differences. Yet, this answer becomes problematic when the ersatz nature of Volkoff ’s representation of indigenous peoples is considered. As the Canadians who participated in the Internationale Tanzwettspiele demonstrated, self-​definition can quickly slip into primitivist appropriation when a dominant group decides to characterize itself as a traditionally marginalized people, even when the intention is ostensibly to honor, not steal. This essay argues that, in his attempt to define and embody a Canadian identity that recognized cultural plurality, Volkoff paradoxically perpetuated the dominance of English-​Canadian ethnocentricity in three main ways: by following the trend of salvage ethnography, which was based on the view that the remnants of “dying” indigenous cultures needed to be saved by white people; by subscribing to the ethos of aesthetic primitivism, which presumed the availability of indigenous cultures as sources for nonaboriginal art; and by attempting to pay homage to aboriginal culture, but in terms that co-​opted indigeneity for nationalist purposes and negated the persistent presence of racism in Canadian history.

414   Allana c. Lindgren

English-​C anadian Ethnicity Before addressing the significance of Volkoff ’s performance of aboriginal cultures in Germany, it is necessary to consider the identity politics the choreographer had to negotiate in Canada. Although many English Canadians might resist thinking of themselves as an ethnic group, Anthony Shay (2006) reminds us that “everyone has an ethnicity” (3). Furthermore, and borrowing again from Shay, ethnicity is not “a primordial identity,” but instead “elastic and constantly undergoing change” (224). Certainly, English-​Canadian ethnicity eludes a singular definition as the phrase English Canadian has had—​and continues to have—​nuanced and shifting meanings (Howard-​Hassmann 1999). It has referred to English immigrants or Canadians of English heritage. It also has been used to define the majority of Canadians linguistically. That is, the term English Canadian has been applied to all English-​speaking Canadians, not just those from England, and has been commonly and tacitly been understood to mean “not French Canadian.” Similarly, English Canada can be used to characterize all the provinces and territories except for Québec. The significant ethnic diversity that existed in Canada during the 1930s was, at least linguistically, homogenized largely because English was the primary language used to conduct federal government business. It was also used in the public educational systems across English Canada and in the common law legal system outside of Québec, and so on. In order to understand Volkoff ’s choreographic motivations and choices, it is also helpful to acknowledge how English-​Canadian ethnicity has filtered through nationalism and colonialism to affect aesthetic attitudes in Canada. There was a strong and vocal English-​Canadian cultural nationalism in the arts prior to World War II, as evidenced in the verse of the Confederation Poets, the paintings of the Group of Seven, the nationalist leanings of periodicals like Canadian Forum, and the novels of Hugh MacLennan, among many other examples (Edwardson 2008; Tippett 1990; Vance 2009). Moreover, cultural nationalism could be detected in debates over the growing influence of U.S. culture within Canada. The 1929 Report resulting from the Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting, for instance, urged the federal government to regulate and ensure that Canadian radio programming contained Canadian content and ownership in response to the increasing U.S. broadcasting presence within English Canada. Despite the fact that there was a significant body of English-​Canadian artists who were motivated by nationalism and were grappling with the question of a Canadian national identity, the arts, especially the “high” arts in English Canada, including ballet, had an ethnicity, or more accurately, were dominated by an ethnic bias toward British ideals and definitions of excellence that would linger into the 1960s (Tippett 1990; Buckner 2005). This bias was reflected in a range of examples, from the choice of British adjudicators for Canadian music festivals and the Dominion Drama Festivals (though French adjudicators were also employed for the latter) to the keen interest in British cultural policy and funding models as indicated in the Report issued by the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences in 1951. In short, within the context of the

English-Canadian Ethnocentricity   415 arts, the phrase English Canadian not only denoted English-​speaking Canadians, but also identified a colonial orientation toward the cultural influence of the British Empire. Toronto—​the city where Volkoff lived—​was the bastion of English-​Canadian culture. Clifford Collier (2000), one of Volkoff ’s former students, suggests that Volkoff “attracted the attention of the social and artistic elite. Toronto had never before had such a choreographer in its midst” (608). Indeed, when Volkoff received the Order of Canada in 1973, the then Governor-​General Roland Michener christened him “the father of Canadian ballet” (“Volkoff Documents Destroyed by Fire,” 1973). Yet, if Volkoff wanted to realize his passionately pursued dream to start a professional ballet company in Toronto, it was clear that he needed to maintain the support of the dominant ethnic group with its hegemonic hold on Canadian culture. With these various factors in mind, it is apparent that the diversity showcased in Volkoff ’s choreography had to be conveyed in terms familiar and acceptable to English-​ Canadian sensibilities. These sensibilities disclosed a colonial attitude toward indigenous peoples that, while not exclusive to English Canada, was a defining feature in the dominant ethnicity’s relations with aboriginals and in its exercise of power. In their research related to indigenous cultural heritage sites in Canada, Siegrid Deutschlander and Leslie J. Miller (2003) suggest that the statements of aboriginal interpreters at these venues “promote one version of Aboriginal history [ … ] This perspective shifts attention away from questions about the empirical accuracy of any account (Is this the ‘real’ story of the community’s past? Are these ‘real’ Indians?) to the ways such accounts organize and enact the world in specific situations” (29). By extending Deutschlander and Miller’s observation to Volkoff, it is possible to assert that though audiences would not have learned anything about actual indigenous communities or their dance traditions by watching Mala or Mon-​Ka-​Ta, through his fanciful representation, Volkoff disclosed English-​Canadian attitudes and values toward aboriginals that were present during the 1930s. In other words, by shifting attention away from the issue of authenticity, it is possible to attend to some of the cultural assumptions underpinning English-​Canadian ethnocentricity at the time. Although Volkoff ’s motivation might have been a sincere desire to honor aboriginal people and the demographic diversity of Canada, the effect of his choreography and his group’s choice of pieces to perform at the Internationale Tanzwettspiele was a validation of English-​Canadian ethnocentricity in which the policies and practices of the dominant ethnic group dictated the terms through which cultural plurality in Canada during the 1930s was conceptualized. The result was a recasting of English-​Canadian dominance as paternalistically benign, and the facilitation of the discriminatory status quo.6

Dance and the 1936 Olympics Discrimination was obviously also an issue in Germany, where all types of dances were subjected to the agenda of the Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and

416   Allana c. Lindgren Propaganda to Aryanize German culture through the expulsion of Jewish participants (Karina and Kant 2003). According to Marion Kant, during the 1930s, “[c]‌alls for a ‘national’ and a ‘racial’ renewal of dance were beginning to be heard. The explicitly German aspect of Ausdruckstanz became one of the central aesthetic objectives of the creative dancer and was accompanied by a rejection of ‘other,’ alien influences” (Karina and Kant 2003, 76–​77). In 1935, for instance, Rudolf Laban, the most powerful man in dance in Germany at the time and the man responsible for organizing the Internationale Tanzwettspiele, was directed by the Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda to define German dance (Kant 2004, 112, 116-​117). In response, Laban created a short list of criteria to evaluate dance for its Germany authenticity. He counseled that dances that had been traditionally performed in the various regions of the country could be considered authentically German despite elements and steps borrowed from other cultures. His reasoning was that “they have penetrated so deeply into the flesh and blood of the German people that they can confidently be termed German dances” (Kant 2004, 116). He also suggested that certain types and forms of kinetic expression were inherently racialized; specific movements, dance styles and rhythms were not only associated with specific cultures, but in fact intrinsic markers of race. His third test for German purity in dance was based on social functionality. Social dances that had influenced folk dance were to be validated. Arguably, the 1936 Olympics was the culmination of the Nazification of dance in Germany and an opportunity to confirm Laban’s theories while demonstrating the presumed superiority of German dance and dancers. The 1936 Olympics were also noteworthy from a dance perspective because it was the first time that the art form was featured in the competition (MacEwan 1936). Beginning in 1912 and continuing until 1948, the modern Olympic games had included arts competitions. The German organizers wanted to expand the arts component, which included architecture, literature, music, painting and graphic arts, commercial graphic art and sculpture, by adding competitions in gold-​and silversmithing, “works of the screen” (sports films) and dance to the list of competitions. However, the International Olympic Committee rejected the proposed expansion (Gricius 2007, 11; Hanley 2006, 38–​42; Large 2007, 203–​204; Stanton 2000, 157, 160–​161). It is unclear why the Germans decided to proceed with their plans to host an international dance competition, except that dance, like every other aspect of the 1936 Olympics, could be used to affirm Aryan supremacy. Dance productions such as Olympic Youth, a mass spectacle performed in the Olympic stadium on the opening night of the games, were celebrations of the youthful and disciplined ideals of Aryan bodies. If the Nazis used dance to reify their political ideology, it appears that Volkoff similarly, though less odiously, saw the games as an opportunity to further his own agenda: to start the first professional ballet company in Canada. In 1934, Volkoff had choreographed two works for the Promenade Concerts at the Varsity Stadium in Toronto. The success of these works apparently prompted P. J. Mulqueen, the president of the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC), to invite Volkoff and his dancers to represent Canada at the Internationale Tanzwettspiele.7 It was possible that Volkoff accepted in

English-Canadian Ethnocentricity   417 hopes that performing at an international event would raise the profile of his amateur group; Germany was his stage, but Canadians most likely were his intended audience. Volkoff, who was born Boris Baskakoff in Tula, Russia, had a passionate commitment to developing dance in his adopted home of Canada.8 In Toronto, he initially worked as the ballet master at the Uptown Theatre and choreographed dances for the intermissions between film screenings. He established his own studio, which quickly gained a reputation as one of the best in the city. During his long career in Canada, Volkoff created over 350 original choreographic works, including ice ballets for the Toronto Skating Club. His success as a teacher was equally impressive. His roster of students included Mildred Herman, who became known as the New York City Ballet principal dancer Melissa Hayden, and Patricia Drylie, who performed with the Radio City Music Hall and appeared in the movie Singin’ in the Rain and the Broadway musical On Your Toes. Volkoff ’s student Don Gillies joined the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet and appeared in the movie Invitation to the Dance and was a member of the original London cast of the musical Carousel. Several others of Volkoff ’s students became charter members of the National Ballet of Canada. After Volkoff accepted the COC’s invitation, stories about his preparations for the Internationale Tanzwettspiele began to appear in the local and national newspapers as well as in periodicals such as Saturday Night Magazine. The participation of Canadian athletes in the 1936 Olympics was fraught with controversy; the Canadian sports and editorial pages hotly debated the issue of whether the country should send a team (Kidd 1978). Conversely, Volkoff and his dancers received attention from the Canadian press without any mention of controversy (Bridle 1936; “Jay” 1936; “Volkoff Dancers at Olympics” 1936; Wood 1936). Furthermore, in order to raise funds to cover the expenses of their trip, Volkoff and his dancers held benefit concerts at Hart House Theatre and the Eaton Auditorium in Toronto. These performances were well attended, thereby suggesting that the audience members who donated money were not opposed to the dancers performing in Nazi Germany. In interviews preceding and following the dance competition, Volkoff himself made no mention of the Nazis. Volkoff and the Canadian arts media’s silence did not mean that the rest of the dance world did not object to the Internationale Tanzwettspiele. Countries such as England, France, the United States, Sweden, and Russia had been invited, but declined to attend. The U.S. modern dancer and choreographer, Martha Graham, for instance, dismissed the invitation publicly, citing her solidarity with artists who had been persecuted by the Nazis and her desire to protect those dancers in her company who “would not be welcomed in Germany” (“German Invitation Refused by Dancer” 1936, 10). In the end, the countries who sent artists to the 1936 dance competition besides Canada were Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, India, Italy, Yugoslavia, Holland, Austria, Poland, Romania, and Switzerland. As a result, Germany, which was represented by 13 groups, including Wigman and her dancers, dominated the gathering (“Volkoff Dancers Score in Germany,” Clipping, Mary Bosley Scrapbook, Dance Collection Danse). Despite the reduced number of international participants, the competition proceeded, and Volkoff ’s group presented six choreographic works at the Volksbühne,

418   Allana c. Lindgren Theater am Horst Wessel-​Platz. Ecstasy, a group piece, and two solos, Petite Polka and Entrance, were all balletic in style. Volkoff performed in another solo, Peasant, which was a character dance he had choreographed for himself. Of direct interest here were the two aboriginal-​inspired dances, Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta. The male titular character of Mala was performed by Pauline Sullivan. The narrative was based on an Inuit legend about a shaman who tries to help his people during a time of famine by pleading with a Sea Queen to provide food for the starving hunters. To reach the bottom of the ocean, Mala encounters a series of obstacles, including “Bouncing Rocks” and a pack of sea hounds. Once in the presence of the Sea Queen, Mala must convince her to let him comb her hair. He is successful and, as a result, the Sea Queen returns the seals that are food to Mala’s people.9 Mon-​Ka-​Ta was based on a First Nations narrative that closely paralleled the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. A young brave mourns the death of his wife. Wanting to see her again, he seeks the advice of four wise women. The women caution him not to look back or to touch his wife. When he arrives in the underworld, he finds his wife and they dance. In his passion, the brave forgets the warning of the women and touches his wife. She is immediately transformed into a log.10 Volkoff and his dancers were generally well-​received in Germany, though Erwin Kroll, the reviewer for the German Der Tanz voiced some ambivalence. He praised the Canadians for being most captivating when performing their “foreign folklore,” but chastised them for entering the realm of expressive dance.11 Artur Michel (1936), a dance writer and scholar who attended the Internationale Tanzwettspiele, also had reservations about the aesthetic success of Volkoff ’s modernist hybridity:  There was also an American [sic] group, that of Boris Volkoff of Toronto (Canada), who believes that he can develop a new style by combining existing ones: classical ballet, Russian dance, and modern gestures are shown, at the one moment reminiscent of Duncan, at another of the last ballets of Diaghileff. I am sorry to say that such a combination of practices could not excite a deep and convincing impression. (552)

Although content and form might have been the focus of some reviewers’ comments in 1936, what is of interest and examined in the rest of this contribution is how Volkoff unwittingly provides access to English-​Canadian ethnocentric views about indigenous peoples and the resulting ideological implications of his choreography.

Following the Trend of Salvage Ethnography to “Save” Indigenous Cultures In his attempt to portray Canada as culturally diverse, Volkoff appears to have subscribed to the beliefs underpinning salvage ethnography. As Andrew Nurse (2001) has

English-Canadian Ethnocentricity   419 noted, during the early part of the 20th century, First Peoples were viewed as culturally endangered: Widely practiced as a central component of early-​twentieth-​century Canadian anthropology, salvage ethnography began from the assumption that traditional aboriginal cultures were rapidly collapsing before the onrush of the modern age. It posited that authentic aboriginal cultures had once existed in a sort of timeless and holistic prehistoric state that had been corrupted by progressive interaction with white culture and society. (443-​444).12

The project of salvage ethnography dominated the motivation and methodology of anthropological engagement with indigenous peoples in Canada during the first half of the twentieth century (Buchanan 2006; Harrison and Darnell 2006; Nurse 2006). Yet, this perceived need for the intervention of white people to save remnants of indigenous traditional practices and artifacts existed without any acknowledgement of the irony that contact with white people had precipitated the social deterioration of aboriginal cultures (Clifford 1987; Marcus and Fischer 1986). Moreover, the belief in the need to intervene ignored the fact that indigenous groups were advocating on their own behalf in groups such as the League of Indians of Canada, which had been created in the 1920s. Artists sometimes participated in salvage ethnographic work. On occasion, Marius Barbeau, one of Canada’s leading ethnographers and folklorists, invited artists to accompany him on fieldtrips to record, evaluate and to help promote indigenous cultures. The 1928 film Saving the Sagas, produced by Associated Screen News Limited in Montréal, for instance, focused on how Barbeau, and Ernest MacMillan, then the principal of the Toronto Conservatory of Music, wanted to save evidence of “the vanishing culture, the rites and songs and dances of the Indians along the Canadian Pacific Coast, north of Vancouver” (as quoted in Jessup 1999, 51). As Barbeau (1984) later wrote about the artists he had invited to participate in this salvage ethnography project:  [I]‌n the ’20s, I took well known people like Sir Ernest MacMillan, A.Y. Jackson and Edwin Holgate with me to make records of the totem poles as they looked, of the Indians as they looked in their potlatches with their costumes. Getting their opinion as to the quality of this art, that is what I wanted to do. (5)

In addition to MacMillan, Jackson, and Holgate, other artists, including the West Coast’s Emily Carr, expressed an affinity for “saving” the cultural artifacts of Canada’s indigenous population. Carr, in particular, saw her art as contributing to salvage ethnographic work. Her paintings, however, which often featured composition of totem poles on the northwest coast of British Columbia, were devoid of humans, which not only unintentionally symbolized the removal of aboriginals from their land, but also expunged the connection between creator and cultural artifact (Moray 2010, 63). Nevertheless, in a public lecture she gave in 1913, Carr (2003) spoke about her work in terms evoking salvage ethnographic efforts by suggesting that she wanted “to depict these wonderful relics of a passing people in their own original setting” (177).

420   Allana c. Lindgren Volkoff clearly wanted audiences in Canada to associate Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta with this salvage ethnography trend. In preparation for the choreography of these aboriginal-​ themed dances, he and one of his students, Janet Baldwin (whom he married shortly before the dancers left for Germany) consulted Barbeau about possibilities for narratives and music (Baldwin n.d., “Memories of Janet Baldwin of Olympics,” unpublished typescript, Dance Collection Danse; Ayre Feb./​Mar. 1996, 36). It was later reported that Barbeau, who was interested in indigenous versions of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and by 1936, had allegedly collected over 150 versions, suggested that Volkoff use this specific narrative for the choreographic work that became Mon-​Ka-​Ta (Maclean 1986, unpublished typescript, Dance Collection Danse). Volkoff similarly contacted Thomas Forsyth McIlwraith, the first lecturer in anthropology at the University in Toronto and curator of ethnology at the Royal Ontario Museum, to inquire about aboriginal legends and art (“Jay” 1936). In his conversations with the press prior to leaving for Berlin, Volkoff frequently mentioned that Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta were based on scholarly research (“Boris Volkoff Group Will Go to Germany,” Clipping, Boris Volkoff Collection, Toronto Reference Library; “Jay” 1936; “Volkoff Dancers at Olympics” 1936). Similarly, one of Volkoff ’s students, James Pape (1936), mentioned this research in his report about the dancers’ participation in the Internationale Tanzwettspiele, which was included in the Canadian Olympic Committee’s official publication detailing the Canadian experience at the Berlin Olympics:  A considerable amount of research was done by Mr. Volkoff in preparing the dances, as he felt that an effort should be made to have a Canadian theme for some of the numbers presented by his group … Professor McIlwraith of the Royal Ontario Museum and Dr. Marius Barbeau of Ottawa assisted Boris Volkoff in his work by furnishing documents and records of Indian legends and melodies. (103-​104)

It is possible that, in the same way Carr viewed her work, Volkoff felt that Mala and Mon-​ Ka-​Ta contributed to the artistic rendering of a “passing people.” Contacting the leaders in Canadian salvage ethnography also gave Volkoff ’s choreography the stamp of authenticity. This concern for authenticity—​and, notably, for potential audience members to be aware of the choreographer’s research efforts—​can be read as publicly signaling Volkoff ’s desire to represent (and possibly to preserve) indigenous cultures as accurately as possible. Yet, as the resulting choreographic works were obviously not about mimetic representation, Volkoff ’s insistence that potential audience members know about his research efforts also can be viewed as a publicity maneuver to bestow authority on the resulting dances and to lure audiences who were curious and more attracted to the exoticism of aboriginal dance than to classical ballet. That Volkoff chose to emphasize that his choreography had been based on salvage ethnographic research by the leading experts in Canada not only serves as a reminder that during the 1930s white Canadians positioned themselves as the savers/​saviours of the “dying” indigenous peoples, but exposes an opportunism on the part of Volkoff

English-Canadian Ethnocentricity   421 who was willing to capitalize on his limited association with the expertise of ethnographers who provided a direct link to actual indigenous people that his choreography otherwise did not have. Furthermore, regardless of whether Volkoff deliberately wanted to participate in an artistic form of salvage ethnography, his choreography implicitly helped to naturalize and validate the practice of using ethnographic research for aesthetic purposes without fully understanding the original context of the source materials.

Aesthetic Primitivism and the Presumed Availability of Indigenous Cultures In many ways, Mon-​Ka-​Ta and Mala were textbook cases of the modernist primitivist aesthetic, which simultaneously revered and diminished aboriginal societies, often commending aboriginals for being uncorrupted by modernity while castigating them for their “uncivilized” nature. In the 1927 Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, for example, northwest coast indigenous artifacts were placed on display next to the modernist art of painters, including members of the English-​Canadian nationalist Group of Seven landscape painters. In the exhibition catalogue, Eric Brown of the National Gallery praised the indigenous objects as being among “Canada’s greatest cultural treasures” and as being “entirely national in origin and character.” Yet, the aboriginal art was positioned next to what the catalogue described as “our more sophisticated artists in an endeavor to analyze their relationship to one another” (Brown as quoted. in Moray 2010, 63, 65). Like the 1927 exhibition of aboriginal and modern art, Volkoff ’s choreography raises the issue of multiple and contradictory representations embedded in the many interpretations of the “Other.” Volkoff ’s depictions honored indigenous peoples to the extent that the choreographer felt they were worthy to symbolize the country and its history, yet he essentialized and homogenized indigenous cultures by validating aboriginal stereotypes already established by and circulating through other artistic representations. Adherents to aesthetic primitivism frequently used First Peoples’ iconography and traditional narratives without permission or apparent concern whether the originators would approve—​an artistic approach based on the presumption that indigenous cultures were archetypical, ahistorical, and, therefore, universal and open to cultural adaptation or hybridity (Flam 2003). More specifically, in the 1930s, and particularly into the 1940s, artists across North America from a variety of artistic disciplines were inspired by indigenous cultures as a way to differentiate themselves from artists in Europe. Similarly, Volkoff ’s claiming of aboriginal cultures ostensibly helped to distinguish his group from the others at the Internationale Tanzwettspiele.

422   Allana c. Lindgren Volkoff drew from the convention of conflating indigeneity with Canada and its history based on the pliancy of “Nativeness” in the white imagination by taking artistic license with his dances. He used nonindigenous sources for the onstage imagery for both Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta. The music for Mala, based on First Nation chants recorded by Marius Barbeau, was composed by Sir Ernest MacMillan (Ayre Feb./​Mar. 1996, 37; “Jay” 1936; “Program,” Internationale Tanzwettspiele 1936). It appears that Volkoff did not directly collaborate with or consult any aboriginal people. Instead, he accessed his contacts in Toronto’s artistic community to assemble his production team (Ayre Feb./​Mar. 1996, 36–​37). The costumes for Mon-​Ka-​Ta, which were designed by Ronald McCrae, were more theatrical than authentic. Some of the dancers wore headbands with a single feather in the back. Others wore war bonnets inspired by those worn by the Plains First Nations tribes. The dresses of the females were loose gowns, and their male counterparts—​mostly performed by female dancers—​wore painted quill breast plates. Stylized masks for the four wise women in Mon-​Ka-​Ta were constructed by art students at the Central Technical School under the supervision of the modernist artist Elizabeth Wyn Wood (Pape 104). The students also created a large totem pole inspired by images of Kwakiutl totem poles (Baldwin, n.d., “Memories of Janet Baldwin of Olympics,” unpublished typescript, Dance Collection Danse). It allegedly was 14 feet high and the span of the wings was 9 feet across. The set piece was not taken to Germany because it was too expensive to ship. The music for the piece was a compilation of excerpts from Bela Bartok, Erik Satie, and aboriginal chants recorded by Barbeau, orchestrated by Leo Lerman and arranged by Volkoff ’s pianist, Margaret Clemens (Ayre Feb./​Mar. 1996, 36–​37; “Jay” 1936; “Program,” InternationaleTanzwetts piele 1936). Although the choreography for Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta is lost, extant photographs and commentary by the performers suggest that, for both dances, Volkoff combined ballet and modern dance idioms with aboriginal “sign language” he supposedly learned from Barbeau and theatricalized to respond to the perceived needs of this choreographic works (Pape, “Sept. 5, 1990,” manuscript notes, Dance Collection Danse). A  photograph of Pauline Sullivan in her Mala costume and mask with flowing hair suggests that Volkoff based his visual interpretation of the character of Mala on an illustration the artist Rockwell Kent included in his 1935 book Salamina, in which he recounted his second trip to Greenland (illustration between pages 132 and 133). In the photograph—​a visual echo of Kent’s illustration—​Sullivan leans to her right while looking left. Her hands, touching at the wrists, are to the right of her head. Her left hand is perpendicular to the viewer with the fingers pointing upward while her right hand points toward the ground aligned along the same vertical axis to create a straight line. The obvious care that has been taken to position the hands so precisely in these photographs invites the viewer to see the resulting gestural images as ambiguously symbolic. That is, Sullivan’s hand gestures seem to be deliberately communicating predetermined meaning, yet they are ultimately “foreign” and “exotic” because they are unreadable to the uninitiated. If this photograph is indicative of a pose incorporated into the choreography and was not created solely for the camera, then it is possible to

English-Canadian Ethnocentricity   423

Figure  18.1 Pauline Sullivan in Boris Volkoff ’s Mala, 1936. Photo from the Flea Market Collection, Dance Collection Danse.

speculate that hand gestures were central to Mala. Similarly, in another photograph, Sullivan balances on her right leg while her left is bent and lifted to her waist.13 She looks to the right while holding her hands above her head as if holding an invisible bowl. Her cupped fingers create a curved symmetry. More importantly, this “quotational” or dialogic positioning of Mala in relation to Salamina suggests that Volkoff was creatively oriented more to his modernist colleagues than to his supposed indigenous sources. The existing photographs for Mon-​Ka-​Ta reveal Volkoff ’s training and immersion in classical ballet and his sense of theatrical staging. Not only do the dancers in these images wear ballet slippers, a couple of the performers sometimes hold their arms in balletic fifth positions over their heads. The images reveal how attention to alignment has been used to direct the observer’s eye.

424   Allana c. Lindgren

Figure 18.2  Dancers of the Boris Volkoff Ballet in Volkoff ’s Mon-​ka-​ta, 1936. Photo from the Boris Volkoff Portfolio, Dance Collection Danse.

In one photograph, for instance, Mon-​Ka-​Ta kneels in profile to the camera while his wife, facing the viewer, leans into his arms. The lines created by their bodies converge at their heads, which rest close together. Thus the viewer is directed by the dancers’ physicality to focus on facial expressions. The visual effect appears to be more about creating an aesthetically pleasing pose than presenting historic and cultural information. Indeed, Volkoff uses blocking in a similar way in two other photographs. In one, the character of Mon-​Ka-​Ta is crouched on the floor, looking to the ground with a despondent expression. His wife stands above him, extending one of her arms toward him. The corps de ballet, also dressed as aboriginal characters, and another dancer who is masked and perhaps is one of the four wise women, sit on the floor upstage facing the same direction as Mon-​Ka-​Ta’s wife. In so doing, they not only provide a backdrop for the principal dancers, but their low positioning on the floor ensures that Mon-​Ka-​Ta’s wife is the focal point. A third photograph appears to be taken after Mon-​Ka-​Ta’s wife has died. The brave kneels over his beloved’s body downstage. The couple is accompanied by two other dancers who might be wise women characters. Upstage, the corps de ballet dancers, strike individual poses of lamentation. The downstage group is lit much better than the upstage corps and, as a result, again become the center of attention. The emphasis throughout these photographs is clearly on theatricality and staging suitable for the pictorial frame of a proscenium arch. Cultural accuracy does not appear to be of primary concern.

English-Canadian Ethnocentricity   425

Figure 18.3  Dancers of the Boris Volkoff Ballet in Volkoff ’s Mon-​ka-​ta, 1936. Photo from the Bunny Lang Electronic Archives, Dance Collection Danse.

In a sense, the depiction of indigenous peoples in Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta by Volkoff ’s students (who wore Elizabeth Arden suntan make-​up to “darken” their skin) was an extension of the spirit of the Canadian government’s assimilationist policies and the aspirations of Duncan Campbell Scott, then the deputy superintendent general of Indian Affairs. Scott had stated in the early 1920s that the purpose of his department was “to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that had not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department …” (quoted in Titley 50). Volkoff metaphorically achieved what the federal government’s policies could not: the tamed “Indian” who performed on cue.14 Interestingly, Canadian reviewers noted but did not object to the ersatz nature of Volkoff ’s depictions of aboriginal peoples. Instead, their comments supported the primitivist hierarchy inherent in the choreography. Christopher Wood, writing for the Toronto weekly publication Saturday Night, for instance, implied that the modernist music for Mon-​Ka-​Ta was more advanced than its indigenous source:  It is rather a sophisticated idea of an Indian dance … and a purist might object to the music which apart from a slight tomtom effect is very far removed from the simplicity of barbarism. It is to be hoped that the judges at the Olympic Games are not overly well acquainted with Indian life, but will be content to judge the work on its own merits, as a work of art but slightly associated with an Indian legend.

426   Allana c. Lindgren Similarly, the lack of veracity in Volkoff ’s choreography did not appear to trouble Augustus Bridle, one of the leading English-​language arts critics in Canada at the time. Bridle acknowledged the essentialist underpinnings of Mon-​Ka-​Ta, but nevertheless applauded the theatricality of the work:  This Indian scenario, a malange [sic] of music by Erick [sic] Satie and other modernistic composers. It is intended to symbolize Canada. It will represent only what a clever Russian dance maestro was able to dig from the archives about one of the many Indian tribes in Canada, none of them much like the scene of the legend. The Olympic judges will not know whether these aboriginals are Micmacs from Nova Scotia or Swampies from Athabasca, but they will be excited by the dazzling costumes designed by Ronald McRae, the spooky masks and fantastic totem pole artificed [sic] by Mrs. E. Hahn, and the intricate rhythmic movements and gestures contrived by Choreographer Volkoff. This dance-​drama is a highly stylized ensemble of Indian origin, somewhat Indian atmosphere and decidedly aboriginal picturization [sic] worked out in the mood of Gluck’s ‘Orpheus and Eurydice.’

As Bridle’s reception of Mon-​Ka-​Ta revealed, the problems and inequity of cultural appropriation was not part of the English-​Canadian mindset at the time. Likewise, Volkoff ’s choreography underscored the fact that the practice of conflating 20th-​ century aboriginal cultures with prehistorical people functioned to divest indigenous peoples in Canada and elsewhere of control over how their cultural property was used.

Homage as an Act of Cultural Control One of the main reasons for Volkoff to turn to aboriginal cultures to represent Canada and its history at the Internationale Tanzwettspiele was the lack of a national dance tradition—​a dance tradition identifiable as obviously and uniquely “Canadian.”15 When discussing how Volkoff might define Canada through dance, one newspaper commentator lamented that Canada did not have an easily accessible national folk dance comparable to that of other countries, and deemed the distinctive regional dance styles that did exist inappropriate:  Canada may be at a disadvantage compared with many European nations whose dances and costumes are picturesque and characteristic. The Highland fling may be claimed by Scotland, the Irish jig may be the subject of dispute between north and south, and so on. Little remains to be called our own. The potlatch of British Columbia has been suppressed by a benevolent government, and the Red River jig has gone of style. (“International Dancing at the Olympics” 1936, Clipping, Boris Volkoff Collection, Toronto Reference Library)

English-Canadian Ethnocentricity   427 In other words, Canada’s colonial history, relative youth as a country, and pluralistic demographics all worked to defy the easy identification of a singular Canadian dance tradition. Conversely, there were numerous artworks in Canada that utilized aboriginal images to represent the country and its history. More specifically, the metonymic use of Native to mean “Early Canada” would have been a trope familiar to the choreographer and his contemporaries. In 1932, for example, the Dominion Memorial Sculpture was installed in the Hall of Honour in the Parliament Buildings of Canada in Ottawa. The image conveyed by the sculpture and confirmed by the Parliament Buildings Guide Manual was that Canadian history was best materialized in the form of a First Nations person: “A youthful figure, Canada wears a headdress of a Caribou mask with antlers, a short chiton and moccasins” (as quoted in Mackey 2002, 37). In addition to being influenced by aesthetic precedents, Volkoff might have felt that he was engaged in an act of homage. The choreographer believed Canadian ballets should be based on the narratives and themes excavated from the country’s collective history, which included the history of Canada’s indigenous peoples (Whittaker 1972, 27). As one Canadian reviewer commented before Volkoff and his dancers left for Germany, “Mr. Volkoff claims that the Indian legends of Canada are highly suitable for ballet material ….” (“Jay” 1936). Similarly, another newspaper writer noted that Volkoff felt “that the choice of an Indian subject is an obvious one for Canada, and will be of great interest to countries not familiar with North American Indian lore” (“Volkoff Dancers at Olympics” 1936).16 According to arts journalist John Fraser, Volkoff “was convinced up to his death that we ignored the heritage of dance from the Canadian Indians to our detriment” (23). Moreover, after his death in 1974, Volkoff ’s ashes were taken to Lake Temagami in northern Ontario, a place the choreographer had loved because of its beauty and because it was where he had learned “Indian lore” (“Boris Volkoff: Fiery Russian Father of Canadian Ballet” 1974, 15). It is essential to remember that Volkoff created Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta for the “Historical and National Dances” section of the competition. As social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2002) has suggested, ethnicity is largely culturally constructed. A key factor in the process of ethnogenesis is the sense of a shared ancestry, though there is always a concern that “history and cultural symbols are manipulated in the creation of ethnic identities and organizations … “ (69). In this light, Volkoff simultaneously recognized and honored aboriginals as the First Peoples at the very same time as divesting aboriginals’ ownership of their mythology by characterizing the narratives Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta as “Canadian.” This transformation of indigenous cultures into Canadian tradition, was facilitated by elements in Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta that were recognizable to white audiences. The epic quest, which served as the structure for Mala, and the echoes of the Orpheus narrative in Mon-​Ka-​Ta, no doubt evoked their classical counterparts in Western literary traditions for many members of the audiences in both Canada and Germany. As a result, the functions of these works shifted from the pedagogical demonstration of admirable

428   Allana c. Lindgren qualities (Mala’s sacrifice) and the cautionary tale of young man who does not listen to elders (Mon-​Ta-​Ka) to an emphasis of similarities between indigenous and Western mythology. In other words, Volkoff ’s choice of material minimized the distinctiveness of aboriginal cultures and instead validated their renaming as “Canadian.” In thinking about Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta not just as being based on historical narratives, but as historiography, it is helpful to turn to the statement by historian Olive Patricia Dickason that “Aboriginal peoples [ … ] traced their histories in myths that tell of their development as human beings through their relationship with the spiritual powers and with their land … “ (118). That is, mythology was and is a form of historiography for many indigenous communities. Whether Volkoff understood the importance of mythology as historical record in the cultural memory of indigenous peoples or, more importantly, whether Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta would have been received this way, is highly doubtful. Instead, the works reinforced the view that the “historical” components in Volkoff ’s choreography were not only the myths they were based on, but the inclusion of aboriginal characters who represented a past way of life. Aboriginal meant aboriginal in traditional dress and traditional ways of life. In short, Mala and Mon-​Ka-​ Ta honored aboriginals, but firmly emphasized that their cultural position was as part of Canada’s past. Paul Connerton (1989) has argued that, “[c]‌oncerning social memory, we may note that images of the past commonly legitimate a present social order” (3). To this end, Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta were particularly malleable in reassuring English Canadians that, in their status as the dominant and most politically powerful ethnic group in Canada, they had treated aboriginals magnanimously.17 By paying homage to indigenous peoples in fanciful choreography without the inclusion of or reference to any political context, Volkoff negated the contentiousness of racist attitudes that more accurately defined the history of race-​relations in Canada’s history. That Volkoff used aboriginal-​ inspired imagery and narratives to represent Canada and that the imagery and narratives were not contested by the Canadian Olympic Committee or the arts media suggests that diversity was a familiar concept to Canadians, though it must be stressed that it was a diversity tightly controlled by English Canadians. In other words, Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta offered a view of diversity, sanctioned and stage-​managed by the politically dominant ethnic group. In this way, the Canadians’ participation in the 1936 Olympics dance competition echoed an earlier celebration of diversity that had been staged in Canada. Between 1927 and 1931, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) held music and folk arts festivals across the country, which consisted of music, handicrafts and live performances, including First Nation dancing. The CPR’s cultural programs were initiated by J. Murray Gibbon, the company’s publicity manager, who would later coin the phrase “Canadian Mosaic” in his 1938 book Canadian Mosaic: The Making of a Northern Nation to denote his vision of diverse cultures unified within the borders of Canada. Yet, Gibbon’s championing of diversity and national unity in both the Festival and his writing was always expressed within the context of Canada as a part of the British Empire; British culture was always given a privileged place in the festivals (Lazarevich 1996, 12). Although actual aboriginal

English-Canadian Ethnocentricity   429 people performed at the CPR festivals and Volkoff ’s Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta were performed by white students, Volkoff ’s choreography nonetheless similarly demonstrated how “difference” was embodied and performed within the terms set and controlled by an English-​Canadian perspective that helped white audiences to feel that they were racially and ethnically progressive. Ironically, Volkoff was depicting aboriginals internationally as the first Canadians at a time when the ability of indigenous peoples in Canada to perform their own dances was legally constricted.18 Several amendments to the Indian Act between 1884 and 1951 limited aboriginal participation in traditional ceremonies, festivals, and dances. The inclusion of indigenous people in parades and festivals was particularly popular in the provinces in western Canada. The participation of aboriginals in events such as the Calgary Stampede, for instance, lent an “exotic foreignness” and their demonstrations of traditional (though often theatricalized) practices, including dance, were exciting (Regular 1986). An amendment to the Indian Act in 1914, however, required all aboriginals in the western provinces and the territories to obtain permission from the Department of Indian Affairs to perform “in any show, exhibition, performance, stampede or pageant in Aboriginal costume” (Statutes of Canada 1914, c. 35, s. 8, amending Revised Statutes of Canada 1906, c. 81, s. 149 amending Statutes of Canada 1895, c. 35, s. 6 amending Revised Statutes of Canada 1886, c. 43, s. 114 [Statutes of Canada 1884, c. 27, s. 3]).When the Indian Act was again reviewed between 1932 and 1933, the law was tightened by removing the phrase “in aboriginal costume,” which effectively meant that any aboriginal participation in or attendance at festivals, pageants, stampedes, or similar events required the approval of a Department of Indian Affairs agent. According to the debates in the House of Commons, the purpose of the amendment was meant “to address the situation of Indians being paraded around to display themselves for the amusement of the white onlooker” (Dominion of Canada, Debates of the House of Commons [1933]). The concern that aboriginal bodies not be exploited “for the amusement of the white onlooker” did not extend to Volkoff ’s dancing facsimiles. On the contrary, it is possible that Volkoff ’s choice to focus on aboriginal images and stories was, in part, a calculated response to the German fascination with aboriginal cultures informed by popular culture, including the Sioux in the Sarrasani circus and especially depictions of aboriginal peoples in the novels of the German writer Karl May. The Romantic notion of the noble savage uncorrupted by white civilization that was present in the heroism of May’s Apache chief Winnetou might have resonated for German audiences watching the morally admirable and idealized Mala, who risks his life to save his village, and the tragic Mon-​Ka-​Ta, whose love for his wife is so consuming that he rejects reason to follow his impulsive passion to turn back to his wife. At the very least, some of the audience in Germany would have filtered Volkoff ’s characters through this German reference, thus viewing Volkoff ’s dancers as stand-​ins for Winnetou. In other words, while Karl May was not at Horst-​Wessel-​Platz where the dancers performed, he was no doubt present in the minds of many in the audience. In this way, the so-​called “Nativeness” of Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta turned aesthetic primitivism into a transnational commodity.

430   Allana c. Lindgren

Conclusions: Then and Now Although the 1936 Berlin Olympics is now a distant memory, Volkoff ’s experience remains enlightening. If the Nazis were intent on rewriting German history in pseudomythological terms to assert their cultural and racial superiority, Volkoff ’s motives were also calculated—​the conflation of ethnicity, race, and nationalism was not only a fascist project in the 1930s. At a reception at the end of the performances, Laban announced that the competition had been commuted to a festival, even though he had been allegedly directed by the Nazi to make sure that a German group won (Lewitan 1936; Pape 1936; Preston-​Dunlop 1988). In other words, Laban transformed the Tanzwettspiele into a Tanzfestspiele that celebrated cultural and aesthetic difference instead of placing countries in adversarial relationships with each other. Although this shift should have made it more difficult for Volkoff to quantify the international standing of his group, he nevertheless framed the experience in competitive terms. After returning to Toronto, Volkoff continued to work toward starting a professional ballet company. He repeatedly told reporters in Canada that no prizes had been given in Germany, but that five honorable mentions had been named, and that his group had received one of them (“Canadian Ballet Dancers did Well in Berlin Contest” 1936, Clipping, Boris Volkoff Collection, Toronto Reference Library; “Canadian Dancers Win Honours” 1936, Clipping, Boris Volkoff Collection, Toronto Reference Library; “So They Won Fifth Place at Olympics” Clipping, Boris Volkoff Collection, Toronto Reference Library; “Star Function Combines Dinner, Dance, Floor Show” 1936, Clipping, Boris Volkoff Collection, Toronto Reference Library; “What Forest Hill did at the Olympics” 1936, Clipping, Boris Volkoff Collection, Toronto Reference Library). As he had hoped, the international exposure resulted in an increased number of invitations to perform with other arts groups in Toronto such as the Toronto Opera Company. Buoyed by his success, in November 1938, Volkoff announced plans to start a ballet company. The following spring, in May 1939, the Volkoff Canadian Ballet premiered at Massey Hall in Toronto. In 1951, the National Ballet of Canada was launched by a group of Toronto’s elite. English-​Canadian colonial allegiances were still intact and ultimately worked against Volkoff when the British dancer Celia Franca was chosen to be the company’s first artistic director over the Russian-​born choreographer. Volkoff was devastated. Furthermore, many of his dancers left him to join the new company, and the Volkoff Canadian Ballet soon collapsed. At the beginning of the 21st century, as people increasingly identify themselves as ethnically “Canadian” (without any hyphenated extension referencing ancestral homes), it is important to guard against appropriation and to remember that national identity tends to unify and minimize difference and, therefore, can conceal inequalities (Cohen 2008; Thomas 2005).19 Though Mala and Mon-​Ka-​Ta can be read as symbolically asserting that Canada’s identity was not located in racial purity, but in diversity and hybridity,

English-Canadian Ethnocentricity   431 the images of indigenous people that appeared in Volkoff ’s choreography were hardly assertions of equality. Volkoff essentialized aboriginal peoples by reinforcing stereotypical views while presenting indigeneity as a malleable concept that willingly accommodated the ethnocentric assumptions of English Canadians. Finally, Volkoff ’s choreography not only provides an opportunity to consider how past dance artists have represented and attempted to embody “otherness” on stage, but also is a reminder to ensure that the performance of cultural diversity is not placed in the service of the politically dominant ethnicity.

Archives Consulted Dance Collection Danse, Toronto, Ontario Toronto Metro Reference Library, Toronto, Ontario

Notes 1. The Canadians who traveled to Berlin with Volkoff were Pauline Sullivan, Joan Hutchinson, Janet Baldwin, James Pape, Jack Lemen, Billy Cochrane, Clara Ord, Helen Pritchett, Bunny Lang, Mary Wilder, Florence Smeaton, Mildred Wickson, Marsden Hall and Margaret Clemens (pianist). For further details about the Canadians’ experiences, see Janet Baldwin n.d., “Memories of Janet Baldwin of Olympics,” unpublished typescript, Dance Collection Danse; and Pape 1936. 2. For a vivid description of some of the dance participants’ performances, see Michel 1936. I would like to thank Dr. Richard Menkis of the University of British Columbia for sharing this source with me. 3. First Nations refers to aboriginals and aboriginal communities, but does not include the Inuit—​the Indigene of the Arctic. The term First Peoples denotes all indigenous peoples in Canada. These terms are used here because they are the names that the First Peoples of Canada have chosen to self-​identify. 4. For another scholarly examination of Volkoff ’s participation at the Internationale Tanzwettspiele, see O’Bonsawin 2004. 5. A chapter entitled “Europe Overseas,” which was included in the book, was written by A. M. Carr-​Saunders. 6. In this way, this essay is part of a growing body of scholarship oriented toward understanding “the complex ways in which Canada has been and is being constructed” (4). For more details, see Strong-​Boag et al. 1998. 7. Volkoff and his dancers prepared for their Berlin début for four and a half months. See Janet Baldwin n.d., “Memories of Janet Baldwin of Olympics,” unpublished typescript, Dance Collection Danse. 8. According to the most common version of his career, Volkoff had studied in Moscow, performed with the Mordkin Ballet, and, in the 1920s, toured with a small group of Soviet dancers who performed in India, Malaya, Burma, Japan, Hawaii, and the United States

432   Allana c. Lindgren mainland before dancing briefly with Adolph Bolm’s company in Chicago. Despite the fact that he allegedly entered Canada illegally from the United States after his visa expired in 1929, he was granted Canadian citizen in 1935. For more detailed biographical information about Volkoff, see Ayre 1995, Feb./​Mar. 1996, Spring 1996, Fall, 2006; “Boris Volkff: Fiery Russian Father of Canadian Ballet” 1974; Collier 2000; Fraser 1974; Mitchell 1982; Tatarnic 1975; Whittaker 1972. 9. For more details, see “Boris Volkoff Ballet,” Program, March 29, 1937, Boris Volkoff Collection, Toronto Metro Reference Library. 10. For further details, see “Promenade Symphony Concerts,” Program, October 15, 1936, Pauline Sullivan Fonds, Dance Collection Danse. 11. “Ganz anders und ziemlich zwiespältig ist der Eindruck der Kanadier. Es ist eine vorwiegend aus Damen bestehende, von dem Russen Boris Volkoff geschulte Laiengruppe, die dort am moisten fesselt, wo sie uns fremdes Volkstum im Tanze zeigt. “Mala,” ein solistischer Maskentanz nach Eskimomelodien, scheint Zauber oder Beschwörung auszudrücken. “Mon-​Ka-​Ta,” ein großer Gruppentanz nach einer indianischen Legende, schildert das “Orpheus”—​Schicksal des gleichnamigen Häuptlings. Wurde man hier von Kostümen, Masken und tänzerischen Einzelheiten gefesselt, so bedauerte man es, daß die Kanadier sich verleiten ließen, such den Bereich des kunstmäßigen Ausdruckstanzes zu betreten.” 12. In 1932, for instance, Diamond Jenness, then chief anthropologist of the National Museum articulated the view that the First Nations people in Canada were culturally endangered: “Doubtless all the tribes will disappear” (264). 13. This photograph appeared on the December 1937 cover of Canadian Stage— Screen— and—​Studio. 14. For an interesting and contrasting discussion about how dance has been used by postcolonial artists to subvert colonial authority, see Gilbert and Tompkins 1996. 15. The lack of a national tradition did not mean that there was not a folklore movement in Canada. Attempts to collect and preserve folk songs were evident in the mid-​19th century with the publication of Hubert LaRue’s article “Les chansons populaires et historiques du Canada” in the magazine Le Foyer canadien in 1863 and Ernest Gagnon’s Chansons populaires du Canada, published in 1865. During the early 20th century, Barbeau focused on collecting the cultural history of indigenous people and French Canada. A prolific writer, one of his earliest books about folk songs was Romancero du Canada, which was published in 1937. 16. Volkoff returned to aboriginal themes and characters later in his career. His Red Ear of Corn, which was created for the second Canadian Ballet Festival in 1949, was based on an Iroquois legend. For more information about Volkoff ’s Red Ear of Corn, see Bowring 2002. Also in 1949, Volkoff provided the “aboriginal” choreography for the pageant Salute to Canada, which marked the tercentenary of Jesuit martyrdom at Huronia. 17. In this way, Volkoff ’s choreography anticipated the use of aboriginals to assuage the white guilt that appeared in Germany during the later 20th century. Katrin Sieg has examined what she calls the “ethnic drag” of the “Indian” hobbyist subcultures of postwar World War II Germany. Some of these indigenous enthusiasts annually gather at the festival at Bad Segeberg where they dress as aboriginals to re-​enact scenes from the novels of Karl May. They have also formed “Indian” clubs, which have been similarly been influenced by May’s writing. In Sieg’s view, these activities have allowed “Germans to

English-Canadian Ethnocentricity   433 align themselves with the victims and avengers of genocide, rather than its perpetrators and accomplices” (12). I would like to thank Helen Gilbert for bringing this research to my attention. 18. For more detailed discussions about the Canadian government’s regulation and restriction of traditional aboriginal dances, see Haslip 2001; Regular 1986; Shea Murphy 2007; and Titley 1986. 19. The idea that national identity tends to present images of unity and to thereby conceal inequity is discussed in more detail in Bhabha 1990 and Hall 1992.

Bibliography Ayre, John. “Berlin, 1936: Canadian Dancers at Hitler’s Olympics.” The Beaver 76(1) (February/​ March 1996): 35–​42. Ayre, John. “Boris Volkoff: The Beginnings.” Dance Collection Danse: The Magazine 62 (Fall 2006): 6–​11. Ayre, John​. “In the Shadow of the Swastika: Boris Volkoff and his students at the XI Olympiad in Berlin.” Dance International 24(1) (Spring 1996): 14–​18. Ayre, John. “Olympic Fervour: 1936 Berlin Dance Festival.” Dance Collection Danse: The News 40 (1995): 3. Barbeau, Marius. “I was a Pioneer.” Oracle 44 (1984): 1–​8. Berson, Jessica. “Mass Movement:  Laban’s Movement Choirs and Community Dance.” In Community Performance Reader, edited by Petra Kuppers and Gwen Robertson, 71–​76. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Bhabha, Homi, K. ed. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. “Boris Volkoff:  Fiery Russian Father of Canadian Ballet,” The Globe and Mail (March 12, 1974): 15. Bowring, Amy. “Setting the Stage for Professionalization: The Canadian Ballet Festival (1948-​ 1954).” In Estivale 2000: Canadian Dancing Bodies Then and Now, edited by Iro Valaskakis Tembeck, 75–​96. Toronto: Dance Collection Danse Press/​es, 2002. Buckner, Phillip. “The Long Goodbye:  English Canadians and the British World.” In Rediscovering the British World, edited by Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis. Calgary: The University of Calgary Press, 2005. Bridle, Augustus. “Volkoff School Gives Olympic Entry Show.” The Toronto Star (May 28, 1936). Buchanan, Colin. “Canadian Anthropology and Ideas of Aboriginal Emendation.” In Historicizing Canadian Anthropology, edited by Julia Harrison and Regna Darnell, 93–​106 Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. Burt, Ramsay. Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, “Race” and Nation in Early Modern Dance. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Carr, Emily. “Lecture on Totems.” [1913]. In Opposite Contraries:  The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings, edited by Susan Crean, 177–​203. Vancouver:  Douglas & McIntyre, 2003. Clifford, James. “Of Other Peoples:  Beyond the ‘Salvage’ Paradigm.” In Discussions in Contemporary Culture. No. 1., edited by Hal Foster, 121–​130. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1987. Cohen, Tobi. “‘Canadian’ Ethnicity Popular.” The Toronto Star (April 2, 2008). [http://​www.thestar.com Accessed July 20, 2010].

434   Allana c. Lindgren Collier, Clifford. “Boris Volkoff.” In Encyclopedia of Theatre Dance in Canada/​Encyclopédie de la Danse théâtrale au Canada, edited by Susan Macpherson, 605–​611. Toronto: Dance Collection Danse Press/​es, 2000. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Deutschlander, Siegrid and Leslie J. Miller. “Politicizing Aboriginal Cultural Tourism:  The Discourse of Primitivism in the Tourist Encounter.” The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology /​Revue canadienne de sociologie et d’anthropologie (CRSA/​RCSA) 40(1) (2003): 27–​44. Dickason, Olive Patricia. “The Many Faces of Canada’s History as It Relates to Aboriginal People.” In Walking a Tightrope:  Aboriginal People and their Representations, edited by Ute Lischke and David T. McNab, 117–​148. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. Dominion of Canada. Debates of the House of Commons, Vol. III (Ottawa: F.A. Acland, 1933). Debate of March 1, 1933. Dominion of Canada​. Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting. Report. Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1929. Dominion of Canada​. Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences. Report. Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1951. Edwardson, Ryan. Canadian Content:  Culture and the Quest for Nationhood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. Ethnicity and Nationalism (2nd ed.). London: Pluto Press, 2002. Fischer-​Lichte, Erika. Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Flam, Jack, “Introduction.” In Primitivism and Twentieth-​Century Art: A Documentary History, edited by Jack Flam, with Miriam Deutch. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003. Francis, Daniel. The Imaginary Indian:  The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992. Franco, Susanne. “Ausdruckstanz:  Traditions, Translations, Transmissions.” In Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research, edited by Susanne Franco and Marina Nordera, 80–​98. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Fraser, John, “Volkoff Recognized, but Only After Death.” The Globe and Mail (December 28, 1974): 23. “German Invitation Refused by Dancer.” The New York Times (March 13, 1936): 10. Gibbon, John Murray. Canadian Mosaic: The Making of a Northern Nation. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1938. Gilbert, Helen, and Joanne Tompkins. Post-​Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Gricius, Pierre. “Painter Jean Jacoby and Sculptor Frantz Heldenstein:  A  Pair of Unknown Luxemburg Medalists and the Story of the Olympic Art Competitions,” Journal of Olympic History 18(1) (April 2010): 9–​16. Guilbert, Laure. “Fritz Böhme (1881–​ 1952):  Archeology of an Ideologue.” In Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research, edited by Susanne Franco and Marina Nordera, 29–​45. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Hall, Stuart. “The Question of Cultural Identity.” In Modernity and Its Futures, edited by Stuart Hall, David Held, and Tony McGrew, 273–​326. Cambridge, England:  Polity Press, 1992.

English-Canadian Ethnocentricity   435 Hanley, Elizabeth A. “The Role of Dance in the 1936 Olympic Games:  Why Competition became Festival and Art became Political,” Journal of Olympic History 12(2) (August 2006): 38–​42. Harrison, Julia, and Regna Darnell. “Historicizing Traditions in Canadian Anthropology.” In Historicizing Canadian Anthropology, edited by Julia Harrison and Regna Darnell, 3–​18. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. Haslip, Susan. “A Treaty Right to Sport?” Murdoch University Electronic Journal of Law 8.2 (June 2001) [http://​fulltext.ausport.gov.au/​fulltext/​2001/​murdoch/​haslip82nf.asp] Accessed August 2, 2010. Howard-​ Hassmann, Rhoda E. “‘Canadian’ as an Ethnic Category:  Implications for Multiculturalism and National Unity.” Canadian Public Policy/​Analyse de Politique 25.4 (December 1999): 523–​537. Huxley, Julian S. and A. C. Haddon. We Europeans:  A  Survey of ‘Racial’ Problems. London: Jonathan Cape, 1935. “Jay.” “Toronto Dancers to Compete at Olympics.” Saturday Night (July 11, 1936): Section 11, 1. Jenness, Diamond. The Indians of Canada. [1932]; Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1963. Jessup, Lynda. “Tin Cans and Machinery:  Saving the Sagas and Other Stuff.” Visual Anthropology 12(1) (1999): 49–​86. Kant, Marion. “German Dance and Modernity:  Don’t Mention the Nazis.” In Rethinking Dance History:  A  Reader, edited by Alexandra Carter, 107–​ 118. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Karina, Lilian, and Marion Kant. Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich, trans. by Jonathan Steinberg. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003. Kent, Rockwell. Salamina. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. Kidd, Bruce. “Canadian Opposition to the 1936 Olympics in Germany,” Canadian Journal of History of Sport and Physical Education 9(2) (December 1978): 20–​40. Koegler, Horst. “In the Shadow of the Swastika:  Dance in Germany, 1927-​1936.” Dance Perspectives 57 (Spring 1974): 1–​48. Kroll, Erwin. “Internationale Tanzfestspiele 1936.” Der Tanz (August 1936): 3–​10. Large, David Clay. Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Lazarevich, Gordana. “The Role of the Canadian Pacific Railway in Promoting Canadian Culture.” In A Celebration of Canada’s Arts 1930–​1970, edited by Glen Carruthers and Gordana Lazarevich, 3–​13. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1996. Lewitan, J. “Olympic Dance Events.” The American Dancer 49 (October 1936): 9. MacEwan, Charlotte G. “News from the Dance Section.” The Journal of Health and Physical Education 7(3) (March 1936): 186. Mackey, Eva. The House of Difference:  Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Manning, Susan. Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman. [1993.] Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Manning, Susan​. “From Modernism to Fascism: The Evolution of Wigman’s Choreography.” Ballet Review 14(4) (1986): 87–​98. Manning, Susan​. “Ideology and Performance between Weimar and the Third Reich: The Case of Totenmal.” Theatre Journal 41(2) (May 1989): 211–​223. Manning, Susan​ . “Modern Dance in the Third Reich: Six Positions and a Coda.” In Choreographing History, edited by Susan Leigh Foster, 165–​176. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

436   Allana c. Lindgren Manning, Susan Allene, and Melissa Benson. “Interrupted Continuities:  Modern Dance in Germany.” The Drama Review: TDR 30(2) (Summer 1986): 30–​45. Marcus, George, and Michael Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Michel, Artur. “International Dance Festival, Berlin 1936.” The Journal of Health and Physical Education 7(9) (November 1936): 552–​553, 595. Mitchell, Lillian Leonora. “Boris Volkoff: Dancer, Teacher, Choreographer.” PhD Dissertation. Texas Woman’s University, 1982. Moray, Gerta. “Emily Carr: Modernism, Cultural Identity, and Ethnocultural Art History.” In The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century, edited by Anne Whitelaw, Brian Foss, and Sandra Paikowsky, 59–​77. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2010. Moss, Suzan. “Spinning through the Weltanschauung: The Effects of the Nazi Regime on the German Modern Dance.” PhD Dissertation. New York University, 1988. Nurse, Andrew. “‘But Now Things Have Changed’:  Marius Barbeau and the Politics of Amerindian Identity.” Ethnohistory 48(3) (2001): 433–​472. Nurse, Andrew​. “Marius Barbeau and the Methodology of Salvage Ethnography in Canada, 1911-​1951.” In Historicizing Canadian Anthropology, edited by Julia Harrison and Regna Darnell, 52–​64. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. O’Bonsawin, Christine M. “ ‘An Indian Atmosphere’: Indian Policy and Canadian Participation in Berlin’s Internationale Tanzwettspiele.” Seventh International Symposium for Olympic Research 2004. [www.la84foundation.org/​SportsLibrary/​ISOR/​ISOR2004.pdf.] Pape, James. “Artistic Dances Competition.” In Canada at Eleventh Olympiad1936 in Germany, edited by W.A. Fry, 103–​105. Dunnville, ON: W.A. Fry, 1936. Partsch-​Bergsohn, Isa. Modern Dance in Germany and the United States: Crosscurrents and Influences. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994. Partsch-​Bergsohn, Isa, and Harold Bergsohn. The Makers of Modern Dance in Germany: Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss. Hightstown, NJ: Princeton Book Company, 2003. Preston-​Dunlop, Valerie. “Laban and the Nazis.” Dance Theatre Journal 6(2) (July 1988): 4–​7. “Program.” Internationale Tanzwettspiele. Anlässlich der XI. Olympiade, Berlin 1936. Regular, Keith. “On Public Display.” Alberta History 34(1) (Winter 1986): 1–​10. Servos, Norbert. “Pathos and Propaganda? On the Mass Choreography of Fascism:  Some Conclusions or Dance.” Ballett International 13(1) (January 1990): 62–​67. Shay, Anthony. Choreographing Identities: Folk Dance, Ethnicity and Festival in the United States and Canada. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, 2006. Shea Murphy, Jacqueline. The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Sieg, Katrin. Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2002. Stanton, Richard. The Forgotten Olympic Art Competitions:  The Story of the Olympic Art Competitions of the 20th Century. Victoria, British Columbia: Trafford, 2000. Statutes of Canada 1914, c. 35, s. 8, amending Revised Statutes of Canada 1906, c. 81, s. 149, amending Statutes of Canada 1895, c. 35, s. 6, amending Revised Statutes of Canada1886, c. 43, s. 114 (Statutes of Canada 1884, c. 27, s. 3). Strong-​Boag, Veronica, Sherrill Grace, Avigail Eisenberg, and Joan Anderson. Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Construction of Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998. Tatarnic, Joseph. “Boris Volkoff:  Memorial Exhibition,” York Dance Review 4 (Spring 1975): 33–​38.

English-Canadian Ethnocentricity   437 Thomas, Derrick. “ ‘I am Canadian.’ ” Canadian Social Trends. Statistics Canada—​Catalogue No. 11-​008 (Spring 2005): 2–​7. Tippett, Maria. Making Culture: English-​Canadian Institutions and the Arts before the Massey Commission. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Titley, E. Brian. A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1986. Vance, Jonathan F. A History of Canadian Culture: From Petroglyphs to Product, Circuses to the CBC. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2009. “Volkoff Dancers at Olympics.” The Globe (May 16, 1936): 8. “Volkoff Documents Destroyed by Fire,” The Globe and Mail (October 31, 1973): 14. “West Coast Indian Art.” Canadian Forum 8(89) (February 1928): 525. Whittaker, Herbert. “Recollections from Volkoff.” The Globe and Mail (August 19, 1972): 27. Wood, Christopher. “Theatre.” Saturday Night (June 6, 1936).

Chapter 19

L a M e ri Purveyor of the Dancing Other Nancy Lee Ruyter

When you visit the King’s [Theatre] to see La Meri, as you must, forget all you have seen in Australia before… La Meri belongs to no school. Her art is her own, and her dances are those of the people whose country they represent, and who live in the soul and body of La Meri. Her remarkable understanding of rhythm and music, and her rare sense of comedy and pantomime, allow her to assimilate the character and every mood of the people she mimics—​for she is a mimic in the true and greatest sense of the word, in addition to being a talented choreographic artiste. Her characters, whether they hail from the Argentine, India, Italy, Mexico, or Japan, breathe authenticity and carry with them the very atmosphere of their native country (“The Genius of La Meri: Opening Performances,” Table Talk, Melbourne, Australia, 6/​25/​36).

This critic’s enthusiastic review of the international concert dance artist La Meri is typical of the reactions she received during her world-​wide performing career, which began in 1926 and included tours in Asia, Europe, Latin America, the United States, and islands of the Pacific. The extensive archive of her reviews show that, with few exceptions, her work was greatly appreciated. This notable woman, who was born Russell Meriwether Hughes and lived from 1898 to 1988, was not only a concert dance artist, but also a teacher and researcher who studied, taught, and wrote about the dance traditions of an international array of cultures. In this essay, I begin with an overview of the range of La Meri’s dance experiences and the pathway that led her in the direction of assuming multiple ethnic identities in her art. Then, I focus on her approach to understanding, teaching, and presenting the dance arts of various cultures outside of their original contexts. I conclude by addressing two

La Meri   439 issues related to La Meri’s work: 1) that of “ownership”—​what can be considered a part of one’s own culture as opposed to what is “foreign” and subject to charges of appropriation; and 2) the concept of authenticity and its ambiguities. Some of the information in this article has appeared in my earlier writings. My sources for La Meri’s life, and for her conceptions, principles, and practices include her 1977 publications, Dance Out the Answer: An Autobiography and Total Education in Ethnic Dance; her other writings; her archival collections; and my own experiences studying at La Meri’s Ethnologic Dance Center in New York City in the 1950s. La Meri built her career on the practice of dances from many different parts of the world. From 1926 to 1939—​when World War II made travel dangerous or impossible—​ she toured internationally, performing in countries of Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific. Her manager, Guido Carreras, was also her husband from 1931 to the mid-​ 1940s. Often La Meri and Carreras were accompanied by a small group which might include a musician, a technical assistant, and up to three other dancers, one of whom was sometimes La Meri’s sister Lilian Newcomer (1892–​1965). After the war and her breakup with Carreras, she performed in various locations in the United States and Latin America, but touring was no longer a major part of her professional life as it had been during the pre-​war years. At times, from the 1920s into the 1950s, she presented solo concerts, sometimes changing costumes and identities on stage with the help of an assistant playing a lady’s maid, and while chatting to the audience about the next dance she would be performing. After establishing her school in New York, her concerts and lecture-​demonstrations would often include students and colleagues in the programs. From her first international performances in Mexico in 1926, La Meri became interested in the dance forms of the cultures she visited. Beginning then, and continuing throughout her touring years, she sought local teachers from whom she could learn traditional dances to add to her repertoire. She would also purchase authentic costumes, and Carreras would record the appropriate music on equipment that they carried with them. The new dances would then be added to her concert programs and performed for audiences all over the world. She was thus not only introducing Asian and Middle Eastern dances to the West and Latin American dances to Europe and the United States, but also dances from the Western Hemisphere to countries in the East—​and dances of specific cultures of Latin America or Asia, for example, to other cultures in those regions. During the course of her travels and study, La Meri accumulated between two and three hundred individual dances which were mostly solos but also included a few couple dances (such as the Mexican Jarabe Tapatío) which were presented when she had one or more additional dancers in the company. Almost none of her performance pieces were abstract. Each involved not only a distinctive movement vocabulary and technique, but also a very human character that had to be portrayed. Each dance thus required assuming and then expressing a different ethnic, social, and sexual identity. Sometimes the dance and dancer represented an elitist ruling culture, such as the Javanese women’s court dances srimpi and slendang (Figure 19.1). Other dance forms, such as the Indian bharatanatyam, had developed from religious contexts, in this case from the traditional

440   Nancy Lee Ruyter

Figure 19.1  ca. 1940s or later. La Meri performing dance from the bharatanatyam tradition of South India.

Hindu temple dance of South India (Figure 19.2). She also learned dances from indigenous American cultures, such as the Hoop Dance (Figure 19.3) and from peasant cultures in Latin America. In addition to portraying the dances of women from many different cultures, she also at times performed male dances—​for example, the male gaucho in the Argentinian dance El Gato (Figure 19.4); and the echigo-​jishi from the Japanese Nihon Buyo tradition. The variety and virtuosity of La Meri’s performances elicited many written reviews and other responses which, as I noted above, were generally very positive and often included expressions of amazement that she could perform as she did. For example, an unidentified reviewer of La Meri’s January 12, 1940, solo performance in Middletown, New York, states that “[T]‌he dancer’s supple body, skillful feet, and expressive hands were equally adept in interpreting the dances of the Orient and Spain, of the Argentine, Hawaii, and the Philippines;” and in discussing her dances from Asia, writes: The Slendang from Java, a scarf dance, revealed a strong marionette influence. Its slow, deliberated movements were calculated to realize the two-​fold aim of the dance—​to teach and to induce in the watcher calmness of spirit. Very charming was La Meri’s presentation of Lasyanatana, an Indian dance of faster tempo and with tinkling bell accompaniment. She made full use of the gesture language, typical of the Indian art of dance, to interpret this allegorical dance about a maiden in her garden (a symbol for youth). She tended her flowers (beauty), was frightened by a bee (troubles of youth), and caught a bird (joys of youth), which escaped. The audience was delighted by a comic impromptu of Japan, Nasu-​To-​Kabocha, in which

La Meri   441

Figure 19.2  ca. 1940s or later. La Meri performing srimpi, a court dance from Java that dates from the 18th century.

La Meri made use of the two classical masks of “The Swollen-​Faced Woman” and “The Laughing Man.” Here the black-​hooded property man appeared on the stage, supplying the dancer with the masks which she donned and doffed alternately as she portrayed now the heavily coquettish woman, now the nimble and amused man. The English title of the dance is “The Cabbage and the Squash” (“Versatile Art of La Meri Captivates Audience Here,” Middletown Times Herald, 1/​13/​40).

After some mixed reactions to La Meri as a performing artist, the noted dance critic and historian Walter Terry (1913–​82) became an ardent admirer of her work and wrote many

442   Nancy Lee Ruyter

Figure 19.3  ca. 1930s or later. La Meri performing “El Gato,” a dance of the Argentinian gaucho (horseman/​ herdsman).

reviews of her performances. In one early review, he describes a group of Spanish dances she performed at the Berkshire Hills Dance Festival held in 1940 at the Jacob’s Pillow School of Dance. He writes that the Spanish section opened with: a “serenata,” a dance performed in the classic style with dignity and elegance of gesture. In contrast, La Meri performed a “farruca,” in which the flashing eyes and teeth of the gypsy matches the chatter of the castanets and the arrogant stamp of the heels. “La Corrida” was based upon the movements of the bullfighter, … The Spanish section closed with “Gitanerias,” La Meri’s personal visualization of Ravel’s “Bolero.” An exciting dance it is, for it shows a girl lying exhausted upon the floor, and slowly an arm begins to move and through the cumulative force of rhythm she seems to re-​ energize herself, to restore the power of her senses until she again falls exhausted at

La Meri   443

Figure 19.4  ca. 1930s or later. La Meri performing a version of the “Hoop Dance,” a secular Native American form.

the end of a wild and sensual dance (“La Meri Offers Berkshire Hills Dance Recital,” New York Herald Tribune, 7/​21/​40).

After she settled in New York, La Meri’s repertoire also came to include several multi-​ cast dance dramas that she conceived and choreographed and in which she played a leading role, for example: Krishna Gopala (1940) on an Indian theme, and El Amor Brujo (1944 and 1953), based on a Spanish legend and to music by Manuel de Falla. She also used Indian dance techniques in her choreographed versions of Western narrative ballets, such as Swan Lake (1944) and Scheherazade (1945), and in an abstract work, Bach-​ Bharata Suite (1946). These all received positive and laudatory responses—​often in the

444   Nancy Lee Ruyter context of the critic’s amazement at what La Meri accomplished in these works—​and in their demonstration that the Indian and Spanish dance techniques could be used creatively. How did La Meri get started on the path of international dance practices? While growing up in San Antonio, Texas, she studied dance (as well as other art forms), performed with her teacher’s student group, and witnessed the work of major performing dance artists and companies such as Anna Pavlova, La Argentina, Denishawn, and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1977a 2, 6, 10). Her student performing included a range of dance types: ballet, historical dance styles, and impressions of Spanish, Russian, and “oriental” dances. In what she did as well as in what she saw, the “crossing of identity boundaries” was a given.1 Each dance involved a different character, different costumes, different music—​and none that was reflective of middle class culture in either San Antonio or the United States in any general sense. On the other hand, the eclecticism did reflect Western (European and Western Hemisphere) dance culture—​as manifested in both professional touring dance companies and local and amateur dance studio work. Beginning a bit later than La Meri, I also grew up in the United States with dance studio training and performance from an early age and attendance at the concerts of national and international touring groups. And for me also, although I would have had no understanding of the concept, crossing identity boundaries was a normal part of dance studies and dance art. However, such crossings represented a “tip of the hat” to the exoticism of other cultures and identities rather than a serious study and representation of them. Donning a new character and costume was “pretend time,” romantic and fun for the dance student. Seeing performances of the great touring companies was also a way of entering a fantasy land that stimulated the imagination, but had little connection with the reality of any of the cultures from which elements or images had been drawn. As La Meri began her career as a professional concert dance artist, she presented eclectic programs with the same kind of variety and exoticism that she had learned as a student dancer. They would include ballet numbers (on pointe), dances with narrative themes, and dances suggesting one or another Asian, Middle Eastern, or Hispanic culture—​all performed to piano scores by Western composers. Little by little, however, La Meri began her serious study of the dances of other cultures, and, as noted above, she would obtain appropriate costumes and musical recordings. She also came to believe that it was important to understand as much as possible about the cultures whose dances she performed and, eventually, such study became a requirement for the full-​time students at her Ethnologic Dance Center in New York City. La Meri’s first venture into reading about other cultures had been spurred by seeing a performance (probably in 1914) of the Denishawn company, which specialized in dance impressions of various cultures from the East and West; she was totally enthralled with the performance of Ruth St. Denis in an Eastern-​inspired number. That experience initiated her interest in what she perceived as the exotic “orient.” She began reading voraciously and formed with some friends a girls club devoted to the study of what they considered “oriental” and to performing “oriental” dances. She wrote later, however, “In my abysmal ignorance, ‘Oriental’ was all of a piece … I casually mixed Moorish, Indian,

La Meri   445 Turkish, Armenian, and what have you …” (1977a, 6). As her knowledge and maturity increased, however, she became an avid reader of serious works about the cultures of the world and their dance arts. One only needs to look at the sources she cites and the bibliographies she includes in some of her publications to appreciate the extent of her commitment to seeking knowledge. Of course, most of her research and reading was limited to sources in English. Although she had been on a short trip to Spain with her mother in the summer of 1922, and taken some classes in Spanish dance there, La Meri’s initial serious research into the movement arts of a foreign culture was on her first professional tour outside of the United States—​to Mexico in the summer of 1926. There she established what would become her habitual practice—​seeking instruction in dances and movement vocabularies of whatever culture she was visiting. She writes that in Mexico, she took lessons in Mexican regional dance, in movements of the torero, and in Spanish dance. She says that she learned the Jarabe Tapatío from Pedro Valdez and performed it with him, identifying Valdez as “Mexico’s finest native dancer, who had taught Pavlova and helped her with the staging of her well-​known Mexican Dances ballet” (1977a, 30). Some of that may be true, but the Mexican dance historian, Alberto Dallal, writes that it was Eva Pérez, a specialist in Mexican dances who had worked with Pavlova to develop her jarabe on pointe (Dallal 1986, 69; and 1996, 69–​70. See also Lavalle). The Jarabe Tapatío stayed in La Meri’s concert repertoire for years; and her lessons in bullfighting movements as well her observation of actual bullfights led to a dance she choreographed, “The Toreador,” which also became a regular offering on her concerts. As La Meri traveled, her study of dance in each culture was fully supported by Carreras. She came into contact with and learned dance practices that ranged from those of technically demanding professional genres to community-​based folk dance forms. An example of the former is her study of the ancient and highly developed dance arts of India. She had been introduced to Indian dance in the 1930s at a concert in Paris given by Uday Shankar (1900–​1977), an artist who was known for fusing traditional Indian dance and modernist concepts. She began to pick up some knowledge from this non-​traditional artist, although he was not willing to formally train her or anyone else. In the late 1930s she toured India and was able to study with some prestigious teachers of different regions and genres. These studies spurred her toward a deeper knowledge of Indian dance, especially of the south Indian genre of bharatanatyam. It is interesting to look at the social and cultural context of the India she visited. As noted by Indian dancer and scholar Mandakranta Bose, classical Indian dance had traditionally been “created and controlled by men but performed by women” (252), and the status of female performers had gone through various changes over the centuries until they and the dance had lost all respect under British colonial rule (252–​253). In the 1930s, however, as related by dance anthropologist Judith Lynne Hanna, a revival of the tradition was promoted by “intellectual leaders at the forefront of Indian nationalism [who] began to re-​evaluate Indian cultural traditions and seek symbols of Indian identity” (1993, 126). This revival was in process when La Meri arrived. Her study, therefore, took place in a particular context in relation to Indian social, political, cultural, and dance history—​a context in

446   Nancy Lee Ruyter which the respectability of the dance as a women’s activity was being re-​established. What if she had arrived ten years earlier? Would her quest have been scorned? As it was, she sought instruction at the very time that it was becoming respectable for high class Indian women to do the same. Even so, her situation as a foreigner and her expectations were very different from those of the Indian girls being encouraged by their fathers to study this heritage. In another area of the world, La Meri gained knowledge and experience of a totally different type of dance culture—​the vernacular dances of various Latin American countries. Evidence of her interest in these dances can be found in the number of such dances that she included in her repertoire over several years—​and in some passages in her writings. La Meri’s tours in the Western Hemisphere included, in addition to the United States, Mexico (1926, 1938, 1948), the Caribbean (1927), and Central and/​or South America (1928–​29, 1938, 1939, 1948). As was true in all her travels, her indefatigable interest in the dance languages of the world led her to seek teachers and learn new dances for her concerts. The adaptations of Latin American vernacular dances for her concert programs included the following: from Mexico: Jarabe Tapatío, La Tehuana, Chiapaneca, and Zandunga; from Cuba: Danzon Cubano, Cubana, Rumba, and Carabali; from Argentina: El Gato and Tango Americano (the Argentine tango as influenced by Broadway jazz); from Peru: Wachi Tusuy and Waraki Tusuy; from Panama: Tamborito; from Bolivia: Bailecito; from Chile: Cueca; and from Paraguay: Polka. Unfortunately, information about how and from whom she learned such dances is frustratingly sketchy. In contrast to the Indian dance forms, whose teachers were well-​known professionals and presumably well or at least adequately paid, the vernacular dances of Latin America (or any area) would not have had specialists and well-​known dance masters earning their living from teaching. An analysis of La Meri’s stage images as well as of her life’s work is difficult because both were complex and traversed many cultures. And tracking down and assessing the details about her studies in certain areas, such as Latin America, is a particular challenge, because there is so little specific information in her writings and archives. However, it is clear that La Meri’s presentation of herself in the dances of cultures not her own differed significantly from the superficial adoption of exotic “signs” found in some of the Western theatrical dance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as that of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. In the beginning, she was following that path, but as she became more deeply interested in the cultures that she studied and in the whole process of understanding and acquiring new dance languages, her work demonstrated an attempt to render the dances in a more seriously “authentic” way, or to be honest about adapting aspects of them in her own original choreographies. In the 1940s and 1950s, La Meri performed and taught in and around New  York City—​at her own Ethnologic Dance Center and other locations. And in the summers of 1942–​53 and 1959–​67, she taught and performed at Jacob’s Pillow, the famous school and festival in Massachusetts founded and directed by Ted Shawn. Her major focus in teaching, choreography, and performance were the dance languages of Spain and India, although she would also present work from other cultures on her programs. In 1977, as

La Meri   447 mentioned previously, she published the book, Total Education in Ethnic Dance, which set forth her definitions, rationales, and approaches to something that by then was already passé—​a professional specialization in dance from a variety of cultures. Today, one would probably not take very seriously a person trying to attain proficiency in the dance, music, theater, or other arts of an array of cultures. One can question the possibility of being able to successfully acquire not only the physical techniques, but also the cultural, spiritual, intellectual, and social baggage that is inextricably incorporated into each art form and its context. At the same time, however, in many parts of the world, and for a variety of purposes, the dances of different cultures are taught at private studios, in public schools, within recreational folk dance groups, and in university programs. And recognized performing artists in dance, drama, and music draw on forms, motifs, and vocabularies from many parts of the world to include in their own productions. There are continuing mutual interest, dialogue, and borrowings among cultures; and I believe that La Meri’s ideas and writings on learning, performing, and teaching dances from different cultures can still be useful to us today. By the 1940s, the dances of the world (excluding Western theater dance and urban social forms) were generally grouped together in the category of “ethnic dance.” La Meri claimed to have introduced the term prior to the 1940s and defined it as the “indigenous dance arts that have grown from popular or typical dance expressions of a particular race.” She wished to give the category an identity and status comparable to that of ballet and modern dance (1977b, 1). And one must realize that, beginning in the 1920s, when La Meri had begun her professional career, and subsequently, from the 1940s on, as she developed her pedagogical approach and its theoretical foundations, she was pioneering an area of dance study that had not yet been defined or theorized among dance practitioners, nor in the academic world—​the study of international dance genres and practices. Dance ethnology and dance history as scholarly pursuits were just beginning to become important in the 1970s, and La Meri’s writings, even the most recent of 1977, show no awareness of questions arising in these disciplines that might have been relevant to her work. The term “ethnic dance” obviously has many problems (which she herself recognized) and has been to a greater or lesser extent discarded today in favor of designations such as “world dance” or “cultural forms” (terms which also raise questions). A major problem with the term has been its ethnocentric equating of the myriad dance arts of the world with single genres stemming from Euro-​American traditions. While by now, ballet and modern dance have spread throughout the world and developed national variations, they still represent recognizable single genres, comparable not to everything else in the world, but to other single genres such as bharatanatyam, flamenco, Irish step dancing, etc. Another problem is the assumption that such terms by definition exclude the western theatrical genres—​an assumption admirably refuted by dance anthropologist Joann Kealiinohomoku in her still-​relevant 1970 article “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance.” There is no evidence that La Meri ever questioned her right to learn and perform dances from different cultures and even to create original works using elements from those traditions. She did, however, insist upon knowledge of the cultural contexts of the

448   Nancy Lee Ruyter dance arts and upon awareness of how she and her students were using them. In her writings, she divides ethnic dance into two general categories. The first, which she calls folk or communal dance, includes all the practices by non-​professionals in traditional communal contexts. The second, which she believed is always related to the first, comprises dance presented by trained professionals in performance contexts such as temples or theaters (1977b, 3–​4). It is this second category upon which she built her career. In Total Education in Ethnic Dance (4–​6), she identifies five ways of presenting such material:





1. “The Traditional” features presentation of the exact dance movement, choreography, music, and costumes of the original dance form. 2. “The Authentic” includes “the traditional costumes, music, and techniques, but takes certain liberties with the form.” Examples would be shortening a dance to present it on stage, or setting a routine for a dance that would normally be improvised. 3. “The Creative Neoclassic or Renaissance” retains the movement, techniques, and style of the traditional form, but may alter the costuming, music, and choreography. Examples of artists who worked in this way include the Indian dancer Uday Shankar (1900–​1977) and the Spanish dancer La Argentina (Antonia Mercé y Luque, 1890–​1936). 4. In “Creative Departures,” the choreographer takes more liberties with all aspects of the presentation than in the previous category. 5. “Applied Techniques” refers to using any of the aspects of the dance source in the creation of original works. Examples of this would certainly include La Meri’s Swan Lake, Scheherazade, and Bach-​Bharata Suite.

La Meri was thus interested in using the various dance languages in different ways, but at the same time meticulously honest in wanting to make it clear to her students, dancers, and viewers how close or how far any particular work was from traditional practices. As she became seriously involved in dance education after settling in New York, La Meri developed a precise pedagogy for teaching what she had learned of Spanish, East Indian, and other dance traditions. Believing that someone outside of a culture requires a kind of training different from that received by students within the culture, she wrote: “The teaching of ethnic dance forms by routines, as is often done in the land of origin, is entirely impractical when dealing with aliens. Exercises for body techniques are essential …”(1977b, 65). She developed such exercises for Spanish and Indian dance, and in the classes at the Ethnologic Dance Center, they were taught by her, her partner Peter di Falco, and her sister Lilian Newcomer. As students we were encouraged to master the exercises and the techniques as preparation for eventually learning combinations, and then learning and performing complete dances. In La Meri’s understanding, posture was the primary element of any dance practice and the particular movements and steps secondary. As she explains: “Of first importance is the placement and control of the spine and its adjuncts—​the neck, the shoulders,

La Meri   449 and the pelvis … In many cases the dance techniques of two different peoples will differ more in the spine carriage than in any other part of the anatomy.” (65). La Meri devoted an entire chapter to the different postures of various cultures’ dance arts (Chapter 7). At the same time, she also realized that posture and movements do not evolve in a vacuum and noted the effects of various cultural elements on their development. Chapter 8 is a discussion of what she terms the “six-​point source plan of exoteric origins.” That includes: 1) what the dancers wear, i.e., clothing and footwear; 2) characteristics of the dance space, including the surface danced on (such as earth or some kind of flooring), and the function of the space (as temple, palace, or theater); 3) the social customs of the culture; 4) the religious beliefs of the culture; 5) the “earliest known origin of the art;” and 6) the physical characteristics of the people (75–​79). In developing her analysis and her approach, La Meri also drew on the theoretical system of the French teacher and theorist of acting and singing François Delsarte (1811–​ 1871). Delsarte’s theories, which were popular in the United States in the late 19th century and adapted for use in physical culture and expression, also influenced the 20th century development of modern dance. La Meri was particularly impressed with his division of the body into three general parts, the head, torso, and limbs, and the relation of each to an aspect of human life and expression: the intellectual or spiritual, the emotional, and the vital, or physical—​and with his more detailed categorization of individual parts of the three main areas of the body in terms of this triune conception. She discusses his theory and then applies it to the genres of flamenco and bharatanatyam (80–​83). La Meri was always searching for ways to understand the dance languages with which she worked and to impart that knowledge to her students. Of course, she was a white woman from Western culture who had grown up with perspectives on life and the arts that were very different from those of the general populations and the specific dance cultures she visited and about which she tried to learn. And, during her travels as an adult in Asia, Latin America, etc., she was entering the various cultures as an outsider both from her point of view and that of the local members of the societies—​and the time she spent in each location and in contact with its dancers and teachers was always very short. To gain more understanding of the dance cultures that fascinated her, she drew heavily on writings from members of Western culture—​for example, those of theorists and educators (such as Delsarte, discussed above, Émile Jaques-​Dalcroze, and Rudolf Bode) and scholars of Asian dance and theater (such as Faubion Bowers, James Brandon, and Claire Holt). While she did use writings of native scholars from the cultures she had studied—​when their works were available in English—​she was mainly limited to Western specialists, and that limitation surely also played a strong role in the development of her understanding of the foreign cultures whose dances she studied, taught, and about which she wrote. In the beginning paragraph, I noted two issues related to La Meri’s work: 1) that of “ownership”—​what can be considered a part of one’s own culture as opposed to what is “foreign” and subject to charges of appropriation; and 2) the concept of authenticity and its ambiguities. The first could include discussion of such varied phenomena as a 20th-​ century American learning reconstructed dances from Louis XIV’s court; the members of a ballet folklórico group performing dances from regions of Mexico the members

450   Nancy Lee Ruyter have never known; a white South African performing and teaching Spanish dance in Johannesburg; an African American specializing in Irish step dancing; a Croatian from Slavonija learning the lindjo from the Dalmatian area of Croatia—​and an American dancer, such as La Meri, performing throughout the world her renditions of dances from a variety of cultures. All of these examples (and countless others) exist in actuality. The question of ownership or exclusive right to a tradition is a difficult one, and I think it is relevant to the reconstruction of historical material from the past of one’s own heritage as well as to the presentation of art forms from a culture outside of one’s own. One can also ask, in light of the effects of globalization and technology, “What is mine, and what is yours?” And, on which criteria can one determine that? One could postulate that it is acceptable to step into someone else’s cultural practice as long as the member(s) of the culture do not object and the “intruder” treats the material with respect and honors its traditions. But what does that mean? Trying to perform a dance or piece of music exactly like the original? And what is an exact reproduction? Especially if the work is in a tradition that includes improvisation? Or, if it is traditionally done in a particular context, such as a temple, and is to be restaged in another context, such as a Western auditorium? Theater historian Julie Stone Peters has addressed the topic of cultural “ownership” in her 1995 article, “Intercultural Performance, Theatre Anthropology, and the Imperialist Critique: Identities, Inheritances, and Neo-​Orthodoxies” asking: Who owns a culture? Who inherits it …? Nobody, of course. For when one inherits, one inherits a global connective web, a web not concentric or symmetrical, but connected in all its parts …, a web which one is meant, indeed bound, to reweave … [C]‌ultural representations, unlike either beads or land, can be borrowed without anyone missing them or attempting to retrieve them at gunpoint. They have the grace (like human beings) to be fruitful and multiply … and to transform themselves in the process (210–​11).

That seems an excellent response to the question of the “ownership” of cultural practices. During my life, I have maintained my own involvement with Spanish dance, expanded my knowledge of Asian dance forms, and spent many years studying, teaching, and performing dances of the Balkan areas. From time to time, the question of authenticity has been raised—​by a fellow recreational folk dancer playing the “more-​authentic-​than-​ thou” game, by an audience member offended by the theatrical presentation of “folk dance,” and by serious teachers committed to imparting as truthfully and fully as possible the dance art of one culture to students of another. However, since the very concept has so many interpretations, one person’s authenticity may be another’s abomination. Sarah Rubidge, specialist in choreography and new media forms, and a prolific writer on dance, provides a useful discussion of conceptions of authenticity in relation to the presentation of historical material in the performing arts. She writes: The notion of authenticity harbors two problematic concepts, that of authenticity itself and that of the “work.” The description “authentic” tends to be applied

La Meri   451 (or not) to revivals of previously performed works of music, theatre or dance. Designating a performance as “authentic” is the outcome of a kind of judgment, one which constitutes a “just recognition” of the work that performance purports to re-​ present. Authentictiy is therefore not a property of but something we ascribe to a performance (219).

The beauty of this statement is that it recognizes that authenticity is not an absolute, but rather a concept that may be understood and used in different ways. Two aspects of her discussion of the reconstruction of early music are particularly useful in addressing the work of La Meri. In the first, Rubidge notes that an accurate rendition of the dance or music being recreated requires mastery of “the grammar and syntax of the stylistic language” (William Crutchfield quoted in Rubidge 224). In the second, she cites musicologist Robert Morgan’s belief that ancient music cannot really be recreated because it is not possible (in Morgan’s words) “to re-​establish that fundamental, inimitable psychological and physiological relationship of the [original] performer to a language that he has not learned, but absorbed unconsciously” (quoted in Rubidge 225). Thinking of a performance genre as a language is useful. And in learning a verbal or nonverbal language from outside a culture, we, of course, do lack the experience of absorbing it unconsciously with all that that implies. Nonetheless, many people in the world do take on the learning of verbal languages as cultural outsiders, and some become fluent in one or more. One may ask if it is not equally possible to become fluent in a foreign nonverbal language. La Meri certainly thought so and devoted her life to investigating ways to do that. One would expect, however, that her dances from around the world would have had a certain amount of “Western” accent. They were, of course, typically performed on Western proscenium stages, which in itself creates an ambience and a purpose that differs from those of the dances in their original settings. As La Meri’s career progressed from the 1920s and into the 1940s, she apparently became more interested in questions of authenticity; and after having settled in New York City where she began serious teaching, she became increasingly committed to finding effective pedagogical methods for bringing her students into some kind of honest relationship with the material. Of course, they could not experience any of it as native practitioners would, but by learning as much as possible about the cultural contexts as well as the dance techniques, the students could at least develop some depth in their understanding of the arts they were studying and a commitment to practicing them as honestly as La Meri did. In the 1950s, while studying and performing Spanish and East Indian dance under the direction of La Meri, her sister Lilian, and her partner Peter di Falco, I met two individuals from those cultures who expressed very different attitudes toward my activity. A man from India was delighted that I was studying bharatanatyam, a dance art of his culture. A man from Spain disdainfully remarked that I might play around with Spanish dance, but lacking Spanish blood, I had no possibility of mastering it, and he seemed almost offended that I would try. And yet, today, Spanish dance, particularly flamenco, has become popular around the world—​not only in the United States, but also in Asia

452   Nancy Lee Ruyter (particularly Japan), South Africa, Europe, Australia, and other places. Bharatanatyam is also practiced globally, as are the Brazilian capoiera, many genres of dance from Africa, Middle Eastern dance, and other traditions of dance, music, and theater. We also now see more fusions of traditions from two or more cultures in all of the performing arts. So questions of authenticity will continue to be discussed with strong opinions ranging from total opposition to any change from the traditional (if agreement can be found for exactly what that is in each case) to support for the sharing of cultural traditions and experimentation with them. To conclude, it is clear that La Meri’s entire life’s work was based on what today some might criticize as a questionable appropriation of dance material from cultures not her own. During most of her career, however, the theoretical and ethical questions that are now being asked about such practices were not even considered. Reviews and articles praised her for the beauty of her performances and for giving visibility and recognition to treasures from unfamiliar cultures. Even though she lacked sophisticated academic education, she was concerned with investigating and developing theoretical principles for the performance and teaching of foreign dance material. And while she did not anguish over the meaning of “authenticity,” she carefully defined various ways of presenting the foreign material in terms of how close or far such presentation would be from the source. To what extent she managed to master, perform, and teach any of the arts she worked with is something that could be investigated. In my personal experience, I have not found discrepancies between what I learned from her and what I have been taught by native Spanish or Indian teachers. My conclusion is that she was unusual in having the ability to become fluent in a number of nonverbal languages with often very little intensive training in them. I believe she served an important function for her time—​to introduce dances of the world to the world, thus broadening cultural experiences and understanding for all.

Note 1. This was one of the themes of the 23rd Symposium of the International Council for Traditional Music Study Group on Ethnochoreology held in Monghidoro, Italy, in 2004. Proceedings published in Zagreb, Croatia:  Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 2008.

Sources Archival Hughes, Russell Meriwether (La Meri). Archival materials in the Dance Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; and in the San Antonio Public Library

La Meri   453

La Meri’s Writings La Meri (Russell, Meriwether Hughes).(1977a) Dance Out the Answer: An Autobiography. New York: Dekker. La Meri (Russell, Meriwether Hughes). (1977b). Total Education in Ethnic Dance. New York: Dekker.

Other Sources Bode, Rudolf. (1931). Expression Gymnastics. Trans. from German by Sonya Forthal and Elizabeth Waterman. New  York:  A.S. Barnes. (From Ausdrucksgymnastik. Munich: Beck, 1925.) Bose, Mandakranta. (1998). “Gender and Performance:  Classical Indian Dancing,” in Goodman, 251–​254. Campbell, Patrick, ed. Analyzing performance:  A  critical reader. Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1996. Dallal, Alberto. (1986). La danza en México. México:  Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Dallal, Alberto. (1997) La danza en México en el siglo XX. México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (first published 1994). Gainor, J. Ellen, ed. (1995). Imperialism and Theatre:  Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance. London and New York: Routledge. “The Genius of La Meri.” (1936). Table Talk (Melbourne, Australia. 6/​25):12. “Off Stage Impressions” (interview with La Meri); “Opening Performances” (review of King’s Theatre performances). Goodman, Lizbeth, ed. with Jane de Gay. (1998). The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance. London and New York: Routledge. Hanna, Judith Lynne. (1993). “Classical Indian Dance and Women’s Status” in Thomas, 119–​135. Kealiinohomoku, Joann W. “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance,” Impulse (1969–​70); reprinted in Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, eds. What Is Dance? Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 533–​549. Lavalle, Josefina. (2002). “Anna Pavlova y el jarabe tapatío” in La danza en México: Visiones de cinco siglos, Vol. 1 of Ensayos Históricos y Analíticos. Maya Ramos Smith and Patricia Cardona Lang, eds. México: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes/​CENIDI-​Danza, pp. 635–​650. Peters, Julia Stone. (1995). “Intercultural Performance, Theatre Anthropology and the Imperialist Critique: Identities, Inheritances, and Neo-Orthodoxies” in Gainor, 199–213. Rubidge, Sarah. (1996). “Does authenticity matter? The case for and against authenticity in the performing arts.” In Campbell, pp. 219–​233. Ruyter, Nancy Lee. (2000). “La Meri and the World of Dance.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, Núm. 77. Terry, Walter. (1940). “La Meri Offers Berkshire Hills Dance Recital,” New York Herald Tribune (July 21). Thomas, Helen, ed. (1993) Dance, Gender and Culture. New York: St. Martins Press. “Versatile Art of La Meri Captivates Audience Here.” (1940). Middletown Times Herald (1/​13)

Chapter 20

Choreo gra ph i ng I ntercu ltu ra l i sm International Dance Performance at the American Museum of Natural History, 1943–​1952 Rebekah J. Kowal

In a letter dated July 30, 1943, Hazel Lockwood Muller, a staff member in the Department of Education at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City, asked her superior, Charles Russell, to allow her to produce “native dance programs” in connection with the museum’s existing “native music programs” (Postal 1952, 18). Several years earlier Russell had asked Muller, a recent college graduate with a background in music, to “build a library of bird songs, animal cries and ethnic music, the bulk of it recorded in the field by various expeditions” (Postal 1952, 18; Bio File, AMNH Archives). Raising funds from the Carnegie Corporation, with Muller’s help Russell compiled this library and began broadcasting its contents over the public address system in what had been “traditionally quiet halls and exhibits of the Museum” (Postal 1952, 17).1 There were twelve halls, each of which depicted multiple-​habitat dioramas intended to promote a visitor’s flight of fancy to the distant reaches of the world. Realistic representations of animal “habitat, behavior, ecology, and environmental issues and concerns” (Quinn 2006, 15), dioramas were not only main attractions of the AMNH in 1943 but also had been central to the institution’s efforts to develop its particular approach to science education (10). Between 1920 and 1950 the museum “dramatically surpassed other natural history museums of similar size and endowment in the quality and quantity of dioramic production” (18). According to Julius Postal, who worked with Muller and Russell, the latter “reasoned that lions, tigers, bears, and humming birds make sounds in nature. American Indians, Australian aborigines, African tribes all have languages of their own and make music” (1952, 18; see also Muller Papers, file 103-​12). From the perspective of a contemporary reader, Russell’s assumption that there was any connection between animal noises and the music of indigenous groups seems racist

Choreographing Interculturalism   455 or culturally ignorant at the very least. However from an educational standpoint relative to his historical moment, Russell’s motivation to achieve heightened verisimilitude supports an assumption current with contemporaneous curatorial best practice: the more lifelike its exhibition halls, the better the museum would educate its visitors. Stating in her July 30, 1943, letter that Russell had thought the idea of live dance in the hall “undesirable” when she had proposed it three years earlier, Muller urged him to rethink. “I believe it would be a great addition to have the movement and rhythm of live dancers for part of the hour,” she reasoned. “I have had a number of dancers offer their serv[ic] es gratis” (Muller Papers, file 103-​33). From Postal’s vantage point, “somewhere along the line it occurred to Mrs. Muller that it was not enough to present merely the music of various tribes and peoples. All of them lived surrounded by a rich pattern of rituals and ceremonials in which the dance played a vital part” (1952, 18). If visitors were unlikely to ever travel to the far reaches of the world portrayed in the exhibition halls, they could still experience some of the cultural and sensorial aspects of these locales virtually, through dance performance. This chapter concentrates on the fruits of Muller’s labor, “Around the World with Dance and Song,” a dance program she directed at the AMNH between 1943 and 1952. “Growing literally out of a phonograph, a big loudspeaker and a collection of records” (Postal 1952, 17), the program presented material from forty-​four countries in approximately fourteen programs annually during its nearly ten-​year run. Initially performers danced in the museum’s monumental exhibition halls, surrounded by naturalistic habitat dioramas, then on a makeshift platform in the Education Hall. To accommodate the throngs of spectators in the first season, Muller moved the performances to the auditorium, thereby repurposing what had been a scholarly lecture hall and turning it into a concert stage. In spite of the limited stage space and minimal capacity for production values, the program had attracted nearly 160,000 viewers2 by the time the museum administration canceled it, citing cost overruns and believing that it had become too entertainment oriented. In both concept and intention, the dance program resonated with midcentury social, cultural, and political trends. In the museum world the program emerged during a period of significant reform prompted by Great Depression–​era economic egalitarianism and dwindling philanthropic resources. Amid concern that museums should play a vital role in the public’s humanitarian education, the program paralleled efforts by other museum administrations around New York City to make their public institutions more accessible and meaningful to the ordinary citizens who supported them with their tax dollars. In a larger cultural context, the AMNH’s staging of international dance performance in the city reflected debates about the meanings of intercultural exchange in a rapidly interconnecting and globalizing world. Marking the middle and end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War’s troubled peace, the series occurred during the period of America’s rising global prominence. New York City figured prominently in this era, supplanting war-​torn Paris as the “cultural capital of the world” and becoming the designated home of the United Nations headquarters, which opened in 1951. The site of, as well as a metaphor for, the heightened US presence on the world stage,

456   Rebekah J. Kowal the city symbolized the nation’s nascent internationalism following the Allied victory (Kowal 2010). Muller’s final assessment of the program’s aims and accomplishments drew directly on these internationalist themes: “The series has been of great service and encouragement to dance[r]‌s in the ethnic field and to newcomers from other countries in offering unusual opportunities to present their native art and folkways, thereby promoting international understanding and friendly goodwill between races and nations” (Muller Papers, file 103–​12). This chapter reveals the contradictory cultural politics within and surrounding the AMNH’s popular dance program, drawing on Muller’s vast archival repository, including notes, correspondence, contracts, programs, clippings, reviews, photographs, and recorded radio interviews, as well as administrative documents, concert programs, and press releases housed at the AMNH Archives. I argue that the program manifested midcentury cultural tensions surrounding the containment and integration of foreign others during a time when many Americans aspired to become citizens of the world. At times the program fulfilled majority expectations about foreign otherness, giving credence to public and political impulses to control and contain it. Yet Muller innovatively staged meaningful opportunities for public engagement with cultural difference, prompting productive interchange between artists and viewers alike and functioning, in Barbara Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett’s words, as “a place for finding ourselves” (2005, 8).

“A Panorama of Many Lands and Many People”3 The program began in 1943 on a shoestring, inaugurated by a performance of the hula in the Hawaiian Hall before an audience of 250 (Muller Papers, file 103-​12). Next Little Moose of the Chippewa tribe presented “dances of war and hunting, as well as stories in sign language” in the Northwest Indian Hall to a standing crowd of 500 (“Ethnologic Dance Series,” November 6, 1943, 16; see also Muller Papers, file 103-​12). At this point Muller’s vision was modest; she invited performers who lived in or near New York City and offered them a $100 honorarium for a performance. According to former museum staff member Postal, “The plan was to present a few dances here and there, without too much fuss or bother, in different Museum halls. The spectators were to sit on folding chairs spread out in a semi-​circle. In no time at all, there were standees. People’s heads got in the way and nobody could see a thing” (18). Postal also recalled that not long after the program’s first several performances, the museum built an “elaborate platform,” on which the performers could dance, to improve the audience’s sight lines while the performances still remained in the exhibition halls. Figure 20.1, a photograph taken of La Meri dancing on the platform in 1943, illustrates its limitations. Used “only two or three times,” however, the platform proved insufficient to meet overwhelming audience demand (18).4 It appears that for reasons of expediency, Muller relocated the performances to the museum’s auditorium within the program’s first season, where they remained until its

Choreographing Interculturalism   457

Figure 20.1  La Meri dancing La Pollera of Panama on a platform in the museum’s Education Hall in November 1943 Photo by Thane L. Bierwert. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Research Library—​Special Collections

termination in 1952. Though providing ample seating for 1,500 people, the auditorium had never been intended for live performance. Designed for the presentation of scholarly lectures and ethnographic films to the public, it was equipped only with a “small lecture platform and booth in the seating area for lantern slide projection,” offering performers a modest and shallow stage with little capacity for large groups or production values and no means of hiding the mechanics of choreography with staged entrances and exits. Figure 20.2, a photograph of Tommy Dorsey’s Dance Group taken in 1945, provides a sense of the stage’s foreshortened dimensions and limited production potential. With no curtain, dressing rooms, stage lighting, or sophisticated sound system, performers and their audiences had to modify their expectations accordingly (Muller Papers, file 103-​12; AMNH Archives, Box 506, Memo 1173, 1949).5 These limitations did not seem to dampen audience enthusiasm for the performances, however. Perhaps it helped that they were free. Regardless of the reason, so popular were the events with the public that it was not long before Muller was scheduling them twice a month during the fall and spring. For each program there were two performances, one in the afternoon for schoolchildren and the other at night for general audiences. A study of the dance calendar listings from the New York Times and the New York

458   Rebekah J. Kowal

Figure 20.2  Tommy Dorsey’s Dance Group appearing in 1945 in the museum’s auditorium Photo by E. Logan. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Research Library—​Special Collections

Herald Tribune between 1943 and 1952 indicates that there were other venues in the city where audiences could see “ethnic” or international dance performances, such as various Broadway and off-​Broadway theaters; the Central High School of Needle Trades; and organizations such as the East-​West Association, founded by humanitarian and author Pearl S. Buck. However, the AMNH series was notable for its diverse offerings and expansive definition of global dance. Muller hired both foreign and American-​born performers, artists whose work drew on one or more dance traditions. The program was so successful that in 1949 Muller converted it into a subscription series for its last three seasons, ostensibly organizing concerts around artists or groups whose work integrated traditional and new material or shed light on ethnic dance in innovative ways.

“Being Ourselves for You”: Performance as Living Diorama The program’s first performances were in line both with the museum’s preeminence in the field of the habitat diorama and with broader initiatives to make museum collections

Choreographing Interculturalism   459 more accessible and relevant to the general public. On the one hand, live dance enhanced the realism of the venerated halls; on the other hand, the performances attracted scores of interested visitors, thus inviting broader participation by the public while at the same time improving the museum’s educational program. Although Muller’s idea to stage live dance in the exhibition halls was new to the AMNH, it followed in a long-​standing tradition of “environmental display,” or the depiction of living specimens, including human beings, in their “native” habitats. A throwback to the age of imperialism, in which the presentation of human beings as specimens “served and benefited capitalism,” such exhibits positioned cultural others as exotic but subhuman natural resources, while at the same time elevating the white Westerners who exploited them (Greenhalgh 1988; Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett 1991; Ames 1992, 3). Common not only to museums but also to Western international exhibitions or world’s fairs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, displays such as these functioned “not only as vehicle[s]‌for merchandising but [as] occasion[s] for the celebration of imperial majesty and rule” (Stanley 1998, 23). Because of their reliance on public revenue to cover operating costs, by the early twentieth century museums became more egalitarian institutions than their commercial counterparts. But this did not put an end to the patronizing display of other cultures or cultural others. With their higher economic investment in public institutions like museums, members of the educated classes felt entitled to see collections that represented their worldview (Ames 1992, 21; see also Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett 1991; Stanley 1998). Stanley theorizes this type of representational economy in terms of “gratification,” or in other words, an exchange between museums and visitors characterized by pandering, which substitutes for meaningful exposure to the unknown that would cultivate knowledge and empathy. Limiting what museum goers might gain from a visit to an institution; gratification imposes even more significantly upon those peoples on display. Muller’s dance program walked a fine line between edification and entertainment. The exhibition halls functioned as “glass boxes” (Ames 1992, 3), defining and prescribing viewers’ reception of performers at the same time that they introduced the public to international dance forms. Situated in their supposed native surroundings, performers were set up to perform to type, to manifest the kinds of “rituals and ceremonials” that might be found in a particular place, region, or culture. Seen in terms of gratification, the settings of the exhibition halls limited the range of the first performers’ self-​definition and cultural expression. Performers became “living signs of themselves,” serving a metonymic function of indicating the totality of the culture of which they were part (Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett 1991, 388). Going further, their performances fed viewers’ fantasies about what they might have found had they happened upon the performers in what they presumed were their “natural” habitats (Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett 1991, 405). This is well illustrated in Figure 20.3, a photograph of Mrs. Witschi’s Swiss Dance Group performing in 1948 with a live goat. Inclusion of the goat added to the group’s presentation of its own “authenticity” by heightened viewers’ impressions of the performers’ otherness, i.e. the pastoral nature of the performers’ existence as compared to the urban experiences of audience members.

460   Rebekah J. Kowal

Figure  20.3  Mrs. Witschi’s Swiss Dance Group (including a goat) appearing in 1948 in the museum’s auditorium Photo by Alex J. Rota. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Research Library—​Special Collections

In spite of the propensity for audience gratification in these circumstances, scholars have limned the complexities within them, highlighting paradoxes related to humanization. Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett, for one, sees complications in the curatorial/​scientific “notion that native life was inherently dramatic” (1991, 406). In some situations the performances of peoples on display, namely “the ability of natives to perform, and particularly to mime, was taken by some viewers as evidence of their humanity” (406). Their performances, albeit unwittingly, inspired audience empathy as well as superiority. Ames argues similarly: “What some call appropriation, other see as inspiration; while some view glass boxes as a form of cultural imprisonment, others see them as a way of preserving heritage for future generations; and what some call the channeling of consciousness, others term consciousness-​raising” (1992, 4). In making these

Choreographing Interculturalism   461 juxtapositions, Ames proposes terms by which we might reassess what look like prima facie compromising situations from the points of view of performers and viewers. Such multidimensional accounts of the representational politics inherent in historic displays of human beings help to unpack the meanings of the first several dance performances at the AMNH, which took place in the exhibition halls. Unlike the performances staged in the auditorium, these events were consistent with the museum’s historic pursuit of environmental realism. They fulfilled the contemporaneous public mandate to involve and serve more ordinary visitors by luring throngs seeking free and exotic entertainment, if not an introduction to indigenous dance practices. Seen through the lens of gratification, it is likely that these stagings encouraged audience feelings of cultural entitlement and presumptions about the performers’ cultural differences, both of which led to the performers’ spectacularization. Worse, these communicative mechanics furthered the cultural essentialism that underwrote the American public’s isolationist impulses leading up to World War II, evidenced, for example, by reluctance to intervene in the Nazi’s “ethnic cleansing” in Europe. The condoning of these approaches to cultural otherness also paved the way for the postwar ideology of communist containment, a campaign against difference in both foreign and domestic theaters. Going far beyond the suggestion of life afforded by the poised animal specimens, however, the very fact of the dancers moving underlined how outmoded the halls’ contrivances, as well as the ideologies that had underwritten them, had become. Is it possible, following Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett, that these presentations of traditional dance and ceremony as dramatic might have led to the viewers’ humanizing the performers even as they deemed themselves superior? Or, following Ames, might the use of dance as kinesthetic supplementation have made the exhibits more meaningful to some visitors in their creation of common lines of identification through performative communication? New York Times dance critic John Martin had famously called this “kinesthetic empathy,” or a compassion that was shared between performers and audiences in corporeal recognition of their common embodied condition.6 Contemporaneous notions about the universalism of the dance medium, built on this idea of kinesthetic empathy, also support such an interpretation. Seen as a common human denominator, dance was thought be many to be a cultural bridge that allowed people to transcend what were seen as superficial differences (e.g., nation, race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender).

The Intercultural Benefits of Armchair Travel Similarly, Muller believed that live performers added dimension to otherwise inanimate exhibits and helped prompt meaningful interactions with museum visitors to support mutual understanding, appreciation, and even empathy. What had at first appeared to be a strategy to attract larger and more diverse audiences to the museum, with the lure of

462   Rebekah J. Kowal exotic dancing in the celebrated exhibition halls, soon became an effective vehicle for promoting what Christina Klein has called the “global imaginary of integration” (2003, 23).7 A  “structure of feeling” characteristic of the postwar and early Cold War years, it prompted Americans to “look outward.” “Directed to the world beyond the nation’s borders, it represented the Cold War as an opportunity to forge intellectual and emotional bonds with the people of Asia and Africa” (quoted in Klein 2003, 23; see also Kowal 2010, 34). Although it appears, based on early accounts such as Postal’s, that Muller did not bill her dance program in these terms, a wide variety of evidence reveals how, guided by Muller’s vision and leadership, the program assumed and sustained integrationism’s discursive and metaphorical dimensions. Begun in the wartime climate of populist patriotism and fiduciary oversight, eventually the dance program advanced a more internationalist postwar agenda. Review of archival materials suggests this agenda tracked with the program’s two phases: 1943–​1948 and 1949–​1952. Phase one began with the program’s inception and continued throughout its offerings of free performances; phase two began with the inauguration of the subscription series and ended with the program’s termination. Throughout the program’s duration, the museum’s commitment to public education through exposure to foreign dance forms and cultures and interaction with global dance artists remained paramount. So did the conception of the series as a virtual world travelogue, in which audience members could be transported to nether regions of the globe through their engagement with live performance of foreign material. What changed, however, were the ways in which Muller, museum public relations administrators, dance writers and critics, and audience members harnessed these objectives to the cause of integrationism to make meaning of the program. During phase one the pragmatic relocation of performances from the exhibition halls to the institution’s auditorium shifted the museum’s treatment of ethnic dance from specimen to artistic practice. The marketing and framing of the program, through press releases, concert program copy, and programming, maintained vestiges of historic, and more exploitative, approaches to museum display of human beings. Employing an analogy of exotic travel both to entice visitors and to describe the viewing conditions inside the theater, the museum figured relationships between audience members and performers in touristic rather than artistic terms. For example, a December 1948 press release announcing the inauguration of the subscription series harnessed the theme of world travel as an enticement to purchase season tickets, referring to past programs thus: “Leading artists and dance groups in picturesque and authentic costumes have transplanted thousands of delighted dance lovers to far-​away lands through colorful dances and music, ranging from the exotic rhythms of the East to the vigorous and ex[c]‌iting arts of the Western world” (AMNH Archives). As Anthony Shay has argued, in a context such as this it is possible to take the word “exotic” to “connote the positive aspect of an ex[c]iting, unknown, and foreign quality of an object, person, or a dance” (2008, 5). But it is also true that entreaties to the exotic, when applied to the foreign or the other, mobilize political economies of spectatorship and display that imply touristic relations

Choreographing Interculturalism   463 between those who are exhibited, or the cultures they are meant to stand for, and those who view or watch. Early programming in the auditorium also supported the travelogue concept as a vehicle for the education of the public about foreign peoples and customs. Between 1944 and 1948, for example, Le Meri (born Russell Meriwether Hughes) appeared at least nine times. Widely recognized at the time as a foremost authority on ethnologic dance theory and practice, she specialized in the dances of India and Spain, although she also presented all-​international concerts. As a collection of concert programs indicates, La Meri presented a series of diverse programs during this period, assisted by the Natya Dancers,8 including “Dances of India,” “Dances of the Orient” (China, Burma, Japan, Ceylon, Java, and Morocco), “Dances of Spain and Latin America” (Venezuela, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Andalusia, and Philippines), “Old and New Dances of Many Lands” (South India, Arabia, Spain, Polynesia), “Dances from India to Cathay” (India, Japan, China), and “Dances of Many Lands” (India, Japan, Burma, Peru, Hawaii, Spain). Under the travelogue theme, early concerts typically covered entire regions of the world within one program. Muller enlisted other artists, such as La Meri, who worked in this vein.9 Taken together, performances such as the one illustrated in Figure 20.4 might have amounted to a world tour as represented by

Figure 20.4  La Meri dancing the WachtiTunsui Dance of Arrow of Peru on a platform in the museum’s Education Hall Photo by Thane L. Bierwert. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Research Library—​Special Collections

464   Rebekah J. Kowal the accumulated program content and countries portrayed. Neatly packaged cultural samplers, they facilitated audience engagement with foreignness, promoting the idea that such public education would make the world a smaller and more manageable place. There were exceptions to this approach to program conceptualization, however, and these cases laid the groundwork for later iterations of integrationism through applications of dance universalism. Elsewhere I have articulated the contradictory cultural politics that surrounded the midcentury ideology of universalism, both as it operated in dance and in culture more broadly speaking (Kowal 2010). Emerging as a dominant ideology in the United States at midcentury in cultural and political arenas, and embraced by a diverse group of dance artists, universalism, as applied to dance and movement practices, was a paradox. Universalists saw movement as a human common denominator and accordingly considered dance a form of communication that could transcend differences of race, ethnicity, nation, language, religion, and class. Seen in this light, universalism could provide a rationale for the approaches of high modernists such as Graham and Limon as well as for other artists who sought to adapt traditional or vernacular movement practices or culturally contextual situations for the stage, such as Katherine Dunham. All could appeal to universalist ideals in arguing for the humanistic relevance of their work. And yet even though artists of diverse cultural heritage and aesthetic predilection could use universalism to argue for the humanistic relevance of their creative work, when applied by members of the dance mainstream such as dance critics, patrons, and institutional stalwarts, universalism maintained ethnocentric biases (white, Western, Christian, heterosexual). Such double standards imposed through the culturally contextual ideology of universalism had a marked impact not only on what was produced by established artists who dominated the concert field, but also on work created by artists on the margins—artists of color, homosexuals, or others who sought to make an aesthetic, and thus ideological, departure from the norm (Kowal 2010). La Meri’s 1945 program, “Theater Stylizations of Folk-​Dances,” is emblematic of a universalist approach to ethnologic dance. Showcasing excerpts of works in progress that “adapted … steps of typical folk-​dances to theatre-​dance,” the program resonated with universalism in its prerogative to stage “three original ballets”10 “based on the technique of typical racial dance forms” (AMNH Archives, May 12, 1945), including Swan Lake, set to music by Peter Tchaikovsky. Calling this work an “east-​west experiment,” the program indicated that “the ballet is in evolution and needs new material, new approaches and new angles.” La Meri’s adaptations of non-​Western dance material for the Western theater embodied the ways in which midcentury applications of dance universalism could support integrationist ideologies. Though she feared that balletomanes would think it “blasphemous,” she likened the work to a thought experiment. This was a “new visualization” of a Western story imagined by a “Hindu child,” populated by familiar characters expressing the tale in culturally consistent ways—​through song, dance, and gesture (1977, 48). While La Meri furthered the convention of the travelogue in her multicultural

Choreographing Interculturalism   465 programs, Swan Lake and the other crossover works epitomize her developing notions of kinesthetic empathy, specifically her use of performance to enable domestic audiences to see the world from a foreigner’s point of view. La Meri’s universalism is evidenced in several ways: in the prerogative she exercised in appropriating material from several Indian classical dance forms for the purposes of her artistic experiment, in the process subsuming their specificity to the demands of the overarching narrative; in her disassociation of necessary elements (characters, movement, gesture, song) from their aesthetic, cultural, philosophical, and spiritual moorings within these forms; and in using her knowledge of Eastern dance forms to assert Western aesthetic and cultural values, even as she sought to promote Indian classical dance as being equal to ballet as a “complete” form. Muller’s programming at this time also made manifest these ideas. In 1946 she began to branch out, featuring both performers who perpetuated the travelogue theme and those whose work traversed in interesting ways dance territories identified with “ethnic” or “concert” categories. One example is the joint performance on May 2 by Pearl Primus and Hadassah, both choreographer-​performers, of “Dance:  The Universal Language” (AMNH Archives). In more or less alternating fashion, Primus appeared in works drawn from Afro-​diasporic traditions in Western and Central Africa and the Caribbean, and Hadassah in those stemming from the East, largely India, Java, and Bali. The program also included a “dance conversation” with drummers Alfonse Cimber and Norman Coker. Although the Primus/​Hadassah concert included material that would have been typical of a travelogue-​inspired program, it diverged in its framing of that material under the universalist banner and in the common conviction among the artists and sponsor that the performance could bridge cultural differences of region, nation, or even race through the common medium of the human body. Correspondence in 1945 between Muller and Primus about this concert introduces universalism as an added dimension to the world travelogue theme, illustrating the ways in which the ideologies of integrationism and universalism began to dovetail at the war’s end. Requesting that the Trinidadian-​born Primus share a fall program with the Israeli-​born Hadassah, Muller wrote on July 5: “I am sure that you will find the response of the Museum audience gratifying.” She continued: “We do feel that we can, through presentations of living art forms, reach a large public, and help along the great work of bringing all nations and races nearer together through increased appreciation and understanding of intercultural interests” (Muller Papers, file 103-​63, emphasis added). Muller appeals to Primus with a promise that the artist would be “gratified” by the response of the museum audience to her and Hadassah’s work. She claims that “through the presentation of living art forms,” such as dance, the program might advance the integrationist work of “bringing all nations and races nearer together.” Muller’s logic is underwritten by assumptions about the interdependence of universalism and integrationism, namely the notion that dance, as a common denominator, might foster “increased appreciation and understanding of intercultural interests.”

466   Rebekah J. Kowal Muller’s comments to Primus imply that universalism could be put to the service of artistic innovation in the area of world dance performance, just as it had been essential to the advancement of dance modernism at midcentury. Likewise, based on her confirmation letter of August 1, 1945, Primus saw artistic leverage in the production of her work at this venue, exclaiming: “I believe that we are all agreed that the title for the performance will be ‘Dance—​The Universal Language … with a subtitle (The Orient, Africa and Haiti)—​Hadassah and Pearl Primus and Company’ ” (Muller Papers, file 103-​63). Ironically for Primus, a Trinidadian America, as well as for other artists typically defined in ethnic terms elsewhere, the AMNH dance series afforded them cultural authority and artistic license that they could not find on the contemporaneous concert stage. The concert dance stage forced Primus to define herself in terms of “Negro Dance” (Manning 2004, 175–​177; Kowal 2010). However, in the context of the AMNH dance series, she felt comfortable exercising her artistic and political prerogative under the banner of cultural universalism. The city’s critics rarely reviewed performances in the dance program. When they did address the phenomenon of ethnologic dance, they appealed to correlations between dance universalism and intercultural integration or understanding. This is apparent in a February 23, 1947, article by Walter Terry, in which he noted a “trend, not total but partial, toward the use by young dancers-​choreographers of ethnologic and sectional material,” evinced by choreographers such as La Meri, Primus, and Hadassah. Tracing the use of “such material” to Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, he notes a break in this artistic lineage caused by the preoccupation of “many young modern dancers … with pure dance with topical theme, with the distillation of human behavior patterns or with characterization dance.” Mentioning Elizabeth Waters, Claude Marchant, Hadassah, Saki, and Cebyn Swajty Maufaunwy, Terry observes a renewal in “the translation and transformation of American folk dance themes and patterns into art—​or theater-​dance usage.” From a US standpoint, Terry’s article is puzzling in several ways, as he clearly omits many artists whose investigation of the overlap between ethnic and concert dance had persisted throughout the interwar years. They included, among others, Afro-​ diasporic–​based artists Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, and Asadata Dafora; Jewish-​based artists Benjamin Zamech, Dvora Lapson, and Pauline Koner; Japanese-​ based artists Michio Ito and Yeichi Nimura; and US-​folk-​based artists such as Sophie Maslow, Jane Dudley, and William Bales. These and other artists had pioneered what we might call crossover dance, performing before varied audiences in venues running the gamut from commercial, to community, to concert, and investigating the shared spaces between ethnic and concert dance. On the one hand, therefore, Terry’s article marks an “invisibilization” (Dixon-​Gottschild 1996) of activity that had been going on for years, which underlay the work of midcentury artists in the same vein. Nevertheless, this observation of a revitalization or trend appears also to mark a moment of realization, making visible what had been overlooked or unnoticed and underlining its contemporaneity. An article Terry published on October 5, 1947, about La Meri and her Exotic Ballet Company went further, claiming the importance of such crossover artistic activities.

Choreographing Interculturalism   467 “If it is our duty and our function to foster the continued creation and expansion of American dance, it is also our obligation and our privilege to acquaint ourselves with the dances of other peoples,” he asserted. “Our dance mirrors our characters and our characteristics and we may be sure that the dances of other nations perform a similar service in revealing something of the heart of a people.” Terry’s observations were in keeping both with dominant notions of dance modernism, as being an enterprise in which the dancer manifested in outward form that which was inner or interior, and with universalism. Not only could engagement with work by crossover artists like La Meri substitute for actual contact with foreign peoples through travel abroad, shedding valuable insight into the human condition, but it could also establish fertile ground for innovation in contemporary dance.

Internationalizing Universalism Terry’s 1947 article presaged the program’s heightened profile, evidenced in its reorganization as a subscription series, the museum’s efforts to build a theater suitable for concert dance performance, and increasingly mainstream press coverage of the program and the phenomenon of ethnic dance in general. In spite of significant production limitations in the auditorium, which previously had not significantly hampered the program’s success, Muller continued to expand and redefine the program, charging for tickets in 1949 and making it possible to purchase a subscription to attend all the events in a season. The release noted that this “includ[ed] an afternoon program especially adapted to children at 2 p.m., and an evening program given by the same artists at 8:30 p.m. for adults, on seven Thursdays from February 10 through May 5, 1949.” 11 In the second half of 1949 and in 1950, encouraged by the dance program’s success, the museum drew up plans and proposed financing for the construction of a “motion picture theatre and presentation house,” planning to convert its current auditorium into “exhibition space” (AMNH Archives, file 1173, August 18, 1949). As proposed, the new facility would include a stage house and dressing rooms, asbestos curtain, counterweight system, tracks, and additional draperies and furnishings. Muller’s implementation of ticket charges not only signaled changes she wanted to make in the program’s profile, it also raised expectations among museum administrators and audiences about its value, purpose, and potential for generating revenue. For example, in a document estimating attendance, admission fees, “cost of talent,” and net, based on twenty afternoon and twenty evening performances per year, charging $.80 and $1.25 for tickets, respectively, and with a total cost for talent of $12,000, the museum’s net revenue would be $29,000.12 According to a memo dated May 11, 1950, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses approved both an addition to the museum and the building of an auditorium to be designed by architect Frank Voorhees. The proposal still had to be approved by the Management Board, and subsequent meetings were scheduled among Moses, Frederick

468   Rebekah J. Kowal Trubee Davidson, the museum’s president, and Mayor William O’Dwyer (AMNH Archives). Articles published in the late 1940s heightened the public profile of the AMNH dance program by articulating both its centrality and innovations to the field of ethnic concert dance performance. A case in point is Maya Deren’s 1948 article “Ethnic Dance,” which appeared in the December issue of Mademoiselle magazine.13 Claiming that “as an art form, ethnic dance was almost entirely lost in the vast abyss between vaudeville and the archives” (109), Deren highlighted a shift in cultural attitudes about ethnic dance among dancers, critics, audiences, and scholars. Positioning the AMNH dance program on the cusp of this change, Deren elevated its presentation of ethic dance compared to those that reaffirmed demeaning cultural stereotypes or rarified it to the point of scholarly obscurity. “With the unassailable dignity of [the American Museum of Natural History] behind her, and acting in the name of scientifically objective educational principles, program director Hazel Lockwood Muller has shown lively courage in giving a hearing to the most exotic dancers from all parts of the world,” she argued (109). Similarly, a July 2, 1949, article by Terry identified Muller’s and the museum’s efforts as central to bringing ethnologic dance to the concert stage. He called “the museum’s fine auditorium” a “Mecca for the growing number of ethnologic dance artists who believe firmly in the theatrical as well as in the scholarly attributes of their art and who are not content with sporadic and expensive appearances in New York’s concert halls or with more frequent performances in their own little studios [or] miniature theaters.” He underlined that for both the audience, composed not of cult followers “but rather the general public,” and for the performers, the point was to “prove that [ethnologic] dance … is of general interest.” Terry went even further on August 28 when assessing the current state of the dance field, lauding modern dance not only for its “inexhaustible” “dramatic possibilities,” but also for its illustration of “new approaches to danced theater.” In the work of contemporary dance artists, he argued, “as the use of ethnologic dance develops, we are finding new artistic adventure, new points of contact with peoples of other lands and other heritages and new forms resulting from the application of ethnologic dance to American theatrical needs.” With the heightened profile of and expectations for the museum’s dance programs, enticement of audiences with the promise of armchair travel gave way to claims that the program facilitated cross-​cultural exchange and mutual understanding among diverse peoples. Along these lines, Muller advanced innovative approaches to concert programming that both recognized ethnic dance across a spectrum of proximal relations to the original and mined productive interplays among traditional or folk and concert dance practices. Although the spring season at the AMNH continued more or less in the same vein as before,14 beginning with the fall season Muller took a decidedly new tack. Programs “included not only the traditional dances of many peoples but also a number of new artistic dance forms created within the framework of ethnic styles.” The press release issued in September continued: “Mrs. Muller hopes to make it clear through these programs that strict adherence to traditional techniques does not limit dance creativeness, nor does it prevent artists from enlarging and molding certain ethnological

Choreographing Interculturalism   469 materials into interesting and varied new dance patterns” (AMNH Archives, concert programs).15 Space considerations prevent comprehensive treatment of this issue here, but it is important to point out that Muller’s approach to programming during this phase suggests that artistic treatment of native material did not have to break down along lines of the authentic and the inauthentic, or the actual and the romantic, or the recreative and the creative, as they often did and have done in critical and scholarly discussions of ethnic dance. It is likely that audiences noted differences in the approaches to Indian material, say from performers such as Sujata and Asoka, whose program included “several classical Hindu dances and two highly religious ritual dances from Tibet” (Kelly, October 23, 1949); to Uday Shankar, whose concert “encompassed the whole range of Hindu dance from the informal folk dances to the highly stylized Kathakali dance dramas” (Norton January 6, 1952); to La Meri, whose work varied between a more “straight” treatment of ethnologic material and the application of that material to the purposes of the Western concert theater; to Hadassah, “with her colorful new company in dances of the Orient and Near East” (Kelly, October 9, 1949); to St. Denis and Shawn, whose “romantic” approach to native material inspired their creative departures (Kelly, October 9, 1949).16 By availing themselves of this range of treatments of ethnic dance material, viewers could juxtapose, compare, and contrast. I argue that as a result, the cognitive tensions they might have perceived resulted in the extension and complication of the field in general, rather than in its attenuation. Muller’s expansion of the definition of ethologic dance went even further in 1951 and 1952, when she secured appearances by well-​known US concert dancers. The fall 1951 slate included dancers from the New York City Ballet in “Ethnic Sources in Ballet,” a program acknowledging “the tremendous debt that ballet dancers and choreographers owe to ethnic sources … in the first program of its kind presented anywhere.” Ruthanna Boris, former star in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, served as “artist supervisor,” and Doris Hering, critic from Dance Magazine, served as commentator.17 Billed as a “a capsule of the 2,000 years of the dance,” the concert “traced” “the origin of dance from its most primitive forms,” including “basic forms [such] as the round, the processional and the line.” In addition, it “illustrated” “classifications as folk, character and national,” and “encompassed” “various periods of the dance from the Romantic through Russian and European Folk and up to Modern Russian, the schools of Diaghilev and Balanchine, and the American dance” (Norton, December 30, 1951). Universalism was operative here in making the necessary translations between ballet and ethnic dance. In tracing ballet’s history back 2,000 years and using ballet to deconstruct all dance into its “basic forms,” the program attempted to establish common expressive and aesthetic ground across all dance practices, while at the same time asserting ballet’s position at their apogee. Beth Dean, a former US dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and in musicals, and her husband, Australian Victor Carell, handled their later concert in a dramatically different way. In “Aboriginal Dance” they presented a “unique group of dances” based on their extended (five-​year) research into “both the Maori culture of New Zealand and that of the

470   Rebekah J. Kowal Australian Aborigine” (Norton, March 23, 1952). It appears in this case that Dean’s and Carell’s work investigated productive intersections among dance modes and practices to produce original material drawn from both studio-​based and indigenous sources. Similarly, Muller raised the series’ professional profile with the appearances of celebrated foreign artists, such as Uday Shankar (India) and Sergio Franco (Mexico),18 and well-​known US modern dancers and companies. Among those from the United States were José Limón (Kelly, May 13, 1951) and Primus (Kelly, April 30, 1950; Norton, May 11, 1952) on the one hand, and Anna Sokolow, Jane Dudley, members of the Martha Graham Company (Pearl Lang, Erick Hawkins, and Bertram Ross), and Donald McKayle (Norton, April 13, 1952) on the other.19 Muller’s efforts to secure and direct Limón’s appearance, for example, reveal differing stakes for her than for the choreographer in conceptualizing his program. On December 8, 1950, the AMNH paid “Limón and company” an $800 advance for their performance in May of the following year, with the proviso that the museum would cover what were considered basics of any concert production. This included but was not limited to “a suitable theatre, hall or auditorium with a grand piano … well-​heated, lighted, clear and in good order, with a comfortable dressing room near the stage for the artists: to furnish all electricians and stage hands required” (Muller Papers, file 103-​56). On the same day Limón’s manager, Susan Pimsleur of Musical Artists, confirmed her understanding that they “would keep in mind that [Muller] desired as many Mexican works on the program as possible” and assured Muller “that upon Mr. Limón’s return from Mexico, he will have some new numbers to offer” (Muller Papers, file 103–​56). By March 1951, however, it appeared that rather than perform many Mexican works at the AMNH, Limón would present a standard repertory concert, including The Moor’s Pavane, Concert, Story of Mankind, and La Malinche (the only work pertaining to Mexico on the program). In a letter to Limón dated March 16, 1951 (Muller Papers, file 103-​56), Muller attempted to clarify what she believed was a discrepancy between her initial understanding with Pimsleur, that Limón would perform as many Mexican-​ inspired works as he could at the AMNH, and the program content Pimsleur sent her leading up to the company’s performance. Expressing her gratitude to the artist for coming, she asked for specific information about the works slated for performance, hoping to glean their “ethnic basis.” Politely, she mentioned a conversation Limón was purported to have had with Reginald Laubin and Gladys Laubin, who “have appeared many times on both our lecture and dance series,” about the “aim, character, etc.” of the program. Attempting to use this account of the conversation as leverage, she implied that there had been a misunderstanding between her and Pimsleur that Limón himself could correct. Although it is impossible to know exactly what transpired after this correspondence, it is certain that Limón chose not to alter the content of his museum program from the works indicated by Pimsleur. The differences between what each side of the production expected and what eventually occurred offer insight into the aesthetic and cultural politics within and outside of the AMNH. From the perspective of the AMNH, Limón’s booking and appearance reflect the developing professionalism of the series. Muller worked with Limón’s

Choreographing Interculturalism   471 manager, entering into a formal agreement through a third party, then negotiated in an attempt to ensure that the artist’s appearance would conform to her conceptualization of the dance program. One thing that may have diminished her leverage was the inadequacy of the museum’s auditorium and its inability to meet even the most rudimentary standards (e.g., stage in good order, nearby dressing rooms, stagehands, or any production elements involving technical staff/​electricians). Based on the decision by Limón or his manager (or both) that he would offer a standard repertory program rather than showcase the works that had been inspired by his research in Mexico, it is also likely that Muller’s conceptualization of her series as a showcase for ethnic dance somehow confined the artist. So he decided to avoid the ethnic numbers and offer the works his company would have performed on any other concert stage in the city. The press release announcing the performance, entitled “Theatre in Dance,” played up Limón’s connection to Mexico while deploying universalist rhetoric to forge meaningful connections between his work and ethnic dance. Calling him “the first male dancer of our era,” the release explained, “many of Mr. Limón’s dances are based on themes from folk legends and dramatic literature, but his main concern is the inner conflicts of man, the basic emotional experiences common to all men.” It elaborated: “To him, the function of the dance is to communicate emotional experience in terms of abstract movement. His works have included the legends and traditions of the people of Mexico, whose government has invited him to carry out important assignments in the field of the dance” (Kelly, May 13, 1951). Clearly the release established Limón’s relationship to Mexican culture through his role as a national emissary. It also traded on the universalist ideology inherent in his work, namely its basis in legends and literature as a means to translate “the basic emotional experiences common to all men” into “abstract movement,” thus illuminating once again the cultural interplay among universalism, integrationism, and ethnic dance at work in the AMNH’s dance series. It is important to observe at this juncture the differences between Primus’s and Limón’s relationships with Muller and the series. Without a doubt Primus, who appeared numerous times at the AMNH, including her first US performance after her return from Africa in 1950 and the series’ ultimate performance in May 1952, had much to gain from her association with the museum and appearances in its auditorium. As a dancer and trained anthropologist, the museum series provided her with a setting that legitimated her fieldwork and her research into modern dance performance. In fact, the end of the AMNH dance program coincided with Primus’s efforts, following her trip to Africa, to educate the public about myriad African dance ways (Kowal 2010). A press release announcing her presentation of “Dark Rhythms”20 established her in those terms. Calling Primus “an anthropologist as well as a dancer,” it announced her presentation of a “unique program of native African dance gathered from her extensive research and exploration in Western and Central Africa.” It continued: “Motivated by an interest in the cultural heritage of the American Negro, Miss Primus traveled from tribe to tribe in Africa studying and recording the music, ceremonial and social dances. By actively participating in their way of life she was able not only to learn the techniques of the tribal dances, but to obtain a better understanding of the religious and social forces

472   Rebekah J. Kowal that originally formed them.” This release indicates what was at stake for Primus, not only in appearing at the museum, a venue that legitimated her status as “both dancer and anthropologist,” but also in finding creative avenues for her expression of the “American Negro’s” experience that extended into the tribal cultures of Western and Central Africa. On the one hand, Primus appears to have had much to gain from her association with the museum’s dance program, which strengthened her artistic status under the banner of universalism. On the other hand, Limón’s presentation of a standard repertory program, grounded in the values of universalism as stated in the press release, gives the appearance that he avoided association with the program’s ethnic dance identity in ways that would bolster his artistic status by contrast.

Edification versus Entertainment In the spring of 1952 the museum canceled the dance program, citing “budgetary” overruns based on “hidden expenses” (Postal 1952, 17). Between 1949 and 1952 financial outlay for the series increased twofold, owing to more generous honoraria, as Muller competed for more high profile performers; increased overtime pay of museum staff who worked at the evening performances; and higher museum heating bills. Thus, even though profits grew almost tenfold from revenue generated by ticket sales, the net yield was only around $500.21 In its final spring season the series posted a small but symbolic loss. According to Postal, although all along Muller’s program had raised eyebrows among “many worthy people,” the budgetary shortfall appeared to free museum administrators to express their qualms about the program’s lost identity and lack of educational value. This became apparent to Muller as early as February 20 of that year when, anticipating the program’s termination, she penned a letter to Margaret Mead,22 asking for her support: I have recently been told that the Administration does not regard “Around the World with Dance and Song” as educational, but as mere entertainment and business, and that since the expenses exceed the income, they will probably discontinue the dances after the current season, ending in May. I would, therefore, appreciate having your opinion as to their educational and cultural value, aside [from] the financial problem. (Muller Papers, file 103–​17)

According to study of these sources, it appears that in the eyes of museum administrators, Muller had taken her concept too far, stripping it of its educational value as she struggled to make it a self-​sustaining entity. Almost accidentally, what had seemed like a reasonable extension of the museum’s public mission in 1943 now appeared to some to be working against it. Administrators questioned Muller’s decision to define the program in artistic terms, perhaps more comfortable with the idea of moving bodies as collateral information within an environmental display or performances framed

Choreographing Interculturalism   473 as living culture. Likewise, Muller had contributed to putting herself out of business in this very effort. In attempting to heighten the program’s profile, by charging for tickets and pursuing more well-​known and expensive talent, she had also raised audience expectations about the performances’ entertainment value. According to Postal, “As long as admission was free, the severe simplicity of the presentations could be praised by critics as happy circumstances that admirabl[y]‌set off the dancers and focused attention on them. The various small discomforts were cheerfully tolerated, even enjoyed as an inevitable and fitting part of the atmosphere” (1952, 19). In essentially making the AMNH a concert dance venue, however, Muller forced herself to compete for audiences who had other options and with agents and promoters for their most valued performers. Over time the program’s focus had changed, becoming less invested in the travelogue theme or enticements to the exotic and more in showcasing renowned artists whose work expanded conventional notions of ethnic or ethnologic dance. Perhaps this caused museum leaders to conclude that Muller had lost her commitment to public education through dance performance. They could not see beyond the high cost of maintaining the series or Muller’s substantial efforts to secure some of the world’s most celebrated performers, even if this did involve transactions through agents, heightened expectations of the venue, added fees for guests or visa sponsorship, or hyped press coverage. To them, this looked like “entertainment,” not education. Muller, however, had a different take on the program’s significance at its end. In an undated reflection she wrote “outlining [its] purpose,” she summed up her accomplishments and assessed the program’s four-​point purpose: “(a) To add a living glow to static Museum exhibits of world cultures in the galleries; (b.) To contribute, through the living arts of dance and music, toward international appreciation and good will and a realization of the worth of cultural values of other races and lands”;23 (c) to use the resources of the museum to promote and contribute to the education of young people, many of whom were drawn there for the first time to see dance performances; and (d) to promote the careers of dance performers whose “engagements were often secured through the Museum” (Muller Papers, file 103–​12). Beyond acknowledging the program’s stated, and original, educational mission, Muller’s reflection enumerates its additional accomplishments, including its engagement of new audiences. Importantly for our purposes in this chapter, this also included the perception and promotion of dance artists as cultural ambassadors and of dance performance as an embodied means of fostering understanding and goodwill among culturally diverse peoples. Her reflection also suggests her understanding that the performance opportunities she gave artists in the museum’s auditorium afforded them greater autonomy to present themselves and their material on their/​its own terms. This becomes apparent not only by comparison to the museum’s staging of the program in the exhibition halls and its treatment of ethnic dancers as specimens, but also through examination of artists’ experiences, such as that of Primus, whose performances at the museum legitimated her work in valuable ways that she found difficult to achieve in other contexts. Although I have not found evidence as complete or compelling with

474   Rebekah J. Kowal respect to other artists as that related to Primus, it is likely that others experienced similar benefits, even if traces of their experiences have been lost to the archive or are imperceptible to this historian.

Conclusion In reviewing the history of the program, it is clear that the museum’s framing of the performances significantly affected their audience reception and cultural meanings. Drawing on the centuries-​long legacy of cultural colonialism associated with the Western museum display of foreign peoples, early on the dance program helped lay a foundation for the postwar ideology of containment, giving credence to audiences’ perceptions of their cultural superiority in ways that promoted the containment of difference at home and abroad. The first live performances, staged in the museum’s celebrated exhibition halls, encouraged audiences’ perceptions of their cultural superiority in ways that were consistent with the Western legacy of human “specimen” display at venues such as world’s fairs and natural history museums. Once moved to the auditorium and reframed as “ethnic dance art,” however, performances were directed toward cultural integrationism (Klein 2003) and thus the humanization of foreign peoples and their ways of life. And yet though the change of venue shed new light on international dance and foreign bodies, well intentioned as it was, the museum’s second approach appealed to paradoxically flawed universalist notions about basic human commonality and equality. Seen, for example, in the light of government and public hesitation to intervene in the European Jewish genocide during World War II; to address ongoing domestic cultural patterns and practices of racial, ethnic, and sexual discrimination after the war; or to significantly reform US immigration policy until 1965, such glorifications of integrationism ring hollow. That said, as Muller continued to refine it, the program contributed to a redefining of ethnic dance at midcentury and mediated a cultural transition toward a heightened global, and even racial, consciousness. On an institutional level, it fulfilled midcentury mandates for municipal museum reform, meant to make public institutions more accessible and meaningful to ordinary tax-​paying citizens. 24 It also supported the prerogative of international dance artists to define their movement practices and products on their own cultural terms and moreover created viable, visible, and legitimate opportunities for their artistic expression on what became a de facto concert stage. On a cultural level, it balanced myriad postwar cultural tensions, between museums as sources of edification or entertainment, between containment and integration, between social construction and ethnic self-​representation, and between universalism and particularism. In spite of its relatively brief presence on the New York City concert dance scene, therefore, Muller’s program made considerable inroads into what we now enjoy as the field of world dance practice and performance.

Choreographing Interculturalism   475 Notes 1. To date I have not found any additional information about the museum’s music program in its archives, nor has the archival staff at the AMNH (Gregory Raml, e-​mail message to author, October 14, 2010). There are a few relevant clues in the Muller Papers, such as undated typed notes, “African Negro Music,” from Diedrich Hermann Westermann, ed., Africa: Journal of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (1928); a description of proposed recordings for the Music for African Hall, such as “Lions Roaring,” “African Xylophone” (recorded in the Belgian Congo by the Denis-​Roosevelt Expedition), “Sorcerer’s Song for Bringing Rain—​ Incantation,” and “Hippopotamus Roaring” (September 11, 1939); and notes on Natalie Curtis Burlin, Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent (1920). 2. This figure is an estimate provided by Muller in her papers, file 103–​112. 3. Kelly, February 20, 1949. 4. I have not found any information in Muller’s papers confirming use of a platform. 5. A 1949 memo examining the need for renovation confirms that museum administration never intended to use the auditorium as a theater, noting that “the outstanding faults of the Museum’s present auditorium represent the lack of basic requirements and facilities for a motion picture theatre and for stage presentations. It is used as such in a make shift manner at present. … [B]‌uilt in 1900 for use as a lecture hall, its only equipment [is] a small lecture platform and booth in the seating area for lantern slide projection … no improvements have been made since its construction” (AMNH Archives, Box 506, 1173). 6. For a discussion of Martin’s theory relative to empathy, see Foster (2010, 1–​2). 7. In Klein’s formulation, the “global imaginary of integration” contrasts with the “global imaginary of containment,” a corollary but contrasting sensibility she associates with postwar US culture. 8. Some of the dancers in the group were Mera Goorian, Gina, Lucille Peters, Juana, Carolyn Hector, Anna Mandal, Mera Goorian, and Aldo Cadena. Sometimes La Meri’s sister, Lillian Hughes, would serve as narrator (AMNH Archives, collected concert programs). 9. This included but was not limited to Tei Ko in “Dances of the Far East” (China, Bali, Siam, Korea, Burma, Cambodia, India, and Java), “Dances and Melodies of the Pacific” (the Philippines, Java, Hawaii, China, Bali, Japan, Samoa, Tahiti, and Korea), and “Dances of Japan and Korea”; Claude Marchant and Company in “Drums of Afro-​Cuba”; Tula in “Mexican Fiesta”; “A Group of Native Hawaiians” in “Ancient Hawaiian Culture”; Dvora Lapson in “Jewish Dance Through the Ages”; Pearl Primus in “Dark Rhythms” (Africa and Haiti); The American Folksay Group performing a “recital of American ‘work’ songs and folk dances”; Arthur Mahoney and Thalia Mara performing “Flamenco Dances”; John Watters’ Scottish Dancers and McKenna’s Irish Dancers in “Dances of Scotland and Ireland”; The Radishev Folk Dance Group in “Folk Dances and Music of the Soviet Republics” (Ukraine, Moldova, and Crimea); Mme Jeannine Dawson and the Dance Group of the French Folklore Society in “Regional Dances of France”; Dorothea Dix Lawson and Company and Margot Mayo and the American Folk Square Dance Group in “The U.S.A. in Song and Dance”; Devi Dja performing dances of Bali, Java, Sumatra, and Borneo; Juana in “Dance Ways from Spain to the Philippines”; The Norwegian Folk Dance Society and The Swedish Folk Dance Society in “Folk Dances of Norway and Sweden”; and Reginald Laubin and Gladys Laubin in “Arts and Dances of the American Indian” (the Lakota and Ottawa tribal groups) (AMNH Archives, collected concert programs). In

476   Rebekah J. Kowal listing these performances in this manner, I do not intend to claim that program titles suffice for detailed accounting of what happened during each of these events. Unfortunately, however, as I have not been able to find any moving images of any of the AMNH sponsored performances, and very few photographs, I am significantly limited in my capacity to present a description of what happened outside of the few accounts of the AMNH concerts provided in dance reviews. 10. The program also included Ea Mai Hawaiinuiakea (Legend of the Birth of the Islands), promoted as “the first full ballet to be created using the modern traditional hula technique as a vehicle,” and Iberia (music by Claude Debussy), in which La Meri adapted “traditional” Spanish dance to tell a story about an acculturated gypsy who longs for her former “simple” life. Gesture Songs or “American Songs interpreted thru classical Indian ‘hasta-​ mudras’ (hand gestures),” was another work in this ilk, which appeared on a program in 1948. 11. Tickets for individual performances cost $.74 for daytime and $1.80 for evening. A subscription to the afternoon performances cost $4.20, whereas for the evening performances it cost $8.40 (Kelly, December 1948). 12. According to the September 16, 1949, document, the estimate is “based on current experience with similar activities on a smaller scale in the old Auditorium and is believed to be conservative” (AMNH Archives). 13. Deren was a multimedia artist (dance and film) who had traveled to Haiti in 1947 to conduct fieldwork on Voudoun (Debouzek 1992). 14. First subscription season concerts included Korean Dance Troupe/​Taik Won Cho; Dvora Lapson and Company; Reginald Laubin and Gladys Laubin; Radischev Russian Folk Dance Group and Polyanka Ensemble; Lyda Alma and Yianni Fleury; Rita and Rozzino, and Josephina Garcia assisted by Renato and San Miguel; Josephine Premice/​Jean Destine and Group; and La Meri and company/​Juana (AMNH Archives, collected press releases). 15. Fall 1949 concerts included Ruth St. Denis/​Ted Shawn; Sujata and Asoka, who used “Hindu and Tibetan dance styles as the basis for [their] program of fascinating” dances; Dudley-​Maslow-​Bales Trio (“The Americas in Concert Dance”); Claude Marchant, in a “skillful modern interpretation of primitive rhythms” (December 6, 1949); Soekoro, Devi Wani, and Indonesian Troupe in dances of Bali, Java, and Sumatra, including two premiers (December 25, 1949); and Hadassah performing “signature works” in addition to “a number of new works in the Israeli, Indonesian and Hindu dance forms” (Kelly, “Creative Dances,” September 1949, unless otherwise noted). 16. Among the works St. Denis performed was Nautch, “a typical street dance of the nautch (street) girls of India,” claimed in the press release to be the “first nautch dance ever done in America.” 17. Dancers included Nora Kaye, Patricia Wilde, Herbert Bliss, and Frank Hobi. 18. Evidence suggests, but does not confirm, the museum’s sole visa sponsorship of Franco and his company. In a letter of December 4, 1950, Wayne M. Faunce, vice director and executive secretary, “certif[ies] that we have engaged the young Mexican dancer, Sergio Franco, and his group of Mexican dancers to appear here on January 11th, 1951 on our series of intercultural programs called ‘Around the World with Dance and Song.’ ” Faunce continues: “These programs are presented in the interest of international understanding a[nd] friendship, and have been most successful since 1942, when they were inaugurated. We should deeply appreciate your cooperation in facilitating the entrance into this country of Mr. Franco and his company, with their costumes, especially since Mr. Franco is

Choreographing Interculturalism   477 coming for the purpose of bringing the culture of Mexico to us, despite the small fee that we, as an educational institution, are able to pay him.” Although I have found no government documents in response to this request, based on evidence of a concert program, it is evident that Franco and his company were allowed to enter the United States for the artist’s “New York debut in a Museum concert” on January 11, 1950, drawn from ancient Aztec, Mayan, Zapotecan, Totonacan, and Tarascan dances. 19. This program, in which “Outstanding Modern Dancers Relate Modern Dance to Ethnic Forms,” included Sokolow in Retablo (Mexican); Kaddish and The Bride (Hebraic); Jane Dudley in Reel (premiere), Harmonica Breakdown, and Cante Flamenco; Martha Graham company members Pearl Lang, Erick Hawkins, and Bertram Ross in a revival of El Penitente; and Donald McKayle in Games. Doris Hering of Dance Magazine served as commentator (Norton, April 13, 1952). 20. “Dark Rhythms” included a number of dances from across Africa, for example, Impinyuza (Watusi), a “tribute to the invincibility and beauty of their monarch,” and Egbo-​Esakapade (Nigeria), a court dance. Drum Talk, Dance of Strength, and African Ceremonial were “based on authentic African dance forms recreated by Miss Primus” (May 11, 1952). 21. These figures are based on a tally kept by Muller entitled “Dance Program Finances.” On one sheet are income, expenses, profit, and loss for seasons held between spring 1949 and fall 1951 (Muller Papers, file 103-​118). On a separate sheet, headed “Spring 1952,” figures reveal lost revenue for the series: income $5,776.19, expenses $6,659.99, profit $1,966.66, and loss $328.35. 22. Mead was a cultural anthropologist, codirector with Gregory Bateson of the film Trance and Dance in Bali, and AMNH curator since 1926. 23. Muller’s idea continues thus: “As President Eisenhower has said, world neighborliness is the best prevention of future wars. And dance and music are universal languages, spring from the human hearts of all men. In the dances of people, we see their history, their physical environment reflected, events of their daily lives portrayed in beautiful movements and rhythms, their traditions, joys and sorrows, hopes and fears.” 24. Speaking to the first point, in a letter to Muller dated May 2, 1952, supporter Alexander Brooks opined on hearing of the museum’s termination of the program: “I need not tell you that your series has received a great deal of acclaim and recognition in the city of New York, as providing a remarkable contribution to our appreciation of cultural heritage of other countries. Indeed, I regard the dance series as being one of the most important contributions the American Museum of Natural History can make to the citizens of New York” (Muller Papers, file 103–​117).

Works Cited Ames, Michael. 1992. Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes:  The Anthropology of Museums. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press. “Administrative Files” pertaining to the “Around the World with Dance and Song” dance series, 1940–​1952. DeBouzek, Jeanette. 1992. “Maya Deren: A Portrait of an Artist as Ethnographer”. Women and Performance 5, no. 2: 7–​28. Deren, Maya. 1948. “Ethnic Dance”. Mademoiselle: 109–​10; 66: 69–​73.

478   Rebekah J. Kowal Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. 1996. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance:Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. “Ethnologic Dance Series:  First Recital Here Tuesday at the Museum of Natural History”, New York Times, November 6, 1943, 16. Foster, Susan Leigh. 2010. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. London and New York: Routledge. Greenhalgh, Paul. 1988. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–​1939. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. “Hazel Lockwood Muller Bio File”. American Museum of Natural History, n.d. “Hazel Lockwood Muller Papers”. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dance Collection. Hughes, Russell Meriwether. 1977. Dance out the Answer: An Autobiography. New York: M. Dekker. Kelly, Dana P. 1949. “Creative Dances on Ethnic Themes Featured in Museum’s Fall Series”. In Around the World with Dance and Song: The American Museum of Natural History. Kelly, Dana P. 1949. “Dances of Bali and Java Offered in Museum Series”. In Around the World with Dance and Song: American Museum of Natural History. Kelly, Dana P. 1948. “First Subscription Dance Series Begins at Natural History Museum”. In Around the World with Dance and Song, 1–​2: American Museum of Natural History. Kelly, Dana P.​1949. “Hindu and Tibetan Dance at Museum of Natural History”. In Around the World with Dance and Song: American Museum of Natural History. Kelly, Dana P. 1951. “Jose Limon and Dance Company to Perform at American Museum”. In Around the World with Dance and Song: American Museum of Natural History. Kelly, Dana P. 1950. “Pearl Primus Performs at American Museum”. In Around the World with Dance and Song: American Museum of Natural History. Kelly, Dana P. 1949. “Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn Open Museum Fall Dance Series”. In Around the World with Dance and Song: American Museum of Natural History. Kelly, Dana P. 1949. “Tropical Rhythms in Museum Dance Series”. In Around the World with Dance and Song: The American Museum of Natural History. Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett, Barbara. “From Ethnology to Heritage: The Role of the Museum”. Paper presented at the SIEF, Marseilles, April 24, 2004. Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett, Barbara. 1991. “Objects of Ethnography”. In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan and Steven D. Lavine Karp, 386–​443. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Klein, Christina. 2003. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kowal, Rebekah J. 2010. How to Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Manning, Susan. 2004. Modern Dance/​Negro Dance: Race in Motion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Norton, Ruth. 1952. “Beth Dean and Victor Carell Present Aboriginal Dance and Song Program at Museum”. In Around the World with Dance and Song:  American Museum of Natural History. Norton, Ruth. 1951. “New York City Ballet Interprets Ethnic Sources in Dance at Museum”. In Around the World with Dance and Song: American Museum of Natural History.

Choreographing Interculturalism   479 Norton, Ruth. 1952. “Outstanding Modern Dancers Relate Modern Dance to Ethnic Sources in American Museum Presentation”. In Around the World with Dance and Song: American Museum of Natural History. Norton, Ruth​. 1952. “Pearl Primus Presents ‘Dark Rhythms’ in American Museum Ethnic Dance Series”. In Around the World with Dance and Song: American Museum of Natural History. Norton, Ruth. 1952. “Uday Shankar and His Hindu Ballet Present ‘the Enchantment of India’ at Museum”. In Around the World with Dance and Song: American Museum of Natural History. Postal, Julius. “ ‘Around the World with Dance and Song’: The End of the Series Points Some Morals”. Dance Magazine, no. December (1952): 16–​19+. Quinn, Stephen Christopher. 2006. Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History. New York: Abrams, in Association with the American Museum of Natural History. Raml, Gregory. Electronic correspondence with the author on 14 October 2010. Shay, Anthony. 2008. Dancing Across Borders: American Fascination with Exotic Dance Forms. North Carolina: McFarland. Stanley, Nick. 1998. Being Ourselves for You: The Global Display of Cultures. London: Middlesex University Press. Terry, Walter. “The Dance World: Season of Modern Dance Expansion Experienced at New London Center”, New York Herald Tribune, August 28, 1949. Terry, Walter​. “The Dance: A Discussion of Its Recent Growth”, New York Herald Tribune, n.d. 1949. Terry, Walter. “Exotic Ballet Group Accents Global Values of Dance Art”, New York Herald Tribune, October 5, 1947. Terry, Walter​. “The Fearsome Ethnologic Dance”, New York Herald Tribune, 1948. Terry, Walter​. “Sectional, Ethnologic Sources Plumbed by Choreographers”, New York Herald Tribune, February 23, 1947.

Chapter 21

“Hot” L at i n Da nc e Ethnic Identity and Stereotype Juliet McMains

Twentieth-​century American social dance history is rife with Latin dance “crazes,” short-​lived periods of frenzied obsession with hip-​centric dances from Argentina, Cuba, or Brazil. For at least a century, starting with the tango craze of the 1910s and extending through the rumba, samba, and conga crazes of the 1930s into the mambo and cha cha crazes of the 1950s, past the lambada craze of the late 1980s, and onto the salsa craze at the turn of the millennium, Anglo-​Americans have practiced dances borrowed from their Latin American neighbors. Their popularity has been fueled by both fear and delight that fiery Latin rhythms propelling isolations of the pelvis and intertwining of the legs will unleash primordial passions and wild abandon even in stiff and stoic North Americans. Common assumptions about “hot” Latin dance are based on stereotypes of Latin Americans as passion-​driven sex vixens, whose physical and emotional impulses overpower their implicitly weaker and less developed rational intellectual reasoning. Although many people may scoff at the suggestion that dancing a few steps of the cha cha makes one complicit in racial/​ethnic stereotyping, it is impossible to deny the similarities between stereotypes of Latin dance and Latin people. I will argue that although few North Americans engage in Latin dance with racist intent, at times their participation in Latin dance reinforces harmful stereotypes about Latin Americans. I will further argue, however, that these stereotypes can be weakened when Latinos for whom Latin dance plays a vital role in formation of their own ethnic identity share the dance floor with non-​Latinos. Drawing from oral history interviews I have conducted with over one hundred dancers, I introduce evidence from two specific moments in American history when these two groups shared the same social dance spaces: New York’s Palladium Ballroom in the 1950s and salsa as practiced at salsa congresses from 1997 to the present day.

“Hot” Latin Dance   481

Latino Stereotypes and the American Ballroom Dance Industry While general American interest in various Latin dances has waxed and waned throughout the twentieth century, Latin American immigrants to the United States have independently sustained their own practices of Latin dance. Within Latin American communities in the United States, Latin dance has most often functioned to foster and sustain community that both honors specific national Latin American cultural traditions and blurs them in the formation of a pan-​Latino ethnic identity. Thus, Latin dance for American Latinos has often served as a vital means through which to negotiate their ethnic identities. Such a function stands in stark contrast to the way in which Anglo-​ Americans have often viewed Latin dance, namely as an exotic curiosity, an erotic space of unbridled sexual desire, an alluring sojourn across boundaries of cultural and racial difference, or an escape from the routine of their ordinary lives. Granted, participation in Latin dance also has many overlapping functions for Latinos and non-​Latinos, including courtship, exercise, social contact, and creative expression, but the segregated practice of these dances exaggerates the points of difference. In addition to the radically different function it serves, the expression of Latin dance in Latino communities also departs drastically in form from the commercial American versions seen in Anglo communities. Latin dances as distributed in classes, books, and performances by the American ballroom dance industry throughout the twentieth century were similar to other ballroom dances in their reliance on a vertical posture, extended limbs, and codified steps, which allowed for little personal improvisation or evolution of the form. These Latin dances of the ballroom dance industry were distinguished from other ballroom dances primarily through a fetishized focus on movement of the hips. In contrast, hip movement was only one of the qualities that characterized the Latin dances as practiced in Latin American communities, where they were learned informally among family and friends. Dances in these contexts were often practiced with a flexible spine and flexed limbs held close to the body, and they relied on fluid improvisational structures that responded to changing musical priorities. Latin dance practiced in Latin communities was never constrained by a single style, step, or rhythmic interpretation; rather, it represented a constantly evolving personal and communal expression. The American ballroom dance industry, however, reduced each Latin dance to a fixed footstep pattern and rhythm, not only simplifying a complex and improvisational approach used in Latin communities, but also freezing the Latin dances at a single point in time. The primary force driving the modification of Latin dances for consumption in America was undoubtedly economic. Until very recently, social dance in Latin America was not taught in formal classes. People learned to dance the way they learned to speak or walk or cook—​watching and imitating people in their communities. Thus, little commerce occurred around sale of Latin dance in Latin America. When Latin dances were

482   Juliet McMains exported abroad, however, teaching and selling Latin dance became business. Working in the United States, Anglo and Latino dance teachers alike found it necessary to simplify and standardize Latin dances in order to maximize their marketability (Savigliano 1995; McMains 2006). So although the gross incongruity between Latin dance as practiced in Latin America and that sold in and by the American ballroom dance industry can be linked to the commercialization of the dances, I believe it was also enabled by, and fed back into, American stereotypes of Latin Americans. Chicano film scholar Charles Ramírez Berg’s description of racial and ethnic stereotypes as “rigidly applied, crude, oversimplified representations of a group” (Ramírez Berg 2002, 166) could just as aptly apply to the ballroom dance industry’s interpretation of Latin dance. Most Americans were willing to accept one-​dimensional static characterizations of Latin dances because they mirrored common representations of Latin Americans in flat, ahistorical, rigid generalizations. Furthermore, the broad generalizations about Latin dances used to market them to Anglo-​American consumers—​spicy, sensual dances of the lower body that unleash uncontrollable passion—​were the same stereotypes circulating in the United States about Latinos. Common stereotypes of Latinos and Latin Americans, including the positive (warm, friendly, passionate, sensual, good lovers, family-​oriented) and the negative (loud, dramatic, sexually uncontrollable, dangerous, criminal, uneducated, poor, macho), are based on assumptions that Latin emotional and physical impulses cannot be controlled or contained by reason or intellect. Given that dominant Anglo-​American culture privileges mind over body, these stereotypes served to justify not only North American superiority over Latin America, but also to reinforce ethnic hierarchies within the United States. Today, most Americans recognize the dangers of racial and ethnic stereotyping and may consciously strive to disrupt them. Few people, however, recognize that the image of hot Latin lovers entwined on the dance floor in a whirl of spicy turns and succulent dips is dependent on these harmful stereotypes of Latin Americans. Not only is this image of Latin dance dependent on stereotypes of Latin Americans, it is also intimately linked to Anglo-​Americans’ own sense of identity. Stereotypes function partly to enable an individual or a group to form a sense of self through contrast to others (Ramírez Berg 2002, 28). Thus, Anglo-​Americans who only shimmy their hips while dancing samba may be performing their distance from the stereotype of the sexual seductress they parody. Although it might seem paradoxical to suggest that Anglo-​Americans are establishing their own ethnic identity by participating in a dance borrowed from another culture, my argument is consistent with that made by other scholars. Cultural historian David Roediger has argued that Irish-​American minstrel actors and audiences in the nineteenth century were able to establish their own racial identity as white by assuring their distance from blackness in blackface minstrel performance (Roediger 1991, 117). Cultural critic Linda Mizejewski has likewise theorized that Ziegfeld Follies girls assured their own racial status as white by performing sexually provocative numbers in “café au lait” makeup (light-​skinned blackface), thereby signaling their own distance from the racially marked sexual stereotypes upon which their performances relied (Mizejewski, 1997, 11). I have argued elsewhere that tanning products

“Hot” Latin Dance   483 widely used in ballroom dance competitions enact a form of “brownface” in which caricatures of Latinos are performed partly as a means of establishing the performer’s own distance from the ethnic identity and accompanying stereotypes upon which it is based (McMains 2006).

Figure 21.1  The author and RadímLaník dancing competitive ballroom rumba at the Sarasota Spectacular in 2001. Photo by Alliance Consulting, photographer Gary Stephans.

484   Juliet McMains Although my theory of brownface focused specifically on the performance of Latin dance in DanceSport (ballroom dance competitions) in the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries, the concept can also be useful in thinking about American practice of Latin dance on social dance floors over the past hundred years. Although they rarely tint their skin a darker shade, such as do performers of minstrelsy, Ziegfeld Follies, or DanceSport, Anglo-​American practitioners of social Latin dance often don a metaphorical mask of otherness in order to execute movements that would be considered inappropriate from within their own cultural frame of reference. It might be said that many Anglo-​American Latin dancers throughout the twentieth century have engaged in “participatory minstrelsy,” a term coined by dance scholar Danielle Robinson to describe the way in which American immigrants in the 1910s earned membership in white mainstream society by participating in ragtime social dancing, which was at the time widely recognized as black (Robinson 2009, 90). I do not mean to suggest that affirming their own racial identity was necessarily a conscious or even a primary reason for Anglo-​Americans’ participation in Latin dance, but I do wish to point out that even for non-​Latinos, Latin dance is often linked to formation of one’s own ethnic identity. Although I  have focused on Anglo-​Americans in my discussion of non-​Latinos engaging in Latin dance, the same argument may also apply to members of other ethnic groups. For example, Chinese immigrants to the United States have practiced Latin dance for many decades, often in segregated clubs where they may dance to “Latin” music with Chinese lyrics.1 Such practices may serve both to distance Chinese immigrants from Latinos (whom they perceive to have a lower social status than they themselves aspire to achieve) and to enable them to strengthen their emerging Chinese-​ American ethnic identity through participation in a social activity that integrates aspects of Chinese and American culture. Thus, even Chinese participation in Latin dancing in America often depends on negative stereotypes of Latinos to strengthen the practitioners’ own contrasting ethnic identity. It might appear I am suggesting that all practices of Latin dance by non-​Latinos negatively impact Latinos. I actually hope to demonstrate, however, that when non-​Latinos approach Latin dance with the sincere intent of understanding and engaging with another culture, cross-​cultural dance practice can actually help to engender sensitivity to, and appreciation for, cultural difference. Writing in 1944 about the American fascination with Cuban dance, New York Times dance critic John Martin reflected on the potential of dance to enable Americans to empathize with the Cuban way of life. He wrote, We simply cannot practice such a movement without producing in ourselves at least a hint of the feeling that prompts the Cuban to move as he does. We are touching him on his most unrationalized level of experience, where his emotional life begins and many of his motivations unconsciously are formed.… Inevitably we emerge with a closer understanding of him (Martin 1944, 23).

By proposing that embodied engagement in the dance practices of another culture can help one better understand the deep emotional motivations of its people, Martin ascribes to dance a power that rivals strategies utilized by international diplomats. I agree with

“Hot” Latin Dance   485 Martin that an earnest attempt to understand and execute dances of another culture can result in profound discoveries not only of cultural differences but also of basic human similarities. The effort must, however, be based in actual engagement with another culture, not in mere flirtation or parody. John Martin further qualified his assertion, Sometimes, however, we miss the point altogether in these importations, as, for instance, when on finding that their unfamiliar movements elude us, we embarrassedly throw everything native about them and go our own provincial way. This not only renders the whole process valueless but makes some very dull dances besides.… The rumba is built so exclusively on a quite alien basic movement of the body that no one is likely ever to proclaim it easy for North Americans to do. It covers very little space, but confines its attention to a distinctive coordination of the hip and knee and shift of weight. Like the tango, if it is ever “adapted,” it will be destroyed (Martin 1944, 23, 38).

Not only does John Martin imply that American adaptation of the Argentine tango has already destroyed both the character of the dance and its value as a means of promoting cross-​cultural understanding, but he also foretells the same fate for the Cuban rumba. Martin’s prescient words did little to alter the course of American appropriation of Latin dance over the proceeding decades as the ballroom dance industry continued to Americanize tango, rumba, and numerous other Latin dances. When the adapted or, to borrow dance scholar Anthony Shay’s term, “tamed” (Shay 2008, 184) Latin dances showed signs of becoming the “very dull dances” John Martin foresaw, the American ballroom dance industry began incorporating ballet steps (e.g., pirouettes, tours en l’air, arabesques, attitudes, splits) into the Latin dances. Although the resulting hybrid ballet-​ Latin dances, now featured regularly on the hit television shows Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance, have brightened up the lackluster Americanized Latin dances with some show-​biz polish, they depart even further from the Latin American social dances for which they were named (McMains 2010). Not only do the representations of Latin dance circulating in the media and the ballroom dance industry employ radically different technique and vocabulary from that of Latin American social dance practices, they reinforce stereotypes of Latin-​ness in their exaggerated performance of sex and passion. In the ballroom dance industry’s choreographies of Latin, chest-​baring men taunt and tame feisty women, who alternately resist and succumb in swooning dips, their wide eyes and open mouths distorted into caricatures of sexual bliss. These gendered stereotypes of an untamable Latin temptress who is nonetheless controlled by a macho Latin man are furthered by the minimization of improvisation from ballroom Latin. Whereas almost all Latin dances in Latin America include space for improvisation on the part of each partner even within the context of a gendered lead-​follow structure, the American ballroom dance industry has virtually eliminated improvisation from its interpretation of Latin dance (McMains 2006). This reinterpretation of the gender roles in Latin dance reinforces common North American stereotypes that Latin American men are dominant and controlling and that Latin American women, although at times showing outward displays of rebellion, are ultimately submissive and complicit in this macho culture. In contrast to these troubling

486   Juliet McMains and widely visible media representations of Latin dance, some American practices of Latin dance invoke the kind of cross-​cultural engagement Martin envisioned. I will discuss two such examples of Latin dance practice in which Latin stereotypes have been challenged: mambo dancing at the Palladium Ballroom in the 1950s and twenty-​first-​ century salsa dancing linked to the salsa congress circuit.

Palladium Mambo Located on the corner of 53rd Street and Broadway in the heart of midtown Manhattan, the Palladium Ballroom began hosting Latin bands in 1947. It soon became one of New York’s chicest nightspots, regularly attracting movie stars such as Marlon Brando, Ava Gardner, and Sammy Davis Jr. Although celebrity presence may have helped to bolster the Palladium’s renown, the rich and famous came to gawk at the real stars of the Palladium—​mambo musicians and dancers. The Palladium was not the only New York venue hosting mambo dance music between 1947 and its closure in 1966. Dozens of other New  York dance halls featured mambo music, including venues catering to Latinos such as the Park Plaza/​Palace in Spanish Harlem and the Hunt’s Point Palace in the Bronx, those drawing African Americans to public school dances in Harlem, those attracting a predominantly Jewish clientele such as Ben Maksik’s Town and Country Club in Brooklyn or Grossinger’s Hotel in the Catskills, and some that were geared toward Anglo-​Americans such as Roseland Ballroom in midtown Manhattan. Why was the Palladium not only the most famous of these venues, but also the site of the most profound innovations in mambo dancing? I believe that what made the Palladium such a unique space was, in large part, the racial and ethnic diversity of its clientele and the cross-​cultural exchanges such confluence encouraged. On Wednesday evenings, the night of the amateur mambo contest and professional mambo shows, no ethnic group formed a majority. Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Italians, Jews, African Americans, Irish, among others, were equally intoxicated by mambo’s rhythms. Almost all former Palladium dancers recalled its power to integrate people across racial and ethnic barriers that were being upheld in most other spaces throughout the city. Professional dancer Michael Terrace (Miguel Gutierrez) reminisced, “so that’s why they called it a mingling melting pot where the Blacks would dance with the Whites and the Chinese danced with everybody else. So the composition of all our ethnic people were gathered together in one room, everybody loving the same music and the same dance.” Likewise, contemporary Cuban Pete (Pedro Aguilar) explained, And there was lots of Latins, yes, but you had Jewish and Italian people and Blacks, those three other ones who loved the music also, they came up.… I think Palladium did, the Palladium time and the mambo did the greatest thing for the culture of this country, everybody got together, everybody danced together.

“Hot” Latin Dance   487 Praise for the Palladium’s racial egalitarianism is a universal theme invoked by Palladium dancers, who agree that status was earned through dance skill, regardless of ethnic, national, or racial background. Although many of the top Palladium dancers were Puerto Rican (e.g., Cuban Pete, Luis Máquina, Margo Bartolomei Rodríguez, Jackie Danois, Aníbal Vazquez, Joe Vega) or Latinos from other Caribbean islands (e.g., Cuban-​Dominican Michael Terrace, Dominican Augie Rodriguez, Cuban Tondelayo), others were Italian (e.g., Millie Donay, Palladium emcee and dance teacher Killer Joe), Jewish (e.g., Marilyn Winters, Larry Seldon, Vera Garret, Tybee Afra), or African American (e.g., Ernie Ensley, Dottie Adams, Andrew Jerrick). As people from such diverse cultures encountered one another on the dance floor, once distinct cultural dance traditions began to merge. The syncopated but stately Cuban son was invigorated with sassy turns borrowed from the American lindy hop. Solo steps from Puerto Rican bomba and Cuban rumba were traded and spliced in between periods of partnered ballroom dancing. Jazz-​ inflected arrangements of Afro-​Latin music inspired similar reinvention on the dance floor where asymmetrical American jazz postures began to pull Caribbean dance styles into new shapes. In her unpublished manuscript based on observations of Palladium mambo in the early 1950s, jazz dance historian Mura Dehn described the ensuing effect.

Figure 21.2  Millie Donay and Cuban Pete (Pedro Aguilar) performing mambo at the Palladium Ballroom in 1954. Photo by Yale Joel/​Time & Life Pictures/​Getty Images.

488   Juliet McMains In spite of seeming abandon, the movement is conscious and controlled. The proud stretch is akin to Spanish dancing. The tension works simultaneously from waist up with a light sway in the chest from side to side and from the waist down into hips and legs. The waist is pulled in and stretched. The undulation is above and below, which brings out an alert lightness. You never slump in Mambo. This elegant control is shattered at times by a wild rotation of the torso and head with such speed and vigor that one can hardly see the outlines of the body. Then follows a wavering step—​pulling high ones knees. A possessed drunken quality like intoxicated bees balancing on a flower.

Dehn emphasizes contrasting qualities of “abandon” and “control.” Although Anglo-​ American interpretations of Latin dance often overindulge in abandon without much regard for control, the nuanced negotiation of contrasting traits is typical of Latin American and African Diasporic dance. In the words of dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Dehn is calling attention to the Africanist aesthetics of “high affect juxtaposition” and “embracing the conflict” (Dixon Gottschild 1996) when she describes a mambo dancer whose elegant stepping is momentarily shattered by a whirling head and torso only to be regained in a posture as delicate and tenuous as an inebriated insect poised on a blossom. Palladium mambo differed from the Latin American dances that inspired it, but it extended their tradition of resolving apparent paradoxes through their expression in motion. As in other Latin American social dance traditions, improvisation and individual style developed in response to African-​derived polyrhythms figured prominently in the Palladium style mambo. Its basic step—​three weight changes landing in a quick-​quick-​slow rhythm falling under a relaxed torso that allows for independent movement of the hips, rib cage, and shoulders—​can be found in most partnered Latin American dances, including, plena, danza, son, guaracha, bolero, danzón, cumbia, lambada, bachata, maxixe, gafiera, and forró. Thus, despite its birth in New York, I believe Palladium mambo to be a Latin American dance. When they learned mambo dancing in Latin communities alive with these cultural memories, Jewish and Italian and African-​American mambo dancers could become equally fluent in mambo as their Puerto Rican and Cuban friends. In fact, the popularity of Latin music and dance among non-​Latin people in the 1950s served to strengthen the ethnic pride of New York Latinos at the same time that it helped to promote racial and ethnic integration. New York Puerto Rican Angela Fontanez recalled, “But it was still something very validating about the fact that these people [non-​Latino] liked our music and enjoyed our music. And of course from that you had the extension of food and intermarriages, etc., etc., etc. But the Palladium was truly a unique institution in that regard” (Fontanez 1993, 2). Fontanez points out both how the popularity of Latin dance and music among different ethnic groups validated her own cultural identity and how it opened the door to cross-​cultural exchange. Only when it was disseminated nationally by studios such as Arthur Murray, where teachers and students were divorced from the social context of Latino communities, did an Anglo-​American mambo begin to emerge that had much more in common with the ballroom industry versions of tango, samba, and rumba than it did with Latin American social dance traditions. Sensuous undulations of torsos and quirky syncopations of

“Hot” Latin Dance   489 playful feet were replaced by sharp, jutting hips and precisely calculated footsteps dictated by dancing masters rather than the spirit of the music. As it was reduced to footstep patterns and numerical diagrams printed in dance manuals, mambo became a stilted caricature of Latin dance. Just as it had with previous ballroom interpretations of rumba, conga, and samba, the codified mambo relied primarily on exaggerated pelvic rotations and pulsations to portray its Latin-​ness, reinscribing stereotypes of libido-​ crazed Latinos.

Congress Style Salsa When the Palladium closed in 1966, the Latino neighborhoods of Spanish Harlem and the South Bronx once again became the center of New York’s Latin music and dance scene. In the 1970s and 1980s, few white New Yorkers learned Latin dance in community settings, and ballroom dance studios once again became the primary means of disseminating Latin dance to Anglo-​America. It was not until the salsa dance boom of the late 1990s that considerable numbers of Latino cultural dancers once again began to share dance floors with non-​Latino dancers. Salsa music, a modernized streetwise take on Cuban mambo developed predominantly by Puerto Rican musicians living in New York, boomed in the 1970s when urban Latin Americans worldwide claimed it as the voice of disenfranchised people.2 Not until the 1990s, however, did the music and associated dance begin to make major inroads into mainstream American culture. The popularity of a less aggressive style of salsa music called salsa romantica in the 1990s combined with a growing interest in partner dancing and a new fashion for all things Latin in mainstream American culture led many Anglo-​Americans to take an interest in salsa. The new salsa converts who had not grown up in families where children learned to dance in the home sought to learn salsa dancing in formal dance classes, a foreign concept to most Latinos. Despite their initial incredulity that people would pay for salsa dance lessons, many Latinos recognized the business potential in Anglo fascination with Latin dance, and salsa dance classes began springing up in cities worldwide. This increased demand for Latin dance by non-​Latin consumers combined with the simultaneous emergence of the World Wide Web as a new platform through which business could be negotiated enabled development of a new Latin dance industry that, in contrast to the white ballroom dance industry, was predominantly controlled by Latinos. Although momentum was building throughout the 1990s, the summer of 1997 can be considered the birth of the modern salsa dance industry when hundreds of salsa dancers from around the world convened in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to share (and sell) their own regional interpretations of salsa at the first World Salsa Congress. The success of this event, which featured dozens of vendors selling salsa music, shoes, and clothing in addition to the classes, performances, and social dancing that constituted the convention’s central products, illustrated the international commercial potential of salsa dance. Within a few years, an international network of businesses centered around salsa dance had emerged.

490   Juliet McMains Salsa congresses, which by 2005 were held in nearly 100 cities around the world, were its crowning jewel. Congress organizers and dancers hired to teach and perform at congresses became the most well-​respected and influential leaders in the new industry, defining and setting the trends and styles that trickled down to salsa studios worldwide. Although some people refer to this commercialized salsa as studio or academy salsa, I refer to it as “congress style” salsa. I use the term congress style salsa to refer not only to dancing at salsa congresses but more generally to the style of salsa that evolved out of, and continues to be disseminated by, salsa congresses and salsa dancers hooked into the international salsa industry. Congress style salsa evolved in the early years of salsa congresses through the hybridization of several regionally distinct salsa dance styles. Pretzel-​like arm wraps developed in Miami, hip-​hop–​inflected footwork and body isolations of the New York dancers, and eye-​catching drama and speed of the Los Angeles dips and turns melted into a new international conglomeration. When YouTube was launched in 2005, enabling salseros to share videos of their latest steps with dancers on seven continents with the click of a mouse, hybridization only intensified. Although congress style salsa consists of several substyles (including the on one and on two rhythms), congress style salsa can be distinguished from Palladium mambo and earlier salsa styles by several factors. Most readily identifiable is the ever-​increasing speed and complexity of partnered turn patterns that, although based on the basic hustle turns that salsa dancers began borrowing in the 1970s, have been turbocharged for the new competitive market. In addition, congress style is characterized by compact, slotted (straight line) dancing, as opposed to more circular and free-​form spatial

Figure 21.3  Social salsa dancing at the 2007 New York Salsa Congress. Photo by Juliet McMains.

“Hot” Latin Dance   491 floor patterns. The style also requires a nuanced physical connection that enables its dizzying array of turns to be led between strangers through continuously interweaving octopus-​ like arm positions. Long sequences of partnered turn patterns are punctuated by shorter periods of solo “shines”—​improvisational footwork and body isolations that interpret the music’s layered syncopations. I do not mean to imply that congress style salsa is better or worse than Palladium mambo or any of the regional salsa styles from which it drew its inspiration. Each has its seductions and shortfalls. I do, however, wish to call attention to how technically demanding the new style is for basic proficiency. Whereas salsa dancing throughout Latin America in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was part of a cultural tradition learned from family and friends in informal settings, salsa dance as practiced and promoted by the new salsa industry became so technically complex that it proved difficult to learn without formal instruction. Thus, the burgeoning salsa dance industry produced a split between regional salsa dancers, who learned to dance informally, and practitioners of the new congress style, who engaged in formal training. Although these two communities—​one that produced Latin dance as culture and one that consumed Latin dance as commodity—​had coexisted even during the Mambo era of the 1950s, the salsa dance boom intensified interaction between the two groups. Whereas prior to the 1990s, membership in each of the two communities was primarily linked to one’s relationship to Latin culture—​Latinos and Latin Americans participating in Latin dance as culture and non-​Latinos consuming Latin dance as commodity—​the new salsa dance industry challenged this simplistic distinction. Although salsa classes and congresses are attended by many Anglos, Asians, and non-​Hispanic blacks, Latino consumers often outnumber non-​Latino consumers at events in the contemporary salsa dance industry.3 The new demographics of Latin dance commodity consumption challenge easy dismissal of commercialized Latin dance as inauthentic. Despite a noticeable shift away from individual variation toward standardization, improvisational social dancing still figures prominently in the salsa industry, connecting salsa much more strongly with traditions of dance in Latin America than with Anglo-​ American iterations of Latin dance. Furthermore, the dominance of Latinos in positions of power in the new salsa dance industry helped to keep salsa rooted in Latin culture even when it borrowed teaching techniques and business models from the ballroom dance industry. Although many practitioners of congress salsa are Latinos in their 20s and 30s, modern salsa has been embraced by an even more diverse racial and ethnic mix than Palladium mambo, attracting Asians, blacks, and Anglos from almost every national background. Thus, similar to the Palladium, congress style salsa has become a means through which Latinos can strengthen their own ethnic identity at the same time it becomes a space in which ethnic stereotypes are challenged and broken through cross-​cultural exchange.4 Modern congress style salsa often functions differently for its Latino practitioners than did Latin dancing at the Palladium, where recent immigrants were able to navigate their new American environment through participation in a familiar Latin American cultural practice. In contrast, Latin dancing for many contemporary Latino salsa participants has become a means through which they reconnect to a distant Latin culture that has been weakened through assimilation.5 Many salsa dancers in the United States are

492   Juliet McMains second-​generation Latinos who grew up speaking English and listening to American music. Involvement in salsa dance, which brings them into extended contact not only with lyric and sonic references to their cultural legacy, but also with many other Latinos, becomes a way for second-​generation immigrants to affirm both their specific national pride and a more general pan-​Latino identity. Salsa musician and ethnomusicologist Christopher Washburne has argued that the hybrid makeup of salsa music itself enables salsa to function simultaneously as a marker of national identity and pan-​Latino identity (Washburne 2008, 68). I agree that it is not only the multiple cultural streams upon which salsa music is based, but also the interactions of people from such diverse backgrounds that enable salsa music and dance to function as a means of affirming connection to both a national identity and a broader pan-​Latino community. For example, Dominican-​American salsera and co-​founder of the first Los Angeles salsa dance company Joby “Brava” Aranda recalled, In high school and college, I  lived in Orange County, which was predominantly Caucasian and Asian. Coming from New  York, which I  was mostly around Hispanics, I kind of lost my ethnicity for a bit. I was listening to KROQ [alternative rock radio station], hang out with surfers and did the American thing. I adapted more to the American culture. Once I got into the salsa scene and into Latin music, it put me back in touch with my roots, especially since the majority of the dancers were Hispanic. Even though salsa’s not Dominican, but definitely it’s Caribbean. You hear the music all over in Dominican Republic. So it’s definitely part of my culture.

Aranda’s reference to both a general Latin culture and her own national heritage in response to my question about how salsa relates to her sense of ethnic identity was typical of Latino dancers I  interviewed. Despite the fact that very few Dominicans are active in the Los Angeles salsa scene, Aranda was able to strengthen her sense of Dominicanness through participation in a predominantly Mexican Latino community. Her experience is consistent with theories of Latino ethnic identity formation that postulate Latino ethnic identity formation always requires negotiating the relationship between a national identity and a more generalized pan-​ethnic identity (Flores 2000). Congress style salsa incorporates elements from American culture (such as turns from hustle and body isolations from hip-​hop) into Latin cultural traditions that extend back many generations, enabling some practitioners to reconcile aspects of their identity that they may otherwise experience in conflict—​modern vs. traditional, American vs. Latin. Similar to the way that Palladium era mambo, which combined dance steps and techniques from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and America, enabled recent Caribbean immigrants to negotiate their new social identity in America, modern congress style offers Latinos from a variety of backgrounds a way to negotiate hybrid identities. Joby Aranda’s story of strengthening her ethnic identity through salsa was echoed by many second-​generation Latino salseras. When I asked New Jersey–​-​born Yesenia Peralta if she felt a different sense of connection to her cultural heritage when she got into dancing salsa, she exclaimed,

“Hot” Latin Dance   493 Absolutely, definitely. Without a doubt. No, absolutely. Because we were more like New Yoricans. It was cool to be playing dominos in front and eating, drinking coquitos for New Years. And eating pernil and arroz con gandules and all that stuff. I thought that that was being Puerto Rican. Or Puerto Rican and Dominican, you know because I’m both. But it’s so much more than that.

Like many American-​raised Latinos, even in places such as Jersey City where nearly one third of the city’s residents identify as Hispanic or Latino, Peralta preferred American music to salsa, which she dismissed as music of her parent’s generation. Yesenia Peralta:  My mom used to blast it [salsa]. And we would be mad. And we would lock ourselves in our rooms because we didn’t want to hear it. We were like, very—​we were very into hip hop and like break dancing. And R&B and free style, but not salsa. I didn’t get really interested in salsa till I was about twenty. Juliet McMains:  Why do you think it took so long for you to get interested? YP:  I guess we weren’t too interested in our culture, maybe? Like we were proud to be Hispanics and Puerto Ricans and my father’s Dominican, but we were very Americanized. So we listened to what teenagers listen to. JM:  So even for the kids who were Puerto Rican, it was not cool, salsa, to your peers? YP:  Well, not while we were growing up. No one was listening to salsa at all. No, definitely not.

Not until she was offered opportunities to dance on stage did Peralta’s attitude toward Latin music and her own cultural awareness begin to shift. Within three months of her first salsa class in 1997, Peralta was traveling around the United States to compete and perform. The validation she received on stage opened the door to a growing investment in Latin music and dance so fervent that, ten years later, Yesenia Peralta opened her own studio, where she is teaching Latin dancing to a new generation of Latino youth. Ironically, if it had not been for the growing interest in salsa from outside Latino communities that propelled growth of a salsa dance industry and its attendant performing opportunities, Peralta would likely not have developed much interest in salsa. Thus, it is partially salsa’s popularity and validation by non-​Latinos that enables Latinos to experience a strengthened connection to their own culture. Not only do the demographics of congress style salsa dance encourage Latinos from different national backgrounds to develop and strengthen their Latino identity, but also the diversity of salsa practitioners helps to safeguard against reification of racial and ethnic stereotypes. Whereas throughout the twentieth century, most Anglo-​Americans participated in Latin dance in segregated communities where they had little contact with Latin Americans, most contemporary salsa dancers active in the international salsa scene dance in racially, ethnically, and nationally integrated communities. Extended social interaction on the dance floor, which often leads to friendships and even marriage off the dance floor, encourages salsa dancers of all races to benefit. For example, Irina, a middle-​aged Anglo-​salsera of five years, believes that her interactions with the large Puerto Rican population in her city’s salsa scene has engendered positive changes in her

494   Juliet McMains own life. She reflects, “I’m more open to creativity. I’m more open to changes. I’m more open to people’s deficits. I’m more tolerant. And it affected work too. I’m more tolerant. If people make mistakes, I’m very patient.” She credits these changes to interactions she has had with Latinos through salsa dancing. She further explains that she has learned this more open interpersonal style from extended cross-​cultural exchange with Latinos. “It’s also their personalities—​usually they are open and friendly. And I  think that affected me too because I am friendly, but I wasn’t that open naturally because I am from the North culture.” Although Irina’s statement that Latinos are usually open and friendly may appear to be based in ethnic stereotype, this example points to an important distinction between prejudice-​driven stereotypes and observations of cultural difference based on protracted interaction. Her generalizations about people from Southern vs. Northern cultures do not reinforce cultural hierarchies; nor are they applied inflexibly as evidenced by her own ability to adapt her Northern cultural values. It is not only white salsa dancers whose racial assumptions are altered through participation in salsa. Steve, a black salsero in his 30s, explained how dancing with older white women challenged his own assumptions about race. He recalled, “in my experience in the past outside of salsa, women that—​or people that look like that [older, white]—​normally think bad things about people who look like me [black]. So I keep my distance.” He went on to explain how his experience dancing with people of different ages, races, ethnicities, and nationalities has made him realize that not all older white people judge him based on his race. I think the people that get really into the salsa scene, not just go to the clubs and do a few moves, are really open-​minded people. That’s what I have found. And these older women, they just want to dance and have fun. They don’t care if I’m green. They don’t care if I’m purple. All they want is fun.

It is impossible to determine whether it was their experience in salsa that made the white women Steve has met less likely to judge him based on his race or if people who become deeply committed to salsa dance are by nature open-​minded. Without the close proximity of dancers from different backgrounds now typical in the salsa industry, however, I do not believe merely dancing salsa would have shifted their racial assumptions. In fact, the experiences of one Hong Kong–​born New York salsera help to illustrate this point. When Winsome Lee began dancing salsa in New York in 1993, she was frequently the only Asian in New York clubs. She recalls that early on, her race made her an object of curiosity in the salsa scene. Winsome Lee:  Asians were a huge minority way back when. And so when I went to the club, I used to have to drag friends to go with me, otherwise I would get—​harassed is not the right word, but it was too much curiosity. It was very inconvenient. Juliet McMains:  So did people dance with you? WL:  People wanted to show me how, let’s put it this way. Some people really wanted to show me, some people used that as an excuse. So it was just not always a pleasant experience. Meanwhile I just wanted to dance.

“Hot” Latin Dance   495 As more Asians began to enter the salsa scene over the next several years, salseros in New York began to treat Lee the same way they would any other accomplished salsa dancer, including hiring her to teach and perform. When she traveled abroad to locales that were not as ethnically diverse as New York City, however, reactions to Lee’s dancing were still very much linked to her race. She recalls, When I was in Argentina I was very well received because they found me “exotic,” … I went to the first Japan Salsa Congress and that was in year 2000. Now granted the history of China and Japan, you would think the countries don’t get along; however they were more than gracious to me, and they—​I had a tour actually around the country. I went to four cities and had the best experience there.… I think they took pride in that, that you know that there is a fellow Asian, that you know she came from the States and she kind of made her name in the States.

Although Lee was well received in Argentina and Japan, reactions were still tied to perceptions about her race and the novelty of seeing a highly accomplished Asian salsera. Racial profiling did not always work in her favor, however, as evidenced in Lee’s experience with event organizers in a neighboring Asian country, we’ll call it A—​. Lee explained, I brought my partner with me to Hong Kong. He goes, “right after Hong Kong, do you want to go to A—​with me to do this gig? Because they asked me to bring an established female instructor from New York who can perform and teach.” And he goes, “and you’re perfect for that gig.” And I never got the airline ticket. Two weeks before the congress I still hadn’t received anything. So finally he had to call them up and say, “what is the deal?” And he was told that Winsome can’t come. He goes, “why?” “Because she’s Chinese.” I couldn’t believe they were that straight forward about it. They weren’t even beating around the bush, “because she’s Chinese.” And my partner said, “well she is not a Chinese dancer, she’s a New York dancer. She wasn’t raised there, so she’s not involved with your politics. Is it political?” “No her heritage is Chinese and we prefer that she does not come.”

Despite Lee’s reputation as an accomplished teacher and performer, the event organizers were unwilling to hire an Asian dancer as their international guest from New York, the cradle of salsa. For the hallowed birthplace of salsa to be represented through another Asian body would have disturbed their image of Latin dancers as exotic racial others. Although this story may be an isolated incident that is not representative of this Asian country’s attitudes in general, it suggests that the popularity of Latin dance in Asia may be dependent upon similar racial and ethnic stereotypes that have long characterized American fascination with Latin dance. Coming from a racially homogenous society, however, few Asian salsa dancers have the opportunity to interact with Latinos in racially integrated salsa clubs where these stereotypes can be challenged. Thus, the fact that an Asian-​born, New York–​trained salsera can make a successful career in the United States but face prejudice when traveling abroad to less heterogeneous countries further supports my proposition that integrated dancing helps combat stereotypes invoked by non-​Latino excursions into Latin dance.

496   Juliet McMains Not all effects of salsa’s cross-​cultural popularity are positive, as noted by dance scholar Cindy García. Writing specifically about Los Angeles, García argues that Latina club-​goers abide by a different code of behavior than do the Anglo women, who dress and dance more provocatively, walk around the club alone, invite men to dance, and engage in more promiscuous sexual behavior than the Latina women. García explains, The implication is that Anglo women use “our guys” for night-​time pleasures (i.e., sex and dancing with your nalgas hanging out), rarely incorporate them into their daily lives, and leave Latinos dissatisfied with the Latinas of daily life who do not accommodate the exaggerated gender roles of the pan-​Latino/​pan-​Latina club dynamic (García 2008, 208).García calls attention to a vexing effect of integrated salsa dancing in some locales. Anglo women are able to indulge in behavior that would be considered inappropriate for Latina women, who cannot risk damaging their reputation in their own communities (as opposed to Anglos, whose position as cultural tourists in the community offers them some protection in its distance from their daily lives). I have no doubt that García’s conclusions accurately represent the double standards in the club she describes, one that is well known throughout Los Angeles as a “meat market.” Because serious dancing is often secondary to sexual seduction in this venue, female patrons are less likely to develop the deep bonds of friendship built around mutual respect that they might at venues attracting dancers who take dance classes together or practice as part of a performance team. Thus, although García raises an important concern, the differences she identifies between Anglo and Latina salseras are not common to all contemporary salsa spaces, especially those of the salsa congress circuit, where the majority of attendees, although ethnically diverse, work in similar middle-​class careers. Although not explicitly stated by García, the effects she observed were as dependent on differences of class as on ethnicity. The appropriation of salsa, which began as a musical expression of working-​class urban Latinos in the 1970s, by middle-​class Latinos in the 1990s is a troubling effect of the salsa dance industry. Although it has alienated many working-​class Latinos, it has also brought many middle-​class Latinos and non-​Latinos into extended contact. In contrast to the club scene described by García, salsa socials have become the main venues for much congress style salsa dancing. Dancing takes priority over drinking and courtship at salsa socials, where interracial and interethnic friendships flourish. For many non-​Latinos, salsa becomes the impetus for more extended education and investment in Latin cultures. Many hard-​core non-​Latino salsa dancers study Spanish, enjoy Latin American cuisine, and travel to Latin America. Admittedly, not all practitioners of congress style salsa engage in deep cross-​ cultural exploration, but such exchange would be far less likely if Latinos and non-​Latinos were dancing in segregated spaces as they did throughout much of the twentieth century.

Steps toward Integration I am not the first person to suggest that the best medicine to fight prejudice and stereotyping is racial integration. In fact, America’s greatest civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., championed this very principle. Beyond fighting to dismantle segregation,

“Hot” Latin Dance   497 Dr.  King strove to achieve integration, “genuine intergroup, interpersonal doing,” as “the ultimate goal of our national community” (King, 1986, 118). Although recent anti-​ immigration legislation and political discourse directed specifically at Latinos highlights how very far America is from realizing Dr. King’s dream, integration on the dance floor may lead us one step closer. Whereas practice of Latin dance by non-​Latinos in segregated communities has throughout much of the twentieth century reinforced harmful stereotypes of Latinos, if non-​Latinos engage in Latin dance in integrated communities in which extended deep interethnic interactions are fostered, these stereotypes are more likely to be challenged. The two cases I have discussed—​the New York Palladium and international congress style salsa dancing—​offer evidence that when Latin dance is practiced in racially and ethnically integrated communities, harmful stereotypes of Latinos that are invoked by its practice in segregated communities can be exposed and reconsidered. Furthermore, the inclusion of non-​Latin people in Latin dance communities does not prevent Latin dance from becoming a means through which Latinos can develop a positive ethnic identity. In fact, the presence of non-​Latinos may strengthen and validate this identity, particularly when they are living in the United States, where their own national, ethnic, and racial identity must be formed in relationship to the dominant national, ethnic, and racial discourses. I recognize that neither the Palladium nor the international salsa congress circuit is a utopic community free from racial or ethnic prejudice. Of course both suffer from the presence of narrow-​minded views and structural inequalities. For example, lighter-​skinned Palladium dancers generally had an easier time getting booked to perform at national venues than did darker-​skinned dancers. Although many male salsa dancers of African descent have become major stars of the salsa congress circuit, very few women of African descent are performing or teaching at salsa congresses. Even taking into consideration such valid criticisms of the imperfect ways in which salsa and mambo foster cross-​cultural community, I believe that these two examples offer alternative models to the mainstream American appropriation of Latin dances that throughout the twentieth century contributed to oppression of Latinos. However, we must remain vigilant to guard against the co-​ option of Latin dance’s emancipatory potential by commercial pressures. We should call out teachers of Latin dance, Latino and non-​Latino alike, when they reinforce static one-​ dimensional stereotypes of Latinos in the language and images they employ. We can counter these representations through continued research and education into the depth and complexity of Latin dance history. We must continue to increase spaces for integrated dance practice, questioning, for example, the effects of salsa clubs in white neighborhoods where few Latinos feel welcome. As the multitude of Latin American dance traditions I have not discussed in this chapter (e.g., Mexican son jarocho, Peruvian festejo, Brazilian forró, Puerto Rican bomba) begin to gain more visibility and commercial value in American society, we should remember the lessons of twentieth-​century Latin dance appropriation. Adapting these dances to make them easier and more accessible for Americans will, in the words of John Martin, not only render “the whole process valueless but makes some very dull dances besides” (Martin 1944, 23). Instead, I hope that the custodians of these dances will share their cultural treasures in dialogue with Americans, who by honoring them with discipline, respect, and a genuine interest in exploring Latin dance beyond its hot exterior, will appreciate the multitude of atmospheric and emotional states invoked by their practice.

498   Juliet McMains

Notes 1. For historical evidence of Chinese-​American Latin dance communities, see William D’Albrew, “Cha Cha on Grant Ave.: The Chinese-​Americans of San Francisco Are Doing Great Latin American and Swing,” Dance Magazine, April 1959, 70–​7 1. Currently, several ballroom dance studios in the United States cater specifically to Chinese clientele, including Vivo DanceSport in Hacienda Heights, CA. 2. Several scholars have written about how salsa dancing of this period became a means through which Puerto Ricans, specifically, and Latinos, more generally, developed an ethnic identity and community around that identity. See:  Lisa Sánchez González, “Reclaiming Salsa,” Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (1999): 237–​250; Mayra Santos Febres, “Salsa as Translocation,” Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/​o America, edited by Celeste Frazer Delgado and José Esteban Muñoz, 175–​188 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); and Lise Waxer, The City of Musical Memory: Salsa, Record Grooves, and Popular Culture in Cali, Colombia (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002). 3. For example, from her interviews with salsa teachers in New Jersey, Katherine Borland reports that their clients are 65% Latino. Katherine Borland, “Embracing Difference: Salsa Fever in New Jersey,” Journal of American Folklore 122, no. 486 (2009): 466–​492. 4. A  flurry of ethnographic research in specific local salsa dance communities (e.g., Austin, Belfast, Hamburg, Illinois, London, Los Angeles, Montreal, New Jersey, and Paris) has recently been published, each author at least touching upon how commercialization has brought Latino and non-​ Latino communities into dialogue. See: Katherine Borland, “Embracing Difference: Salsa Fever in New Jersey,” Journal of American Folklore 122, no. 486 (2009): 466–​492; Joanna Bosse, “Salsa Dance and the Transformation of Style: An Ethnographic Study of Movement and Meaning in a Cross-​ Cultural Context,” Dance Research Journal 41, no. 1 (2008): 45–​64; Cindy García, “‘Don’t Leave Me Celia!’ Salsera Homosociality and Pan-​Latina Corporealities,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 18, no. 3 (2008): 199–​213; Sydney Hutchinson, “Mambo on 2: The Birth of a New Form of Dance in New York City,” Centro Journal 16, no.  2 (2004):  108–​137; Deborah Kapchan, “Talking Trash:  Performing Home and Anti-​home in Austin’s Salsa Culture,” American Ethnologist 33, no. 3 (2006): 361–​377; Patria Román-​Velázquez, The Making of Latin London: Salsa Music, Place, and Identity (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1999); Sheenagh Pietrobruno, Salsa and Its Transnational Moves (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006); Priscilla Renta, “Salsa Dance: Latino/​a History in Motion,” Centro Journal 16, no. 2 (2004): 139–​157; Yannis Ruel, Les soirées salsaàParis:  Regard sociologique sur un monde de la fête (Paris:  L’Harmattan, 2000); Jonathan Skinner, “The Salsa Class: A Complexity of Globalization, Cosmopolitans and Emotions,” Identities Global Studies in Culture and Power 14 (2007): 485–​506; Norman Urquía, “The Re-​branding of Salsa in London’s Dance Clubs:  How an Ethnicised Form of Cultural Capital Was Institutionalised,” Leisure Studies 24, no.  4 (October 2005): 385–​397; Heike Wieschiolek, “‘Ladies, Just Follow His Lead!’ Salsa, Gender and Identity,” Sport, Dance and Embodied Identities, ed. Noel Dyck and Eduardo P. Archetti (Oxford: Berg: 2003), 115–​137. 5. Katherine Borland comes to this same conclusion when writing about her fieldwork in the New Jersey salsa scene. “As many of the salseros I  interviewed explained, second-​ generation Latinos turned to dance as a means of reconnecting with their cultural heritage” (“Embracing Difference,” 469).

“Hot” Latin Dance   499

Interviews Cited Aguilar, Pedro (aka Cuban Pete). Interview with David Carp, Oct. 3, 1993. Transcript, Carp Collection in Bronx Historical Society. Aranda, Joby “Brava.” Interview with Juliet McMains, Atlanta, GA, Feb. 24, 2008. Fontanez, Angela. Interview with David Carp, Sept. 30, 1993. Transcript, Carp Collection in Bronx Historical Society. Gutierrez, Miguel (aka Michael Terrace). Interview with Juliet McMains, Fort Lee, NJ, Feb. 1, 2008. Irina. Telephone interview with Juliet McMains July 24, 2010. Lee, Winsome. Interview with Juliet McMains, New York City, March 27, 2009. Peralta, Yesenia. Interview with Juliet McMains, Seattle, WA, Nov. 30, 2008. Steve [pseud.]. Interview with Juliet McMains, New York City, Sept. 7, 2007.

Bibliography Borland, Katherine. “Embracing Difference: Salsa Fever in New Jersey.” Journal of American Folklore 122, no. 486 (2009): 466–​492. Bosse, Joanna. “Salsa Dance and the Transformation of Style:  An Ethnographic Study of Movement and Meaning in a Cross-​Cultural Context.” Dance Research Journal 41, no.  1 (2008): 45–​64. D’Albrew, William. “Cha Cha on Grant Ave.: The Chinese-​Americans of San Francisco Are Doing Great Latin American and Swing.” Dance Magazine, no. 33 (April 1959): 70–​7 1. Dehn, Mura. “Mambo.” Unpublished manuscript. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library. Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996. Flores, Juan. From Bomba to Hip-​ Hop:  Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. García, Cindy. “‘Don’t Leave Me Celia!’ Salsera Homosociality and Pan-​Latina Corporealities.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 18, no. 3 (2008): 199–​213. Hutchinson, Sydney. “Mambo on 2: The Birth of a New Form of Dance in New York City.” Centro Journal 16, no. 2 (2004): 108–​137. Kapchan, Deborah. “Talking Trash:  Performing Home and Anti-​home in Austin’s Salsa Culture.” American Ethnologist 33, no. 3 (2006): 361–​377. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “The Ethical Demands for Integration.” In Testament of Hope:  The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by James Melvin Washington, 117–​125. San Francisco: Harper, 1986. Martin, John. “We Trade Fox Trot for Rumba.” New York Times Magazine, Feb. 6, 1944, 23, 48. McMains, Juliet. Glamour Addiction:  Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006. McMains, Juliet. “Dancing Latin/​Latin Dancing: Salsa and DanceSport.” In Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader. Edited by Julie Malnig, 302–​322. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. McMains, Juliet. “Reality Check: Dancing with the Stars and the American Dream.” In The Routledge Dance Studies Reader. 2nd ed. Edited by Alexandra Carter and Janet O’Shea, 261–​ 272. London: Routledge, 2010.

500   Juliet McMains Mizejewski, Linda. Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Pietrobruno, Sheenagh. Salsa and Its Transnational Moves. Lanham, MD:  Lexington Books, 2006. Ramírez Berg, Charles. Latino Images in Film:  Stereotypes, Subversion, Resistance. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Renta, Priscilla. “Salsa Dance:  Latino/​ a History in Motion.” Centro Journal 16, no.  2 (2004): 139–​157. Robinson, Danielle. “Performing American:  Ragtime Dancing as Participatory Minstrelsy.” Dance Chronicle 32, no. 1 (2009): 86–​126. Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1991. Román-​Velázquez, Patria. The Making of Latin London:  Salsa Music, Place, and Identity. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1999. Ruel, Yannis. Les soirées salsa à Paris:  Regard sociologique sur un monde de la fête. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000. Sánchez González, Lisa. “Reclaiming Salsa.” Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (1999): 237–​250. Santos Febres, Mayra. “Salsa as Translocation.” In Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/​ o America. Edited by Celeste Frazer Delgado and José Esteban Muñoz, 175–​188. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Savigliano, Marta. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder, CO:  Westview Press, 1995. Shay, Anthony. Dancing Across Borders: The American Fascination with Exotic Dance Forms. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. Skinner, Jonathan. “The Salsa Class:  A  Complexity of Globalization, Cosmopolitans and Emotions.” Identities Global Studies in Culture and Power 14 (2007): 485–​506. Sublette, Ned. Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004. Thompson, Robert Farris. “Teaching the People to Triumph over Times: Notes from the World of Mambo.” In Caribbean Dance from Abakua to Zouk:  How Movement Shapes Identity. Edited by Susanna Sloat, 336–​344. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Urquía, Norman. “The Re-​branding of Salsa in London’s Dance Clubs:  How an Ethnicised Form of Cultural Capital Was Institutionalised.” Leisure Studies 24, no.  4 (October 2005): 385–​397. Washburne, Christopher. Sounding Salsa:  Performing Latin Music in New  York City. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. Waxer, Lise. The City of Musical Memory: Salsa, Record Grooves, and Popular Culture in Cali, Colombia. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. Wieschiolek, Heike. “‘Ladies, Just Follow His Lead!’ Salsa, Gender and Identity.” In Sport, Dance and Embodied Identities. Edited by Noel Dyck and Eduardo P. Archetti, 115–​137. Oxford: Berg, 2003.

Chapter 22

F rom Salsa to S a l z onto Rhythmic Identities and Inventive Dance Traditions in Ghana Christey Carwile

Introduction A Ghanaian couple moves fluidly across the dance floor of a dimly lit, crowded nightclub on the outskirts of Accra. It is past 1am and their face and shirts are drenched in sweat. As the salsa rhythms and Spanish lyrics boom through the speakers, the couple stays in time, their hips synchronized, their feet mirroring one another. The young man leads his partner into various spins and turns as she adds her own hand and arm flares. As the music breaks into a simple percussive segment, the couple separates and begins dancing individually while still facing each other. They lower further to the ground with bent knees and straight backs, shifting their weight from side to side while shimmying their shoulders to an entirely different rhythm. They continue to accentuate different rhythms in ways reminiscent of more local dance styles—he adds a quick jump and a turn and she laughs and responds by taking wide steps behind her while making front to back sweeping motions with her arms. As the music returns in full, they come together, hands connected, back into a synchronized salsa step with huge smiles on their faces. Both dancers are from different ethnic groups—she is Ga, he is Ewe—and as we later sit at a table for an interview they share with me their attraction to the dance. She begins, “Salsa is basically . . .” He quickly finishes her sentence with, “African dance that has been modified.” Dance in Africa has historically been associated with local “tribal” identities and used as an indicator of permanency and primitiveness. Yet the practice of salsa dance in Africa continues to expose the inevitable pitfalls of the tradition/modern dichotomy when it comes to African dance. Salsa dancers in Ghana situate themselves in between these two poles, shunning neither change nor continuity, but being perfectly

502   Christey Carwile content with a complex combination of both. Drawing on fieldwork in Accra from 2008 -2010, online interviews and my own eleven years of experience as a salsa dancer and instructor in the United States,1 I argue that salsa dancers in Ghana are doing more than simply appropriating a dance style. They are embodying and reclaiming an African aesthetic and rhythmic identity that bridges the past with the postcolonial present, constructing an African identity that is modern and global yet grounded in this African aesthetic tradition. My interest in this chapter is less how dance reflects and maintains ethnic identities and more how it may serve to overshadow, broaden, or reimagine them. I first situate the adoption of salsa dance by Ghanaians within the context of Ghana’s rich dance history, from specific, local, “traditional” dances, to the push to nationalize these dances as part of a pan-​African political agenda, to the more contemporary dance trends pioneered by Ghanaian urban youth. I am interested in moving away from a focus on the global commodification of salsa music/​dance (Waxer 2002a; Pietrobruno 2006). Although I agree that these approaches hold merit and provide insightful critiques on the globalization of salsa, I think it is equally important to discuss the potential of globally circulating dance forms to create spaces for positive social change regardless of whether they are reproduced in capitalist markets. I take my lead from Judith Hamera: Dance explicitly links aesthetics, affect, labor, and bodies together and insists on their centrality to a meaningful public discourse that reflects on our shared humanity and imagines alternative social alliances and arrangements. (2011, xiv)

I argue that it is the pan-​ethnic, international space that salsa produces, as well as the African sensibilities of the dance itself, that have caused it to gain a powerful hold in Ghana and Africa in general, creating the potential for a particular type of grassroots, social pan-​Africanism that is natural and unforced. To contextualize this argument I begin with a larger critique of previous trends in the ways in which dance and ethnicity have been approached in Africa, both in Western scholarship and from within postcolonial nations attempting to revive African “traditions.”

From Invented Traditions to Inventive Traditions: Dance and Ethnicity in Africa Ethnicity, as both a concept and an experience, is always shifting. It may emerge from within a group as a result of shared experience, or it may be produced from without through discourses that label, define, and differentiate the “other.” The history of ethnicity in Africa is an obvious testament to this. Throughout the late nineteenth and

From Salsa to Salzonto    503 early twentieth centuries, as colonial administrations struggled to tame what they perceived to be the messiness of African culture, the labeling and categorization of groups into “tribes” emerged as the modus operandi for creating a sense of organization. Together with anthropologists and missionaries, they proceeded to map out distinctions between groups that were, in many cases, arbitrary—​some organized by language, others by political organization or religion, and still others by phenotypic traits or forms of dress (Southall 1997). Because the term “tribe” was used to essentialize and fix identities in place and at the same time distinguish “primitive” Africans from “civilized” Europeans, transition and change was removed from the equation. Social practices, customary laws, and belief systems were attributed to particular “tribes” and served to distinguish between “traditional” African culture and “modern” European culture during a time of intense contact and social change. As Ranger notes, colonial administrations sought to “codify” local traditions, “transforming flexible custom into hard prescription” (1997, 598)—a practice he calls invented traditions. As part of local cultural traditions, dances were inevitably caught up in the process of inventing traditions and perceived as visible and permanent expressions of ethnic and village identities. In documenting the local dances of those with whom they studied, anthropologists described them as living traditions, with little acknowledgment of their past histories, influences, and travels prior to European contact—​a product of the structural-​functionalist paradigm typical of the time. This established a trend in which dance, like ethnicity, was viewed as product rather than process. This trend continued through the early sixties as countries began gaining their independence. Ethnicities became subsumed under a new focus on pan-African nationalism, and African leaders encouraged a resuscitation of African “traditions,” including music and dance.2 Local village-​based dances were performed in radically different contexts (soccer stadiums and national theaters are two common examples throughout the continent) and were showcased as an expression of a larger national culture. This era also gave birth to a variety of national dance troupes, trained specifically to embody choreographies that depicted national values and ideals. In her 1965 essay, African dance scholar Judith Hanna referred to these dances as “Africa’s new traditional dance”: “The new traditional dance is mostly being perpetuated outside its original context. It has changed from a sacred, communal, ritualistic role, to more of a profane, theatrical and recreational one” (1965, 15). She writes with a sense of urgency about recording and preserving these dances before they “lose their uniqueness and become homogenized in the Western mold” (1965, 20). I will return to this discussion later, but first will briefly discuss these shifts in Ghana specifically. In 1957, after over fifty years of British colonial rule, Ghana became the first SubSaharan African country to gain its independence, making it particularly key in laying the practical and ideological groundwork for what African nationalism might look like. Kwame Nkrumah’s pan-​Africanist agenda, fostered by the concept of “unity in diversity,” sought to advance the idea of a universal “African personality”—​a collection of common principles assumed to underlie traditional African society. In his 1963 speech

504   Christey Carwile delivered at the opening of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Nkrumah encouraged the development of “new forms of dance and drama, of music and creative writing, that are at the same time closely related to our Ghanaian traditions and express the ideas and aspirations of our people at this critical stage of our history” (Nkrumah 1963). What emerged from this agenda was the Ghanaian Dance Ensemble, created by two professors at the University of Ghana.3 Aspiring members of the national dance troupe could take a two-​year certificate course in dance and were required to learn a repertoire of traditional dances from various ethnic groups by studying them in their local environment. These dances—​carefully selected from a variety of Ghana’s ethnic groups—​ were then performed on stage as a display of Ghanaian national culture. (Schramm 2000) This not only marked a new stage in the documentation of African traditional dances, but it also shifted their meanings. The concerns expressed by Judith Hanna mentioned previously reflected apprehension about the fate of African traditional dance during this rapidly changing historical moment. While these concerns were well-​intentioned responses to colonial domination and postcolonial change, we must be careful not to become so defensive that we run the risk of essentializing African dances or viewing any change as inherently destructive. In so doing, we run the risk of turning “traditional” dance into invented traditions. In African Rhythm and African Sensibility, Chernoff avoids getting caught up in the polarities of conversion and conservation when discussing African music and dance styles: There are those who can find African Genius only in the past, who seek an image of Africa in the arts and wisdom of traditional societies; in the meantime new styles of music and dance sweep the continent, signs of a tremendous creative vitality. (1979, 22)

This “creative vitality,” whether it occurs in the rural village or in the urban nightclub, is always grounded in an African sensibility that is informed by tradition, and as such involves a renewal of that tradition (Chernoff 1979, 23). Thus, the adoption of different dances and the creation of new dance styles are both part of the process of what I call inventive dance traditions: local innovations in dance that engage with and interrogate foreign, global, or unfamiliar styles while continuing to draw on indigenous dance aesthetics, methodologies, and values. Joanna Bosse’s concept of “movement dialect” is helpful here in explaining dance styles as “simultaneous expressions of individuality and markers of cultural affinity and difference, … a set of movements with shared, culturally agreed upon meanings” (2008, 40). Inventive dance traditions are dialogues—​embodied ways of interrogating and responding to the world through a complex blending of different movement dialects. Unlike the invented dance traditions espoused by colonial administrators or postcolonial leaders, inventive dance traditions are pioneered from below—by new generations of urban African youth—and signify less about ethnicity and more about what it means to be African.

From Salsa to Salzonto    505

Salsa’s “Worldly” Moves Salsa is a product of more than one history—​an amalgam of several racial, ethnic, and national identities. Emerging out of the working-​class barrios of New York City in the 1960s and pioneered primarily by those of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent, salsa owes its birth to a complex blending of rhythms that had already been heavily blended. As Duany (1984) points out, Puerto Rican popular music alone was influenced by Southern Spain, West Africa, Cuba, North America, Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Haiti—​all of which brought their own heterogeneities and cross-​influences. The commercial label salsa, or sauce, was meant to reflect this, serving as “a kind of musical hodgepodge for anything that has an Afro-​Latin flavor (Duany 1984, 187). “Thus the term ‘salsa’ lumps a whole host of different rhythms together, particularly Afro-​Caribbean rhythms like the Cuban son, rumba and cha cha cha as well as Puerto Rican bomba and plena—​all of which have been strongly influenced by the West African bell patterns that made it to the new word through the trans-​Atlantic slave trade” (Washburne 1995; Roberts 1998). The consolidation of Afro-​Caribbean rhythms also happens on the dance floor. Advertised “salsa nights” often mean the chance to dance salsa, and cha cha cha; the Dominican bachata and merengue; the Latin-​Carribean complex known as reggaeton; and perhaps even the Angolan-​inspired Kizomba. Because salsa is a homogenization of different Latin music and dances styles, it is a convenient symbol for pan-​Latin identity for Latinos and non-​Latinos alike. A Peruvian salsa dancer living in the United States explained to me at a Midwest salsa club one night: I know that I will find other Latinos if I find a salsa club. Even though they don’t really dance salsa in Peru as much as they do in other paises (countries), it doesn’t matter. I am getting in touch with my Latin heritage and connecting with other Latinos. No one cares that I am from Peru.

As several scholars have pointed out, salsa created a Latin consciousness that moved well beyond the barrios of New York, eventually becoming associated with a worldly pan-​Latin identity, or pan-​Latinidad (Waxer 2002b; Berrios-​Miranda 2004; Garcia 2008; Bosse 2008; Pietrobruno 2006; Valdivia 2003). This “worlding” of salsa dance creates an illusion of solidarity that, as Savigliano points out, “reframes difference as a political resource and allows us to imagine a globality of multicultural harmony that transcends boundaries of nationality, ethnicity, and race” (2009, 166). While Salsa music and dance was and continues to be viewed both as a symbol and a practice of Latin identity, it also celebrates an Afro-​Latin identity. Salsa reinforced a racial consciousness and connection between Puerto Ricans and African Americans who shared the barrios during salsa’s emergence and because “salsa musicians and their audiences took new pride in the African roots of the music … [it] became a symbol of racial integration as well” (Berrios-​Miranda 2004, 166). The public acknowledgment and expression of pride in African heritage became ingrained in the salsa tradition.

506   Christey Carwile The cover of Ray Barretto’s 1971 album From the Beginning depicts what looks like both an egg and the globe lying on a beach. In the center of the shell, between the two continents of South America and Africa, a man is “hatching” from the location of North America. South America is connected by what looks more like a geographic umbilical cord than Mexico and Central America, and the man’s only free arm is outstretched behind him, reaching toward Africa. Visual depictions like these, as well as salsa lyrics and album titles, encouraged and reaffirmed an Afro-​Latin connection that began resonating with those of African descent throughout Latin America. Colombian musician Yuri Buenaventura titled his 1997 album Herencia Africana (African Heritage). In the song with the same title, a chorus of singers, backed only by a rhythmic Afro-​Cuban percussion, sing: Somos herencia Africana, orgullo tengo en mi raza (We are African Heritage, I have pride in my race)

The worlding of salsa dance has also meant that its underlying African story is increasingly becoming included as part of the basic knowledge and history that is conveyed through personal instruction and the media. It should come as no surprise that this African story is heard loudly by urban African youth, who in the process of learning the dance discover its history and slowly begin cultivating a sense of ownership over it (Carwile forthcoming). Although the adoption of salsa dance among non-​Latino dancers has largely been discussed in terms of an appropriation and exotification of a Latin “other” (Garcia 2008; Pietrobruno 2006; Shay 2008), the adoption of salsa by African dancers does not lend itself as well to this kind of analysis. For instance, Waxer argues that “the rise of … African salsa points not so much to a return of salsa to African soil … but to a complex process of cultural appropriation between two regions of the so-​called Third World” (2002, 12). The concept of appropriation, however, relies on an underlying assumption of authenticity—​which again stresses product over process and deemphasizes salsa’s multiple histories. I echo Ehrenheich’s concerns in “Confessions of a White Salsa Dancer”: Seeing the issue as a question of appropriation versus appreciation reinforces a static and essentialized view of culture, ignoring centuries—​old currents of cross-​ fertilization among Euro-​ American, African, and Latin American societies. (Ehrenreich 2001, 797)

Indeed, in discussing this issue in terms of popular music, John Storm Roberts (1992, 22) claims that the “issue of authenticity is largely irrelevant.” I am not suggesting that we ignore the places and peoples from where inventive dance traditions fully come to fruition, but I do believe it is equally important to give full attention to the histories and diffusions of these dance forms and to query the reasons for their popularity in new contexts. Salsa’s multiple and at times contested histories provide possibilities for negotiation on an ideological level as dancers from varying racial, ethnic, and national boundaries

From Salsa to Salzonto    507 come to their own understandings of it. While walking along the cobblestone streets in Havana’s Afro-​Cuban neighborhood of Regla, I witnessed this negotiation between two faculty members, one a Puerto Rican born woman, the other a Cuban man of African descent. Fully aware of what I was doing, I asked them if salsa was Cuban or Puerto Rican. In no time our brisk walk had come to a halt and a lighthearted, yet intense banter developed between the two, each arguing his or her own point about why salsa is “de Cuba como todo la musica Buena” (from Cuba like all the good music) or “¡Es Puertoriquena, claro! Es nuestra identidad” (Clearly it is Puertorican! It’s our identity). In another hemisphere entirely, different negotiations take place. As I was beginning my research in Accra in 2008, I was quite surprised to find some Ghanaians dancing salsa rueda, a distinctly Cuban style of salsa that is quite different from the New York and Los Angeles styles that tend to dominate the global salsa scene. Rueda, or casino as it is sometimes called, has a large repertoire of foundational dance moves, each with its own name in Spanish that is called out and then enacted by a circle of dancers as the leads seamlessly pass their partner in a counterclockwise position. In a darkly lit club tucked away on the second story of a business building on the corner of one of Accra’s busiest intersections, I watched as a group of young men and women formed a circle and carried out these complicated moves as the caller yelled out names like sombrero, dedo por debajo, and setenta complicado. At times they argued among themselves about how to properly execute the moves. The point is, salsa is open to interpretation. It provides dancers with a methodology for movement, while at the same encouraging individual style and inventive moves. Salsa’s multiple histories, as well as its ability to be negotiated and played with through individual style and improvisation, is, I argue, key in understanding its popularity in Ghana.

Salsa’s African Sensibilities To be honest, I never fully understood African rhythms and movement until I became an accomplished salsa dancer. During my doctoral fieldwork in Nigeria in 2000 and 2002, I was expected on many occasions to dance, but my lack of movement vocabulary and ability to hear the polyrhythms in the music made it awkward and difficult for me. It was only after understanding the clave rhythm4 in salsa music through the dance that I began to understand what Chernoff refers to as an “African sensibility” and Gottschild (1996) calls the “Africanist aesthetic”—​a canon of embodied qualities and principles that underlie African dance and musical expression. In his examination of the relationship between youth culture and popular music, Bennett concludes that “in seeking to justify particular tastes in music and style … individuals inevitably draw upon a range of locally embedded images, discourses and social sensibilities centred on the familiar, the accessible, the easily recognizable” (2000, 197). While dancing with and speaking to Ghanaian salsa dancers in Accra, it became clear to me that many felt something familiar in salsa, something they could easily relate to. In

508   Christey Carwile his exploration of how Latin American became the music of choice during the independence era for many sub-​Saharan African countries, Dorsch explains: At first glance, it may seem surprising that Cuban music, of all things, still continues to epitomize the feel of the independence era. We need to take into account, however, that Latin American music has firm roots in African rhythm. This fact was, of course, known to the African musicians and their audiences. Latin American music could thus be viewed as a modern form of African music. (2010, 143)

Similarly, Osumare attributes hip hop’s popular resonance in Africa to its continuance of the Africanist aesthetic, arguing that for Africans it is seen as “recognized methodology in a new form” (2008, 31). I make a similar argument for salsa: that it fosters an aesthetic and rhythmic identity that is recognized far and wide. In order to understand what resonates with Ghanaians when it comes to salsa, it is necessary to first discuss the elements of the Africanist aesthetic that are most commonly expressed in the dance. I apply the rich scholarship on this topic done by Robert Farris Thompson (1966, 1974), John Chernoff (1979), Brenda Dixon Gottschild (1998), and Molefi Keti Asante and Kariamu Welsh Asante and (1985) and Kariamu Welsh Asante (1998), to my own eleven years of experience with salsa and Afro-​Latin dance to show specifically how salsa dance expresses an African aesthetic on the dance floor. 1. Bent knees and grounded posture In salsa dance, the knees must be slightly bent, while the upper body remains in an upright posture. This is not only crucial in allowing the dancer’s hips to move freely, but makes the dancer appear relaxed while still being engaged and ready for the next move—​what Thompson refers to as “the cool” in African artistic expression (1966). It is quite common for salsa dancers to accentuate this grounded posture during moments of improvisation—​when the couple breaks apart—​lowering deeper to the floor, appearing to slow down the movement, and perhaps shifting the inertia of the body to the side, similar to guaguancó (a specifically Cuban style of rumba). This practice of “getting down” usually happens at a musical break and serves as a way to honor the musicians (and spirits in the African context) in a more intense and obvious moment during the dance (Thompson 1974). 2. Polyrhythmic movement and a deeply embodied connection with the music Polyrhythmic movement refers to the ability to shift weight in the feet according to one rhythm while simultaneously moving others parts of the body to other rhythms entirely. Obviously this skill relies on a deep knowledge and understanding of the rhythmic and musical patterns of the music. In order to dance salsa, one must, first and foremost, understand the clave rhythm. The clave is tapped out in a 2/​3 or 3/​2 contrast within a two-​measure phrase and serves as the underlying rhythmic foundation for both

From Salsa to Salzonto    509 musician and dancer.5 This rhythm bares striking similarities to West African bell patterns and is played out in a typical African call and response format.6 In addition, Chernoff explains that “[t]‌he African dancer may pick up or respond to the rhythms of one or more drums,” but the best dancer “adds another rhythm, one that is not there” (1979, 144). Similarly, good salsa dancers are often those with the ability to “play” with the rhythms—​to stretch them out, pause them, or tap out entirely different ones. They may keep the basic rhythm with their feet while pulsing out another with their shoulders, or they might aggressively accentuate one beat, say with the hip, or a kick, while the rest of the body calmly dances en clave. This ability to “step inside” a rhythm (Thompson 1974) is what allows the dancer to improvise during particular moments of a song and is considered one of the most advanced skills of the dance. Related to this sense of “play” in the dance is what Gottschild (1998) calls “high-​affect juxtaposition,” in which the dancer may contrast different moods within the dance by either stopping or pausing, heightening a mood or shifting styles within the same song. Usually in tandem with a musical break or change, salsa dancers may contrast fast-​paced steps and spins with slow taps or shifts in weight and perhaps even move from sensual, seductive-​like moves with their partners to comedic gestures as they laugh together on the dance floor. 3. Call and response, the break, and improvisation As mentioned previously, the clave rhythm in salsa is itself a musical expression of call and response with a contrasting 2/​3 or 3/​2 pattern. In the dance, this happens during “the break”—​the moment in which the couples separate from each other and dance on their own. This is also the moment in the dance that is marked by the most improvisation, where dancers play with the rhythms outside of their regular movement repertoire and play off of each other’s moves. Thompson (1966) considers call and response and apart dancing as dialogue, a kind of conversation between the two dancers as one initiates a move and the other responds. There is another conversation that happens between dancers and the music (or musicians if the music is live). The dance break in salsa tends to happen during a break in the music, which is typically a dropping of all instruments except the percussion, making it sound as though the speed and energy of the song has slowed down or been put on hold. Skilled salsa leads, upon hearing this change, will often initiate a break by disconnecting with their partners, then executing a series of complicated footwork patterns (“shines”), hook turns, and spins as the followers respond with their own stylistic variations. The break can often be one of the most intense moments for both musicians and dancers, both being aware that the break will come to an end, culminating in a rapid build up of the song’s original pace and energy. This musical suspension creates a sense of expectation—​a feeling that the dancer must make a contribution in order to “restore the music to its proper state” (Schloss 2009). Thus, it heightens an awareness of the relationship between the dancer and the music, as discussed previously. 7 This moment is beautifully articulated by poet/​performer El Extreme in the documentary From Mambo to Hip-​Hop, a South Bronx Tale:

510   Christey Carwile When you dancing mambo, when you dancing salsa, man, you have to, like, be very on top of it. And there’s the solo and there’s, you know, the break, and the drum beat playing and you mark it, and mark it and mark it and then it becomes this whole thing where you become one with the drum. The whole audience becomes one because the ritual of the beat. The beat is going at a certain tempo and that creates, you know, what I call “the hypnotic.”

I have both observed and experienced this “hypnotic” moment, both in West African dance as well as in salsa. It relies on the deeply intense connection that the dancers have both with the music and their partners. The break is also where the most innovation occurs. Although both dancers are still held by the basic rhythm, the falling away of the rest of the music opens up the opportunity for dancers to communicate in a different pattern and to experiment with different moves and style. 4. Strong hip and pelvic accents One of the most difficult aspects for new dancers who are learning salsa, particularly those of European background, is mastering the hip movement, what studio instructors call “Cuban motion.” This movement is not contrived, as for example in the 1950s “twist.” Rather, it should naturally occur as a result of the bending and straightening of the knees and the weight changes in the feet. As the dancer steps out of the initial neutral position (the “break” step), the hips sway in line with the dancer’s step, appearing as one fluid motion. Hip movements can be accentuated through particular moves or during improvisations. The hip movement typical of African dance styles has historically been deemed sexually lewd and licentious by Europeans standards, despite the fact that this movement was more of a celebration of fertility and social reproduction than the sex act itself. Yet this connotation has remained, to a certain extent, associating Latin dances with the same sexual connotations. 5. Prioritization of style over technique Chernoff notes that in African dance “personal coolness and communicative purpose are the essential elements of good style” (1979, 148). One must appear in control both in one’s movement as well in one’s mastery over the rhythms. Good dancers are not viewed as such simply because they know the techniques of a dance or can execute a variety of different dance moves. Rather, this status comes from their ability to “get into the grooves provided by the rhythms and add their bodies to the elaboration of rhythmic sophistication and power” (Chernoff 1979, 149). In my own experience dancing, the partners I enjoy dancing with the most are those who understand the rhythm and seem to visibly enjoy the dance, but whose styles are subtle rather than flamboyant. Subtlety and control are important in indicating to one’s partner that he or she is attempting to communicate personally rather than to entertain an audience (1979, 147). As I was in the midst of writing this article, I had a conversation with a Haitian born fellow salsa dancer

From Salsa to Salzonto    511 and friend living here in the United States about why she connected so much with salsa dance. Despite her experience in Haitian folkloric dance, ballet, ballroom, and other popular dances in Haiti, she claimed, “With salsa, it was different. With salsa I found my style.” I knew exactly what she meant. She was not simply referring to the fact that she had found salsa as a style of dance, but more to how she had found her own style within the dance. This Africanist aesthetic in salsa dance is merged with the heterosexual partner hold and lead/​follow structure that is more typical of European dance traditions (Gottschild 1998; Daniel 2002). This style of dancing was introduced to sub-​Saharan Africa primarily through Western ballroom styles introduced during the colonial era and backed by the circulation of Latin music popular in the 1950s and 1960s. Closed partner dancing would eventually get incorporated into other African dance styles, most notably West African highlife.8 By 1965 Judith Hanna had already noted this integration as an established style in West Africa: The West African highlife, another example of fusion, combines the structure of Western ballroom dancing with some of the style and generalized meaning of indigenous dance. In many African societies, it was considered highly immoral for a man and woman to dance in public tightly clasped together…. Today the imported ballroom dancing position is accepted by most Western educated Africans, and it is commonly used along with indigenous African steps, posture, gesture, manipulation of hips and buttocks, earthy quality, meaning (affirmation of life), and function (e.g., emotional release, exhibit of skill, and display of sexual attractiveness). (Hanna 1965: 20)

Contact partner dancing certainly contributes to some of the appeal of contemporary salsa for young Ghanaian dancers in Accra, who are looking for new ways to connect to members of the opposite sex in public that will still be considered socially acceptable. For instance, Kwame explained to me as we danced a slow-​tempo salsa one evening at a popular weekly dance social, “In our traditional dances, the men do their dances and the women do theirs. They do not touch each other. Salsa lets you get very close, to touch, to be sensual and sexual but not get into trouble [laughing].” But it is not closed partner dancing by itself that excites most Ghanaian salsa dancers. An overwhelming number of the dancers I interviewed alluded to a familiarity with its rhythms and aesthetics9. Petra Peterson, a Nigerian born resident of Accra whom I heard referred to as the “Patron” and “Queen Mother” of salsa in Ghana due to her overwhelming support and involvement in salsa happenings in Accra, acknowledged salsa’s African past and underlying African aesthetic: We are very proud of the African heritage of salsa. Even those who know little about salsa sense the powerful underlying African rhythms, particularly in Cuban Salsa. We hear “Africa” in salsa’s beats. In fact it is even possible to use several Ghanaian dance moves in free-​style salsa. I am not too good in this area, but I have met dancers who have been excellent at this improvisation.

512   Christey Carwile Echoing this, thirty-​two-​year old Kweku told me “It’s a lot like our highlife music and dance. The rhythms and the movements all feel familiar to what we already know.”10 Upon first discovering salsa in Lagos, Nigeria, Oluwa’damilare, founder of Salsa Abuja, shared with me his first impressions: A few months over 20 years old, I knew for sure that [salsa] was the art I wanted to express. Song after song, … I could feel the rich tunes of the African percussions enmeshed in the Latin jazz rhythms as I watched the people move to the music.

Over and over again the Ghanaian dancers I interviewed articulated an explicit knowledge of salsa’s African history, particularly those who had been dancing for some time or were heavily invested in the dance. Because many were unable to understand the words of the salsa songs being played, they did not learn this history as it is celebrated and recapitulated in the lyrics of the music. Instead, it came from the popular discourse circulating among instructors and dancers exposed to this history through online and other popular media. The following blog entry posted on an American dance instruction site is just one example of this kind of discourse: I think we can all agree that West Africa is the spiritual home of what has grown to be known as salsa. When we see dancers in the clubs doing their mambo, rumba moves, we can’t help but visualize the ritualistic dances done by brothers, heavily chalked, deep in trance and connected with the ancestral spirits of their forefathers in the temples and shrines of Nigerian, Ghanaian, Gambian, holy men and healers. This is what the slaves carried with them … as they were enslaved and forcibly relocated on many of the islands of the Caribbean. This became the soul, spirit and passion that evolved and later manifested itself in salsa music and dancing. (http://​www.centralavedance.com/​node/​3284)

The initial sense of familiarity expressed by dancers is often reinforced by this kind of popular discourse, and it fosters a strong sense of connection among those who dance salsa. One dancer describes this to me as “blood rhythms”—​a kind of rhythmic identity that reaches beyond local ethnicities, space, and time. This echoes Welsh-Ashante’s use of the term “blood memory” to describe the maintaining or rekindling of African aesthetics and practices by those of African descent (1994). This memory through practice, does not necessarily highlight specific national or ethnic origins, but rather pays homage to larger African sensibilities. As I discuss in the next section, salsa’s retention of this African aesthetic makes it particularly convenient as a Pan-African practice.

Salsa’s Pan-​African Possibilities If we accept ethnicity not as a given fact, but rather as a “set of relations” (Comaroff 1987), then we must also realize that dance can be a powerful mediator of these relations. In “African Dream: The Imaginary of Nation, Race and Gender in South African

From Salsa to Salzonto    513 Intercultural Dance,” Radhakishnan (2003) discusses the role of choreographed dance performance in communicating national ideals and desires that encourage multiculturalism in post-​apartheid South Africa. She argues that intercultural dance performance from groups like Surialanga, made up of Indian women and Zulu men, “poses a threat to the power structures of apartheid that persist,” and serves as a microcosm for cross-​ cultural interaction (2003, 530–​531). Although she also acknowledges the contradictions that exist between the ideal conveyed on stage and the gendered, racial, and ethnic realities that exist for the dancers off stage in their everyday lives and relations, she continues to stress the potential of the dance to blur these differences, even if only temporarily. Whether it is an intentionally choreographed performance like this one or a popularly emergent social dance like salsa, the collection of differing bodies in one space, moving to the same rhythms, taking on and sharing the techniques and knowledge of a dance on a routine basis, inevitably creates a sense of community (see Figure 22.1). As Hamera points out, dance communities become bonded through shared intimacies, which include “individuals’ fantasies and interpersonal conversations; they are the social and affective micropractices from which complex communities are built” (2011, 14). These dance communities often carry messages about identity, either implicitly through the simple presence of coexisting bodies or explicitly through taught histories, aesthetics, and values. As such, they initiate, create, and display an ideal. As I  have discussed in more depth elsewhere (Carwile forthcoming), salsa dance for Ghanaians is often approached less in terms of learning a Latin dance, and more as tapping into the African roots of a Latin dance. Dancers engage with and reinforce

Figure 22.1  Weekly salsa events at nightclubs like this one in Accra’s lively Osu district, create intimate spaces of community where differing identities and ethnicities intersect.

514   Christey Carwile salsa’s African past through popular discourse that addresses Africa as the “home” and “birthplace” of salsa. This discourse permeates salsa promotional media in Ghana and is taught to newcomers during dance lessons. Moses (pseudonym), a twenty-​year old resident of Accra who had been teaching salsa for just over a year at the time, told me: I tell my students that salsa is really not that much different than our traditional dances, really. I could dance a number of traditional dances to salsa music and I often add some of them in when I am dancing salsa to give it, you know, a push. It comes easy to me. Probably because it comes from Africa and I’m African!

In season three of Ghana’s reality TV dance competition Close Up Salsa Fiesta, a judge criticizes one couple’s attempt to blend Ghanaian traditional dance with salsa (the goal of this particular episode): The truth actually is salsa emanated from Africa, right here. You understand what I am saying? Salsa came from traditional dances from Africa here, so I was expecting you to blend it, bring it out of the salsa dance. (Salsa Fiesta, Episode 6, Ghana 2013)

Though one could argue that this focus on the African influences of salsa deemphasizes its original political undertones as an expression of Nuyorican and Latin identity, it is equally important to understand how salsa for Ghanaians is implicated in the process of identity construction in its new context. In her comprehensive discussion of the spread and popularity of global hip hop, Osumare claims that in addition to its Africanist aesthetic, hip hop among youth is driven by a sense of “connective marginality”: “perceived linkages across nation-​states and language groups that occur through a mediating local agency in the face of lingering social inequalities in the postcolonial era” (2008, 15). As I will touch upon more in the next section, salsa’s international appeal and its African story seem to quench urban Ghanaian desires to be included in the global world. But unlike hip hop, it draws dancers as an indicator of a different type of urban cosmopolitanism—​one more in line with sensuality and sophistication than with the rawness and aggression associated with the urban ghetto11 (Carwile forthcoming). Rosina Kwawukume, a salsa dancer and instructor in Accra who is Ewe, told me: [I see] salsa as being more cosmopolitan and not really along ethnic groupings…. At a usual salsa event, several ethnic groupings are present and get along very well because salsa in itself is a language, a form of communication, as is able to break all kinds of barriers, including tribal barriers.

Time and again I heard dancers, DJs, and promoters speak of salsa dance as a “barrier breaker” and as a practice that creates connections between ethnic groups as well as nations.12 One salsa promoter in Accra told me, “ During a salsa event, everyone becomes an equal.” One way in which this is enacted is through what Ghanaians call “salsa line-​ups.” Line-​ ups are commonly done in large groups on the dance floor (similar to electric or cha cha

From Salsa to Salzonto    515 slide at some dance clubs here in the United States), and I observed them at almost every salsa venue I attended. The playing of a particular salsa track by the DJ signals the dancing couples to separate as others run up to join them on the dance floor. They then form a series of rows from which they proceed to enact a choreographed routine made up of simple salsa footwork and body rotations, all in unison (see Figure 22.2). As Rosina contends, “Bottom line is there can’t be a salsa night without line-​ups.” Not only do they aid new dancers in learning the basic footwork in salsa, but it is “very beautiful and exciting to see everyone doing the same thing and [gives the] opportunity for people to exhibit their creativity.” Some of the most spectacular salsa line-​ups can be observed at the free weekly event known as Salsa Mania, which takes place at the Coconut Grove Regency Hotel, nestled in Accra’s bustling embassy district. Here literally hundreds of primarily young dancers, of varying ethnic backgrounds,13 line up around the outside pool, tapping, stepping, hopping, spinning, and traveling in a fantastic display of unison and synchronicity. Moments like these, along with the frequent nods to salsa’s African past, make for a powerful evocation of pan-​African identity.

Figure 22.2  Salsa line-​ups combine salsa footwork with other local dance steps and techniques and are quite popular in Ghana’s urban dance scenes.

516   Christey Carwile I am in no way trying to argue that this pan-​Africanism is synonymous with utopia—​ that salsa perfectly transcends class lines and attracts all ethnic groups equally. One young Nigerian salsa instructor, who is Yoruba, acknowledged that he rarely had salsa students who were Hausa, which he attributed to the fact that most of them were Muslim and may have problems with the close holds and sensuality of salsa. However, salsa does provide a familiar movement framework wrapped up in a global package, which resonates across ethnic, national, regional, and class divisions in a way that traditional dances do not (see Figure 22.3). It is just one example of the myriad ways in which

Figure 22.3  Couples in Accra’s 2010 Intertertiary Salsa Competition perform a variety of popular salsa moves for an inter-​ethnic and international audience.

From Salsa to Salzonto    517 popular dance is employed by urban youth as a way to construct a modern African identity. It is interesting that Rosina refers to salsa as “a language” in light of Katrina Hazzard Gordon’s description of the mediating role of dance during the transatlantic slave trade: Though the ceremonial context and the specific uses of movement of each enslaved ethnic group’s dance were different, the basic vocabulary of West African movement was strikingly similar across ethnic delineation. As a result, in the new culture creating environment, inter-​ethnic assimilation was probably more easily facilitated than in other aspects of African culture, i.e., language. (1998, 105)

Indeed, Nkrumah and other pan-​African postcolonial leaders recognized the powerful potential of dance to foster a sense of African unity by showcasing the dances of different ethnic groups on the national stage. Today Ghanaians are certainly exposed to the dances of varying ethnic groups; however, the actual learning and participating in dances different from one’s own ethnic group tends to be limited.14 Salsa, on the other hand, often fosters a learning community of dancers all working toward the mastery of a dance that has no ethnic leanings but strong African sensibilities. 15

From Salsa to Salzonto: Dance That Keeps Moving Inasmuch as dance involves movement, it also inevitably involves change. Dances referred to as “traditional” in Africa were not permanent products of the past but processes infinitely shaped by historical forces, both local and external. Prior to European contact, music and dance traditions in Ghana had long been shared, borrowed, and modified among the Dagomba, Akan, Ewe, Hausa, and Ga (Nketia 1971). The lines between “traditional” and “modern” music and dance forms are increasingly blurred, as indicated by such scholarly referents as “new traditional,” “modern traditional,” and “neo-​traditional.” As John Collins claims “much of contemporary Ghanaian and indeed African popular music, is a direct continuation of traditional but ever dynamic recreational music, albeit with elements of the West incorporated into it” (2000, 61). Collins also draws our attention to the crucial role of Ghanaian youth in leading innovations in popular music and dance: Because recreational music and dance styles are continually open to generational modifications, it is from these, rather than the more slow-​changing ritual and court performance, that so much of Ghana’s acculturated or transcultured popular dance music arose. (2000, 60)

Prior to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, innovations in Ghanaian recreational dances occurred as youth altered and reinterpreted older styles and borrowed those of neighboring ethnic groups. However, with increased Western contact brought about

518   Christey Carwile by colonization and globalization, sources for novelty shifted to more external sources, particularly from Europe and the Americas.16 Thus, much like in the West, popular dance trends in Ghana are pioneered by urban youth who, while drawing on their own dance traditions and movement dialects, continually revise, renew, borrow, and innovate dance styles as markers of youth identity, creating their own inventive traditions in the process. One example of this is Kpanlogo, a music and dance style that developed in the early 1960s among Ga17 youth in Accra. Often referred to as “neo-​traditional,” it combines an older Ga dance known as kolomashie with hip movements from popular American dances like the “twist” and rock ’n’ roll (Collins 2002. Even though Kpanlogo’s highly exaggerated pelvic accents were quite controversial among older generations, who saw the dance as sexually suggestive, it was eventually endorsed by President Nkrumah himself as a “cultural” music and dance form (Collins 1992). Today Kpanlogo is generally accepted as a Ghanaian national dance, and I frequently heard it referred to as a “traditional” dance by many of the dancers I interviewed in Accra, particularly those in their twenties and thirties. Both males and females dance Kpanlogo, but in the typical “apart dancing” characteristic of African dance (Thompson 1966). They begin separately with the basic movement, which involves a wide-​legged stance, alternating steps on the heels in a low, crouched position, accompanied by strong hip swings and open palms. The females typically wear patterned cloth wrapped around the body and tied at the chest, whereas the males wear button-​up shirts with suspenders and either knee socks with low shorts or long trousers. Throughout the song the couple comes together, either playfully mirroring each other face to face or with her back to his front. In the latter position, the dance often becomes openly flirtatious, as she shakes her hips against his groin or he attempts to slide his body through her legs. Kpanlogo is often full of theatrical comedic expressions—​large exaggerated smiles, raised eyebrows, back and forth play between the couple—​and moments of improvisation interspersed throughout the structure of the dance. In an attempt to explain this dance to me in an interview, one female dance instructor told me: The whole concept of the kpanlogo is a man trying to win the ladies attention and the lady is also flirting with the man by moving her bum all over the place. The dressing of the man mimics that of our colonial masters. Bottom line they’re trying to show how classy and wealthy they are even in their sharp British style outfit…. hilarious isnt it?

On three separate occasions, I witnessed salsa dance being either fused or performed in conjunction with Kpanlogo. Interestingly, the basic bell pattern in Kpanlogo percussion is synonymous with the 3/​2 clave pattern in salsa, making it convenient to blend both music and dance styles. During a 2012 public salsa performance/​competition in Accra, one dance group began their performance with Kpanlogo dance and music, playing up the flirtatious and comedic aspects of the dance. The music quickly shifted to a salsa song, and the couples came together in closed position, performing salsa turns and

From Salsa to Salzonto    519 patterns while continuing the comedic, playful feel of the Kpanlogo. (See YouTube 2012b for a video of a similar performance.) Salsa encourages innovation and inventive styles through improvisation, and its African sensibilities make it particularly easy to fuse with a variety of local African dance styles, whether old or new. Over the course of my fieldwork I observed these fusions and innovations happening quite frequently in both formal performance settings and in informal social dance scenes.18 Currently, however, it is Azonto—​Ghana’s newest popular and now globally circulating dance—​that is finding its way into salsa fusions. Azonto is danced by individuals, but often in pairs or lines, usually without much traveling. Its signature step is a rapid pivoting on the ball of one foot while pumping the shoulders and arms downward, then one arm upward, creating a twist or winding effect from which a whole range of daily gestures are incorporated and parodied. While its origins are disputed, several accounts suggest that it developed out of the coastal suburbs of Accra.19 Some have associated its style with Apa, a variation of Kpanlogo that involves mimicking work-​related gestures (Shipley 2013; Jakana 2012), while some dancers I talked to mentioned the Akan dance, Adowa, as an influence. Petra’s elucidation is less specific about the origins of Azonto, instead serving as a reminder to understand it as an inventive dance tradition: Azonto is a combination of various Ghanaian dances, which is why it can be danced to many types of music. It originated in the coastal suburbs of Accra. If you are conversant with Ghanaian dances from those areas you can clearly see that Azonto is a modernized version of them.

Because Azonto is not associated with any one particular ethnic group, it has become a shared symbol of Ghanaian identity both in Ghana and abroad (Shipley 2013). The digitally produced pop music that Azonto is danced to shares little similarities with salsa music, but its unique style is not only becoming an addition at salsa venues, it is also steadily being integrated into salsa dance as yet another Ghanaian dance innovation. In fact, beginning this year, one Accra club is now offering a weekly dance event called salsa-​salzonto. According to Rosina, one of the instructors at this event: Azonto is not tribe specific even though some believe that some of the dance movements are similar to Adowa dance movements whereas our typical traditional dances are tribe specific. So yes the Azonto is seen largely as a Ghanaian invention and has more Ghanaians dancing or attempting to learn the movements…. Salzonto was coined out of salsa and Azonto, basically fusing some Azonto moves on salsa rhythms especially when doing freestyle salsa.

Another extremely popular trend I observed in Accra was the blending of Azonto dance movements with the salsa line-​ups described previously. When an Azonto song came blaring from the speakers at a wedding reception I attended one afternoon in Kumasi, attendees formed a salsa line-​up similar to those I observed in Accra. However, as they

520   Christey Carwile traveled side-​to-​side and forward and back together, they also added in Azonto hand gestures and foot pivots during key phrases of the song. Azonto, like salsa, “celebrates structured improvisation” (Shipley 2013) and provides endless possibilities for innovation. But as one dancer laments, “anything that is new and hip and cool, everybody wants to see what’s happening there. But Azonto won’t last. It will get swallowed up by the next dance fad.” On the other hand, when I asked dancers their thoughts on the longevity of salsa in Ghana, some felt that salsa would be better at standing the test of time. The early presence and influence of Latin music in sub-​Saharan Africa seems to be an important contributor to salsa dance’s popularity and perceived longevity. Luc Kpelly, a salsa teacher in Benin, told a reporter: No modern music competes with salsa in Benin today. We have our traditional dances; they are always there. The others are born and die…. Yesterday was soukous; tomorrow maybe zouglou again. But if you play salsa today and play it again in 10 years, the reaction will be the same. (Mark 2012, 1–​2)

Salsa also provides a stable movement framework onto which other popular dances are attached and showcased:  Congolese Soukous, Cameroonian Makossa, Ghanaian Azonto, Angolan Kizomba, etc. Whereas these dances embody and signify national identities, salsa speaks more broadly to being African within the continent while also projecting a mastery over it as a globally circulating dance style. In Salsa-​Afrique, a Lagos-​printed dance magazine popular among Nigerians and Ghanaians (see Figure 22.4), a Nigerian writer/​dancer dedicates an entire article to the importance of becoming proficient in “foreign” dances: The recent seeming-​like acceptance of dance is sure not a result of our own indigenous dances which has [sic] always been; rather it’s because of the foreign dances’ influence, like salsa and hip-​hop etc. Some people might call this hypocrisy or unpatriotic, but I don’t think so. I may just not believe in eating the same kind of Egusi20 soup…. For starters, I like chicken, so why not Egusi soup and chicken? It may be hard to believe in this day and age but there are still people who think it can’t and shouldn’t be changed. (Yibowei 2006, 46)

Moving on from his Nigerian-​specific food metaphor, the author encourages Nigerian dancers and instructors to be innovative by finding ways to bring local dance traditions in line with more contemporary dance trends. He warns that “even with this new love of Salsa, Hip-​Hop, etc., we shouldn’t get comfortable,” otherwise “the best of it will have been seen and we will be back to the bottom of the Artistic[sic] chain again” (Yibowei 2006, 46). This need for constant innovation in dance as a way of keeping up with the global dance world resonated in many of my interviews. “Dance is part of who we are,” a twenty-​three-​year-​old salsa dancer explained to me with conviction as he caught his breath between dances at a small, low-​key nightclub on the outskirts of Accra. “It’s what we do in Africa. The world knows this. You know what I’m saying? But we have to mix it

Figure  22.4  Salsa Afrique dance magazine showcases salsa instructors, history, events, and fashion to a primarily West African audience.

522   Christey Carwile up. We have to add new things and show everybody that we can change with the times, that we can be leaders in the dance world by setting new dance trends.” In order to keep up with dance trends, Ghanaian youth seem less interested in showcasing their traditional dances to the world. Rather, they continue what they have long been doing for centuries when it comes to recreational dance: they revive, recycle, reinterpret, and reinvent what suits them, sending it back out as a kind of movement dialogue that conveys their presence in the world.

Conclusions As I have tried to demonstrate, popular dance in Ghana always speaks to tradition even as it thrives on innovation. While salsa dance may not explicitly express traditional rural values in Ghana, it does reflect aspects of the life of those who dance in the global cosmopolitan city, while at the same celebrating an African aesthetic tradition that has stood the test of time. Osumare explains this continuity beautifully within the global hip hop scene: “An Asian b-​girl’s dynamic body isolations during her improvisation in a breakdance circle in Tokyo for example, create an intercultural moment as she echoes centuries of African-​derived movement repertoires within her own place in time” (2008, 19). Similar to this “intercultural moment,” salsa dance has become a global framework that connects dancers across space through its common movement dialect, creating new opportunities for social communication and alliances between different groups. African youth play a vital role as cultural ambassadors through the medium of dance. This ambassadorship occurs as village youth add their own innovations to recreational dances, as young members of the Ghanaian Dance Ensemble learn village dances and perform them on the national stage, or when youth in nightclubs and social venues create their own inventive dance traditions inspired by the (re)introduction of global currents. Diouf argues that “young Africans can be seen as searching for a narrative that provides a territory for the free play of their imagination.” They create new “sociabilities” that have the “capacity to erase distance and to create a ritual community whose imagined geography is so powerful that it challenges the geography of borders” (2003, 6). Through shared intimacies on the dance floor and the recirculation of particular histories surrounding salsa dance, Ghanaians embody a world dance and at the same time re-​world it. Savigliano defines world dance as “a classification applied to newly ‘discovered’ dances and dancers, who while all along, doing their dancing thing out there in the world, now have been worlded differently so as to fit the Dance collections under globalization” (2009, 167). There is no doubt that salsa has been worlded in this way through the circuits of global media and technology, international salsa congresses, and performances on the world dance stage.21 This is ultimately how salsa has found its way to the African continent. Salsa dance as a product includes a set of rules for achieving a particular movement dialect as well as expectations surrounding gender relations,22 dance floor etiquette, and even fashion and has moved well beyond its initial emergence

From Salsa to Salzonto    523 in the barrios of New York City. Nevertheless, I also suggest that the process of worlding may not be driven solely “from above” or by institutions that have the power to globally define “dance” and what it should look like. Worlding also occurs with a variety of inventive dance traditions, as dancers come to understand its rules, sometimes selectively, and on their own terms—​thus keeping the dance in movement.

Notes 1. I conducted participant observation at a variety of salsa venues in Accra and Kumasi during four visits between 2008 and 2010. This included formal stage performances and competitions and social dances held at nightclubs, hotels, and social functions such as weddings and family parties. I also observed instructors teaching lessons in classes and at the beginning of salsa events. When not in country, I stayed in touch with salsa events and happenings in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania through Facebook, promotional websites and blogs, and salsa-​related TV shows. I also continued online interviews with salsa dancers, instructors, and promoters from both Ghana and Nigeria up until the writing of this essay. My experience with salsa and Latin dance began in 2002 and includes ballroom mambo, New York style On1 and On2, cha cha cha, and salsa rueda. I have attended and participated in numerous salsa events, congresses, and performances across the United States and completed a brief research stint on salsa in Havana, Cuba, in 2011. 2. For example, Mobutu’s authenticité campaign sought to ban foreign music from Zaire and encouraged rural musicians to teach “traditional” music styles to younger musicians. However, as Dorsch (2010) points out, much of the music of the independence era in Congo/​Zaire was Latin-​inspired, like the Congolese rumba. 3. For a detailed account of the formation of the Ghanaian Dance Ensemble and its role in developing a national culture in Ghana through dance, see Schramm (2000). 4. The Spanish word clave, meaning key, refers to the 3/​2 or 2/​3 rhythm upon which salsa music and dance depends, as well as the wooden instrument typically used to keep this rhythm. 5. Salsa is typically danced either on the first or second beat of the music, depending on the particular style of the dance. Salsa On1 involves a break step on the first beat of the music that is marked by the first beat of the clave. Salsa On2, also referred to as mambo, has two different variations, both of which break on the second beat of the music and follow the conga drum rather than the clave. These include the “Palladium style” and the Eddie Torres technique. For more detailed discussion of these differing styles, see Renta (2007). 6. Among the Igbo in Southeastern Nigeria, for instance, the ritual dances I participated in relied heavily on the 2/​3, 3/​2 contrast, which was played on a similar hollowed wooden percussive instrument called an ekwe. 7. Berrios-​Miranda (2004, 163) describes this bond with the concept of afinque: “the tight locking of the various rhythmic layers, melodies and harmonies in a salsa ensemble and the close relationship between dancer and musician.” 8. Highlife developed as a syncretic musical genre along the southwest coast of Ghana and became popular in West Africa throughout the twentieth century. It combines African-​ based rhythms with the sounds of European brass orchestras and harmonies as well as elements of Latin percussion. See Collins (1976) for a more detailed discussion of highlife’s

524   Christey Carwile origins and growth. Highlife declined shortly after the independence era and has been replaced in Ghana with hiplife, a combination of highlife influences with hip hop. 9. It is also important to note that the salsa I refer to throughout this chapter is what is popularly referred to as, “street” or “club” style salsa, rather than the style performed in the ballroom tradition. While some of the dancers I spoke with had some exposure to ballroom styles, those dancers made a sharp distinction between the two styles. One dancer referred to ballroom as “monotonous” and “rigid,” preferring the “freedom” and “honest passion” that the more social version of salsa provided. 10. It is interesting that Kweku draws upon the familiarity of highlife in explaining his attraction to salsa, especially considering the syncretic nature of this music and dance. Another dancer mentioned a similarity with hiplife, another syncretic form (see note 8). 11. I would also add that both male and female dancers mentioned the connection between partners in salsa dance—​while still being able to improvise—​as a reason for choosing salsa over hip hop. One young woman told me: “ Hip-​hop seems angry. I like salsa because it’s less about a battle and more about a deep connection with your partner.” 12. Ghanaian and Nigerian dancers, for instance, have created a strong relationship by hosting salsa events in tandem, like the West African Nite of Salseros in 2007 and the 2009 Ghana Naija Salsa Fiesta, both of which featured Salsa Ghana and Salsa Naija—​informal dance communities from Ghana and Nigeria, respectively. 13. Although I was unable to interview every dancer present at this venue, its free admission was certainly a draw for dancers of differing socioeconomic backgrounds, and I knew many dancers who came from some of Accra’s more economically impoverished regions. 14. Almost all of my interviewees seemed knowledgeable about the dances of ethnic groups different than their own, but no one I spoke with claimed they knew how to execute them, with the exception of one student who was studying dance at the University of Ghana-​ Legon. Two young ladies mentioned that they taught certain aspects of their own village dances to their friends for fun, but this did not involve the complexities of dancing to particular drum rhythms. Rosina also mentioned the technicality of traditional dance and drumming. “When dancing salsa, the gentleman leads and the lady follows so all you need is music whereas with African dances you might need a whole ensemble of instruments and the dances are done taking instructions from the lead drum, [which] can be very technical at times.” 15. Salsa dance is also being introduced onto the national stage in Africa, as it is featured in beauty pageants, African salsa congresses, and even pan-​African festivals. 16. Collins (1977, 54) notes that syncretic music and dance forms were established much earlier in the twentieth century in British colonial West Africa than in those countries colonized by the French. He attributes this to the fact that French colonial administrations enforced stronger demarcations between French culture and indigenous culture, whereas the British policy of indirect rule was “much more tolerant toward Africanization of Western political and cultural institutions.” 17. The Ga are the most prominent ethnic group in the Greater Accra region. 18. Another local dance I  observed being integrated with salsa was atorkor, from Ghana’s Volta region, and a Nigerian interviewee mentioned highlife and galala as dances that he incorporated into salsa when freestyling. 19. Shipley (2013) mentions Bukom and Jamestown suburbs as well as the city of Tema as possible origins of Azonto and traces its emergence to sometime in 2011. Most of the Azonto

From Salsa to Salzonto    525 dancers I spoke with were unclear about its specific origins, but agreed that it was most likely from the suburb along the coast. 20. Egusi soup is a quintessential Nigerian dish made with seeds from the native egusi melon and other ingredients. 21. Salsa is now being showcased at national and political events throughout Africa. 22. Given space limitations, I  am unable to address Ghanaians’ performance of gender in salsa in this chapter. However, readers interested in this topic should see Garcia (2008), Wieschiolek (2003), and Borland (2009).

References Asante, Kariamu Welsh. 1998. African Dance: An Artistic and Philosophical Inquiry. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Asante, Kariamu Welsh. 1994. The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions. Westport, CT: Praeger. Asante, Molefi Keti, and Kariamu Welsh Asante, eds. 1985. African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Berrios-​Miranda, Marisol. 2004. Salsa Music as Expressive Liberation. Centro Journal 16, no. 2: 159–​173. Borland, Katherine. 2009. “Embracing Difference:  Salsa Fever in New Jersey.” Journal of American Folklore 122, no. 486: 466–​492. Bosse, Joanna. 2008. “Salsa Dance and the Transformation of Style: An Ethnographic Study of Movement and Meaning in a Cross-​Cultural Context.” Dance Research Journal 40, no. 1: 45–​64. Carwile, Christey. Forthcoming. “The Clave Comes Home: Salsa Dance and Pan-African Identity in Ghana.” African Studies Review. Chernoff, John Miller. 1979. African Rhythm and African Sensibility:  Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Collins, E. J. 1976. “Ghanaian Highlife.” African Arts 10, no. 1: 62–​68, 100. Collins, E. J. 1977. “Post War Popular Band Music in West Africa.” African Arts 10, no. 3: 53–​60. Collins, John. 1992. West African Pop Roots. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Collins, John​. 2002. “The Generational Factor in Ghanaian Music: Concert Parties, Highlife, Simpa, Kpanlogo, and Local Techno-​Pop.” In Playing with Identities in Contemporary Music in Africa. Edited by Mai Palmberg and Annemette Kirkegaard, 60–​74. Nordiska Afrikainstitutet: Stockholm, Sweden. Comaroff, John. 1987. “Of Totemism and Ethnicity: Consciousness, Practice, and the Signs of Inequality.” Ethnos 52, nos. 3–​4: 301–​323. Daniel, Yvonne. 2002. “Cuban Dance:  An Orchard of Caribbean Creativity.” In Caribbean Dance from Abakua to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity, edited by Susanna Sloat, 23–​55. Gainesville: University of Florida. Diouf, Mamadou. 2003. “Engaging Postcolonial Cultures: African Youth and Public Space.” African Studies Review 46, no. 2: 1–​12. Dorsch, Hauke. 2010. “Indepéndence Cha Cha”: African Pop Music Since the Independence Era. Africa Spectrum 45, no.3: 131–​146. Duany, Jorge. 1984. “Popular Music in Puerto Rico: Towards an Anthropology of Salsa.” Latin American Music Review 5, no. 2: 186–​216.

526   Christey Carwile Ehrenheich, Nancy. 2001. “Confessions of a White Salsa Dancer: Appropriation, Identity and the “Latin Music Craze.” Denver University Law Review 78, no. 4: 795–​815. Garcia, Cindy. 2008. “ ‘Don’t Leave Me Celia!’:  Salsera Homosociality and Pan-​ Latina Corporealities.” Women and Performance 18, no. 3: 199–​213. Gordon, Katrina Hazzard. 1998. “Dancing Under the Lash:  Sociocultural Disruption, Continuity and Synthesis.” In African Dance:  An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, edited by Kariamu Welsh Asante, 101–​130. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. 1998. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, CT: Praeger. Foster, Susan. 2009. Worlding Dance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hamera, Judith. 2011. Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference, and Connection in the Global City. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hanna Judith. 1965. “Africa’s New Traditional Dance.” Ethnomusicology 9, no. 1: 13–​21. Harper, Peggy. 1967. “Dance in a Changing Society.” African Arts 1, no. 1: 10–​13, 76–​80. Jakana, Alex. 2012. Could Ghana’s Azonto Craze Take Over the World? BBC News Africa, June 18. http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​world-​africa-​18495493 (accessed July 27, 2013). Kealinohomoku, Joann. 1970. “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance.” In Impulse 1969–​1970. San Francisco: Impulse Publications: 24–​33. Mark, Monica. 2012. “Salsa Lives on in Benin Though the Cubans Have Gone.” Guardian, November 5.  http://​www.guardian.co.uk/​world/​2012/​nov/​05/​salsa-​music-​book-​benin-​ african-​roots (accessed June 27, 2013). Nketia, J. H. K. 1971. History and Organisation of Music in West Africa. Legon: University of Ghana, Institute of African Studies. Nkrumah, Kwame. 1963. The African Genius: Speech Delivered at the Opening of the Institute of African Studies on October 25th, 1963. Accra: Ministry of Education and Broadcasting. Osumare, Halifu. 2008. The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-​Hop:  Power Moves. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Pietrobruno, Sheenagh. 2006. Salsa and Its Transnational Moves. New York: Lexington Books. Radhakrishnan, Smitha. 2003. “ ‘African Dream’: The Imaginary of Nation, Race, and Gender in South African Intercultural Performance.” Feminist Studies 29, no. 30: 537–​539. Ranger, Terrence. 1997. “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In Perspectives on Africa:  A  Reader in Culture, History, and Representation, edited by Roy Grinker and Christopher Steiner, 597–​612. Oxford: Blackwell. Renta, Priscilla. 2007. “Salsa Dance Performance:  Latina/​Latino History in Motion.” In Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/​o Studies, edited by Nancy Raquel Mirabal and AugustinLaó, 269–​294. New York: Lexington Books. Roberts, John Storm. 1992. “The Roots.” In Salsiology: Afro-​Cuban Music and the Evolution of Salsa in New York City. Edited by Vernon Boggs, 5–​23. New York: Greenwood Press. Roberts, John Storm. 1998. Black Music of Two Worlds: African, Caribbean, Latin and African-​ American Traditions. 2nd ed. New York: Schirmer. Savigliano, Marta. 2009. “Worlding Dance and Dancing Out There in the World.” In Worlding Dance, edited by Susan Foster, 163–​190. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schramm, Katharina. 2000. “The Politics of Dance. Changing Representation of the Nation in Ghana.” Afrika Spectrum 35, no. 3: 339–​358. Schloss, Joseph. 2009. Foundation:  B-​ Boys, B-​ Girls and Hip-​ Hop Culture in New  York. New York: Oxford University Press.

From Salsa to Salzonto    527 Shay, Anthony. 2008. Dancing Across Borders: The American Fascination with Exotic Dances. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Shipley, Jesse. 2013. “Transnational Circulation and Digital Fatigue in Ghana’s Azonto Dance.” American Ethnologist 40, no. 2: 362–​381. Southall, Aidan. 1997. “The Illusion of Tribe.” In Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation, edited by Roy Grinker and Christopher Steiner, 38–​ 51. Oxford: Blackwell. Thompson, Robert Farris. 1966. “An Aesthetic of the Cool: West African Dance.” Africa Forum 2, no. 2 (Fall): 85–​102. Thompson, Robert Farris​. 1974. African Art in Motion. Los Angeles: University of California. Valdivia, Angharad. 2003. “Salsa as Popular Culture:  Ethnic Audiences Constructing and Identity.” In Companion to Media Studies, edited by Angharad Valdivia, 399–​418. Boston: Blackwell. Washburne, Christopher. 1995. “Clave: The African Roots of Salsa.” Kalinda! Newsletter for the Center for Black Music Research (Fall): 7–​11. Waxer, Lise. 2002a. Situating Salsa:  Global Markets and Local Meaning in Latin American Popular Music. New York: Routledge. Waxer, Lise​. 2002b. “Llego La Salsa: The Rise of Salsa in Venezuela and Colombia.” In Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meaning in Latin American Popular Music, edited by Lise Waxer, 219–​245. Routledge: New York and London. Wieschiolek, Heike. 2003. “ ‘Ladies Just Follow His Lead!’ Salsa, Gender and Identity.” In Sport, Dance, and Embodied Identities, edited by Noel Dyck and Eduardo Achetti, 115–​137. Oxford: Berg Press. Yibowei, Preere. 2006. “An Interesting Perspective to Dance in Nigeria and Africa as a Whole.” Salsa-​Afrique Dance Trends Magazine. 1, No. 2: 46. YouTube.com. 2012a. AZONTO Dance by USHER& EMMANUEL {Buddy Salsa} Learn Azonto Dance. Posted by BuddyDanceTV, June 18. https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=GtC1YSV9aiQ (accessed June 15, 2013). YouTube.com​. 2012b. Salsa Azonto. Posted by Niitettey2010, February 17. https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=f2mipL1e_​n4 (accessed March 22, 2012).

Chapter 23

Spe ctacles of Et h ni c i t i e s The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival Miriam Phillips

Introduction Dancing is a powerful way for people of diverse cultures to maintain connection to their ethnic heritage, particularly when they have moved away from their country of origin or are first, second, or third generation immigrants. It is an evocative way for people to link to their familial cultural inheritance, and it can also serve as a means for others outside of a particular culture who feel an affinity with that culture, to bond, engage with, even adopt the worldviews and sensibilities of cultures outside of their own heritage. Dance is also a highly effective and commanding means to display one’s own ethnicity, or those that one has embraced, to people outside of one’s culture. If dance is considered an embodiment of culture, that is, a people’s values and belief systems are embedded in their dances and manners of producing them (Novack 1990; Ness 1992; Sklar 2001; Hahn 2007; Phillips 2013), then presumably by watching dance, we see and possibly learn something about the cultural values, aesthetics, and ideologies inherent in what we are watching. However, with today’s global village mentality, what happens when dances are packaged and repacked, “placed and re-​placed” (Van Zile 2014, 192) in different social and cultural contexts and done so by people outside the cultures represented? What are the different agendas of those that participate in these packaged acts: producers and funders, performers and observers? What might be considered culturally appropriate strategies to produce dance performances that include styles from diverse parts of the world, particularly when each cultural form has its own standards of production founded in deep-​seated aesthetic values? In order to examine these questions I elaborate on how ethnicities are performed and packaged in one of America’s most prominent multicultural dance festivals—​the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival (SFEDF or Festival). Featuring the rich talent of Northern California dance artists and community groups, this popular summertime

Spectacles of Ethnicities    529 festival’s core format centers on a succession of theatrical performances showcasing a variety of world dance styles, along with additional adjunct events. While I question and critique how the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival is packaged, as a kind of spectacle of ethnicities, it is important to keep in mind that the issues raised in this chapter are not exclusive to this festival. SFEDF serves as one model of a highly developed multicultural dance production with a nearly four-​decade history. Because of its longevity and popularity, I focus this chapter on SFEDF using it as a case study to reflect upon the kinds of production values and aesthetics prevalent to these types of multicultural dance festivals that have proliferated throughout the United States. This chapter interrogates issues around the politics of representation and confronts some notions of diversity that are presumed in these exhibitions of multiculturalism.1 Furthermore, as much as I have personally cherished the SFEDF having been on all sides of it since the early 1980s: excited audience member, rejected audition performer, successful Festival performer, studious consultant, souvenir program book and website researcher and writer, even briefly as a festival director, sadly to say, over the years I have grown more and more uncomfortable with the single narrative that the Festival tells as revealed in its production values in the name of, “the world united through dance” (Scott Horton Communications 2012, 1). However, I also frame these considerations around the concept of liminality, drawing upon the pioneering work on ritual of anthropologists, Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Part of the appeal of the Festival, not just as a product for audience consumption, but also as a process experienced by its practitioners, is that it sets up a liminal stage—​a threshold where differences between people, such as, ethnicities, nationalities, races, religions, social status, and distinctions in dance styles, professional dancer versus nonprofessional, even differentiations in dance skill level are dissolved. The dissolving of differences between people, even temporarily, brings about a great sense of community and social solidarity among tourists, performers, audience members, and even staff producers, which I believe account for the Festival’s popularity.

Witnessing the Event I walk into the cavernous red-​carpeted foyer, of one of San Francisco’s main theatrical venues, the Palace of Fine Arts Theater, that is contained within a historic landmark replicating a fictional Roman ruin with Greek décor originally built for the 1915 Panama-​ Pacific International Exposition world’s fair. I instantly feel the expectant buzz of diverse groups of Bay Area ethnic community members and fellow dancers woven into the populous of San Francisco tourists. Eager dance audiences fill this glamorous hall to meet friends before the show, view striking photos of ethnically garbed dancing bodies strategically placed around the space, while sipping Sonoma Valley wine or Coca-​Cola and nibbling on one of the lobby caterers’ Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, or other ethnic plates. For several weekends in June this scene is repeated. Over the month-​long

530   Miriam Phillips festival, enthusiastic spectators witness, “50 companies, 750 world dance and music artists” (Scott Horton Communications 2011, 1). Lights flash, announcements sound, I shuffle to my seat, along the way greeting fellow dancers, colleagues, and Festival staff. Sitting in plush crimson velvet seats facing an extensive proscenium stage, lights dim, and we are welcomed by a calm ethnic-​sounding voice on the “god mic.” The name of the first group is announced; we hear loud calls in culture-​appropriate idioms coming from a certain section of the theatre—​undoubtedly family members and friends of that particular ethnic community group. When the red curtains finally open on the Palace of Fine Arts stage, the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival is a splendor to behold. Northern California-​based dance companies and soloists representing cultures from diverse corners of the world, glitter the stage with color, exotic, spirited dances, and dynamic music. They offer to San Francisco Bay Area audiences a window into the world, a global smorgasbord of culture. Festival Co-​Artistic Director C. K. Ladzepko explains in a promotional video, “you can travel to Peru, to Native America, to Asia, Spain, Europe, to Hawaii, to Korea, you can go to Turkey, and then you can go to Cuba—​that is the Ethnic Dance Festival in just one evening” (SFEthnicDanceFest 2012b). Facing the expansive black stage, we are invited into the high-​spirited and athletic world of the colorful batik-​dyed cotton-​wrapped Oakland city girl’s West African dance offerings; to the meditative ever-​flowing, precise, and highly ornamented realm of the regal Cambodian soloist whose intricate hand gestures and jeweled costume with high head crown juxtapose the quiet demure face. We are pulled into the coquettish big-​smiled, foot-​stomping ambiance of a Mexican folklórico group where women clad in primary-​colored flouncy ruffled skirts with white-​laced blouses swirl and stomp to a live bravado brass-​band, and become entranced by the agile, graceful, and skillfully articulate dance world of sequence-​glittered, chiffon-​laden bodies of Chinese teenage girls dancing to loud orchestrated Western music with overtones of Chinese instrumentation. We enthusiastically follow the boisterous, jovial mood of the rhythmically precise, suspender-​held work-​trousered, foot-​trudging gay male North American clogging group, then notice the focused nervous intent of the tiny tots to confident grannies’ intergenerational Irish step dance company in their colorfully-​brocaded Celtic-​knotted costumes whose waterfall of curls bob and flounce in response to their buoyant high kicks and percussive steps against with firmly pressed arms at their sides. Pausing for a breath as the thunderous drumming, fifty-​member group unison movements of grass-​ skirted, full-​bodied, hip-​flowing, coconut-​shell bra wearing, long-​haired women dance to old Polynesian chants before all performers are called out for the final bow. There is a new dance from a different country every ten minutes, five for soloists. The San Francisco Chronicle’s dance correspondent Allan Ulrich enthusiastically portrays this format, “the result…floats by in a unique multicultural pageant. … One really does experience a world tour in a couple of hours” (Ulrich 2012). In an odd way, there is something about this experience reminiscent of sitting on the boat in Disneyland’s It’s a Small World ride where every few seconds passengers float by enchanting tableaus depicting a different country, as elaborately adorned dolls sing and dance. At

Spectacles of Ethnicities    531 SFEDF we see a succession of ethnicities on display as dancers and musicians representing a variety of global dance practices share their wares to the initiated and noninitiated audience viewers. These diverse dances each temporarily inhabit the same bare cavernous stage; the space altered only by the placement of performers, instruments, and occasional props, and transmuted by colored lighting gels and patterned gobos that manipulate the shape of the light cast over the stage and objects within it. Although different cultures value and utilize the senses in distinct ways, this festival’s production style, which focuses our attention on color, motion, and sound, prioritizes the visual followed by the auditory (see http://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=_​i3KUfVjAjE [SFEthnicDanceFest 2012a). This 37-​year old well-​loved Festival has become one of the city’s mainstay cultural events. World Arts West (formerly City Celebrations), the producing organization of SFEDF, consistently delivers a streamlined, high-​tech, and exciting spectacle that boasts to regular patrons, tourists, and nonperforming community members, the multiplicity of diverse cultural performing artwork contained within the San Francisco Bay Area. The Festival advertises its’ showcase as, “The World United Through Dance” (Scott Horton Communications 2012, 1; see Figure 23.1).

Of Separate Communities But Linked Festival performers consist of newer or lesser-​known community groups or soloists, as well as seasoned performers and company groups who hold annual concerts for their own devotees. “Professionals and nonprofessionals alike, the festival attempts to include and embrace them all” (Hattersley-​Drayton 1984, 2). Of the veteran companies, many have their own histories that parallel the Festival’s, and in several cases, the Festival served as the platform for them to achieve greater public visibility and move into the arena of so-​called professional performance production. The soloists and members within the performing groups comprise a wide range. There are newer or well-​established immigrants as well as, first, second, and even third generation members. There are those who identify with the group because of a direct familial or ethnic heritage, and then there are those (like myself) who have a strong affinity to the spirit and aesthetics of a particular dance style but are not actually from the ethnic groups whose dance they represent. There are those who have day jobs such as, nurses, accountants, personal trainers or computer engineers; to those who work full-​time as professional teaching artists. All in all, members are a part of these performing groups because the regular group contact through weekly classes and rehearsals gives them a sense of connection to their roots and belonging to a community, as well as provides them an expressive outlet. The Festival is typically programmed through an audition process where as many as a hundred companies and solo artists can tryout for an average of thirty available slots. In some financially lean years the programing has been done by invitation. Despite the

Figure 23.1  San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival 2012 souvenir program book cover. Dancer: La Tania, photographer: RJ Muna, graphic designer: Jason Fuges, Basic 8 Creative, producer: World Arts West.

Spectacles of Ethnicities    533 Festival’s name spotlighting “San Francisco,” eligibility criteria to partake in the January auditions and subsequent June Festival events simply requires performers to reside in northern California, and that they should consider themselves as representing “dance forms from around the world that are rooted in a cultural tradition” (see http://​www. worldartswest.org/​main/​guidelines.asp accessed June 18, 2013). As the third largest and most populous state in the United States, California has two unofficial geographical delineations, northern and southern, with distinct topography, climate and culture. The vast geographical expanse of northern California encompasses: rugged mountain ranges once considered sacred to indigenous tribes and still fiercely protected by national and state park services and environmental groups, fertile farmlands which provide much of the country’s produce, and plunging Pacific coastlines that have long attracted artists, entrepreneurs and alternative lifestyle seekers. Incorporating forty-​eight distinct counties, northern California’s primary urban hubs consist of Sacramento—​the state capital; Fresno, centered in the agriculturally abundant Central Valley, and the San Francisco Bay Area, a network of cities linked by a series of bridges crossing the San Francisco Bay, which drains water from inland rivers and mountains out to the Pacific Ocean. While community group performers in the Festival have come from some of the outermost regions of northern California, predominant representation are from those residing in the San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA or Bay Area). Although cultural diversity is a salient feature of most American cities, the SFBA has a higher degree of cultural pluralism than other cities. Brian Godfrey wrote in 1988, “San Francisco’s ethnic and racial minorities now collectively make up about half the city’s population” (Godfrey 1988, 3). Compared to ten other cities ranking the percentage of foreign-​born inhabitants to the total population, San Francisco ranked number one in 1890 and again in 1980 (Godfrey, 11). Spanish and Mexican qualities permeate the Bay Area as many town and street names are in Spanish, and the prevalence of Spanish-​ mission architecture and landscaping, likely remnants of the Spanish missionaries and when California was once a part of Mexico. Yet there is also a pervading East and Southeast Asian sensibility largely due to being on the Pacific Rim and the proximity of those countries. Walking through many San Francisco neighborhoods one can feel distinctive cultural identities emanating from the sights of the people and architecture, the languages spoken and written on storefronts, and the types of commerce and restaurants. Many neighborhoods contain higher amounts of one particular ethnic group or “nonconformist community” (Godfrey 1988) than another, although boundaries have shifted and discrete divisions have diffused since the 1990s. The Mission District with its many Mexican and Central American immigrants has been considered the Latino district; North Beach as Little Italy, overlapped with Beat Generation inhabitants in the 1950s, is adjacent to Chinatown, deemed the oldest in the U.S. The Castro District, the first openly gay neighborhood in the US, still thrives, while the Haight-​Ashbury’s hippie legacy and location of the infamous 1967 Summer of Love happenings has shifted dramatically. Parts of The Avenues in the Richmond District have significant populations

534   Miriam Phillips of Russian and Ukrainians; other parts have more Vietnamese, Filipino and Pacific Islanders. The Western Addition contains Japantown, built after Japanese immigrants moved to the area following San Francisco’s devastating 1906 earthquake, and a now diminishing African American community who relocated from the South to seek industrial jobs during World War II. While it is less easy to discern where the Irish, German, Scandinavian and other European immigrants who once had a stronghold in San Francisco were, they nonetheless left an indelible mark on the city’s cultural legacy. Traversing across the various Bay Area bridges the cultural landscape expands with some similar immigrant and minority communities and additional ones not found as prominently in San Francisco: the East Bay with a larger African American population, along with Native Americans, Africans, and Southeast Asians; the South Bay with strong East Indian population working in the high-​tech industry, as well as Afghani, Central Asian, Mexican, and Eastern European communities. And while the North Bay is less ethnically diverse than other parts of the Bay Area, it certainly has attracted other nonconformist groups, such as artists, environmentalists, organic farmers, and New Age seekers. Having been my adopted home for over thirty years, there is something so unique about the SFBA that I believe among other factors, has to do with how one can be aware of being in or a part of a specific community, while simultaneously feeling connected to another. With the hilly terrain and perpetual vistas of the San Francisco Bay, one can be in one community and literally see across to another, drive through one town and moments later be in another, shop in one ethnic enclave and cross the street to have coffee in another. Like the bridges linking peninsulas to each other, there is an awareness of being separate but linked. This awareness I believe also contributes to the spirit of camaraderie generated during and around Festival performances.

The Festival as Product and Promoter of Multiculturalism There are many aspects to the history of multiculturalism in the United States, as well as debates about its meaning and validity that are outside the scope of this chapter. However, the concept of multiculturalism arose as a response to the increasing influx of immigrants in the mid-​twentieth century and coalesced in the aftermath of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement when African Americans, and other historically oppressed minority groups challenged the discriminatory practices so ingrained in public institutions. Demands increased for racial equality in the workplace and other public sectors, a more equitable distribution of power and resource, and curriculum reform that included multiple histories and viewpoints. By the 1970s and 1980s the concept of multiculturalism gained wider acknowledgment, which began to impact critical shifts in public policy and education reform. These changes spawned a kind of multicultural

Spectacles of Ethnicities    535 boom, where by the mid 1980s the term “multiculturalism” became a buzzword, and so-​ called expressions of it seemed to appear everywhere. Distinct from an earlier cultural assimilation model (the “melting pot” ideology) that encouraged immigrant and minority groups to assimilate into a dominant culture, which many argued perpetuated majority control and caused immigrants to detach from their culture, the multicultural movement brought issues of ethnic and cultural identity to the forefront by embracing diversity (Vissicaro 2004, 4). Some educators however, began to call for a more in-​depth assessment of the aims of multicultural education and criticized features such as, simply adding facts about minority history and contributions, or including books or modules on particular ethnic groups maintaining that these potentially perpetuated stereotypes. Others, while recognizing that multicultural education aimed to provide equal educational opportunities for all students and promote tolerance also argued for more transformational approaches that would help students to “reduce biases and prejudices by engaging in cross-​cultural communication, [and further] become critical thinkers and able to analyze and resolve the social problems in their society” (Celik 2012, 5). As cities and suburbs became increasingly filled with a multitude of ethnic communities, and shifting ideologies occurred which recognized the need for minority communities to have outlets to be seen, heard, and understood, as well as for those around them to develop skills to learn about other viewpoints, the arts, particularly dance, became used as a powerful tool to promote cultural identity and ethnic diversity. Dance educator Pegge Vissicaro asserts, “Dance creates a bridge for traversing cultural borders because fundamentally it involves the human body, something that all people have in common. This commonality provides a thread of connection and promotes unity among many people of the Earth” (Vissicaro 2004, 5). First produced in 1978, the SFEDF proclaims itself as “the first multicultural, city-​ sponsored ethnic dance festival in America” (see www.worldartswest.org/​edf/​history [accessed September 5, 2011]). It came about when city planners recognized that San Francisco contained an abundance of ethnic communities whose group activities often centered around the practice of dance, yet they did not have the size, structure or knowledge to apply for the regular performing arts grants that larger more mainstream performance companies, such as the ballet or opera had. David Gere’s fine report on SFEDF’s first ten years describes how in 1977 a group of community organizers and philanthropic foundation administrators, many from ethnic and minority groups themselves, “set out to radically revise the way San Francisco supported its arts” (Gere 1988, 5). The SFEDF was birthed through the backing of the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, a municipal agency established in 1961 to promote San Francisco tourism. Its Grants for the Arts program has since become a national model of arts funding that continues to be a big supporter of the Festival. Although the Hotel Tax Fund supported certain ethnic community events in the early years, Gere describes how by the mid-​1970s it came under attach as perpetually unfunded community and performing arts groups challenged administrators bias methods. This eventually led to city officials, appointed by the then newly elected liberally minded Mayor George Moscone’s office, to reevaluate

536   Miriam Phillips the ways these funds were distributed. Even with the Fund’s more equitable distribution, still community-​based ethnic dance groups did not have the organizational structure to apply. Thus the Festival, which Gere describes as a political and aesthetic venture (Gere, 9)  became a conduit for them to access these funds, albeit through the dominion of the Festival production. At a time when Western theatrical performing arts companies like San Francisco’s Opera, Symphony, and Ballet, along with some modern dance companies dominated the arts scene, SFEDF provided a much-​needed opportunity to community-​based ethnic dance groups and solo artists for greater visibility and a level of status that had been previously unattainable. It allowed ethnic dancers to share their work to audiences who did not ordinarily have the opportunity to see them, and it offered them a chance to situate their dances within the context of a “professional setting, with the best in technical assistance, promotion, and staging” (Hattersley-​Drayton 1984, 2). The Festival provided access to and taught novice companies a level of production they were not in a position to garner. Companies embraced the chance to have lighting design—​some even for the first time, publicity in major newspapers, marketing yielding press releases and slick advertising mailers, professional photo shoots and live videography in which artists could then purchase copies of these, and a visually striking program book that named the performers and provided basic information about their dance cultures. Other production components were sometimes less welcome, included, paperwork, contracts, lengthy technical and dress rehearsals requiring the attendance of all performers, with some groups totaling up to fifty personnel. San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival shows are typically programmed through an elaborate audition process where hired regional specialists (many of whom are dancers in the Festival) act as consultants to final decision makers, now called artistic directors, who seek strong works that have the potential to hold attention on a large theatrical stage and are deemed to have a certain degree of cultural and artistic integrity. Further the producers strive to include all geographical regions, balance out old and new groups, and include as much live music as possible (Phillips 2008, 2–​3).2 Many artists and performing groups felt and continue to feel proud to perform in such a mainstream context. It brings great honor to the communities that they are a part of and to finally be seen and appreciated by members outside of their immediate ethnic communities. There is no question; the SFEDF is beautiful. It is a visual feast, a vibrant spectacle filled with great joie de vivre. At the forefront of the wave of the multicultural movement the Festival was very much a product and promoter of the multiculturalism. But what kind of multiculturalism, and is it still relevant?

The Beast Inside The Beauty If the original Mission of World Arts West (SFEDF producers) was “to honor and celebrate culturally diverse dance forms through presentation, education and support of

Spectacles of Ethnicities    537 artists and their traditions,” and the Vision was “ … to work with artists, organizations and communities, to advance cultural understanding, and to achieve universal appreciation and support of the world’s diverse dance traditions as a vital and essential part of daily life” (my emphasis) then, is the Festival achieving these goals? And, what is the measure of that3 (see www.worldartswest.org/​about/​mission [accessed June 13, 2012]; see also https://​www.facebook.com/​SanFranciscoEthnicDanceFestival/​info?tab=page_​ info (open Company Overview) [accessed December 15, 2014]). At its inception this festival was a groundbreaker. Former program director and dance ethnologist Lily Kharrazi states: “The initial idea was reflective of the identity politics of the time, to empower minority communities in all areas of political and cultural reframing. Its relevance has changed over time and its performers reflect changing immigration patterns, however, the format remains static” (Kharrazi personal communication 2012). Thirty-​seven years past its inception, there are several distortions to be penetrated in order to disentangle some sociocultural predicaments that impede the Festival’s growth. Certainly the early intention to create a more publicly visible multicultural thriving San Francisco that could show non-​San Franciscans the cultural richness of the city’s ethnic diversity is an intention that I believe continues in 2014. Yet despite the Festival’s splendor, I question, if it is an appropriate way to present culture in the twenty-​first century? Is it, as anthropologist Sally Ness asks about a popular neoethnic Philippine ballet, “a culturally responsible production” (Ness 1997, 69)? In its mission “to celebrate culturally diverse dance forms,” I wonder if cultural understanding is truly being advanced, or if a repositioning of Western aesthetics have become embedded into a homogenized packaging of ethnic dances—​a practice that verges on looking like a form of neocolonial totemism. Have representatives of so-​called minority dances succumbed to a form of disguised elitism reaffirming Western ideals? Do audiences simply wish to be given a kind of Disneyland ride in the name of cultural diversity? It seems that the SFEDF has become a cultural contradiction. It pronounces diversity, yet its production style and publicity materials promote a singular aesthetic, obfuscating other aesthetic points of views. Lily Kharrazi writes, “Today’s Festival format—​a string of beads, one disparate dance following another, has evolved as more and more artists sought to participate,4 becoming the festival blueprint, making and remaking the festival’s main statement: celebrate diversity … But paradoxically, this format unintentionally obliterates cultural uniqueness by lumping everything under a “brand. [ … ] The uninflected sequence of dance offerings can become monotonous, a blur, a festival monoculture” (Kharrazi 2008: 5). Even with the new Vision statement adopted in 2012, “The world united through dance” (see footnote 3), leaves me with more questions: Is the world really being united or are distinct cultural identities melding into a mono-​ ethnic aesthetic—​a single global ethnicity acted out on the stage of dance on behalf of diversity? Has multicultural sensibilities regressed to a “melting pot” mentality? Has the beauty in fact become a beast? While the term “ethnic dance” has been largely debated amongst dance scholars since Joann Kealiinohomoku’s groundbreaking article of 1969, “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance,” in the original context of the SFEDF the term came

538   Miriam Phillips to mean anything other than ballet or modern dance.5 According to the “Inventory of the Ethnic Dance Festival Collection” from 1987, sometime in the mid 1980s “the festival adopted an official definition of ethnic dance as ‘A communal expression of dance and music which is primarily derived from the traditional elements representative of a specific ethnic group or culture’ ” (San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum 1997). But the problem here is, what is deemed traditional is often quite contemporary, what is considered representative may actually be quite uncharacteristic, and what is identified as ethnic may be a hybrid of many ethnicities. Further, the people dancing are not necessarily from the culture represented—​often not—​but this is not a bad thing, it simply makes complex an already intricate situation and points to the fact that there is no easy delineation.6 As dance anthropologist Andrée Grau points out, “any generic term not only simplifies reality but, more importantly, may well be about establishing power relationships” (Grau 2008, 240]. The term in reference to San Francisco’s dance festival is a misnomer because a lot of what we are seeing is “indigenized ballet” (Reed 1998, 514), or “balleticized” indigenous dance, neoethnic dance [Ness 1997], national dance, transnational dance, colonial and postcolonial dance, diasporic dance, overwhelmingly urban, imagined traditions, even ballet, contemporary and postmodern dance disguised under the semblance of “ethnic.” The point is, that what we are seeing may not always be what it appears and can potentially perpetuate stereotypes. San Francisco’s Ethnic Dance Festival is one of the more renowned multicultural festivals. It is of course not the only festival of this type but is unique in its focus on dance, particularly highly polished theatrical presentations. Other US. cities that incorporate global performing arts within a festival format are, the Festival of Nations in St. Paul, Minnesota; the Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle; and Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival, although these have an entirely different structure and encompasses a wider range of cultural events than does SFEDF. Many smaller counties within larger metro areas also have potpourri-​style multicultural dance productions with a similar structure as SFEDF only on a smaller scale. For example, the World Dance Showcase held in Prince George’s County, Maryland near Washington D.C. (for which I have also been an adjudicator) and one with the same name in San Marcos, Texas near San Antonio. Similar to San Francisco these festivals boast the cultural richness of the local region and become a public symbol of cultural tolerance and inclusion. Yet, the type of dance programming offered leads to certain contradictions. Within the appearance of cultural diversity, something so essentially not diverse is going on! Los Angeles Times’ dance critic Lewis Segal points out that, “the politics of multiculturalism may extort extravagant hymns to diversity from everyone, but more and more that perceptual filter between us and the traditional cultures we think we’re seeing on our stages looks suspiciously like a mirror” (Segal 1995, 49). In this discussion, I  do not wish to undermine larger issues and trends such as nationalism, globalization, and the politics of multiculturalism itself that certainly impact, even cause this phenomenon, I only wish to point out that what started out as

Spectacles of Ethnicities    539 a grassroots effort to fill a genuine need has spawned a structure and production values where diversity is lost. This kind of production, one that gives audiences a “kick of culture” (Kharrazi personal communication 2012) has become a model worldwide. And in fact, it does not appear that cultures are really being understood, but instead, pressed into becoming the same.

The Predicament of Multiculturalism Although this essay focuses on a particular festival in San Francisco, my arguments are applicable to other multicultural dance festivals in North America, the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe (see Giurchescu 2001; Vissicaro 2004; Shay 2006; Grau 2008; Nahachewsky 2012). In the essay, “Dance and the Shifting Sands of Multiculturalism” (2008), Andrée Grau investigates the politics of multiculturalism in the United Kingdom arising in the mid-​1970s. “Multiculturalism was accepted as a condition of the time, though, in most instances, it was a multiculturalism of the ‘food/​festival/​ arts/​quaint native garb’ variety, to use anthropologist Judith Lynn Hanna’s expression […], rather than one that questioned the existing social order [… the concept of multiculturalism] is as fraught with problems as its earlier cognate, the concept of cultural relativism” (Grau 2008, 234). Drawing on the work of Stanley Fish she considers, “ … as a demographic fact, multiculturalism is uncontentious [yet] if one looks at multiculturalism as a ‘philosophical problem’ …, then one enters a world of irresolvable debates” (245). Indeed Stanley Fish’s discussion on multiculturalism (1997) describes two types, a “boutique” variety that affirms “a politics of equal dignity,” (a phrase he attributes to Charles Taylor) and “strong multiculturalism”—​that speaks to “the politics of difference” (cited in Fish 1997, 381), which he argues are each fraught with fallacies about diversity, self and other and ultimately he questions whether multiculturalism even exists (385). Fish’s descriptions of “boutique multiculturalism” pertain closely to the SFEDF. “Boutique multiculturalism is the multiculturalism of ethnic restaurants, weekend festivals, and high profile flirtations with the other … [It] is characterized by its superficial or cosmetic relationship to the objects of its affection. Boutique multiculturalists admire or appreciate or enjoy or sympathize with or (at the very least) “recognize the legitimacy of ” the traditions of cultures other than their own; but boutique multiculturalists will always stop short of approving other cultures at a point where some value at their center generates an act that offends against the canons of civilized decency as they have been either declared or assumed” (Fish 1997, 378), [I might add, or becomes too complicated to figure out]. Fish further elaborates, “Another way to put this is to say that a boutique multiculturalist does not and cannot take seriously the core values of the cultures he tolerates. The reason he cannot is that he does not see those values as truly “core” but as overlays on a substratum of essential humanity. That is the true core, and the differences that mark us externally—​differences in language, clothing, religious

540   Miriam Phillips practices, race, gender, class, and so on—​are for the boutique multiculturalist no more than what Milton calls in his Areopagitica “moderat varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportionall.” We may dress differently, speak differently, woo differently, worship or not worship differently, [or dance differently], but underneath (or so the argument goes) there is something we all share (or that shares us) and that something constitutes the core of our identities. Those who follow the practices of their local culture to the point of failing to respect the practices of other cultures … have simply mistaken who they are by identifying with what is finally only an accidental aspect of their beings” (1997, 379–​380). What would it look like for Festival producers and participants to try to figure out ways to incorporate other aesthetic production values so that the show looks and becomes less boutique-​like? However, I do not wish to insinuate in this argument that festivals such as this do not have a place in the world. However, I do believe that there needs to be a greater understanding of what these types of festivals are and are not, and a reevaluation of their raison d’ être. Adrienne Kaeppler writes about “the emergence of hula as an aspect of ethnic identity conveyed at festivals.” In these contexts hula has become “the visual manifestation of ethnic identity. As part of this political construction, hula can be an aural and visual statement of distinctiveness” (2010, 194). She describes how this has caused “a new kind of identity ritual,—​indeed, a spectacle of ethnic identity” (194). While David Gere in 1988 called the Festival “anthropologic entertainment” (Gere 1988, 6), I believe the Festival is more accurately a spectacle of ethnicities on display. And as scholar Jane Desmond notes in Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World: “Spectacle—​an emphasis on sights, sounds, and motion—​replaces narrative, and with it the possibility of historical reflection.” (Desmond 1999, xvi). In witnessing a SFEDF concert as described earlier in this chapter, one is very much aware of the emphasis on sights, sounds, and motion as colorfully clad dancing bodies jump and gesture, glide or shout to rousing live or recorded music against a vividly lit theatrical stage. It is not only the decontextualizing and funneling of diverse dance styles and production values into a singular aesthetic that is so troubling, but the lack of critical reflection that appears to be rampant. Therefore, part of the purpose of this essay is to shake things up a bit by “questioning the existing social order” (Grau 2008, 234).

Aesthetics of Production /​ Hierarchies of Space The notion of aesthetics has many facets especially when considering the wide range of aesthetic values contained within dance practices around the world. How people of a certain group create dance (and other arts) and what they deem as beautiful in the production and presentation of art is what the subfield of ethno-​aesthetics attempts to

Spectacles of Ethnicities    541 elucidate. Noted dance anthropologist Adrienne Kaeppler considers the concept of aesthetics as an “evaluative way of thinking,” one based in a philosophical system of principals and values (Kaeppler 2003, 153). Kaeppler asserts, “Each society has standards for the production and performance of cultural forms. These standards, whether they are overt and articulated, or merely covert, can be said to constitute an aesthetic for that society … If we are to understand (rather than just appreciate) an aesthetic, or a society’s cultural forms, it is essential to grasp the principles on which such an aesthetic is based, as perceived by the people of the society which holds them” (154). Without realizing it SFEDF’s production values foreground a singular aesthetic and background the multiplicity of performance aesthetics from which the included dances come from. An overarching Western theatrical worldview permeates in a number of ways. One predicament is how notions of space and the “hierarchy of places” (Grau 2012) play out in the minds of the various EDF players. In a 2012 presentation at the twenty-​ seventh Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology in Ireland, anthropology of dance scholar Andrée Grau discussed how dances, among other elements “ … also acquire their values and meaning through the places they are performed in: ballet in the church hall does not have the same status as ballet at the opera; capoeira in a Rio neighborhood is not the same as capoeira on the stage of London’s Saddlers Wells theatre” (Grau 2012, 15). Of course, the valuing of space has a lot to do with who is doing the valuing —​the producers, the performers, the public—​and might not always carry the same meaning. In his essay, “Looking at Postcards: World Dance on Western Stages,” Lewis Segal writes, “Consider that dance spaces are as culturally determined as dance itself, and the proscenium theater exists primarily to serve pictorial illusion and crowd control. Idioms with other priorities can be at a loss there, but seeking alternative contexts not only runs afoul of the practicalities of theatrical real estate but also of several kinds of elitism” (Segal 1995, 47). Where do these companies or soloists normally perform outside of the SFEDF? Places completely culturally appropriate to their form might be considered lowbrow art, such as nightclubs, restaurants, street corners, city parks, churches, temples, even living rooms. Others rent school or civic auditoriums, community centers, or local dance studios, while more established companies who followed suit with the SFEDF might rent any of the major theatres in San Francisco, including the Palace of Fine Arts. Some companies may also be given bookings at presenting theatres or city-​sponsored events. Segal affirms, “Many world dance artists want opera-​house bookings due to the status involved…. this represents a genuine political victory: the takeover of a Euro-​American symbol of high art by traditions struggling to be respected. What earth-​stage or plaza, however inviting, can deliver as much–​especially when our cultural power brokers validate that line of thinking” (Segal 1995, 47)? The notion of a “professional production” indicates a Western theatrical structure as well; a style of production that appears to have been propelled by critics, and where all players seem to yield without question. As discussed in program books as early as 1984, the Festival boasts offering a “professional production” experience to fledgling ethnic

542   Miriam Phillips community groups implying a learning-​by-​doing type of training. However, this seems to suggest that the ways these ethnic artists produce their own shows and the community structure from which they operate are not professional. The Festival first occurred in 1987 with fifteen performance groups and was held at three different venues including at two inner-​city ethnic community neighborhoods, the Mission Cultural Center in the Mission District predominated by Mexican and Central American immigrants and the Chinese Cultural Center in the oldest Chinatown of North America, as well as at the Palace of Fine Arts. As the multisited production proved unwieldy at the time, the Festival moved into the Herbst Theatre adjacent to the Symphony Hall and Opera House, also home of the San Francisco Ballet. Historical documents indicate that this move provided the “opportunity to produce more professional-​looking programs. Critics applauded the new and improved festival but also called for more polished technical presentations. [While the Festival] grew from modest beginnings as an experimental neighborhood cultural event … ” (San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum 1997) bringing audiences into ethnic communities they might not otherwise venture into, it has since mushroomed into a slick, high-​tech production inclusive of over thirty performance ensembles mainly staged in popular theatrical venues on the perimeters of the city.7 In this context, this development can be perceived as helping to elevate ethnic dance’s status as a low-​culture art (or at least an “othered” art) to high-​culture art as now ethnic dance “made it” into the mainstream—​even at venues where high-​art is shown. We know in the early days, ethnic community groups were too small or did not have appropriate structures in place that would allow them access to the type of funding offered by San Francisco’s Hotel Tax Fund and other funding that the Ballet and Opera had access to for example; and this was one of the original ideas behind creating a city ethnic dance festival. So in a way by following the funding through following the Festival’s guidance, these community groups were led into adopting a very particular organizational style, one quite distinct from a more collective approach. Even the concept of an “artistic director,” where one individual takes credit for what may have been great collaborative efforts, and a term that more and more of the Festival companies have adopted, indicates a hierarchical organizational structure within a Western high-​art ethos that values and endows artistic authority to certain individuals while undermining the creative contributions of others, or what might be a group process. Curiously, the role now called Festival artistic director, a term that first came into use in 1998 and 1999 and reappeared in 2004, at other times was called Festival director, Festival producer, or in earlier years, program director, or coordinator, but meaning of the entire producing organization not just the Festival.8 Based on my experience as a former “Festival director,” this role is much more like a curator with a bit of stage direction as well. David Gere points out in his historical essay “The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival: The First Decade, 1978–​1988” how the original San Francisco funders were excited by the vibrancy of ethnic communities in the city but noticed that they were not structured in a way that would allow them to apply for city funds. This was one of the impetuses behind the creation of the SFEDF. However, this process seemed to

Spectacles of Ethnicities    543 press these communities into setting up a tiered organizational structure that may not have been akin to their natural ways and thus led them to follow a Western theatrical administrative model. Deciphering what the differing performance aesthetics are within so many world dance forms presented in the SFEDF would be a complex undertaking because many of these aesthetics may be obscured by other factors, however, I nonetheless wonder how some other production elements could be explored in a way that could highlight distinctive performance values and diminish the domineering Western theatrical aesthetics (see Re-​visioning the Future section). This would embolden the voices of multiple ethnicities and promote more holistic cultural understandings.

Templified Ethnicities or “The Single Story” The adherence to a dominant production aesthetic in SFEDF and similar types of multicultural dance festivals, leads to distinct dance forms looking homogenized as each dance act is packaged similarly. This repetitive container conveys a particular narrative. SFEDF “hypocontextualizes” culture by placing many distinct styles of dance into the same empty space (whereas something like Disneyland’s It’s a Small World ride “hypercontextualizes” culture by stuffing so many layers of stereotypical costumes, paraphernalia, flora, fauna and architectural sites into one same small space).9 In SFEDF and similar dance showcases, context is stripped away in a similar fashion as for example, when an African or Oceanic artifact that was part of a rich multisensorial event is placed on display in a museum. Of course this issue is derived in part from putting dances that were originally done in a particular physical environment for specific social, ritual, political, or other purpose by and for a specific community, onto a barren stage for entertainment or educational purposes for the consumption of people outside the respective community. This process and its historical lineage and ramifications are chronicled in depth in Anthony Shay’s work (1999, 2002), who identifies dances “done in the field” (dancing done by the people, for the people, in more naturalistic settings) and “on the stage” (presentations by professional or semiprofessional dance ensembles). Developing ideas from previous works on folk dance categories and contexts, Hoerburger (1968), Kealiinohomoku (1972), and Dunin (1989), Nahachewsky’s 2001 work elaborates on themes of participatory and presentational dance and his later 2008 publication develops the notion of dance as “vival or revival,” subsequently termed “vival and reflective” dance (2012). Vival being “dancing in which the participants are focused specifically on the moment of performance, with no significant orientation to the past” contrary to reflective dance where “participants actively invoke past performances” often by recreating aspects of a dances history (Nahachewsky 2008, 41). Europe’s pioneering ethnochoreologist, Anca Giurchescu

544   Miriam Phillips considers that “vernacular folklore and stage-​adjusted folklore exist in indivisible and unbroken continuity. However, considering the practice of symbolic transformation and manipulation, it is necessary to formally separate the here and now processes of folklore from selected products (dance, music, costumes) that are performed within the frame work of a spectacle, and which are generally called “folklorism” (2001, 117). The process by which a dance moves from “the field” to “the stage,” or from being participatory to presentational, vival to reflective, or vernacular to stage-​adjusted, I call the “stageification process.” This process obviously predates the SFEDF as outlined in some of the works previously mentioned. However, the way in which these dances are produced on the Festival stage and through its accouterments of digital lighting, swanky publicity photos, and advertising hyperbole, where oddly, distinct dances start to seem and look alike. Dances and the ethnicities they represent have become reified, where “othering” becomes more magnified than ever. Over the years the SFEDF format has become formulaic—​what Kharrazi calls, “a brand.” I see it as a template (hence my made up term, “templified ethnicities”). In the EDF production, dances and dancers are, to use dance ethnologist Judy van Zile’s expression, “placed and re-​placed.”10 I add even mis-​placed in a kind of “hypocontextualized” space—​one that has become a template where only the moving parts within it change, and even then, only within a limited range. In fact, templates are reflected throughout all levels of the production, time, stage space, the lighting templates, program book layout, website design, even the press photos—​all undoubtedly stunning, have a similar look (Figure 23.2).11 Similar to other years, the 2012 photos reveal dancers clad in billowy attire predominantly emphasizing upwardness and elevation.12 The production depicts a clean, homogeneous aesthetic, one with clear boundaries, that is sparkly, upbeat, exuberant, occasionally introverted or somber, but overall, it presents a two-​dimensional depiction of culture—​one that is hardly diverse. Visually, dances become flattened as the vertical with some horizontal is emphasized, and depth, that which bridges performer to onlooker, is diminished. The words in EDF publicity boast diversity, but the visual images illustrate uniformity. Yet this brand, this template, seems to be a formula that has garnered increasing critical praise, including from one of the New York Times’ chief dance critics. Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Adichie, speaks eloquently in a TED talk called “The Danger of a Single Story.” “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story” (Adichie 2009). As a production I believe that the SFEDF constructs “a single story.” One that depoliticizes and sterilizes dance and bypasses the sometimes messy, frayed-​at-​the-​edges ways in which dance exits or existed in the everyday lives of people and of ethnic communities, both past and present. The production does not, for example, reveal the suffering that some dancers endured through civil war, genocide, political oppression, or religious or ethnic persecution (Jackson and Shapiro-​Phim 2008) or how some dance forms were birthed out of extreme economic conditions and oppression.

Figure 23.2  San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival 2011 souvenir program book cover. Dancer: Jet Tagle of Parangal Dance Company, photographer: RJ Muna, graphic designer: Jason Fuges, Basic 8 Creative, producer: World Arts West.

546   Miriam Phillips As stated earlier, each dance group has ten minutes to present their offering and soloists have five minutes, which in some cultures is hardly enough time to even finish an introduction to a dance, which results in dancers having to make peculiar choreographic edits and awkward cuts to their music. Other companies try to pack in as many dances as possible in their allotted time to make sure that we see the panoply of their culture’s repertoire. Groups fly by one after the other; dances from disparate parts of the globe whoosh across the stage stitched together with interludes of dancer interactions as one dancer exits and another enters. These interactions, sometimes informative, such as the passing of a drum from a West African to an Afro-​Haitian musician symbolizing the African diaspora. Other times, “artistic” (if not sometimes confusing)—​the fringe of a flamenco dancer’s shawl flutters through the fringe of the Native American dancer’s tunic as they circle one another—​mostly serve as practical transitions to give time for stage hands to rearrange sets, props or microphones. What is problematic here is that as audience members, we don’t really know what we are seeing. Cultural understanding is not truly being advanced, but obscured. We don’t get for example, that often dances offered by local companies are modeled on repertoire from State-​sponsored companies of host countries that already went through a kind of cleansing process, described earlier as a “stageification process,” during those countries’ nation-​building campaigns (see Shay 2002, 2006; Phillips 2012; Nahachewsky 2012) and sometimes even the local company directors are not cognizant of this either. Or, how dances with presumed ancient origins in temples are now discovered as upper-​class recreations of a fabled past to eradicate historical sexual undertones associated with the dance and then misrepresented by colonial outsiders (Meduri 1988; Chatterjea 2004; Chakravorty 2008). Or, how some dances are really a kind of “airport art” (Kaeppler 1977) “an internationally generated transformation of cultural forms, already influenced by Hollywood [… where] the Other conforms cultural expression to the perceived worldview and preferences of [the tourist or outsider]” (Snyder 1995, 84). The Festival does not reveal the story of how the ugly faces of colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, or racism, may have empowered one ethnic group who appropriated from or squandered another (Farnell 2007; Fairbank 2009; Straker 2009; Millazo 2010), and many other stories that the readership of this publication may be all too familiar with. While there is a souvenir program that provides some cultural background, it largely glosses over these issues in service of a happier, simpler narrative that shines through the slick paper and cheerful photos. Despite efforts in this program book to contextualize the dances through 500 word or less essays based on information provided by company leaders (who have varying degrees of knowledge about the history of the dances they represent), along with additional research done by the program writer, the way the production is formulated overall, presents a singular sensational narrative—​one that is undoubtedly entertaining, beautiful, and upbeat, yet covert in what it shields. With the Festival format, we cannot know that many so-​called “authentic” forms that supposedly come from an uninterrupted tradition are not really “traditional” at all but are quite contemporary manifestations of invented or reinvented forms (Lamp 1996; Ness 1997; Shay 2002; Keappler 2010). In fact the Festival format may perpetuate these

Spectacles of Ethnicities    547 myths by essentializing ethnic dance, a process critiqued as highlighting unequal power relations between dominant and marginalized groups (Farnell and Wood 2007). In Brenda Farnell and Robert Wood’s articulate discourse on alternative ways to reposition notions of authenticity, which could also be applied to notions of ethnic dance, they first situate the problem, “There has been a postmodern critique of ‘authenticity’ that justifiably rejects reified notions of truth and accuracy as well as positivist essentialisms, recognizing the ever-​present influence of unequal power relations, ideologies, and contested interpretations. In colonial and postcolonial contexts, we find such essentialism at work in the reduction of indigenous peoples by their colonizers to a fixed, core idea of what it means to be, for example, ‘Indian’ or ‘Arabic’ or ‘African.’ It is also found in exoticizing essences such as ‘the Celtic spirit,’ ‘Négritude,’ or ‘Islam,’ where “sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogeneous and unbroken tradition” (Rushdie 1991: 67)” (Farnell and Wood 2007). While there have been efforts throughout SFEDFs history to bring some contextualization into the programing, such as grouping dances around specific themes, or adding in a local celebrity narrator in between transitions, these have met with varying degrees of success.

The Players There are of course many factors contributing to these performed cultural predicaments, and several different kinds of participants involved that could be the subject of another chapter. Briefly I see three major types of players involved. One, the producers of the Festival; two, the community—​the performers who participate in the Festival; and three, the public who attend the performances. One could argue categories for the promoters or funders of the Festival as well as dance critics who often directly influence Festival dynamics and trends. Further, within each category there are many different kinds of “theys.” While it is out of the scope of this chapter to go into specifics roles and responsibilities about each domain of participant, and include their perspectives, my main focus here is to problematize where the players intersect—​that is, in the production itself (see Figure 23.3), and to call attention to the incongruity between what the original mission and vision statements of the producing organization of SFEDF articulate is happening, versus what is essentially being constructed. Admittedly this chapter centers on the perspective of someone watching the production than someone participating in it as a performer or staff member. Future directions would of course include direct voices of each player, including choreographers, artistic directors, and performers in order to hear their views about Festival aesthetics, choices of repertoire, and experiences participating in the Festival. Also important would be dialogues with production staff members, board of directors, and funders, as well as with audience members. Having worked on all sides of the Festival, I recognize that each player would consider the issues raised here from a different vantage point.

548   Miriam Phillips

Producers

Performers The SF EDF Production

The public

Figure 23.3  Intersection between various participant roles of Festival event:  Producers, performers, public.

In this discussion I also do not intend to assign sole responsibility of these issues to the Festival producers. As indicated earlier, these styles of representation have come about through long and complex social, cultural, and political processes within each culture and subsequent translations to international and US soils, notwithstanding, to the unique immigration history and ethnic makeup of San Francisco itself. Further, I  believe performer-​participants and their leaders contribute to these issues based on what they know or don’t know about the histories, cultural, and social backgrounds of the dances they represent, the program descriptions they offer to Festival production staff and choices in choreographic style and repertoire offered. What agency do dance performers or company directors have? After all, they select the repertoire to be shown, they choose to audition for the Festival and agree, if selected (or invited), to adhere to its standards. On the outset it may look like they succumb to the kinds of Western ideals promoted in the Festival, and yet, many of them somehow feel more validated by being accepted into the Festival as it represents a kind of gold standard. To have people outside of their ethnic communities appreciate their dance feels like a certain level of “making it” in the mainstream world. And, frankly, the mainstream world is often where the money also is. The irony however is that the times have changed so much in San Francisco since 1978 that in many ways ethnic dance has become mainstream. Companies representing so-​ called ethnic forms of dance have more sold out performances and have more funding prospects than even modern dance companies (I recall a prominent Bay Area Caucasian modern choreographer whose class I attended in the late 1990s complaining about this). Over the years, possibly due to more exposure or to an increase in dance practitioner community members, many people feel some of these dance forms are more accessible than ballet or modern dance. One could say that the SFEDF promoters and producers were instrumental in making this shift happen and in this respects have succeeded in their vision to “achieve universal appreciation and support of the world’s diverse dance traditions.” Some newly formed community groups who are chosen to be in the Festival are thrilled to be given this esteemed recognition, as well as the opportunity to learn how

Spectacles of Ethnicities    549 to organize undertakings more efficiently. Other performing arts groups or soloists participate in the Festival because it provides them with a much splashier degree of public visibility, which then feeds back into their own performance or teaching agendas, possibly leading to other bookings, and offers them the possibility of purchasing high resolution publicity photos and videos made on the Festival’s expense that they can then use to promote themselves—​something that may be cost prohibitive otherwise for some companies. These certainly are all positive attributes that this community–​producer relationship brings. However, I wonder if there could be an opening in this relationship where performing artists revisit or investigate more thoroughly what the aesthetic criterions of their own cultural systems are independent of SFEDF production norms. Could performers consider ways to remain more authentic to the standards of their unique forms? Could Festival producers and adjudicators reflect upon the values of beauty they promote and consider how they might be representing culturally specific dances through a single-​focused lens? What are some ways the template could be eased; the story opened to include multiple aesthetic views and historical voices? In this way, to be a more effective conduit to promote deeper cross-​cultural exchange.

Dance as Communitas Before looking into possible solutions for the twenty-​first century, I ponder with my former Festival director colleague as to why this type of format is so enduring. Is it that we want to feel happy and reassured, particularly in relation to those who appear so different from us? Perhaps we want to sense that, despite the complex sometimes baffling phenomenon in the world around us, or the many other values that threaten our own beliefs and core identity, that we can feel, at least for a few minutes, that we are ultimately connected through a shared humanity. Each Festival performance culminates in a grand dénouement where the community spirit is visually seen and powerfully felt. In the finale, representatives of each dance company (if not the whole company) reappear as each group is called back to the stage. We see a fusillade of color, dance, and merriment and hear an explosion of drums, bells, and foot stomps as artists gather for the infamous final bow. Performers boogie together, sometimes mirroring each other in impromptu duets or trios, or taking on the movement of another. The culminating final bow, a symbol of “the world united through dance,” appears to be the communitas that Victor Turner identifies as an important aspect of the ritual process—​a consciousness that develops based on a common shared and warm humanity (Turner 1977). This communitas thus annihilates any need to question the beautiful social order (as I have done in this chapter). And to add fuel to the fire, in more recent years even this communitas has become commodified. After the performance dancers still garbed in costumes exit to the lobby to comingle with the audience. The stronger

550   Miriam Phillips sense of community that is cultivated backstage during the weeklong technical and dress rehearsals as multiple groups share the same dressing rooms, and where food, stories, gestures, rhythms, and laughs are so palpable that now the Festival offers donors of a certain level, a backstage tour (which could also be seen as a kind of colonial tourism). Many of us who have danced in or worked for the Festival have often felt that it has a life of its own beyond any singular person. The community spirit is vibrant and infectious, and this is perhaps the Festival’s greatest strength. That despite the homogeneity that the production model renders distinct dance forms, or the single narrative it projects, it nonetheless unites participants through a shared community experience. To audience members and funders, the banquet style presentation of dance sends the message that, despite distinctions in race, class, religion, geographical local—​people dance. My main goal in this chapter has been to outline some of the problematic issues at play in this type of packaging of culture through ethnic dance festival programing. The next steps remain to elucidate these issues in greater depth, including incorporating the direct voices of all the players involved. A more comprehensive view would elaborate on the nuances of multiculturalism in America and its particular expression in northern California, including, the changing landscape of San Francisco’s social and political ideologies around art, dance, identity and culture, a more complete history of the SFEDF in relation to other local agencies and national festivals, as well as the legacies of the Bay Area’s many unique immigrant communities particularly those that use dance as a medium to connect with and express ethnic identity. Future studies would explore the following question more fully. What agency do the performers have and what are their various interests and understandings of their participation in SFEDF? What compels audiences to attend these types of shows and what roles do they play in shaping this type of production? How have state, corporate, and private funding trends and fluctuations affected Festival directions; how have art critics influenced style? How can the producers, along with their chosen marketing and publicity contractors, balance out the entertainment side of dance presentation while still retaining cultural integrity? What are some ways that true cultural understanding could be fostered while still being able to sell tickets? Is there a way to create programming in performance venues that are more inclusive of other aesthetics, so that these dance cultures can be experienced on their own terms?

Re-​visioning the Future—​Possible Solutions for the Twenty-​first Century In conclusion, I outline what could be some more culturally viable solutions for the twenty-​first century. A first step would be to interrogate the existing status and to reexamine underlying intentions and fundamental philosophies. For example, to reflect

Spectacles of Ethnicities    551 upon notions of diversity—​to recognize that promoting diversity happens (or doesn’t happen) on many levels. Creating an arena to exhibit different moving bodies in costumes with live music in staged choreographic forms is only one layer of presenting diversity. Considerations can be given as to how to present dance in ways that gets at deeper layers, including, to acknowledge a variety of perspectives and to be more inclusive of or at least explore the range of aesthetics, values, and presentational formats of a variety of forms. Inclusive of this would be to recognize the politics of power relations and the social nature of what is going on by all parties—​that is, the SFEDF as an authoritative entity, which seemingly gives validation to the city’s ethnic minorities. There needs to be awareness that a multicultural festival “is a political field in its own right, though with significant links to larger political arenas. The Festival field is organized in terms of power relations, structures of authority and legitimacy, and differential control over values” (Bauman and Sawin 1991, 20; cited in Shay 2006, 160). I suggest that organizers and community members reflect upon the Festival’s roots, reevaluate its earliest motives and history, and reconsider the nature of current production values and how they have evolved over time. There needs to be a better understanding of the city’s current ethnic demographics and how these have changed during the nearly four decades of SFEDFs existence. If possible, a formal needs assessment of Bay Area dance artists and ethnic communities should be made to determine and address any gaps between current conditions and what is needed today, since those needs are quite different in the early twenty-​first century than they were in the late twentieth century. Inclusive in an assessment of needs would be those of San Francisco visitors. How might the city’s Hotel Tax Fund Grant’s for the Arts contribute to these understandings? As stated earlier, many companies, but not all, have built such vivacious communities over the years and developed tremendous followings such that their own annual season concerts sell out while many modern dance and ballet companies, and even the SFEDF itself, struggle to fill seats in their own shows. The SFEDF platform may offer these companies greater visibility to the “outside world” and opportunities for cultural exchange with representatives of different dance styles, which allows them to experience how they are a part of a larger and important community web of local dance artists. Yet could alternative, possibly more inclusive platforms be explored? I believe that a reprioritizing and restructuring of programming in addition to shifts in types of venues used could help restore diversity and embrace a range of performance aesthetics. In discussing the high-​risk of producing world dance tours, and criticizing the potpourri-​style programing approach, critic Louis Segal suggests that “countless unexplored formats exist between the extremes of the two-​hour tourist hodgepodge and the all-​night, torchlight-​and-​moths festival for purists…. What would happen, for instance, if [they] dropped the variety show approach after intermission and devoted Act 2 to a single piece performed in something like documentary real-​time? Would American audiences run shrieking into the night?” Segal suggests that “the generation that cut its teeth on postmodernism could just be the best prepared in our history to meet the structures and time schemes of the most daunting world dance idioms, with

552   Miriam Phillips little compromise” (Segal 1995, 44). (Although Segal’s essay was written before the advent of the YouTube and smart phone generation!) Currently there are supplementary events and multiple sites being utilized such as museums, and municipal buildings, but the slick ethnicities-​on-​display style of programing pervades. More recently the Festival has coproduced with select performing groups shows that are more singularly focused on one dance region, however, these companies tend to be more established ones who also receive their own funding. Nonetheless this type of collaboration, if developed, could support creating a broader performance aesthetic. Another possibility might be, instead of bringing ethnic dance communities to the audience, bring the audience to the communities that they normally perform for and in venues they normally perform in. Recalling the early days when the Festival was produced in venues within some of San Francisco’s oldest ethnic neighborhoods, might it be possible to scale down production ambition and to revisit this possibility afresh? However, rather than creating a similar smorgasbord approach simply replaced in a different neighborhood theater, Festival producers could conceivably work in tandem with local communities and performing companies already creating events in those neighborhoods anyway. Related to this idea would be to have an Ethnic Dance Fringe Festival running alongside the main event, or even at another time of year, where SFEDF producers could work collaboratively with those dance companies who are already producing dance events in various neighborhoods and environments throughout the San Francisco Bay Area (not necessarily all concerts on a proscenium stage) by offering them similar kinds of publicity, and possibly fiscal sponsorship so that these groups could, particularly developing ones, seek additional funding. Multiple events could happen in a condensed period of time, including several events in one day, and audience members would have a central calendar of these events and be able to choose where they spend their time. This would allow audience members to experience dance in the environments in which ethnic dance communities are already engaged in for themselves and acquire a taste for a different aesthetic experience.13 Over my years as a San Francisco Bay Area resident and dancer I have attended many ethnic dance events that are produced directly by the communities who perform in them, sometimes through collaborative efforts of several groups representing a similar geographical area, such as the Aloha Festival produced by the Pacific Islanders Cultural Association (PICA), the Rakkasah Middle Eastern Dance Festival, and the Annual Collage des Cultures Africaines, organized by Diamano Coura West African Dance Company, to name a few. These events are generally filled with tremendous vitality and in many ways one gains a more culturally authentic experience than watching a staged theatrical production of multiple dance styles representing different geographical regions. Often these events engage all the senses not only the visual and auditory. Further, the use and expression of space, time, dress, social etiquette, and other typical customs are part of the total experience. Dance performances may be part of a larger event like a multiday-​long festival or

Spectacles of Ethnicities    553 evening bazaar that includes other performing and visual art presentations, and culturally typical expressions of décor and dress; as well as ethnic artifacts, clothing, jewelry, flora, and food for sale. Dressed in stylish traditional attire, the majority of attendees are from the cultures represented in these events, or if outside the culture, have great knowledge and affinity. One can feel a distinctly unique aesthetic at these events as they are produced by members within the communities who are able to make decisions about repertoire and timing of dances, overall pacing of the event, how the space is set up, what important community leaders should be present or honored and other culturally significant elements to include. For example, I think of the many classical Indian dance events I have attended in school auditoriums where upon entering, one’s senses get bombarded with smells of luscious combinations of incense, Indian scented oils and curry spices, colors of the rangoli mandalas made out of flower petals decorating the floor lobby, sights of elegant, bright silk brocaded sari’s or tunics with pantaloons, flowing shawls, sounds of Hindi, Bengali, or other Indian dialects, sweet and pungent tastes of the various chutneys and pickles to accompanying the samosa and curry plates for sale, and during the possibly five-​hour event, coteries of Indian families may flow in and out of the performance space. This type of scene occurs weekly in the various pockets of ethnic communities throughout the SFBA and undoubtedly in many diaspora communities around other major metropolitan areas. Why not make information about these types of events more readily available to the San Francisco visitors and so-​called mainstream audience member? Why not expose SFEDF audiences to these types of events where they can feel what it is like to be “the other” rather than just look at “the other”? Most importantly I  believe that a re-​visioning of the Festival would mean creating context-​building activities and performance models that would foster a three-​ dimensional appreciation of dance and culture. The thematic approach could be revisited, as well, the previously held preperformance talks that included moderated dialogues on particular topics related to what the audience was about to see in the performance. Why not bring these back, along with additional pre-​or post-​Festival educational symposiums, workshops, or classes that include the voices of artists and scholars. While the Festival has been commendably inclusive of artist’s views in the adjudication of its events, it has gotten lax in recent years to include the perspectives of dance anthropologists or ethnologists for example. Bringing the perspectives of scholars, who bring a depth of understanding through careful investigation, critical thinking and experience, into the programming and planning of events could help nurture a less superficial kind of program. Organizing or working with academic or other art institutions to create interactions between scholars and artists, or open-​to-​the-​public artist-​scholar-​ producer-​funder dialogues, could truly “advance cultural understanding” and help the Festival to bring out other aesthetic points of view. The 2011-​debuted Asia Pacific Dance Festival could be looked to as a model. Coproduced by the East-​West Center Arts Program and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Outreach College, this festival centers on a series of performances, yet “includes such complimentary activities as workshops, university course offerings, public lectures,

554   Miriam Phillips forums, and community demonstrations. These activities foster diverse and dynamic types of interactions leading to opportunities for dialogue that increases cross-​cultural understanding and respect for what we know and what we come to know” http://​www. outreach.hawaii.edu/​community/​asiapacific/​apdf_​mission.asp [accessed August 5, 2013]. Of course I present these ideas knowing full well that the logistics and finances behind creating any of the above named ideas needs careful thought and planning. Also challenging would be the balancing act between how to educate yet also entertain, how to support artists and dance cultures yet sell tickets, and how to publicize culture without trivializing it. Despite these challenges I think it is time for the SFEDF and community to revisit the story being portrayed in its popular annual festival as it grows toward its fortieth year and to seek ways to broaden its small world.14

Acknowledgments I extend deep appreciation to my long-​time colleague and fellow dancer dance ethnologist, Lily Kharrazi, for sharing many informative and colorful conversations with me over the years on dance, culture, and representation, which galvanized me to write this chapter, and for her generous perceptions that greatly inspired my reflections on this topic. I also acknowledge the valuable feedback provided by the anonymous reader and editors Tony Shay and Barbara Sellers-​Young who propelled me to expand my ideas in new directions.

Notes 1. Preliminary ideas in this essay were first presented at the 27th Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology at the University of Limerick in Ireland, July 27, 2012, for the theme Dance and Festival, and published in the subsequent conference proceeding (see Phillips 2014). 2. For more detailed information on the Festival’s programming and production process, see Phillips, “ Behind the Curtains: Everything you need to know about making it into the Ethnic Dance Festival.” In In Dance, San Francisco: Dancers Group, June 2008: 2–​3. (Also available:  http://​dancersgroup.org/​2008/​06/​behind-​the-​curtains-​everything-​you-​need-​ to-​know-​about-​making-​it-​into-​the-​ethnic-​dance-​festival/​. Note:  this article originally titled: “Behind the Curtains of the SF Ethnic Dance Festival” was changed by the editors. 3. These Mission and Vision statements have existed for many years, at least since the mid 1990s when I worked in the Festival office and including the date I accessed them for reference information for a conference paper on September 5, 2011. I was surprised that when I  looked again on January 3, 2013 while working on the conference proceedings, they had been reordered and changed. The Vision now proclaims simply, “The World United Through Dance,” and the Mission: “Our mission is to support artists sustaining the world’s diverse dance traditions by providing needed services and performance opportunities,

Spectacles of Ethnicities    555 and provide the general public with opportunities to experience and learn more about world arts and cultures.” To see the original wording, refer to the SFEDF Facebook page:  https://​www.facebook.com/​SanFranciscoEthnicDanceFestival/​info?tab=page_​info (open Company Overview) [accessed December 15, 2014]. 4. And I  would add, as “critics called for slicker technical presentations” (San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum 1997) and producers became more resourceful at delivering those, along with increasing marketing and promotion strategies. 5. Anthropologist and dancer, Kealiinohomoku deconstructs the term “ethnic dance”, along with her follow-​up essay “Angst Over Ethnic Dance” (1990). Also see Kealiinohomoku (1972) “Folk dance” and Buckland (1999) “All Dances Are Ethnic, but Some Are More Ethnic Than Others.” 6. Over the decades the Festival has had internal conversations about continuing to use the term “ethnic dance” in its title. Additionally, scholars, funders, and practitioners have struggled to find more culturally-​inclusive, less problematic terms to replace “ethnic dance” and derivatives such as, “world dance,” “cultural dance,” “urban dance,” etc. More recent terms include phrases such as, “culturally-​specific dance,” (critiqued by Fu 2009) or “global movement practices” (Takiyah Nur Amin). Generally speaking dance ethnologists prefer to use as much specificity as possible when speaking about dance, however, that would not solve the issue of how a wide-​reaching program like the SFEDF might consider renaming itself. 7. The main Festival showcase performances normally occur at the Palace of Fine Arts in the North part of town, but due to construction in 2011 to 2014 temporarily moved to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on the East side of town (both within walking distance to the San Francisco Bay), with some performances at the University of California Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. Adjunct Festival events have occurred at other types of venues such as museums, cultural centers or municipal buildings in various locations around the San Francisco Bay Area. 8. Formerly called City Celebrations, this nonprofit organization used to produce several international performing arts events throughout the city—​the SFEDF has been the most well-​known. The current organization, World Arts West, continues to produce smaller events around the city as adjunct or satellite cultural offshoots of the Festival. A unique children’s program, People Like Me, the brainchild of Lily Kharrazi, existed from 1994 to 2009, which drew upon Festival and nonFestival artists. Bay Area elementary school children were bused in to the city Marina District’s Cowell Theater to attend a small world dance and music educational showcase focused on a particular theme, which also supplied teachers advance viewer’s guides including learning activities to integrate into the classroom. 9. I use the prefixes “hyper” and “hypo” as in a medical type situation with hyper meaning, over or excessive, as in hyperthyroidism is an overproduction of thyroid hormone; whereas hypo is under or inadequate—​hypothyroidism being an under production of hormone. Thus, hyper-​contextualization is an excessive, oversaturated representation of context, whereas, hypo-​contextualization is an under or minimal representation of context. In both cases, cultural context is distorted thereby altering perception and interpretation for those that witness it. 10. Van Zile’s presentation: “(Re-​)Placing Dance in Korea: Advertising With and For Dance” presented at the 27th Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology in Limerick, Ireland, July 25, 2012, explores what aspects of Korean dance are chosen to represent Korean culture “in order to determine what happens when dance is re-​placed, when it is placed in advertising media” (Van Zile 2014, 192).

556   Miriam Phillips 11. For samples of program book templates and photos see the Festival’s Program Book Archive: http://​worldartswest.org/​main/​programbook.asp. 12. For publicity photo examples from 2011 and 2012, which depicts this in further detail see SFEDF photographer, R.J. Muna’s website (images 33–​39), http://​www.rjmuna.com/​ galleries/​images/​dance/​showcase/​ (accessed December 10, 2013). The 2013 photos marked a shift in photographic style, emphasizing close-​ups and portraits, a style replicated occasionally in prior years. 13. As a dance ethnologist, I often think that what people do when I’m not there is possibly more authentic than anything they might change due in my presence. In a 2013 trip to Southern Spain I was struck by the schism between artistry and social context in some flamenco venues that I attended. While I noticed that artistry did not necessarily deteriorate when presented to a solely tourist audience, what changed for me was the packaging of the artistry and the ambience created by the physical and social context. For example, a precisely timed one hour show where each artist was allotted ten minutes for their solo, occurred in a newly renovated historical indoor patio produced by organizations that cater primarily to tourists who sit quietly and attentively in chairs, in contrast to the four hour performance in the open air bull ring where each artist performed for thirty minutes, often improvising over the time—​while the hustle-​bustle of local Andalusian families and friends enthusiastically call out to the artists, even come near the stage to dance in front of the star singer, or get up and down to eat, drink, and socialize or create small singing, dancing, hand-​clapping huddles during breaks. The second case was more enjoyable to me not necessarily because the artistry was any greater but because the ambience seemed thicker, richer, more genuine—​but then again, there are those that could find this tedious, repetitious, and time-​consuming and might just wish to have “the art delivered to their doorstep” (nothing wrong with that); which may be why ethnic dance festivals such as SFEDF are so popular. 14. Although the research and writing for this chapter began in 2010, its ultimate publication some five years later seems to correspond with a newer recognition for change on the part of the Festival as expressed in its 2013 souvenir program book. “After much research and community input, World Arts West created a strategic plan to transform the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival into a multi-​platform, multi-​venue, geographically-​ expanded series of programming. Education is core to our future goals. Our goal is to create opportunities for students to learn about diverse dance forms and traditions from Festival artists year-​round. We are developing new programs to leverage introductory exposure into lifelong connections with dance forms and cultures from around the world. Over time, we aim to increase cultural literacy or, more simply: increase people’s knowledge of world cultures” (World Arts West, 2013, p. 48). While we have yet to see how these ideas unfold, I am excited to see the acknowledgement of some potentially significant change.

References Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009. “Chimamanda Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story.” TED Talks: TED Conferences LLC. Filmed Jul 2009, Posted Oct 2009, TEDGlobal 2009. http://​w ww.ted.com/​t alks/​chimamanda_​adichie_​t he_​danger_​of_​a_​single_​story.html (accessed February 15, 2010).

Spectacles of Ethnicities    557 Buckland, Theresa. 1999. “All Dances Are Ethnic, but Some Are More Ethnic Than Others:  Some Observations on Dance Studies and Anthropology.” Dance Research:  The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 17, no. 1: 3–​21. Chakravorty, Pallabi. 2008. Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women and Modernity in India. Kolkata, India: Seagull Books. Celik, Rasit. 2012. “A History of Multicultural Education in the USA: Origins, Approaches, and Misconceptions.” The Online Journal of New Horizons in Education 2, no. 4 (www.tojned.net [accessed February 6, 2015]). Chatterjea, Ananya. 2004. “Contestations:  Constructing a Historical Narrative for Odissi.” In Rethinking Dance History:  A  Reader, edited by Alexandra Carter. 143–​156. New  York, New York: Routledge. Desmond, Jane C. 1999. Staging Tourism:  Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dunin, Elsie Ivancich. 1989. “Dance Events as a Means to Social Interchange.” In The Dance Event: A Complex Cultural Phenomenon, edited by Lisbet Torp, 30–​33, Copenhagen: ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology. Fairbank, Holly C. 2009. “Preserving Minority Dance in China: Multiple Meanings and Layers of Intention.” Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement 16, no. 1/​2: 1–​16. Farnell, Brenda. 2007. “Choreographing Colonialism in the American West.” Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement 14, no. 3. (International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance [accessed April 1, 2012]). Farnell, Brenda, and Robert N. Wood. 2007. “Dancing with Authorization:  From the Reservation to Ramallah.” Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement 14, no. 4. (EbscoHost [accessed April 1, 2012]). Fish, Stanley. 1997. “Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech.” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2: 378–​395. Fu, Alice. 2009. “The Problem of “Culturally Specific ” Dance:  The Search for a Critical Multiculturalism in Dance.” San Francisco: In Dance. Dancers Group, April. http://​dancersgroup.org/​2009/​04/​the-​problem-​of-​culturally-​specific-​dance-​the-​search-​for-​a-​critical-​ multiculturalism-​in-​dance/​ (accessed 2013 August 30, 2013). Gere, David. 1988. “The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival:  the First Decade, 1978–​ 1988.” Encore (special issue on the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival), 4, no. 2-​4. San Francisco: Archives for the Performing Arts Quarterly. Giurchescu, Anca. 2001. “The Power of Dance and Its Social and Political Uses.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 33: 109–​121. Godfrey, Brian J. 1988. Neighborhoods in Transition: the Making of San Francisco’s Ethnic and Nonconformist Communities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grau, Andrée. 2008. “Dance and the Shifting Sands of Multiculturalism: Questions from the United Kingdom.” In Dance Transcending Borders, edited by Sarkar Munsi Urmimala, 232–​ 252. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Grau, Andrée. 2012. “Dance, Spatiality, and the Hierarchy of Places: A Cross-​Cultural Enquiry (abstract).” In 27th Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology (Programme), 15–​16. Limerick:  Ireland:  International Council for Traditional Music Study Group on Ethnochoreology; The Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick, Ireland. Hahn, Tomie. 2007. Sensational Knowledge:  Embodying Culture Through Japanese Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

558   Miriam Phillips Hattersley-​Drayton, Karana. 1984. 1984 San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival (program book). San Francisco: City Celebrations and the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. Hoerburger, Felix. 1968. “Once Again:  On the Concept of ‘Folk Dance.’ ” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 20: 30–​31. Horton Communications, Scott (publicist). 2011. “33rd San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival press release.” San Francisco:  World Arts West. http://​www.worldartswest.org/​Assets/​ TicketsRelease_​Final.pdf (accessed October 24, 2011). Horton Communications, Scott (publicist). 2012. “34th San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival press release.” San Francisco:  World Arts West. http://​www.worldartswest.org/​Assets/​ 2012%20Festival%20announcement%20news%20release%204-​25-​12.pdf. (accessed June 12, 2012). Jackson, Naomi, and Toni Shapiro-​Phim, editors. 2008. Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Kaeppler, Adrienne L. 1977. “Polynesian Dance as ’Airport Art,’ ” Dance Research Annual 8: 71–​84. Kaeppler, Adrienne L. 2003. “An Introduction to Dance Aesthetics.” Yearbook for Traditional Music. International Council for Traditional Music, 35: 153–​162. Kaeppler, Adrienne L. 2010. “The Beholder’s Share: Viewing Music and Dance in a Globalized World.” Ethnomusicology 54, no. 2: 185–​201. Kealiinohomoku, Joann Wheeler. 1969–​1970. “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance.” Impulse 24–​33. Kealiinohomoku, Joann Wheeler. 1972. “Folk Dance.” In Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, edited by R.M. Dorson, 381–​404. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kealiinohomoku, Joann Wheeler. 1990. “Angst Over Ethnic Dance.” Cross-​Cultural Dance Resources Newsletter no. 10: 1–​2, 5–​6. Kharrazi, Lily. 2008. “The Emperor’s Old Clothes? Reflections on Thirty Years of the Ethnic Dance Festival.”. San Francisco:  In Dance. Dancers Group, June, 8.  http://​dancersgroup. org/​2008/​06/​the-​emperors-​old-​clothes-​reflections-​on-​thirty-​years-​of-​the-​ethnic-​dance-​ festival/​. Kharrazi, Lily. 2011. “Email communications on the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival with Miriam Phillips.” San Francisco (October 28, 2011). Kharrazi, Lily. 2012. “Phone conversations on the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival with Miriam Phillips.” (July 15, 2012). Lamp, Frederick. 1996. Art of the Baga: A Drama of Cultural Reinvention. New York: Museum for African Art; Munich: Prestel. Meduri, Avanthi. 1988. “Bharatha Natyam  —​ What Are You?” Asian Theatre Journal 5, no. 1: 1–​22. Millazo, Kathy M. 2010. “Black Africanist Aesthetics in Spanish Dance: Revising Flamenco’s History.” Paper presented at the conference Re:Generations—​International Perspectives on Dance of the African Diaspora, London Metropolitan University, November 5th. Nahachewsky, Andriy. 2001. “Once Again: On the Concept of ‘Second Existence Folk Dance.’ ” Yearbook for Traditional Music 33: 17–​28. Nahachewsky, Andriy. 2008. “Folk Dance Revival Strategies.” Ethnologies 30, no. 1: 41–​57. Nahachewsky, Andriy. 2012. Ukrainian Dance:  A  Cross-​Cultural Approach. Jefferson, North Carolina: MacFarland & Company. Ness, Sally Ann. 1992. Body, Movement, and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Spectacles of Ethnicities    559 Ness, Sally Ann. 1997. “Originality in the Postcolony: Choreographing the Neoethnic Body of Philippine ballet.” Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 1: 64–​108. Novack, Cynthia Jean. 1990. Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Phillips, Miriam. 2008. “Behind the Curtains: Everything You Need to Know about Making It Into the Ethnic Dance Festival.” In Dance. San Francisco: Dancers Group. June, 2–​3. http://​ dancersgroup.org/​2008/​06/​behind-​the-​curtains-​everything-​you-​need-​to-​know-​about-​ making-​it-​into-​the-​ethnic-​dance-​festival/​. Phillips, Miriam. 2012. “D’mba Lost and Found:  The Discovery, Destruction, Construction and Reconstruction of Baga Masked Dance in Traditional Villages of Guinea, West Africa.” In Dance, Gender and Meanings /​Contemporizing Traditional Dance, (Proceedings 26th Symposium of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) Study Group on Ethnochoreology), edited by Elsie Ivancich Dunin, Daniela Stavělová, Dorota Gremlincová. Prague: Academy of Performing Arts in Prague Press, 179–​186. Phillips, Miriam. 2013. “Becoming the Floor /​Breaking the Floor: Experiencing the Kathak-​ Flamenco Connection.” Ethnomusicology, 57, no. 3: 396–​427. Phillips, Miriam. 2014. “Beauty and the Beast:  The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival’s Global Stage.” In Dance, Place, Festival, (Proceedings 27th Symposium of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) Study Group on Ethnochoreology), edited by Elsie Ivancich Dunin, Catherine E. Foley. Limerick, Ireland: Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick, 271–​277. Reed, Susan A. 1998. “The Politics and Poetics of Dance.” Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 503–​532. San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum (repository). 1997. “Inventory of the Ethnic Dance Festival Collection:  Organizational History.” (Ethnic Dance Festival Collection, 1978–​ 1994, Collection number:  994.083). http://​danceheritage.org/​xtf/​ view?docId=ead/​ethnicdanID.xml;query=;brand=default (accessed July 28, 2012). Segal, Lewis. 1995. “Looking at Postcards:  Word Dance on Western Stages.” In Looking Out: Perspectives on Dance and Criticism in a Multicultural World, edited by David Gere, 41–​49. Dance Critics Association. New York: Schirmer Books. SFEthnicDanceFest. 2012a. “San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival.” World Arts West (producer). (YouTube video. http://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=_​i3KUfVjAjE. (uploaded: May 17, 2012; accessed June 15, 2012). (Promotional video of the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, 48 seconds). SFEthnicDanceFest. 2012b. “WAW Ethnic Dance Festival.” World Arts West (producer). YouTube video. http://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=_​4w4RAROTPA&list=UUAfKvp xMAyJqtOIBFS1y79A&index=1&feature=plcp (accessed June 29, 2012). (Promotional video of 2012 Festival artists with narration of several staff including C. K. Ladzepko, 3:09 minutes). Shay, Anthony. 1999 “Parallel Traditions: State Folk Dance Ensembles and Folk Dance in “The Field.” Dance Research Journal 31, no. 1: 29–​56. Shay, Anthony. 2002. Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Companies, Representation, and Power. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Shay, Anthony. 2006. Choreographing Identities: Folk Dance, Ethnicity and Festival in the United States and Canada. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company. Sklar, Deidre. 2001. Dancing with the Virgin: Body and Faith in the Fiesta of Tortugas, New Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.

560   Miriam Phillips Snyder, Allegra Fuller. 1995. “Filmed in “Holly-​Vision ”: Hollywood Images of World Dance.” In Looking Out:  Perspectives on Dance and Criticism in a Multicultural World, edited by David Gere. Dance Critics Association, 73–​93. New York: Schirmer Books. Straker, Jay. 2009. Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution. Bloomington:  Indiana University Press. Turner, Victor Witter. 1977 (1969). The Ritual Process:  Structure and Anti-​ structure. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ulrich, Allan. 2012. ”San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival is Calling.” The San Francisco Chronicle May 31, 2012. San Francisco:  Hearst Communications Inc. http://​www.sfgate. com/ ​ p erformance/​ article/​ S an-​ Francisco-​ Ethnic-​ D ance-​ Festival-​ is-​ c alling-​ 3596470. php#ixzz23xiosoSy (accessed July 20, 2012). Van Zile, Judy. 2014. “(Re-​)placing Dance in Korea:  Advertising With and For Dance.” In Dance, Place, Festival, (Proceedings 27th Symposium of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) Study Group on Ethnochoreology), edited by Elsie Ivancich Dunin, Catherine E. Foley, 192–​198. Limerick, Ireland: Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick. Vissicaro, Pegge. 2004. Studying Dance Cultures Around the World:  An Introduction to Multicultural Dance Education. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/​Hunt Publishing. World Arts West (producer). 2011. “San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival: History.” (Website of on history of the Festival) http://​www.worldartswest.org/​edf/​history/​index.html (accessed September 5, 2011). World Arts West (producer). “World Arts West Mission and Vision.” (Website of on History of the Festival) http://​www.worldartswest.org/​about/​mission.html (accessed September 5, 2011). World Arts West. 35th Anniversary San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival (Program Book). San Francisco:  World Arts West. http://​www.sfethnicdancefestival.org/​newmain/​ethnic_​ dance_​festival_​2013_​program.pdf (accessed September 12, 2013).

Pa rt  I V DA N C E A S  A F OR M OF E T H N IC R E SI STA N C E

Chapter 24

Dan cecapes of Di onysu s From Kali Vrisi (Northern Greece) to the Olympics Christos Papakostas

In recent years there has been lively debate in the social sciences on the relation between place and culture. The dominant view was that this relation was a “natural” one. Groups identify with specific geographical spaces and their culture, likewise, groups consider themselves to be rooted in a discrete territory. A taxonomic logic prevails, which demands clear categories of cultures and cultural regions. The rise of the phenomenon of nationalism contributes to this, since part of its rhetoric is reinforced by the substantiation of the relation between place, community, and culture. Anthropologists have vehemently challenged this essentialist approach.1 As Nitsiakos (2003, 25) has pointed out, “this fact is linked not only with the more general critique of nationalism [ … ], but also with the reflective disposition of anthropologists, which contributes considerably to deconstructing old certainties and to a more general emic criticism of the conceptual and methodological tools of classical anthropological thought.” New phenomena such as migration, diaspora communities, hybrid cultures and identities, the continuous circulation of materials and cultural goods, and the development of new technologies demand the reexamination of the place of culture (Olwig and Hastrup 1997, 3). Perhaps the most extreme proposal in this direction is that of Appadurai (1991), who introduces the neologism ethnoscapes as an analytical tool of modernity and its accompanying phenomena: diaspora, mobility, migration, transnationalism. The component “ethno” of ethnography today takes on a fluid and nonlocalized character, to which the anthropological description is summoned to respond. The concepts of culture and identity are disengaged from the corresponding space and do not constitute homogeneous and static categories that define a group of people over time. Consequently, culture is understood as a historically dynamic category “… which is in a continuous state of flux and is an object of negotiating collective identities and otherness” (Nitsiakos 2006, 363). The starting point of the theoretical framework of the present paper is the theory of practice (Bourdieu 1977).2 According to this, dance is a cultural practice “through which the community manages its past and present, is reconstituted at a symbolic level and

564   Christos PapaKostas incorporates elements of contemporary developments into its tradition in a dynamic manner” (Nitsiakos 2003, 87). Conceptions about the place, the identity and the relations between social and ethnic groups, which are always relations of power, are embodied in cultural practices and structure them. The practices are the ways and the fields in which these conceptions are realized—​that is, are understood and become real (Cowan 1990). The theory of practice helps us to transcend the dichotomy structure/​action and, consequently, to overcome the problem of substantiating the relations between place and community, and between place and culture. Folk culture and dance are not perceived as static cultural phenomena, as “lists” of stable and unchanging characteristics, but as dynamic processes “historically predetermined and subject to social and political manipulations and negotiations” (Nitsiakos 2003, 8). This perspective allows us to examine dance beyond the view that it is synonymous with space, that is, rooted in a particular geographical territory. Research does not aim at the geographical location and classification of “pure” dance and music forms, nor does it place the issue on the basis of a clear-​cut bipolar opposition of local/​nonlocal. The homogeneity of the term local (Gr. ντόπιος-​ dopios) has been disputed in several anthropological studies.3 What constitutes local dance and music is, each time, the outcome of a historical process that depends on the prevailing social and economic circumstances, the power relations developed at a given moment in time, as well as the action of the actors studied. Social scientists have criticized the idea that dance simply reflects structures (Cohen 1982), and for music (Stokes 1994). Apart from the theory of the “reflection” of social structures, dance provides the meanings through which the hierarchies of the place become an object of negotiation, are transformed (Stokes 1994), and contribute to the symbolic reconstitution of the place and the ethnic groups. Dance is at once product and process (Cowan 1990), and is related to cultural and ethnic identity. Identity is a social and cultural construct founded in history. It is a means of communication, through which self-​definition is achieved.4 According to Barth’s (1969) theory of boundaries, the cultural identity of a group is not a nexus of predetermined social traits. So, research interest shifts from the cultural content of ethnic groups to the borders and to the processes that define groups and their identities.5 The distinction between boundary and content facilitates the enhancement of a wider distinction between nominal and virtual identity. The former concerns the name and the latter the experience of an identity. Grossberg (1996, 89) notes that there are no fully constituted, separate, and discrete identities. He denies, too, the existence of authentic and original identities based on a universal common origin or experience (ibid.). Furthermore, he considers identity, including ethnic identity, as an always temporary and unstable outcome of relations that define identities through differences. Stuart Hall defines identity as a structured representation (1991, 21), a “production” that is always evolving, is never completed, and is always constituted through representation (Hall 1990, 222). Following from this last observation, dance can be considered not only as constituting the cultural identity, but also, concurrently, as a representation of this identity. Thus, through dance, we have the opportunity to investigate the relations between ethnic

Dancescapes of Dionysus    565 groups, as well as the practices and the strategies that these groups apply in space and time. Specifically, in the ethnographic example of a stigmatized ethnic group, examined later, through reading the representations we are able to detect various tactics of negotiation and resistance, the spear-​point of which is dance as a response to the nation-​ state’s strategy of homogenization.6 Our aim here is to study dance and its relation to the constitution and management of the cultural identity of the ethnic group of locals (dopioi) in a community in the Prefecture of Drama, in Eastern Macedonia. The Prefecture of Drama, located in the far northeast of Greece, on the frontier with Bulgaria, is surrounded by the Rhdope mountains in the north, Mt. Menoikios and Mt. Orvilos in the west, Mt. Pangaion in the south, and the Lekani range in the east. Its capital, the town of Drama, is approximately 150 kilometersfrom Thessaloniki and 650 kilometers from Athens.

The Community The community discussed here is Kali Vrysi, which lies 23 kilometers from the town of Drama, in the northeast foothills of Mt. Menoikios, at an altitude of 270 meters (Aikaterinidis 1995, 5). Formerly known as Gornitsa, it was renamed Kali Vrysi in 1928. Aikaterinidis informs us of the composition of its population—​on ethnic criteria: “Its 832 inhabitants (1991 census) are for the most part indigenous, apart from a few families which originate from Pontos, Eastern Thrace and Asia Minor” (Aikaterinidis 1995, 5).7 Here the term indigenous, used instead of the term local, is rather vague, particularly as it is not part of the villagers’ everyday discourse. So, it is a socially and ideologically neutral term, if not actually “sterilized.”8 The Greek State in the early twentieth century was constituted around a central ideology of “Greekness.” Any deviations from the structural elements of Greekness (religion, doctrine, language) were deemed problematic. Consequently, the linguistic otherness (the villagers spoke a local Slav idiom) of the Kalivrysians (Kalivrysiotes) cast doubt on their Greekness.9 The result of all the above was the social, ethnic, and cultural stigmatization of the locals of Kali Vrysi as non-​Greek. Furthermore, in certain historical periods (1912–​1913, 1916–​1918 and 1941–​1944) the local communities of the Drama region found themselves caught in the middle of national claims and counter-​claims between Greece and Bulgaria. In this framework, community members were embroiled in a painful process of directly “choosing” a national and ethnic identity.10 This process was renewed after every foreign occupation and every anomalous political situation (Lyceum Club of Greek Women 1998, 498). It is clear that in the specific ethnographic example the concepts of localness (topikotita) and of belongingness (entopiotita) are not identical. Localness refers to a local scale of cultural expression, whereas belongingness to the sense and the consciousness of a particular origin and identity, which corresponds to a particular place (Nitsiakos 2003, 102). In the wider area of Macedonia, belongingness is charged ideologically, since it embodies antithetic and conflicting meanings, which are

566   Christos PapaKostas heightened in the framework of constituting a single nation state (Papakostas 2003, 267; Papakostas 2008). This convention is obvious too in the field of dance and of folk culture in general. In the framework of gradually establishing its structures, the young Greek nation-​state sought to achieve cultural uniformity and homogenization through manipulating ethnic traditions and cultural manifestations.11 Deviant cultural practices (dances, songs, customs) were judged problematical and were even prohibited. As a result, in the bilingual ethnic groups, such as the (then) Slavophone locals and Turcophone Gagavuzans and Cappadocians, any cultural expression in the mother tongue was treated as a predicament. The communities were forced to comply and to align with the demands of the nation-​state in order to avoid suffering the painful consequences. Songs, mainly, were lost, dances and customs lapsed, and the stigmatized communities expressed themselves within the imposed and permitted national strictures. So, the communities adopted many songs and dances that the nation-​state promoted through school education, for example, kalamatianos, tsamiko, Makedonia xakousti.12

The Ritual: Babougera The name of the custom observed at Kali Vrysi on January 6–​8 is babougera, which takes its name from the basic animal disguise worn in the ritual performance (Figure 24.1).

Figure 24.1  Babougera.

Dancescapes of Dionysus    567 It is the central customary event of the community and has a nodal place in the annual cycle, being linked with the transition from winter to spring, from the old to the new (Van Gennep 1960). Babougera is a nexus of symbolic actions that aim, through sympathetic magic, to secure the fertility of the earth and abundant harvests, as well as the health and prosperity of the people (Nitsiakos 2003, 156). However, in addition to all these elements, babougera has been the reason and pretext for Kalo Vrysi’s “appearance” in numerous bibliographies in the texts of mainly folklore and archaeological studies (see Drandakis 1998; Aikaterinidis 1995; Peristeri 1998; Trakasopoulou-​Salakidou 1998). I do not intend to give a morphological analysis of this ritual. Suffice it to say that, in general, it meets the four basic features of a ritual, as defined by Schultz and Lavenda (1990, 176): (1) it is a repetitive social practice consisting of a sequence of symbolic actions (dances, songs, gestures/​movements, etc.): (2) it is placed outside the routine of everyday life; (3) it adheres to a characteristic culturally defined scheme, according to which the members of a society, even if they have not seen a specific ritual, are able to say that a certain sequence of actions is ritual; and (4) it is linked closely with a particular group of ideas, which are frequently codified in a myth. What is interesting in the case of Kali Vrysi is that the ritual is linked directly with the process of constituting the community’s ethnic identity. Baumann (1992), relying on Durkheim, argues that rituals should be seen as symbolic representational performances at the core of the social identity of the community, which create, conserve, and change the cultural identity of a society (Figure 24.2). Lefteris Drandakis (1998, 484) classes babougera as a dance ritual. In dance rituals, by dance we do not mean only the stylized movement that is contained in strict rhythmical

Figure 24.2  Babougera “teasing” people.

568   Christos PapaKostas and kinetic motifs, but also the free (rhythmical) kinetic behavior of the participants, which is included in the wider meaning of the term dance (orchese or orchisis13).14 On January 6, after the blessing of the waters by the priest, the babougera appear.15 With “unruly” and aggressive movements they pursue and taunt by-​passers, trying to touch them with the cloth bag they are holding.16 We would describe the babougera’s movement as “agitated” (Drandakis 1998, 487), free, dynamic, and improvisational. Whatever the case, this movement is organized and shaped through the dialogue between the body and the sound of the bells. On January 6th and 7th, in addition to babougera there are other dance events, which take place mainly in the coffee shops and tavernas, to the accompaniment of local musical instruments (bagpipes-​gaides and drums-​dacharedes) or instruments of the wider region (shawms-​zournades and drum-​daouli). On January 8th the ritual reaches its climax, with the merry and even comic representation of a wedding. The whole community takes part and, generally speaking, the ceremonial and actions of the local wedding are followed; shaving the bridegroom, dressing the bride, parading the bride to the groom’s house, the bride bidding her relatives farewell, the wedding procession headed by the musical instruments (gaides and dacharedes), crowning the couple, wishing the newlyweds good luck by pinning banknotes on the chest, etc. (Aikaterinidis 1995, 13). The mock wedding takes place to the accompaniment of local musical instruments and the same local dances as at an actual wedding are danced. The representation and the custom of babougera in general conclude with a dance in which the entire community and the visitors take part. In 1994, certain modernistic elements appeared in relation to the earlier manner of performance. These new elements concern changes in the ceremonial and the roles of the parody wedding as well as the introduction of new figures and disguises (Lyceum Club of Greek Women 1998, 502–​503). Particularly significant is the appearance of one new figure, that of Bacchus/​Dionysos, both as an effigy and as a living figure which, henceforth, has become an organic element of the ritual performance. This modernistic but not fortuitous element is the result of the philology and, in the end, invented tradition that has developed within the community, relating to the archaeological excavation at the site of Mikri Toumba, just outside the village. This site is known to the locals as “Bacchus’ Palace” and it is noteworthy that it is also sanctified in the Litany held after Easter.17 In the 1920s, a sanctuary was excavated at that site, which the archaeologist contends was dedicated to the god Dionysos, citing as supportive evidence: (1) the performance of babougera, which is characterized as distant echo of Dionysian cult, and; (2) the existence of the musical instrument the gaida, which is considered descendant of the Satyrs’ askos (bagpipe) (Aikaterinidis 1997). The same reasoning underlies certain folklore approaches, which argue that the ancient origin of the ritual of babougera is demonstrated, correspondingly, by the archaeological evidence. The two-​way interaction and the interweaving of the archaeological and folklore approaches have resulted in the formation of a common conception by both disciplines.18 This common conception is based on the unbroken continuity and direct linear relation between the ritual performance and the ancient Hellenic world, specifically the god Dionysos. The critical review of the theoretical and methodological issues the aforesaid positions raise is outside the

Dancescapes of Dionysus    569 scope of the present study. What is important is that these views are widely accepted by the community. However, the community, given the negative stereotypes ascribed to it with regard to Greekness, passes from the perception to the adoption of theories favorable to it, in usage. Thus, on the one hand it “inventories” the scientific conclusions in a peculiar popularized way, and on the other, it processes these and makes them part of its “tradition,” to such a degree that they become “self-​evident” and, in the end, “authentic.” Indeed, so “authentic” that they “authenticate” the very cultural identity of Kali Vrysi. The documentation of a discipline as emotively tangible as archaeology as well as its “conversation” with folklore studies (Laographia), offers a firm ideological platform for connecting the community, via Greek Antiquity, with the Modern Greek identity. In other words, the dance ritual of babougera not only has a ritual character, but also takes on an instrumental one. Through this the local cultural identity begins cautiously to cast aside the ethnic stigmatization of the past and to claim a place in the wider national identity (Figure 24.3). Dionysos as an abstract concept is enhanced as the paramount symbol for the community, with direct emblematic use and/​or abuse. Ness, referring to Turner, notes that dominant symbols possess three empirical properties: condensation, unification and polarization (Ness 1992, 58). In other words, she concludes that they simulate and function as magnets. In the case of Kali Vrysi, Dionysos gathers all the aforesaid properties. As abstract concept and as figure, he contains multiple and condensed meanings, both for the “others” and for the community. The first are drawn simply from mention of Dionysus, as he is the projection of a glorious and mythical past “of our own” into the present day. On the other hand, his involvement in the ritual performance of

Figure 24.3  Dancing in the center of Kali Vrysi.

570   Christos PapaKostas a stigmatized community provides the stuff from which its myth of origin is woven. A myth compatible with the national ideology, which not only argues in favor of the community but also adds to this a sense of cultural superiority. The result is the reconstitution of the community (unification) around a central core (ritual), which has a dominant focal symbol-​emblem (Dionysus). Within this framework, which was shaped in the 1990s, the residents of Kali Vrysi appear as truly acting objects/​social actors and not merely as objects of a weak pole, of a bipolar model, with the national government in the role of the powerful pole. They are active at a local, supralocal and institutional level, publishing books on the local folk culture, music and dance, and especially on babougera, recording CDs of local music, composing new verses dedicated to Bacchus, participating in European programs, building a guesthouse in the traditional architectural style, and so on.19 At the same time, the custom, as well as the music and dance activity accompanying it, has activated the structural nostalgia of the townspeople of Drama, which tends to exoticize rural life and its associated traditions (Nitsiakos 2003, 169). Thus, the community has become the focus of interest, for folklorists—​professional and amateur; social scientists, journalists, dance teachers, musicians, and others. Babougera and the local dances of Kali Vrysi feature frequently in television programs and in, mainly, folklore stage performances, outside the “physical space” of the community. Not only is the local dance troupe invited to perform in other regions, but also, correspondingly, the dances of Kali Vrysi are performed by dance troupes in all parts of Greece. Moreover, quite often a group of elderly residents of Kali Vrysi has been asked to take part in performances and recordings of “authentic” local Greek dances. Criterion for choosing the babougera and the dances of Kali Vrysi in stage performances is the dynamic and impressive spectacle they offer. The differentiation between localness and belongingness on the basis of remarkable and rare customs is a product of recent decades, when the community is comprehended as a medley of unique and curious customary behaviors that lend themselves to exploitation by the tourist industry (Avdikos 2002, 117). As an outcome of this situation, the folk culture and dance of Kali Vrysi has been placed at the center of a peculiar political-​cultural economy that inter alia reflects the community’s ethnic identity. A case in point is the “Macedonia Issue” in the early 1990s, which caused serious tension between Greece and FYROM The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) over use of the name “Macedonia.” What is of interest here is that both sides in the dispute used dance and folk culture as documentation “of being Macedonian” and of national purity. It is no accident that since 1992 the dances of Macedonia have been presented countless times by dance troupes all over Greece, to audiences of the Greek diaspora and in seminars and festivals abroad. This fact, in conjunction with the constant demand for the continual renewal of the repertoire of local/​ supralocal/​urban dance associations, has resulted in dance teachers and associations “being forced” to record and perform the dances of communities whose Greekness is doubted. The truth is that “forced” is perhaps too strong a word, if not a deception, given that it was obvious from the outset that the dances of Macedonia are high-​quality stage material, due to the variety of their kinetic and rhythmical motifs, and their vigor. So, for

Dancescapes of Dionysus    571 many years the dances of Macedonia have been the “trump card” for performances by dance associations. The same applies to the dances and babougera of Kali Vrysi. The performances of Kalivrysian dances in such prestigious settings as the Odeum of Herodes Atticus and the Athens Concert Hall have been highly important, for in these “national” venues for premier theatrical and musical events, which are able to propose and/​or impose aesthetic models, a rite of passage takes place in which the community and its dance are legitimized and acquire certification of Greekness and authenticity. In other words, they are instrumental in the process of including cultural manifestations in the national repertoire (Papakostas 2007).

Olympic Games: The Ceremony of Ritual A recent example of the appearance of the babougera ritual outside space and time, in the form of a spectacle, is the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in Athens (August 28, 2004).20 Turner (1967, 95) distinguishes two categories of ceremonies: transformatory ritual and confirmatory ceremony. The first, strictly speaking, is addressed to forms of religious behavior associated with social transition. The second is linked with social situations in which political and legal institutions are of greater importance (Turner op. cit.). Given that in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games all forms of power and authority are involved, and that hosting the Olympic Games is a strategic choice of the nation-​state, I would class the opening ceremony as a confirmatory ceremony. Through this, the community’s illustrious historical past, its contribution to the national cause, and primarily, its direct relation to and importance for the nation-​state are confirmed. The texture of the specific ceremony set a new framework of limitations in which the performance of the custom should move. Essentially, the babougera ritual was a small part of a ceremony with pronounced modernistic elements. Customs such as the Babougera of Kali Vrysi, the Arapides of Monastiraki in Drama and Nikisiani in Pangaion, and the Carnavalia of Socho, were presented at the beginning of the closing ceremony. This artistic choice is not by chance, since the specific customs were presented as temporal and symbolic beginnings of a single culture: Greek Culture. Junctures along the way in the closing ceremony included: The Lyceum Club of Greek Women and other urban dance troupes, Chronis Aidonidis and Domna Samiou and other singers of folk and popular songs, and the highpoint was the flying Sakis Rouvas, who came in third place in the Eurovision Song Contest, singing a pop version of the oriental-​mode folk song Karapiperim. A few days prior to the ceremony, the mass media were advertising the participation of customs, using generalizing and vague terms such as koudounatoi, koudounophoroi (wearing bells), metamphiasmenoi (wearing disguises, masked) or simply koudounia (bells!). Furthermore, they spoke glibly about the origin and provenance of the customs, using terms such as: primitive, ancient, primeval, and Dionysian. In a

572   Christos PapaKostas nutshell, “Greekest of Greek.” To this day, the community discusses the resounding success, which is acknowledged as the most important event in recent years. In the end, was this a representation of the presentation or a presentation of the representation? We could point out certain changes in the spatial-​temporal structure of the custom, as this was presented in the closing ceremony. 1. The closing ceremony took place in a “nonplace,” to use the term coined by Mark Auge (1995), having as audience also a global public. A  colorless and faceless space, a space of cultural consumption, which is not interwoven with the cultural identity of the community and is largely opposed to the “natural.” Consequently, we could maintain that in this framework the reconstitution of the community at symbolic level is not achieved (Cohen 1989). Nonetheless, the closing ceremony, in the specific place, “unnatural” and devoid of history, seems to “neutralize” the social actors, which appear as “super-​Greeks.” That is, the presentation on stage of a ritual or a “tradition” in general and its transfer from the local level to the national, “authenticates” and, in the end, legitimizes the cultural identity of a previously stigmatized community. This fact alone plays a major role in reconstituting the community and securing its unity and cultural survival. 2. At the temporal level, the presentation of the custom in the closing ceremony lacks the cyclical quality of the corresponding performance in its natural and traditional space. In the ceremony there is artistic and, in general terms, unilinear time, which is dictated by the artistic demands of the eponymous creator and the conventional obligations of producing a spectacle. In essence, the ritual is not performed but is essentially “realized” in a highly regulatory framework. It would be no exaggeration to say that the participants were called upon to “play” the ritual and to act themselves. Taking into account the above spatial and temporal singularities, which are counter to the “natural” performance of the custom, as well as the imposed changes in the ceremonial of the ritual, we could perhaps go one step further and contend that in the presentation of the custom on stage, particularly on the occasion of the closing ceremony, an atmosphere of what Turner (1969) terms antistructure is cultivated, which in the end relieves the problems and renews the structure. The custom of babougera, as a part of national tradition, offers the community alternative scenarios for dealing with these stereotypes. In other words, it includes a rhetorical dimension that endeavors to convince “selves” and “others” of the affinity between local identity and supralocal, and, by extension, national identity. At the same time, the particular case study reinforces the view that tradition as a concept is a product of modernity, a direct derivative of which is, in its turn, the nation-​state. The nation-​state, which, in almost all cases, is the dominant pole in the bipolar scheme of national-​local, has, in this case, been subverted by the local. However, does an interpretation based on a strictly bipolar scheme perhaps do the Kalivrysiotes as acting objects of the weak pole an

Dancescapes of Dionysus    573 injustice? The specific empirical example here deconstructs the bipolar scheme nation-​ state/​community, since the Kalivrysiotes, through a process of continual negotiation, using agency, undertake significant actions and attempt to manipulate the strong pole (nation-​state) (Derrida 1978, 41). Lastly, these actions are distinguished by a series of paradoxes. 1. The “theoretical weaponry” for this negotiation is provided for the community by the preselected and popularized versions of scientific conclusions from the disciplines of folklore studies and archaeology. 2. The recognition of the community and the relinquishing of negative stereotypes of the past come also through the presentation of rituals on stage, outside place and time. That is, in spaces and times that are homogenized, legitimized and, therefore, national.

Dancescapes The dance phenomenon at Kali Vrysi, and in the Drama region generally, displays considerable fluidity. The findings of ethnographic research do not correspond to an overall equating of space, place, and culture (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). The ethnic group of the locals at Kali Vrysi does not constitute a static entity, outside and beyond the historical and cultural context. Its dance culture is not a separate culture that is constituted per se, that is without interacting with the wider “… administrative, economic and social environment” (Avdikos 2002: 11). In this sense, the dance culture or the dance identity of the Roma of Herakleia should be interpreted as a concept that is fluid and not subject to the local, as product of strategic choices of the social actors.21 From the above, the empirical example may be seen as deconstructing the relation between place, identity, and dance as strictly predetermined, self-​evident and, in the end, natural. This reasoning indicates that the study of dance must turn toward new theoretical tools, which will allow and facilitate interpretation of the dance phenomenon through a dynamic perspective. In response to this challenge, we propose the neologism “ethno–​dancescapes” or simply “dancescapes” (Figure 24.4). These are dynamic and polymorphous landscapes, which are constituted through a multidimensional and continual process of consent, rupture, appropriation, rejection, conservation, transformation, and negotiation of dance and of space. The relation between ethnic group, place, and dance “… is considered historically determined, culturally constructed and, consequently the sought-​after object of ethnographic practice and not given” (Nitsiakos 2003, 86). Specifically for the study of the relation between dance phenomenon and modernity, dancescapes follow the theoretical principles of Appadurai (1991) and the neologism ethnoscapes, which he introduced. Dancescapes refer to dance identities, which are distinguished by fluidity and hybridism that surpass the boundaries of nation-​states and intersect the boundaries of national identities

574   Christos PapaKostas

Figure 24.4  “Marriage ceremony”(parody). The “Dionysus”(Bacchus), the “groom”, the “bride” and the “best man.” All these photos are from the official website of the Cultural Association of Kali Vrysi. http://​www.kalivrisi.gr/​

(Nitsiakos 2003, 97). In no case are these identities homogeneous, static and rooted in one place, as the national ideology would like them to be (Nitsiakos 2003). Thus, through the perspective of dancescapes it is possible to explore and to describe situations and phenomena that articulate dance both with the traditional and the modern situation. 1. The role of the nation-​state as historical derivative of modernity (Gellner 1983), its relation with the local communities and the consequent new realities this brings in their dance identity are taken into serious consideration. Very often the local dances appear as variations of the national ones, and the nation-​state, in the framework of cultural nationalism (Gross 1992, 129–​130), appropriates them and, not infrequently, resorts to them in a possible “crisis of [its] legitimization.”22 One of these realities is the appearance and the spread of dance troupes as a new form of managing traditional cultural manifestations, such as dance. Dance troupes approach dance as a homogeneous cultural manifestation and present it in the framework of a homogeneous space and time.23 So, dance in the community coexists with dance in the dance troupes, which are an “artificial habitat” (Avdikos 2004). Despite their innate differences, these two traditions do not move independently of one another, but very often entwine, intertwine, and intersect. The dance of the community is the raw material for the dance troupes, but the community itself, in several cases, adopts attitudes and practices of dance troupes in order to achieve its own goals.24 In this sense, we could extend further

Dancescapes of Dionysus    575 the view of Shay (1999), who speaks of parallel traditions. It would be more proper to speak of interdependent and superimposed traditions. Furthermore, the study of dance through dancescapes tries to overcome a series of dichotomies: first/​second existence (Hoerburger 1965, 1968) and dance “as it was/​dance as it is” (Main 1995).25 The past is not in counterpoint to the present, but in a relation of dialogue with it, which also enhances the multiple existences of dance, as well as its multiple meanings. Thus, dance is not trapped only in the before or only in the now, but is considered as a process, as “a living organism that is created, develops, resists influences, changes, continues to exist, is replaced, dies, relives, is transformed, complements, supports, etc.” (Loutzaki 1999: 216). This takes into account both its immaterial character and the way it is “felt” by its performers (Bull 1997). 2. In the framework of dancescapes the factor of movement is not ignored. Study of the form and the technique of movement, the chorographic synthesis, the stylistic elements, the variations, the terminology and the use of movement (Loutzaki 1999) contributes to the fuller understanding of the phenomenon. Dance is not confronted only as a “finished product” (Kaeppler 1991), but also in relation to the historical, social and cultural environment. Of interest is both the analysis of what “dance itself ” does (Spencer 1985) and the examination of dance as a form of cultural performance (Cowan 1990). So, the form, the structure and the style of the dance are not reduced to transcendental concepts outside and above the wider framework of their constitution and formation. The issue is not to seek pure and authentic dance forms—​the one and only “authentic” and generally accepted version and performance, which will emerge through practices of selection and rejection. In the perspective of dancescapes, dance is not implied as a cultural manifestation that is static in space and time, but as a manifestation distinguished by multiple versions,26 authentic messages (Tomlinson 1988) and countless choreographies (Derrida and McDonald 1995).27 3. The study of dance through the perspective of dancescapes does not ignore the existence of new frameworks of dance activity, new kinds of dance events. The appearance of a peculiar from of political economy (Marcus and Fischer 1986) and market of dance has contributed to shaping all the aforesaid. For the needs of this market, dance is freed from the place and the community (Papakostas 2003), it is neutralized and sterilized, and is projected simply as a variation of the homogeneous national tradition. It is demoted to a consumer product that is offered to heteroclite customers, in places and nonplaces, as an exotic experience. It is ironical that many of the dances projected as par excellence national originate from stigmatized groups of low social status. Such dances-​emblems, which are projected by nation states as synonymous with their cultural identity, are the hasapiko in Greece (Torp 1989), the tango in Argentina (Savigliano 1995), the rumba in Cuba (Daniel 1995), the samba in Brazil (Browning 1995), the flamenco in Spain (Papapavlou 2000) and the çifteteli in the Middle East (Shay and Sellers-​Young 2005). Some characteristics of the political economy of dance, which merit further investigation, are,

576   Christos PapaKostas a. The presentation of dance on stage and its theatricalization in the framework of local, national, and international festivals (Buckland 2002; Kaeppler 2001). These spaces are, in most cases, colorless and unrelated to the history and the cultural identity of a social group, that is, nonplaces (Auge 1995). Thus, the dance identities are disengaged from space and time, and are reconstituted in more abstract and diffuse conditions (Nitsiakos 2003, 107). b. The systematic and standardized teaching of dance in dance troupes, dance schools, seminars of diverse forms of dance all over the world.28 Also the diffusion and the dissemination of a host of dance and music styles through records and electronic and other audiovisual teaching media (e.g., books, DVDs, websites). A  contemporary phenomenon is the migration and the simultaneous usage and experiencing of certain dance forms (e.g., hasapiko, Balkan, Latin) to various parts of the world by heteroclite social, ethnic, and national groups.29 That is, dance idioms are constituted with supralocal, transethnic and, principally, transnational character. In this case dance is a social field in which two or more communities come into contact and which involves “ … networks of relations which bypass, ignore or even undermine the imagined function of the borders” (Nitsiakos and Mantzos 2003).30 c. The projection of selected, always on national criteria, images of the dance culture by the mass media. These images are in the majority imbued with a romantic sense of nostalgia for an idealized past. d. The use of dance as a good for tourist consumption, either as lesson or as spectacle.31 Here, in the framework of a series of practices related to entertainment and leisure, dance is made available so as to fill the void of the customers’ free time. e. The enhancement of new dance events in which dance may be cut off from localness but continues to constitute their nucleus. Such events are the parties and gatherings of dancers, members of dance troupes, dance schools, river parties, dance parties of all kinds, youth festivals, and so on.32 We should not forget that most of the above dance events take place in venues such as tavernas, clubs playing only Greek music, nightspots, clubs.33 From the aforesaid I conclude that the fundamental aim of dancescapes is the in vivo description and interpretation of the dance phenomenon. Essentially, this is an attempt at dance topography, which is carried out through introspection onto a wide gamut of dance practices and behaviors. This theoretical construct can in no case ignore the role of the research objects/​social actors. It should be kept in mind that although dancescapes are an attempt to deconstruct the relation between place, identity, and dance, nevertheless, at the same moment, the research objects enhance dance as one of the most basic components of their cultural identity. So, the acting objects are not placed de facto at the weak pole, incapable of reacting and with sole option their total submission to constructed realities, rather, they remain active agents in the process. The example of the Roma of Herakleia, however, revealed that the social actors do have some possibilities of

Dancescapes of Dionysus    577 agency, which are constituted as “ … a complex, contradictory and constantly changing mixture of acceptance, doubting and negotiation of the constructions of the dominant group” (Ortner 1995).34 A typical example is the essentialist view for the ancient origins, the undoubted genuineness and authenticity of the dances of Kali Vrysi, which is deeply embedded in the dominant discourse of the nation-​state. However, what perhaps escapes us is that essentialist views are not found only in the hegemonic discourse but also in the corresponding discourse of the stigmatized ethnic groups. These groups do not just preserve these views but reinforce them through a mesh of practices (e.g., auto-​exoticism), and in the end activate them when and where is deemed expedient. This process is characterized by alternating actions of consent and resistance, which strengthen the ethnic identity of a group.

Notes 1. See Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Olwig and Hastrup 1997; Marcus and Fischer 1986. 2. Cf. Ortner 1984. 3. See Asad 1993; Gefou-​Madianou 1999; Appadurai 1988. 4. Smith 1987. 5. For a presentation and critique of Barth’s positions see Jenkins 1996. 6. The dichotomy strategy/​tactic is analyzed by de Certeau (1984). Strategy concerns the actions and the objectives of the dominant groups, while tactic concerns the practices applied by the dominant groups, mainly in the field of daily life. These practices are the response of the dominant groups, which apply, appropriate and reinterpret the dominant strategies. 7. Hantzianastasiou (2002, 634) mentions that in 1928 there were 993 locals and 211 refugees resident in Kali Vrysi. 8. See Lafazani (1997, 106–​107), who states “the use of the term indigenous refers automatically to alignment with the terminology of the official view. The content of the term local (dopios) is essentially weakened, which extends also from the abusive inclusion among the indigenes of all those who are not refugees … ”. 9. Generally, for this linguistic idiom see Ioannidou (1997) and Kostopoulos (2000). 10. For more about historical context see Mazower 2000. 11. See Gross 1992. Cf. Wade (2000) for how the State negotiated the paradoxes of homogeneity and heterogeneity. 12. Several communities, in trying to keep alive their songs and dances, as well as to avoid punishment by the machinery of power, were led to a compromise solution: they translated into Greek the verses of the songs and the titles of the dances. This certainly affected the structure and the manner of performing the songs and dances, nevertheless it is an interesting form of negotiation and adaptation, which merits further investigation. 13. About the concept of the term orchisis in Ancient Greece see Lawler (1964). 14. In Drandakis’s view (op. cit., 484–​485), for a ritual performance to be characterized as a dance ritual it must meet the following preconditions: (1) The thiasos. Only a limited number of individuals (thiasos—​troupe) undertakes to perform partial actions of the custom, which are established by tradition, which all together make up the custom. (2) The props

578   Christos PapaKostas of the thiasos, which is characteristic disguises and objects that differentiate the performers of the custom from the other members of the community. (3) Action of the thiasos, that is, elements of an organized spectacles, such as the agermoi. the parades and various other acts and mimes carried out by the thiasos or only by members of it, and which create the “dramaturgical” development of the spectacle. The action of the performers can take place at a given time (of short or long duration) as well as in the space (at the center of the community but also outside it). (4) Dance (orchese), which underpins the action of the performers. If the dance is not an essential element of the action, then we cannot speak of a dance ritual. (5) Acceptance of the thiasos’ action as social expression and participation of its members in individual rituals, and (6) Mass participation in the final dance action, if and where it is imposed by tradition. 15. The disguise of the babougero is described as follows: The babougera wear a mask of white woolen cloth, which ends in horn-​shaped finials with black pompom of sheep’s wool. Sheep’s wool is used to form also eyebrows, moustache and beard. Two rows of beans in the position of the mouth indicate the teeth. On the body they wear white trousers and the gouna, a sleeveless overcoat, garment of the local female costume, which is no longer worn. They have a hunchback, while hung around the waist are sheep-​bells, cast and hammered (four double bells, two in front and two on back, and one large bell, the batali, behind on the waist). With special movements they make the bells ring. (Lyceum Club of Greek Women 1998, 502). 16. The bag used to contain ash and not straw, as today. This was banned by the modern regulatory framework in which the ritual currently moves, which is now defined by the official organizers: the community and the cultural association. 17. The first Thursday after Easter. 18. Typical of this trend are the following excerpts. The first derives from the viewpoint of archaeology and the second from that of folklore Excerpt 1 The echo of Dionysiac cult is encountered in today’s traditional carnival at Kali Vrysi, in early January, while the site of “Mikri Toumba” is known down the generations as the “Konak of Bacchus’ and each year it is sanctified by the priest during the procession to bless the fields…. Today’s bagpipes (gaides) in the area bring to mind the askoi of the Satyrs at the Rural Dionysia, while the various ritual vessels brought to light by the archaeologist’s spade lead thoughts to the rituals of the Rural Dionysia. Does the January carnival procession with the masks perhaps preserve elements from the procession of the Rural Dionysia? It is a sanctuary of Dionysos with local elements hitherto unknown…. The masked god of ecstasy, of the fertility of the earth and chthonic in character, whose worship is known in the Drama region, seems to have had faithful devotees in Kali Vrysi too in ancient times, in the early third century b.c. (Peristeri op. cit., 162–​163). Excerpt 2 The fact that the disguises have survived to this day, are not inexplicable. Because of the annual fertility rituals aimed at securing a good year in its widest sense of good health and rich harvests, as were the Dionysian ones, the people have kept primarily the merry element, within a general climate of joy and festivities, as in that of the Twelve Days of Christmas. The disguises of the dodecameron have preserved also other elements

Dancescapes of Dionysus    579 of Greek Antiquity, through Roman and Byzantine times. One example is enough: the wedding representation at Kali Vrysi is a traditional element which is found in several similar events. [ … ] These ritual performances acquire even greater importance after the recent archaeological excavations in the area of the village, which, only one kilometer away from it, have uncovered a temple, dedicated, according to existing indications, to the worship of Dionysus. Thus, Kali Vrysi has the privilege of combining a ritual performance of Dionysiac character with an actual Dionysian site, which is in fact also a site of modern religious expression. (Aikaterinidis 1995, 21–​23). 19. Typical is the example of the priest of Kali Vrysi, Father Michail Giotis, who wrote and set to music the poem “The feast of Bacchus”, which is sung as a local song and is played by the local musicians. See Aikaterinidis (1997). 2 0. See http://​w ww.kalivrisi.gr/​i ndex.php?option=com_​c ontent&view=article&id=7 8:mpampougera-​athens-​2 004&catid=44:video 21. Lovell 1998; Gupta and Ferguson 1992. 22. See Habermas 1975. 23. This was the direction in which the first two associations whose main activity is dance moved, the Lyceum Club of Greek Women (Antzaka 2004) and the ‘Dora Stratou’ company (Stratou 1979). For a general review of “national dance groups” see Shay 2002. Cf. also Karayanni 2004. 24. An example is the founding of dance groups by elderly dancers, male and female, which takes place within the community. In several cases the dance groups take part in festivals as representative of a local dance culture. 25. See Nahachewsky 2001. 26. This position echoes the ethnochoreology studies by researchers mainly from Eastern Europe. For a general discussion on the basic characteristics of the ethnochoreology school see Lange 1980; Buckland 1999; Thomas 2003. 27. Kivy 1995 speaks of authenticities and not of authenticity. 28. Foster 1996 argues that chorography, apart from its technical aspect, is enhanced as an interpretative tool through which we approach issues of identity, gender, community, and nationalism. 29. See Loutzaki 1999. 30. Peters (1997) defined this situation as ‘bifocality’. Cf. Gupta & Ferguson (1992: 9). For the phenomenon of transnationalism and migration see Glick, Basch, & Szanton Blanc 1992. 31. Cf. Frow 1997. 32. Cf. Papakostas 2003. 33. See Malbon 1999. 34. Several authors consider that the role and the possibilities of the performers has been overestimated. See Cowan (1990).

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580   Christos PapaKostas Antzaka-​Vei, E. 2004. “Oi protes parastaseis ellinikon horon tou Lykeiou ton Ellinidon. Ti ideologiko plesio kai ta praktika apotelesmata [The first performances of Greek dances by the Lyceum Club of Greek Women. The ideological framework and the practical results].” In:  Horeftika Eteroklita [Dance Miscellanea], edited by E. Avdikos, R. Loutzaki, and Ch. Papakostas, 183–​202. Athens: Ellinika Grammata & Lykeio ton Ellinidon Dramas [Greek Letters and Lyceum Club of Greek Women, Drama]. Appadurai, A. 1991. “Global ethnoscapes:  Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology.” In Recapturing Anthropology. Working in the Present, edited by R. Fox, 191–​ 210. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press. Appadurai, A. 1988. “Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory”. Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 1: 16–​20. Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion. Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Auge, M. 1995. Non-​places. London-​New York: Verso. Avdikos, E. 2002. Halase to Horio mas Halase. Istories peri akmis ke parakmis sti Lefkimi Evrou [Our village is spoilt, spoilt. Tales of zenith and decline of Lefkimi, Evros]. Alexandroupolis:  Polikentro Dimou Tiherou [Cultural Centre of the Municipality of Theros]. Avdikos, E. 2004. “Panigiria ke Horeftiki Omili:  viosi ke anaviosi tis paradosis [Panegyria and Dance Associations:  living and reviving tradition].” In Horeftika Eteroklita [Dance Miscellanea], edited by E. Avdikos, R. Loutzaki, and Ch. Papakostas, 203–​212. Athens:  Ellinika Grammata & Lykeio ton Ellinidon Dramas [Greek Letters and Lyceum Club of Greek Women, Drama]. Barth, F. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference. Boston: Little Brown and Co. Baumann, G. 1992. “Ritual implicates ‘others’:  Rereading Durkheim in a Plural Society. In Understanding Rituals, edited by D. D. Coppet, 97–​116. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Browning, B. 1995. Samba: Resistance in Motion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Buckland, Th., ed. 1999. Dance in the Field: Theory, Methods and Issues in Dance Ethnography. London: Macmillan. Buckland, Th., ed. 2002. “Multiple Interests and Powers:  Authenticity and Competitive Folk Dance Festival.” In Whose tradition?, edited by L. Felfoldi, and Th. Buckland, 70–​78. Budapest: European Folklore Institute. Bull, C. J. C. 1997 “Sense, Meaning, and Perception in Three Dance Cultures”. In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, edited by J. C. Desmond, 269–​288. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Cohen, A. P. 1982. Belonging:  Identity and Social Organization in British Rural Cultures. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cohen, A. P. 1989. The Symbolic Construction of Community. London: Routledge. Cowan, J. 1990. Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece. Princeton:  Princeton University Press. Daniel, Y. P. 1995. “Changing Values in Cuban Rumba, A  Lower Class Black Dance Appropriated by the Cuban Revolution.” Dance Research Journal 23, no. 2: 1–​10. de Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Derrida, J. 1978. Positions. London: Athlon Press.

Dancescapes of Dionysus    581 Derrida J., and McDonald C. V. 1995. “Choreographies.” In Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, edited by E. W. Goellner and J. S. Murphy, 141–​156. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Drandakis. L. 1998. “Horeftika Dromena sto nomo Dramas (Monastiraki-​Kali Vrisi-​Volakas) [Dance rituals in the Prefecture of Drama (Monastiraki  —​Kali Vrysi  —​Volakas)].” In I Drama kai I Perioxi tis. Istoria ke Politismos [Drama and its Region. History and Culture], 483–​ 494. Drama:  Dimotiki Epihirisi Kinonikis ke Touristikis Anaptixis [Municipal Enterprise for Social and Tourism Development]. Foster, S. L., ed. 1996. Corporealities:  Dancing Knowledge Culture and Power. London: Routledge. Frow, J. 1997. Time and Commodity Culture. Oxford: Clarendon. Gefou-​Madianou, D. 1999. “Cultural Polyphony and Identity Formation: Negotiating Tradition in Attica.” American Ethnologist 26, no. 2: 412–​439. Gellner, E. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L., and Szanton Blanc, C., eds. 1992. Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration:  Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered. New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Gross, D. 1992. The Past in Ruins: Tradition and the Critique of Modernity Amherst,: University of MA Press. Grossberg, L. 1996. “Identity and Cultural Studies —​Is that all there is?” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by St. Hall and P. Gay, 87–​107. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage. Gupta, A., and Ferguson, J. 1992. “Beyond ‘Culture’:  Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1: 7–​23. Jenkins, R. 1996. Social Identity. London, New York: Routledge. Habermas, J. 1975. Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon Press. Hall, S. 1990. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, edited by J. Rutherford, 222–​237. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hall, S. 1991. “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity.” In Culture Globalization and the World System, edited by A. King, 19–​40. London: Macmillan. Hantzianastasiou, T. 2002. “Ellines slavophoni sinergates ton Voulgarikon arhon katohis ke to kinima antistasis [Greek Slavophone collaborators of the Bulgarian authorities and the resistance movement].” In I Drama ke I periohi tis. Istoria ke Politismos [Drama and its Region. History and Culture], 652–​636. Proceedings of 2nd conference. Vol. 2. Drama:  Dimotiki Epihirisi Kinonikis ke Touristikis Anaptixis [Municipal Enterprise for Social and Tourism Development]. Hoerburger, F. 1965. “Folk Dance Survey.” International Folk Music Journal 17: 7–​8. Hoerburger, F. 1968. Once Again: On the Concept of ‘Folk Dance.” ’ Journal of the International Folk Music 20: 30–​31. Ioannidou, A. 1997. “Ta slavika idiomata stin Ellada [Slav idioms in Greece].” In Taftotites stin Makedonia [Identities in Macedonia], edited by I. Gounaris, I. Mihailidis, and G. Aggelopoulos, 89–​102. Athens: Papazisis. Kaeppler, A. 1991. “American Approaches to the Study of Dance.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 23: 11–​22. Kaeppler, A. 2001. “At the Pacific Festivals of Art: Revival, Inventions and Cultural Identity.” In E. Dunin & T. Zebec (Eds) Proceedings of 21th symposium of ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology, 5–​20. Zagreb: Institute for Ethnology and Folklore Research.

582   Christos PapaKostas Karayanni, S. 2004. Dancing Fear and Desire:  Race, Sexuality, and Imperial Politics Middle Eastern Dance. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Kivy, P. 1995. Authenticities:  Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kostopoulos, T. 2000. I apagorevmeni glossa [The forbidden language]. Athens: Mavri Lista. Lafazani D. 1997. “Mikta horia tou kato Strimona: ethnotita, kinotita ke entopiotita. [Mixed Villages in the Lower Strymon: Ethnicity, Community and Localness].” Synhrona Themata 63: 96–​107. Lange, R. 1980. “The Development of Anthropological Dance Research. Dance Studies 4: 1–​36. Lawler, L. 1964. The Dance in Ancient Greece. London: A. & C. Black. Loutzaki, R. 1999. “The Association as Milieu for Dance Activity.” In Music of Thrace. An Interdisciplinary approach: Evros, 192–​247. Athens: The Friends of Music Society —​Research Programme “Thrace.” Lovell, N. ed. 1998. Locality and Belonging. London, New York: Routledge. Lykeio ton Ellinidon [Lyceum Club of Greek Women] 1998. “Metamfiesis toy Dodekaimerou se tris kinotites tou nomou Dramas.” [Disguises of the Twelve Days of Christmas in three communities in the Prefecture of Drama], 495–​532. In I Drama kai I  Perioxi tis. Istoria ke Politismos [Drama and its Region. History and Culture], 483–​494. Drama:  Dimotiki Epihirisi Kinonikis ke Touristikis Anaptixis [Municipal Enterprise for Social and Tourism Development]. Main, L. 1995. “Preserved and illuminated.” Dance Theater Journal 12, no. 2: 14–​15. Malbon, B. 1999. Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy, Vitality. London: Routledge. Marcus, G., and Fischer, M. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Mazower, M. 2000. The Balkans, London:  Weidenfeld and Nicolson and New York: Random House. Nahachewsky, A. 2001. “Once Again:  On the Concept of ‘ Second Existence Folk Dance.’ ” Yearbook of Traditional Music 33: 17–​28. Ness, S. A. 1992. Body, Movement and Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nitsiakos, V. 2003. Htizontas to Horo kai to Hrono [Building Space and Time]. Athens: Odysseas. Nitsiakos, V. 2006. “I diahirisi tis ethnikis taftotitas meso tiw mousikohoreftikis paradosis. Ena paradigma apo tin elliniki mionotita tis Alvanias [The management of the national identity through the music and dance tradition. An example from the Greek community of Albania].” In Horos ke taftotites sta Valkania [Dance and Identities in the Balkans]. Praktika 3ou Synedriou [Proceedings of the 3rd Conference], edited by P. Panopoulou, 363–​372. Serres: TEFAA Serron and Municipalty of Serres. Nitsiakos, V., and Mantzos, C. 2003. “Negotiating Culture: Political Uses of Polyphonic Folk Songs in Greece and Albania In Greece and the Balkans: Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment, edited by D. Tziovas, 192–​208. Aldershot: Ashgate. Olwig, K. F., and Hastrup, K., eds. 1997. Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Project. London: Routledge. Ortner, S. 1984. “Theory in anthropology since the sixties.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26: 126–​166. Ortner, S. 1995. “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1: 173–​193. Papakostas, Ch. 2003. “O horos apo tin kinotita sti skini: praktikes ke antifasis. [Dance from the community to the stage: practices and contradictions].” In Melody-​Word-​Movement, edited

Dancescapes of Dionysus    583 by K. Panopoulou, 255–​272. Proceedings of the 2nd Panhellenic Conference. Serres: TEFAA Serres and Municipality of Serres. Papakostas, Ch. 2007. “Repertoire: Practice vs. Theory. The Greek Paradigm.” In A. Cooper Albright, D. Davida & S. Davies Cordova. Rethinking Practice and Theory, 374–​378. International Symposium on Dance Research. Paris:  Society of Dance History Scholars, Congress on Research in Dance & Centre National de Dance. Papakostas, Ch. 2008. “Dance and the place:  The Case of Roma Community in Northern Greece.” In Balkan Dance. Essays on Characteristics, Performance and Teaching, edited by A. Shay, 69–​88. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. Papapavlou, M. 2000. Der Flamenco als Präsentation von Differenz. Gitanos und Mehrheitsbevölkerung Westandalusiens in ethnologischer Perspektive. Gottingen:  Cuvillier Verlag. Peristeri, K. 1998. “Anaskafiki erevna stin Kali Vrisi Dramas [Excavations at Kali Vrysi, Drama].” In: I Drama kai I Perioxi tis. Istoria ke Politismos [Drama and its Region. History and Culture],” 161–​163. Drama:  Dimotiki Epihirisi Kinonikis ke Touristikis Anaptixis [Municipal Enterprise for Social and Tourism Development]. Peters, J. D. 1997. “Seeing Bifocally: Media, Place, Culture.” In Culture, Power, Place. Explorations in Critical Anthropology, edited by A. Gupta and J. Ferguson, 75–​92. Durham, London: Duke University Press. Savigliano, M. 1995. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder: Westview. Schultz E. A., and Lavenda R. 1990. Cultural Anthropology:  A  Perspective on the Human Condition. New York: West Publishing Company. Shay, A. 1999. “Parallel Traditions: State Folk Dance Ensembles and ‘Folk’ Dance in the Field.” Dance Research Journal 31, no. 1: 29–​56. Shay, A. 2002. Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Ensembles, Representation and Power. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Shay, A., and Sellers-​Young, B., ed. 2005. Belly Dance:  Orientalism, Transnationalism and Harem Fantasy. Costa Mesa, California: Mazda Publishers. Smith, A. 1987. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Spencer, P, ed. 1985. Society and the Dance: The Social Anthropology of Process and Performance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Stokes, M., ed. 1994. Ethnicity, Identity and Music:  The Musical Construction of Place. Oxford: Berg. Stratou, D. 1979. “Ellinikoi Praodisakoi Horoi: Enas Zontanos Desmos Me To Parelthon [Greek Traditional Dances: a Living Link with the Past]. Athens: Organismos Didaktikon Vivlion. Thomas, H. 2003. The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tomlinson, G. 1988. “The Historian, the Performer and the Authentic Meaning in Music. In Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium, edited by N. Kenyon, 115–​136. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Torp, L. 1989. “The Dance Event. A  Complex Cultural phenomenon.” In Proceedings from the 15th Symposium of the ICTM study group on Ethonochoreology, edited by L. Torp, Copenhagen. Trakasopoulou-​ Salakidou, E. 1998. “Protomi Dionysou Apo Ti Drama [A Bust of Dionysos from Drama].” In I Drama kai I Perioxi tis. Istoria ke Politismos Drama and its Region. History and Culture, edited by L. Torp, 169–​182. Drama: Dimotiki Epihirisi Kinonikis ke Touristikis Anaptixis [Municipal Enterprise for Social and Tourism Development].

584   Christos PapaKostas Turner, V. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Turner, V. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-​Structure. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Van Gennep, A. 1960. The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wade, P. 2000. Music, Race and Nation. Musica Tropica in Colombia. Chicago:  Chicago University Press.

Chapter 25

Ballet and W h i t e ne s s Will Ballet Forever Be the Kingdom of the Pale? Jennifer Fisher

In the 1990s Brenda Dixon Gottschild called ballet the last bastion of white supremacy in the Western concert dance world.1 One might immediately want to object to this hard-​sounding pronouncement, were it not so very true. Twenty years later things may have changed, but not much: a British dance scholar and artistic director who looked around for working ballet dancers of color to study, but found none, concluded, “Typically, ballet is still a very elitist, white upper-​class pursuit” (Pool 2010). Dixon Gottschild’s statement bears consideration. Almost any way you look at it, ballet is a bastion, a very established hierarchical art form that often patrols its borders on the level of looks and body type, above and beyond the many talents it takes to perform well. And it is very white, meaning that pale-​skinned people have dominated both onstage and backstage throughout its history as a profession from the seventeenth century to the present. Does this “whiteness” have an element of racial supremacy built in? Perhaps, inevitably, it does, ballet being an art form that has thrived during many eras when racism has been blatant and even institutionalized.2 Thinking optimistically, ballet today is not intentionally racist—​nor have Dixon Gottschild and the few other scholars who have written on this subject focused on that aspect except to provide context. But ballet has a significant association with whiteness and is thus aligned with the history of racially charged images. As chronicled so well by cultural theorist Richard Dyer (1997), whiteness in Western cultural representations has been linked to purity, innocence, unattainable ideals, and notions of “civilized society.” Certainly ballet since the romantic era has often been associated with the shimmering, tulle-​clad figure of a sylph or swan. Can classical ballet ever change as long as there are iconic white and black swans onstage, and the dancers playing the swans are almost all white? Will ballet ever ignore skin color as long as there are some artistic directors who think a “unified aesthetic” means that skin color should match, as well as the costumes?3

586   Jennifer Fisher Bringing these questions and this history to light in the current age should contribute to ballet’s healthy evolution, some of which is ongoing, some of which perhaps has been postponed in the name of “tradition.” When I speak of ballet as “the kingdom of the pale,” I do so to single out a bias against skin color, specifically skin color that is considered too dark. For now I am not addressing the issue of body shape, though it is related.4 Nor do I suggest that black dancers are always excluded, especially when it comes to contemporary ballet. What I maintain is that most classical schools and companies can absorb a great deal of change when it comes to diversity, as long as dancers are pale and proportioned in a way that suits various companies. I start from the obvious fact that dark skin color has been a barrier for many dancers. Artistic director and former dancer Arthur Mitchell publicly acknowledged ballet’s problem with race when he founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1968 to provide opportunities for black dancers, but despite the range of skin colors in the Dance Theatre of Harlem over the years, there has never been a dark-​skinned Giselle (Powell, 10).5 Contemporary ballet companies, such as the Netherlands Dance Theatre, Alonzo King’s LINES, and the German-​based companies of William Forsythe, have been decidedly more inclusive when it comes to skin color. These companies do not dance the European story ballets, and the ones who do are still mostly white. Those familiar with the ballet realm need only cast their minds over all the major classical ballet companies in the world, throughout time, to realize that there have been very few faces that are not light-​skinned. There are exceptions, of course; there are always persistent individuals who succeed despite the odds—​pioneers like Mitchell in the New  York City Ballet, and before him Janet Collins in New  York’s Metropolitan Opera Ballet, and Raven Wilkinson, whose safety was a concern when southern racists found out she was touring with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the 1950s.6 The accomplishments of the few black classical dancers who followed them, such as Albert Evans and Andrea Long (NYCB) or Lauren Anderson (Houston Ballet), should not be minimized, but the fact that these examples are so easily singled out shows how rare their success still is. These dancers have proved, of course—​if it has ever needed proving—​that there is no reason for ballet dancers of color not to succeed. But why are there not more of them? Why, in the 1990s, did dance anthropologist Cynthia Novack at one moment feel lost in aesthetic admiration watching the New York City Ballet, then suddenly become aware that the faces onstage did not reflect the diversity of the New York City crowd she had just passed through on her way to the theater? (Novack 1993, 44). Ballet has the power to enchant, Novack points out, but it also needs examination to understand the way “its ideas and practices gain cultural power” (1993, 39). Growing up in an immigrant family in 1950s middle America, Novack was attuned to social hierarchies in dance forms—​ballet had more prestige than tap, for example; ballet was art, tap was entertainment (1993, 35). Associated with “a bourgeois, white audience,” as well as a wider popular audience through films and television, ballet has a kind of technical respect and institutional support that led to its categorization as

Ballet and Whiteness    587

Figure 25.1  Lauren Anderson as the Sugar Plum Fairy in Ben Stevenson’s Nutcracker at Houston Ballet. Photo: Geoff Winningham. Source: Came from Kimberly Espinosa and Shauna Tysor at Houston Ballet, with the caveat that their union requires the photos appear with the dancers’ names.

a respected form, a status consistent with being “not ethnic” (Novack 1993, 39). Over time ballet’s overall aesthetic has evolved to include dancers of many ethnicities; many artistic directors will avow that dancers’ ethnic backgrounds are unimportant in casting decisions.7 Yet very few black ballet dancers are admitted to large classical companies.

588   Jennifer Fisher

Ballet and the Question of Ethnicity Historically there is one logical reason for ballet’s association with white dancers (as well as choreographers and artistic directors): the art form came of age in Europe. It developed significantly in Italy, France, Denmark, and Russia, all regions where pale-​skinned people predominated at least through the nineteenth century. From the start ballet reflected the language, genetic features, and cultural traditions of northern Europeans. Because like all dance forms ballet has clearly reflected the culture in which it developed, dance anthropologist Joann Kealiinohomoku famously declared that it should be considered an ethnic dance form. Everything, from the fairy tales and uplifted aesthetic, to the chivalrous idea of romance and theatrical customs, points to its European roots. Today ballet is often called a global form, because it exists strongly in many places in the world, from Asia to South Africa. Along the way its putative ethnicity, though strongly argued by Kealiinohomoku, has remained more of a footnote than an integral part of its grand narrative. In everyday conversation or in formal dance writing, no one says, “I’m going to see some ethnic dance tonight—​they’re doing Sleeping Beauty at the opera house.” Nor has the concept changed the way dance history is written. In fact, the point Kealiinohomoku was making by calling attention to ballet’s ethnic roots has largely been lost, and I raise it here as part of the discussion leading to ballet’s problem with skin color. Kealiinohomoku meant to highlight the casual way dance writers of the time (pre-​1970) assumed ballet was an art form, meant to be respected in all its meaningful complexity, whereas dance from “exotic” other places was often categorized as “small-​c” cultural, reflecting a limited worldview. In other words, ballet could speak to all the world about the human condition and beauty, but “Other” dance forms had limited appeal, and especially up until the last 30 years or so, were often categorized by Western dance writers as limited and simplistic. Kealiinohomoku attacked ballet’s assumed claims of superiority, examining the attitudes implicit in prominent representatives of dance writing. Her argument relates to Dyer’s in terms of “whiteness” and its presumed normalcy. For Dyer, representations that present glowing white figures as the hope of the heavens and earth bolster the claim that white people are “ordinary,” and “Others” are “peculiar, marked” (Dyer 1997, 222). It all leads to the notion that “other people” are all of a particular race, whereas white people claim the distinction of being “the human race” itself (222–​223). Since Kealiinohomoku’s seminal essay was first published in 1970, a multicultural impulse has been widely felt in the increasingly diverse West, and dance writers have become decidedly less categorical in the way they label and discuss non-​Western dance. In Looking Out (Gere 1995), dance critics and scholars grappled with their newly expanded world, questioning their right or ability to pronounce on unfamiliar forms. In a series of essays they pledged to learn and respect different histories and aesthetics and called on their sensitivity and dance analysis skills to widen their own contexts and continue to learn and write about dance in relation to the whole world. The term “ethnic

Ballet and Whiteness    589 dance” was clearly on its way out, and even the less biting “world dance” was questioned. “[I]‌f ‘world dance’ is dance from Out There,” critic Bruce Fleming asked, “what are we here at home? Other-​worldly?” (Gere 1995, 18). Still, ballet seems to resist being categorized as one dance form among many. In a widely used American dance history text of the 1990s, the authors begin a subsection titled “Ethnic Dance” with the acknowledgment that “a number of contemporary dance scholars” have argued for calling all dance forms ethnic. “However,” the text concludes, “this view has not been generally accepted” (Kraus, Hilsendager, and Dixon 1991, 256). Therefore, classical dance forms from Japan, India, and Indonesia are lumped together as “less familiar to us and more exotic than the traditional dances of Western nations” (256). I quote from this text because despite the more progressive scholarship available today, this is the way that many people learn to tell the history of ballet, keeping it a kind of privileged enclave. The fact that ballet, although known in much of the world, is still viewed as strange in many places, was brought home to me on a recent trip to Ghana. In a lecture before a roomful of students at the University of Ghana, Legon, I asked if anyone had ever seen ballet, and only one hand went up. “What did it look like,” I asked this student, and she said without hesitation, “It looks like space age dance.” I was perplexed, because of course ballet looks nothing like space age dance to me. I asked her to explain, preparing to have to tell her that what she had seen was in fact not ballet, and she demonstrated, standing rigidly upright and circling her stiffly curved arms around in circles. It looked very much like an outsider’s impression of ballet—​precise, severely vertical, controlled—​and I suddenly saw that, to an outsider, a ballet dancer with an implacable expression could in fact look as foreign as an alien space invader. “Dance with your knees bent,” says an African proverb, “lest the gods should think you are a corpse.” To some eyes, then, ballet dancers might look like zombies, the walking dead. The Ghanaian students tittered at her impression, perhaps fearing an insult to the visitor’s dance form, but I delighted in the revelation. Of course ethnic dance forms can seem odd to outsiders. It wasn’t even an insult—​space age dancers might be seen as progressive, exploring new frontiers. It all depends on your point of view.

Balanchine and Africanist Innovation8 During the twentieth century ballet arguably advanced most significantly when Russian choreographer George Balanchine adopted and adapted many aspects of African American music and dance. His innovations revolutionized the Russian classical style he inherited, incorporating aspects such as angled limbs, flexed feet, hip displacement, playing with balance, rhythmic complexity, syncopation, an impulsive attack, and bold juxtapositions (Dixon Gottschild 1990, 1995, 1996). The Balanchine style has been called American, jazzy, or “neoclassical,” all terms that minimize the impact of African Americans on the Russian master, though much research supports this impact

590   Jennifer Fisher (Dixon Gottschild 1995, 1996; Banes 1993; Genné 2005; Valis Hill 2005). A brief foray into the reception of scholarship on Balanchine and Africanist influences reveals much about the character of the ballet world and its sluggish reluctance to change. When dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild first detailed the way Africanist aesthetics were “dreadlocked” into Balanchine style, she encountered enthusiastic response to her intercultural revelations mostly outside the dance world. In her own field she ran into angry colleagues, controversy in the peer review process, and subsequent lack of recognition in projects that related directly to her seminal analysis (Dixon Gottschild 2005, 73–​79). She was forced to conclude that “[s]‌uggesting a connection between Balanchine and Africa is blasphemy,” and that there was still an “ongoing battle of race and rights, here waged on the field of cultural endeavor” (2005, 74). Ballet’s blinkered bastion mentality also emerged for another scholar, whose article detailing the extensive interactions of Balanchine and Katherine Dunham was once pulled from a dance publication for “casting Balanchine in too critical a light” (Valis Hill 2005, 27). The historical information on Balanchine and the black dancing body keeps growing. In several publications Dixon Gottschild provides detailed connections between Balanchine’s many movement innovations and the canon of Africanist movement values (1990, 1995, 1996). Dance historian Sally Banes documented the many points of contact between Balanchine and performers/​choreographers like Josephine Baker, the Nicholas Brothers, and Katherine Dunham (1994, 53–​69). More recently, Balanchine’s process of intercultural artistic exchange with black artists has been further illuminated by Beth Genné (2005; on Josephine Baker) and Constance Vallis Hill (2005; on Katherine Dunham). It is impossible not to notice how much these artists exchanged to their mutual benefit. This is not to say Balanchine was “stealing” or exploiting—​artists have always been inspired by each other, and the cultural influences went both ways—​although scholars are quick to point out that Balanchine, as a white male, enjoyed privileges not always afforded to his black, often-​female collaborators (Genné and Valis Hill 2005, 24, 25). In the accounts of those who worked with him, however, Balanchine comes off as a generous, respectful collaborator who developed “a unique methodology for staging intercultural performance,” through “astute observation, diplomatic negotiations and imaginative fusings of disparate movement styles and cultural materials” (Valis Hill 2005, 64). This fairly recent detailing of Balanchine’s debt to African America does not minimize his genius in forging a new style from the best of the New World. What it does is reemphasize the racial divide that has previously rendered invisible this primary aspect of dance history. There is no doubt that Balanchine melded influences from many places—​ his Georgian folk dance roots and the Spanish dance flair already present in story ballets of his youth as well—​but the evidence shows that his jazzy makeover of classical form owes its primary impulse and substance to its Africanist roots. Balanchine joined ballet’s European cool verticality and complaisance with the “aesthetic of the cool,” African style to remake the form. Has this new scholarship affected the way Balanchine’s impact on dance history is assessed? Not exactly. A popular 2010 history of ballet that received much national publicity and praise does not mention the African American influences on Balanchine. The author notes that he famously integrated the cast of his 1957 ballet

Ballet and Whiteness    591 Agon during “a critical junction of the civil rights movement” in America, but fails to mention how much Africanist aesthetics influenced the Russian master’s seminal innovations (Homans 2010, 528–​531). Instead it is said, in a retrogressive “invisibilizing” move, that the choreographer was “firmly rooted” in the New York City of 1957 (Homans 2010, 530). More progressive scholars, however, have continued to probe the connections between Balanchine and black musicians and dancers. Dance historian Beth Genné adds fascinating detail and another perspective to the pioneering work of Dixon Gottschild by looking at the professional and personal relationship of Balanchine with Josephine Baker. Genné points out that Baker’s musicality and adventurous spirit, along with her long legs and lithe body, “not only fit Balanchine’s ideal but also helped to create it” (2005, 45). As Genné notes in copious examples, Balanchine displayed an egalitarian impulse when it came to skin color, making strides toward integrating ballet within the limits of his more conservative artistic world. It was not his style to grandstand or make explicit political statements—​except when his dancing bodies did it for him. Despite requests not to present interracial couples onstage, for example, he somehow worked Arthur Mitchell into a dance with a white partner (Genné 2005, 50) when it was absolutely taboo in the 1950s. He welcomed African American students to the School of American Ballet, and when parents of white students complained, he invited them to go to another school (50). Balanchine, on closer inspection, seems to have been a choreographer who might have advanced the field even further for dancers of color if he had not encountered a racist climate in his new home.

Balanchine, Black Dancers, and What Might Have Been Given the evidence of how secure and generous an artist Balanchine was, he would surely have been delighted to acknowledge his debt to black dancers, musicians, and choreographers once scholars started to write about it. As is the case with most creators, it was not his business to analyze his own dances, nor was dance scholarship in a position yet to point out these popular-​classical or black-​white connections. Without an overt agenda to disrupt the status quo, Balanchine just did what creative artists do: he took in his new cultural milieu, became inspired by particular black artists, and saw where these exchanges might fit into his own practice. He is on record as planning earlier in his career to mix black and white dancers, undoubtedly thinking of the aesthetic possibilities (embracing aspects of chiaroscuro), as well as the movement innovations he had developed by absorbing Africanist ideas (Mason 1991, 116–​117). Unschooled in the racial habits of segregated America, he seems to have had to back off from many interracial experiments after he encountered racial prejudice in New York in the 1930s (Genné 2005, 48). He integrated his own company much earlier than other leaders in the field

592   Jennifer Fisher and gave much support, materially and artistically, to the Harlem Dance Theatre from its inception in 1968 to his death in 1983. Still, his judgment was questioned when it came to his own company’s racial makeup. Writing about a 1971 gala benefit performance in which New York City Ballet dancers appeared alongside members of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, critic Clive Barnes wondered when Balanchine’s nearly all-​white troupe would make another black dancer a full member, stating, “I cannot see how any company that is, in effect, our national company can adopt a segregated racial policy, nor can I readily see any other explanation of the absence of black dancers from City Ballet.”9 Balanchine spoke in a radio interview about the implied accusation that his casting had a racial bias, even though he rarely responded to his critics.10 On this occasion, however, he took the opportunity to explain that he had in fact strategized with Arthur Mitchell about how to recruit African Americans as students, but that black parents (along with many white ones, he seems to indicate) were often impatient when they found out that it took so long to reap the rewards of ballet training (Genné and Valis Hill 2005, 22–​23). Years before, Balanchine told the interviewer, he had wanted to cast black dancers (Genné and Valis Hill 2005, 22), and though he did not explicitly point to American racial attitudes as the barrier that had prevented him from doing so, his many eager collaborations with African Americans certainly indicate that it wasn’t his choice to avoid them. “I don’t take people because they are black or white,” he said. “I take exquisite people that I like to see” (22). When Balanchine couldn’t find or easily hire dancers with dark skin, as Dixon Gottschild suggests, he sought out white bodies with Africanist characteristics, “[recast] them culturally and choreographically, and, in so doing, [redefined] the feminine ideal in ballet” (1996, 65). One can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Balanchine had not “run into the brick walls of racism erected by his adopted country” (Genné and Valis Hill 2005, 25). His combination of Russian “high art” authority and his interest in black dancers and dance forms might have led the ballet world into a more explicit relationship with dancers of color.11 African American choreographers like Dunham or the Nicholas Brothers might have entered into a relationship with the New York City Ballet. The presence of black choreographers in large ballet companies might have attracted more black dancers, and their acceptance might have been accelerated. If Balanchine had been allowed to experiment more in terms of skin color, he might have literally changed the complexion of mainstream ballet. As it was, Beth Genné says, he was more involved with black dance and dancers than any other white classical choreographer of his time (2005, 24). He loved the black women he worked with as “his muses” (Genné 2005, 24), but because of racial barriers, they had to remain his “closet muses” until recent scholarship brought them to light.

The Future of the Pale Ballet Kingdom What if ballet history could recognize the idea that ballet has ethnic roots, like all other dance forms, and that a major shift in its transformation in twentieth-​century America

Ballet and Whiteness    593 was inspired by African American influences? Would it change attitudes about skin color in casting? Or would it just result in the acknowledgment that cultures have always borrowed from each other, and ballet would still see itself as a pale-​skinned accumulator of many influences? Over years of trying to get university students to grapple with the issues that come up when categorizing dance as “ethnic” or not, I have encountered interesting resistance related to a certain worldview.12 Students often agree with the premise that ballet has roots among Europeans, and that cultural markers remain in the form (the use of French, familiar fairy tales, aesthetic and theatrical conventions), so it may theoretically be considered an ethnic dance form. But they still want to cling to what is familiar—​that ballet is exceptional and universal—​so they dance around the idea that ballet might be stuck in some of its ethnic habits. They will often try to rationalize the fact that their local Nutcracker sometimes contains a borderline racist portrayal of Asians in the “Chinese” dance of the second act. They will inevitably be unaware of the Orientalizing stereotypes in La Bayadère and Le Corsaire. Their attitudes often point to the notion that “we are beyond racial exclusions,” and that nineteenth-​century stereotypes are more quaint relics than contemporary insults. Perhaps they accept the most benign interpretation of the phrase “post-​intentional racism” (Perry 2011), without considering how any kind of racism can productively be analyzed and altered in the world of ballet. Ballet partisans who don’t want to think about potential bias in the field will often focus on the idea that ballet is historically buttressed and well meaning, and therefore somehow above racial politics. They have been schooled to think that ballet is art, and art has its own color-​coded rules. I regularly find that American dance majors prefer clear-​cut categories and generalizations: ballet, modern, and contemporary dance are important and universal; other forms of dance are specific and ornamental. Western dance forms are what most of them have come to study, forms in which the university specializes. They don’t want to be confused or disturbed by the idea that ethnic or racial prejudice might be intertwined in their history. They do not want to hear that ballet is a “kingdom of the pale.” Racial bias surely has played a role in ballet’s history, but it is perhaps too easy to point to racism as an unchanging force that implicates all of ballet today and prohibits darker skin tones. One might as well ask why African dance experts tend to be black or the hula world seems to favor dark-​haired performers over blondes. Is it as simple as that? That ideal body types and looks grow from native soil, and no matter how far from home dance forms travel, both presenters and audiences tend to patrol the aesthetic boundaries? In dance, bodies are judged by the way they look as well as the way they perform. Skin color is only one of the ways in which dancers are expected to conform. As ballet has evolved formally since the seventeenth century, it has become more and more exclusionary in many ways. The technique, for example, has developed “to such an extent that only a few individuals with the right kind of bodies, stamina, mental strength, as well as artistic flair excel in it today” (Grau 2005, 145). In these progressive times, nobody says that ballet dancers also need to have pale skin; it just turns out that way.

594   Jennifer Fisher The question of ballet as a culturally specific form and the related issue of its skin tone bias are rarely discussed; if they are, the discussion has little impact on the field. There is no doubt that ballet has had an appeal in many places across the world, that it is evolving, and that it has made small steps toward being inclusive. In 2011 one black ballet dancer was still talking about these small steps, in a film clip that popped up on my Facebook page and YouTube. Ayesha Macmillan recalled how thrilled she was as a child to be cast as a southern ballet company’s first African American Clara, a lead role in The Nutcracker. It felt profound and historical to her, she said. There was the artistic challenge, of course—​the role was complex in her company’s version—​but she was also thrilled to imagine young black audience members who “would never have the experience of seeing a ballet completely absent of any brown people,” and “never have to think ‘well, that’s one place I can’t go,’ or ‘That’s one barrier that I would have to break down’—​ that it could just ‘be’.” In 2010, as the Dance Theatre of Harlem was preparing to relaunch as a smaller troupe after debt had forced it into hiatus in 2004, a New York Times piece focused on what the company planned to do, to take ballet “beyond its roots as the first major black ballet troupe to ask what ballet means in the 21st century” (Kourlas 2010). Artistic director Virginia Johnson stated that “ballet is something that is broader, deeper, stronger than the currently understood notions of it,” and that the new mandates would include “being curious,” a rare quality in the ballet world. Having Dance Theatre of Harlem back

Figure 25.2  Lauren Anderson and Carlos Acosta in Don Quixote, Houston Ballet. Photo: Jim Caldwell. Source: Came from Kimberly Espinosa and Shauna Tysor at Houston Ballet, with the caveat that their union requires the photos appear with the dancers’ names.

Ballet and Whiteness    595 to represent dancers of different skin colors is one way to add to ballet opportunities. Another, suggested Oakland Ballet artistic director Karen Brown in 2005, is for those in charge of other companies “to decide you’re going to have a dancer of color. It doesn’t just happen” (Collins 2005). In a world of “post-​intentional racism” in the twenty-​first century, if ballet is going to keep up, much less evolve, it will have to move beyond being the kingdom of the pale, by being curious and by making decisions that truly integrate its ranks. If Balanchine’s embrace of a culture that was not his own is any indication, it can only lead to extraordinary progress.

Notes 1. Dixon Gottschild included this sentence in her 1990 presentation at the Fifth Hong Kong International Dance Conference (169), but not in some of the published material that followed (1995, 95–​121). The idea appeared again in The Black Dancing Body, when she called ballet “this last bastion of white dance primacy” (2003, 131). 2. Following Hylland Eriksen, I use the terms race and ethnicity somewhat interchangeably in this chapter. Although contemporary scholars have heated arguments about the overlapping categories and definitions, they tend to agree that “race” is a cultural construct rather than a biological reality, and that there is cultural relevance in “the notion that race exists” for many people (2002, 5). For example, in the United States, Hylland Eriksen says, African Americans are an example of how the “kindred concepts” of race and ethnicity “tend to be blurred” (2002, 4). 3. The “unity of the corps” has long been an excuse for why black dancers are not admitted to ballets in which the majority of dancers have pale skin. The phrase even cropped up in the modern dance world; Dixon Gottschild was once told that her skin color would “destroy the unity of the corps” when she was rejected by choreographer Pearl Lang for a part in a chorus of four dancers (2003, 4). 4. Dixon Gottschild (2003) discusses ballet and body shape issues, reporting the experiences and perceptions of several dancers in a section called “Mapping the Territories” (102–​225). See also Collins (2005) and Pool (2010) for recent personal perspectives on body shape and black ballet dancers. 5. I thank Stephanie Powell for her insights and shared experiences in her MFA thesis at University of California, Irvine. Powell was my student when she was seeking a theme to focus on and decided to take off from my contention that skin color was the strongest barrier for black ballet dancers, given that all dancers deal with similar body shape requirements. She had personal experiences that related to my theme, having been asked to whiten her skin tone with powder for a classical “ballet blanc” (Powell, 16). 6. Wilkenson tells part of her own story in the film Ballets Russes (Zeitgeist 2005). 7. Miami City Ballet artistic director Edward Villella represents a “color-​blind casting” attitude in the ballet world, saying that he does not discriminate when it comes to a dancer’s ethnicity, but rather hires “based on certain abilities that suit our repertoire” (quoted in Collins 2005). In the same article, other artistic directors point out that some attention to reflecting the audience might be necessary to consciously integrate ballet companies.

596   Jennifer Fisher 8. My use of the term “Africanist” follows that of Brenda Dixon Gottschild, who acknowledges the inadequacy of generalizing about Africa, but recognizes several aspects of West African dance, music, and art that can be described, often overlap, and can be contrasted to “Europeanist” aesthetics. She defines “Africanist” as “concepts and practices that exist in Africa and the African diaspora and have their sources in concepts or practices from Africa (2003, xiv). She has defined a canon of aesthetic principles in relation to dance in many of her writings, especially in her essay of 1995 and in more depth in her 1996 book. 9. I thank Beth Genné and Constance Valis Hill for bringing this review to my attention in the preface to the excellent article “Balanchine and the Black Dancing Body” (2005, 21). The Barnes review appeared in the New York Times, May 8, 1971. 10. Genné and Valis Hill quote the transcript of this interview (2005, 22–​23). 11. Dixon Gottschild was the first to note this lost opportunity for American ballet to have included different skin colors and ethnicities very early in its history. Even allowing for “the primitive trope” at work in Balanchine’s visions of supple, rhythmic “negroes,” she speculated that “if his dream had been realized, what a different history might have ensued for American ballet and its relationship to peoples of African lineage” (1996, 77). 12. I started teaching the scholarship of Joann Kealiinohomoku and Brenda Dixon Gottschild in 1990 at the relatively diverse York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and have subsequently had these discussions at Pomona College (with both homogenous groups and very diverse groups) and at the University of California, Irvine, where undergraduate focus is often strongly on the techniques of ballet and contemporary dance, and ethnic identifications tend to be mostly “white,” “Asian” (about half, campus-​wide), and Latino, with only a sprinkling of other identifications. I have often included the topic of the whiteness of ballet in guest lectures, during which students of all ethnic identifications have weighed in. Discussions in various communities during Nutcracker research also convinced me of the newness of the idea that ballet was anything but “universal,” no matter what the ethnic or racial identities of the discussants were. I have often been made aware of ethnic identifications because students talk about their personal relationships to the topic. To some degree, my hope that the topic of this chapter will change attitudes and open up possibilities when it comes to ballet is based on the climate of a room when people start thinking about it from new perspectives. Responses have changed over time to reflect a growing respect for cultural diversity and understandings, but I have noticed that students who have themselves been defined as “outside the mainstream” have perhaps been quickest to analyze the cultural and ethnic components of ballet. However, the notion that ballet is universal still persists.

References Banes, Sally. 1994. Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism. New England: Wesleyan. Collins, Karyn D. 2005. Dance Magazine (June). Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. 1990. “Up from Under:  The Afrocentric Tradition in American Concert Dance.” In Proceedings:  The Fifth Hong Kong International Dance Conference. Society of Dance History Scholars, 169–​185. Dixon Gottschild, Brenda​. 1995. “Stripping the Emperor: The Africanist Presence in American Concert Dance.” In Looking Out: Perspectives on Dance and Criticism in a Multicultural World, 95–​121. New York: Schirmer.

Ballet and Whiteness    597 Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. 1996. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, CT, London: Greenwood Press. Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. 2003. The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. 2005. “By George! Oh Balanchine.” Discourses in Dance 3, no. 1: 73–​79. Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. London and New York: Routledge. Genné, Beth. 2005. ‘ “Glorifying the American Woman”:  Josephine Baker and George Balanchine.’ Discourses in Dance 3, no. 1: 31–​57. Genné, Beth, and Constance Valis Hill. 2005. “Balanchine and the Black Dancing Body: A Preface.” Discourses in Dance 3, no. 1: 21–​29. Gere, David, ed.. 1995. Looking Out: Perspectives on Dance and Criticism in a Multicultural World. New York: Schirmer. Grau, Andrée. 2005. “When the Landscape Becomes Flesh:  An Investigation into Body Boundaries with Special Reference to Tiwi Dance and Western Classical Ballet.” Body & Society 11, no. 4: 141–​163. Homans, Jennifer. 2010. Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet. New York: Random House. Hylland Eriksen, Thomas. 2002. Ethnicity and Nationalism:  Anthropological Perspectives. London, Boulder, CO: Pluto Press. Kealiinohomoku, Joann. 1969–​1970. “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance.” Reprinted in What Is Dance?, edited by Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, 533–​ 549. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Kourlas, Gia. 2010. “Harlem Troupe Prepares for Act II.” New York Times, October 29. Kraus, Richard, Sara Chapman Hilsendager, and Brenda Dixon, eds. 1991. History of the Dance in Art and Education. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Mason, Frances, ed. 1991. I Remember Balanchine. New York: Doubleday. Novack, Cynthia (later Bull, Cynthia Jean Cohen), 1993. “Ballet, Gender and Cultural Power.” In Dance, Gender and Culture, edited by Helen Thomas, 34–​48. London: Macmillan. Perry, Imani. 2011. More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States. New York: NYU Press. Pool, Hannah. 2010. “Black Ballet: Pointe Break.” The Guardian, December 4. Powell, Stephanie Marie. 2004. “Unveiling Invisible Chains.” Master of Fine Arts thesis, Claire Trevor School of the Arts, University of California, Irvine. Valis Hill, Constance. 2005. “Cabin in the Sky:  Dunham’s and Balanchine’s Ballet (Afro) Americana.” Discourses in Dance 3, no. 1: 59–​7 1.

Chapter 26

Men an d t h e Happines s  Da nc e Barbara Sellers-​Y oung

Once the mimetic has spring into being, a terrifically ambiguous power is established; there is born the power to represent the world, yet that same power is a power to falsify, mask, and pose. The two powers are inseparable. Michael Taussig (1993, 42–​43) Migrations move within and through colossal fields of power, fields that exert pressures and influences, and that can create tensions, obstacles, diversions, and other resistant or facilitating features of their own. The attainment of a new place in the world, a far removed place—​the main consequence of a migratory move—​is always in some sense a power play. Sally Ann Ness (2008, 261)

In a series of articles discussing his life growing up as a Lebanese American in a small community in Pennsylvania, Ibrahim Farrah describes events in which the extended family and members of the Lebanese-​American community would gather to celebrate birthdays and weddings with food, music, and dance. The dances of celebration were in two categories. The group debke focused on an articulation of the legs and feet supported by a strongly-​held torso and had come to symbolize the nation of Lebanon. The other dance, commonly referred to in North Africa and the Middle East as “raqs sharqi,” was a solo dance form that included articulations of the hips and torso with those of the feet and legs. Ibrahim Farrah’s mother referred to the dance as the “happiness dance,” as in its integration of the pelvic region with the rest of the body it celebrated the ability of the family and community to survive despite wars, famine, and relocation. In the course of his life, Ibrahim Farrah became a proponent of raqs sharqi and of men performing it, despite the fact that since the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the dance had been provocatively labeled belly dance by entrepreneur Sol Bloom and

Men and the Happiness Dance    599 advertised as a female dance form; this was even despite the performances at the fair of the male dancer Mohammed. The consequence was that raqs sharqi, despite its history as a form that celebrated community through dance, was consistently viewed through the lens of orientalism and defined as an erotic dance performed by women for the male gaze. This image was picked up throughout the twentieth century in popular cultural crazes beginning with the fascination with Little Egypt and Salome in the early part of the century; the film versions of the dance that were part of Hollywood blockbusters set in the Middle East; and finally, the appropriation of the form by the second phase of the women’s movement in the 1960s and ’70s. However, on the edges of the dance’s popularity among American women, there have always been male dancers, such as Ibrahim Farrah, who often traced their lineage to the male dancers of North Africa and the Middle East. I will not in this chapter discuss the entire history of solo improvisational dance forms in North Africa and the Middle East, nor the history of orientalist frameworks that influenced the dance’s reception as primarily a female form, as this has been discussed elsewhere by Edward Said (1979), Marta Savigliano (1995), Leona Wood, Anthony Shay (1976), and others. Instead, I will be focusing on the ongoing evolution of raqs sharqi in terms of the confluence of forces upon it and its relationship to creation of masculinity. As Fisher and Shay point out, these constructions of masculine identity through dance often take place “between the opposing forces of structure and anti-​structure” (2009, 11)  in the interpretation of the dancer’s body both locally and globally. Arjun Appadurai (1996) refers to these forces as cultural flows of the social imaginary, in which the imaginary actually becomes social practice. A significant force in the transmission, and ultimately, the transformation, of raqs sharqi as it has crossed cultural and political boundaries, is interpretation, or mimesis. Michael Taussig has written, “Once the mimetic springs into being, a terrifically ambiguous power is established; there is born the power to represent the world, yet that same power is a power to falsify, mask, and pose” (1993, 42–​43). More recently, Sally Ann Ness refers to this transnational mimesis as the migration of dance as gesture: “Migrations move within and through colossal fields of power, fields that exert pressures and influences, and that can create tensions, obstacles, diversions, and other resistant or facilitating features of their own. The attainment of a new place in the world, a far removed place—​the main consequence of a migratory move—​is always in some sense a power play” (2008, 261). As raqs sharqi has migrated around the globe, individual dancers of raqs sharqi, many of them male, have integrated personal perceptions within a contextual positioning to evolve new gestural languages. This essay concentrates on the performance lives of three men who have contributed to this history. They are Mahmoud Reda and Tito Seif of Cairo, Egypt, and John Compton of San Francisco, California. In their unique and individual approaches to dance, each dancer indirectly challenges classical orientalist visions of the imaginary orient of nineteenth century writers, photographer and painters. Directly or indirectly, each dancer and associated company has been impacted by the dance’s history within Islamic countries.

600   Barbara Sellers-Young

The Impact of Islam Embedded in the tenets of Islam are concerns with human representation that Leona Wood and Anthony Shay (1976) note are part of Islamic attitudes toward the performing arts in general. In his 1999 study of dance in Iran and related diaspora, Shay identified this attitude as “choreophobia.” This term encompasses a wide range of prohibitions based on gender, age, social status, and religiosity. Shay’s model demonstrates the complex set of relationships that contribute to dance being a component of social celebrations in Islamic countries and yet also a mode of expression which needs careful regulation to prevent transgressions of accepted gender norms. The choreophobia of Islam discouraged raqs sharqi from developing a named movement vocabulary or a direct transfer from teacher to student as exists in ballet, bharata natyam, nihon buyo, and other dance forms. Instead, the transmission process for raqs sharqi historically has been a matter of observation through community participation. The lack of named vocabulary provided a boundary between the religious code which prohibited representation of the body and the innate desire to celebrate joyful events with expressive gestures which engaged the body. As the dance form moved outside of its original cultural context, the absence of named vocabulary ultimately allowed for a variety of interpretations by those who participated in the dance as performers and audience. Thus, the “erasure” of dance as a legitimate expressive form in Islamic culture indirectly and ironically contributed to its adaptation by twentieth-​century western performers for their personal expressive desires, a set of desires unrelated to an Islamic ethos. In the final analysis, Islamic attitudes toward bodily representation combined with an unnamed technical vocabulary to provide an empty space for a social imaginary. New interpretations of the solo dances of North Africa and the Middle East evolved in the United States in the 1950s as Syrian and Lebanese clubs in urban centers evolved into Middle Eastern restaurants that united visions of the orient from Hollywood films such as Salome and Kismet with America’s desire for an exotic, but local, adventure (Rasmussen 1990). The belly dancer, a familiar film trope, became a typical entertainment feature of these venues. These solo performers, some from North Africa and the Middle East and some from the United States, mixed movement vocabulary from various solo improvisational forms from Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, and elsewhere (Sellers-​ Young 1992, Shay and Sellers-​Young 2003). At the same time, American women were, with the development of the birth control pill, in the middle of a sexual revolution and sought a physical expression for their newly liberated bodies (Griffin 1975, Morgan 1984). This is aptly demonstrated in the 1967 film Barefoot in the Park, in which Jane Fonda’s character in a moment of exuberance gets on stage and performs with the belly dancer. The adherents of this increasingly popular form were not limited to a specific named vocabulary; instead, they relied on the general improvisational nature of the

Men and the Happiness Dance    601 form combined with a Hollywood costume style to create very personalized movement expressions. Ultimately, there evolved in the late twentieth century several hybrid forms of belly dance that trace their movement vocabulary to the personality of a particular teacher and the cultural ethos of a specific urban environment both inside and outside of North Africa and the Middle East. An individual who has moved in and between the ethoi of these urban communities is Mahmoud Reda.

Mahmoud Reda The history of a nation is not only written by leaders and the military, nor is it merely based on historic events. It is also very much written by intellectuals, scientists, artists, philosophers, and indeed the people at large. Some figures make their way to history by their deeds (or misdeeds); but the larger group of public only exists as “the masses,” although equally significant. It is hence that the importance of the Reda Troupe emerges, for it documents the Egyptian folk art, revealing the untold part of a nation’s tale that no history book could provide.1

In the spring of 2001, Mahmoud Reda was honoured by the global Middle Eastern dance community at a conference in Southern California for his role in bringing the folkloric dances of Egypt to the world stage. The event represented a convergence of two distinct dance entities that were increasingly communicating with each other through the medium of raqs sharqi—​the global belly dance community and folkloric companies of Egypt. Born on March 18, 1930 in Cairo, Egypt, Mahmoud Reda is responsible for creating, through the founding of the Reda Troupe in 1959, a movement vocabulary that brought the dance forms of Egypt to the proscenium stage. Prior to the Reda Troupe, Egypt was host to many professional dance companies from Europe and elsewhere, but did not have a professional dance company. Aided by the support of his brother Ali Reda, and the family of dancer Farida Fahmy, Reda devised a vocabulary and pedagogical approach that gave structure and form to teaching Egyptian dance. Reda has influenced advocates of Middle Eastern dance, and more specifically belly dance, around the globe. Mahmoud Reda’s career, as a dancer, choreographer, and company founder, has been fashioned at the intersection of a family in which sport and artistic activities were encouraged as part of secondary education or family events, as well as by the political atmosphere under Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president from 1956 to 1970. Nasser’s political era featured a coming of age of the integration of Egypt with the Soviet bloc and a period of ascendancy of middle-​class educated Egyptians. The children of this middle class studied at English-​style private schools and public universities, watched American movies, and participated in the growing international sports community; all in the background of the Middle East Umm Kulthum’s monthly radio broadcasts and

602   Barbara Sellers-Young songs of love, loss and longing. As Seibert suggests in her analysis of the positioning of the history of the Reda Troupe, there was at this point a debate in Egypt regarding identity: This debate on Egyptian nationhood is characterized by tension between Eastern and Western identifications. Western-​ness offered models for success and advancement necessary to achieve the parity with Europe desired by the middle and upper classes. Yet the legacy of colonialism and the devaluing of Eastern identity led to Islamic pan-​Arab identification in the wake of decolonization. (2002, 55)

A founder of the Reda Troupe, Mahmoud Reda, would be negotiating a choreographic style that would negotiate a middle ground between these tensions. Early in his life, Mahmoud Reda established himself as an athlete, first in swimming and later in gymnastics winning a gold medal for free exercises in the Pan Arab Sports Championship in 1950 and competing in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. However, for Mahmoud and his brother Ali, dance was a passion, in particular the dances of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. As Mahmoud phrases it: I used to see the same movie, maybe 30 times. Every single night I went, even when I had exams, I’d take my book and sit in the lounge of the Metro Cinema, for example, and study during the first part—​not the movie but the cartoons and the news—​but once I heard the movie start, I’d close my book and go. If I learned something, I’d try it on the street at night, in the dark street, like this. I’d try before I could forget. So, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly were my inspiration.2

Following graduation from Cairo University in 1954, he joined an Argentine Dance Company Alaria and toured with the company for a year. This gave him an opportunity to study ballet when he was not on stage and also an insider’s view of a professional dance company. This was an unusual step for an Egyptian man as dance was a recreational part of ritual and family occasions, but not an anticipated career choice, in particular not for someone from an upper-​middle class family with a degree in commerce. In their discussions of male dancers in the Middle East, Anthony Shay (2009) and Stavros Karayanni (2009) maintain that early orientalist artists and writers from Edward Lane on did not know how to view the playful and often ironic parody of community-​based performance in dance there, and therefore assumed that all gestural movement that used the hips must be female. In fact, this attitude was so pervasive it held sway over colonial administrations. For example, female dancers in the late nineteenth century Egypt were banned to Upper Egypt, but performances of male dancers were banned entirely by colonial-​controlled governments; these viewed male performances through the lens of western colonialism and considered their dance to be a form of female impersonation. Despite these attitudes toward male dancers, Reda’s dancing imagination had been enlivened by his time with the Argentine company and he returned to Egypt in 1955 with the desire to create an Egyptian dance company.

Men and the Happiness Dance    603 In 1959, Mahmoud Reda founded the first folk dance company in Egypt, the Reda Troupe, which consisted of only 15 members, all dancers. Today, the company has 150 members, including dancers, musicians, and technicians. As a dancer, choreographer and director, Mahmoud Reda has performed globally at Carnegie Hall (NY, USA); Albert Hall (London, UK); Congress Hall (Berlin, Germany); Stanislavsky & Gorky Theaters (Moscow, USSR); Olympia (Paris, France); and the United Nations (NY and Geneva). His contribution in bringing the Egyptian dance to the world stage has been awarded with Egypt’s Order of Arts and Sciences in 1967; The Star of Jordan in 1965; Order of Tunisia in 1973; and an International Dance Committee/​Unesco award in 1999. In 2009, the Reda Troupe celebrated its 50th anniversary. The movement of these choreographies is a convergence of Reda’s personal background in gymnastics and ballet with borrowings from the musical theater vocabulary of Hollywood films and his personal research into the village dances of Egypt in 1965–​67. In his book Choreographic Politics (2002), Anthony Shay suggests two primary influences on Reda’s hybrid movement vocabulary. The first was the impact of colonialism on the psyche of the Egyptian elite, and the second was the role of Russian culture, specifically, the tours of the Moiseyev Company. In order to appeal to an Egyptian upper class and therefore become part of nation-​building under Gamal Abdel Nasser, Mahmoud Reda’s gestural language needed to resist the orientalist discourse of the West while living comfortably within the political identity of the Soviet bloc and pan-​Arab identity. Yet it still needed to be recognizably Egyptian, and as such, appeal nostalgically to the popular conception from Egyptian films of beledi or village life. Thus, his goal was not to recreate the dances, but to integrate the village vocabulary in dances that would gesture towards an Egyptian national identity. In keeping with the gender dichotomies of Egyptian society, the physical style of the Reda vocabulary is separated by gender. Men spin, leap, jump, hop, lunge, and pose, often in relationship to the women on the stage. Women swirl, sway, and subtly move their hips or gently move their torsos. Men and women appear individually, as groups of men or women, and in intricate spatial organizations of both genders. The women’s presentation is happy, quietly flirtatious, and demure. Men are openly friendly, bold, and vigorous, and project themselves into space. What women and men do not do is dance together in the same physical partnering one finds in the films of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. Instead, the graceful continuous fluid movement through space, which was the hallmark of Astaire or Kelly and their partners, is performed separately, with distinctively different movement vocabularies for men and women. Like other national ensembles from Eastern Europe, the Reda Troupe has moments when men and women are in separate lines, but often this is replaced by pairs of women or pairs of men, or pairs of a man and a woman. In male/​female pairings, the man often poses with his gaze on the woman as she demurely smiles and twists, or shifts her hips in happy rhythm to the underlying drum beat. One such example is an early filmed version of a village dance in which the beginning segment has Mahmoud Reda leaping in the air as he turns to the right, and then drops to his knees, quickly switches balance on his knees, and begins to clap as Farida Fahmy comes over the rise of the hill; she uses an

604   Barbara Sellers-Young inner and outer arm gesture to swish her floor-​length skirt. Facing Reda, Fahmy sways to either side and turns while Reda stands hops back, does a quick step side, touch, step side, to either side, hops with leg back and opposite leg forward, and lands on one knee looking up at Fahmy as she continues dancing, and he claps.3 In other choreographies, there are variations of this theme. A man lunges to the side of a woman while she dances with hips and torso. He might circle her with a hopping or leaping step as she dances in the center. In this respect, the spatial organization of Reda’s choreography is reminiscent of the dancing between appropriately related family members at social gatherings. As such, it mimics the social positioning and responsibility of both men and women. A woman is at the center of the home and a man is both her observer, and by the barrier of his body, her protector. The family is therefore the center of honor and women its physical manifestation (Mernissi 1975, Sabbah 1984). This physical representation of men and women is the opposite of the orientalist fantasy of the seductive female and overly libidinous male. Mahmoud Reda’s popularity as a choreographer is that he captured on stage fundamental social relationships of Egyptian society based on family; and placed them within the larger global network of Soviet Era choreography.4 This set of relationships was reflected backstage, as Marjorie Franken describes in her discussion of the life of the Reda Troupe’s primary dancer, Farida Fahmy, who was also Mahmoud Reda’s sister-​in-​law (2001). The Reda Troupe operated as a family, with Farida Fahmy’s parents Hassan and May Fahmy as chaperones to protect the reputations of the young women dancers. Mahmoud’s brother Ali brought his extensive experience and entertainment world connections to the troupe, and his wife, Melda, was a dancer and artist with the company. Mahmoud’s wife, Nadeeda, also Farida Fahmy’s sister, used her art training to design costumes, while her mother May was the wardrobe mistress. The image of the Reda Troupe as a family company in which many marriages actually took place among company members gained the company popularity with the Egyptian press. The combination of the choreographic style and the organization of the company allowed Mahmoud Red to project an image of Egypt that moved across the class divide between western educated elites and the working class of Cairo, as well as between the urban and rural populations. This representation of Egypt during a time of pan-​Arab unity was a counter discourse to depictions in Hollywood films and other representations by Western artists. Thus, the Reda Troupe’s impact was not limited to national-​building in Egypt, but encompassed re-​visioning of the Arab community. During the mid-​1970s, the primarily female American belly dance community in search of its historic roots started traveling to Egypt. In the process, they discovered the Reda Troupe and other companies such as the National Folk Troupe started in 1961 by Russian-​trained Boris Ramazin, a former member of the Moiseyev (Shay 2002, 155). Dancers such as Morocco made recordings of both companies, but dancers gravitated towards study with Mahmoud Reda, as the lightness and fluidity

Men and the Happiness Dance    605 of his movement vocabulary for the women dancers more closely matched their image of femininity, familiar from Hollywood musicals. American belly dancers, and increasingly, dancers from elsewhere in the world, began traveling to Egypt to learn what was becoming referred to as the Reda style. In 2005, dancers from Spain, Finland, France, Italy, and Switzerland gathered in tribute in an evening of eighteen of his choreographies in a program titled “Homage to Mahmoud Reda: A Life for Dancing.” In response to this increasingly popularity, Mahmoud Reda began touring the globe, traveling to New York, Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Moscow, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, teaching Reda style to eager fans. As the Reda Troupe continued into the 1990s and beyond, other members of the company, such as Nada of Toronto, have relocated and are teaching his style in their communities. Other former members of the company, such as Aida Nour, Kazafy and Raqia Hassan, are located in Cairo and teach at events held within the city as well as workshops in other parts of the world. In these workshops, the phrases taught to the women and sprinkling of men who attend feature arms that glide gracefully through space and support turns which evolve into an intricate lift or twisting of the hip or a moving undulation of the body. The Reda masculine style is saved for the “Asaya,” cane dance, and is taught equally to men and women. The specific gender dichotomy of the Reda Troupe is, in the global marketplace, replaced by an equality of gesture. Moving from its culture of origin, the language of the Reda style has crossed gender definitions and has promoted a re-​positioning of that language among male dancers outside of Egypt; it also has had an impact on male dancers in Egypt, who, 30 years ago, would not have been accepted in public. Such is the case of Tito Seif.

Tito Seif Despite periodic suppression by the government in Cairo and religious officials, male performers are wiggling into popularity at cafes, clubs, and celebrations.5

Cassandra Lorius (1996) and Karin van Nieuwkerk (1995), in their writings on professional female dancers of Egypt, point out the dancer’s contradictory position as she negotiates the western frame of the exotic and the community gender roles for women. The professional female dancer is a fixture of Egyptian films, restaurant entertainment, and weddings; her presence at the wedding reception blesses and brings good luck to the newly married couple. Yet, dancers are expected to perform modestly in a style that communicates sexual knowledge devoid of aggressiveness. Each female dancer devises an individual approach to this contradictory dilemma. The same is true of Egypt’s male dancers, for whom the obstacle is not modesty, but the need to communicate masculinity in a movement vocabulary that, since the beginning of the 20th century, has been identified on Egyptian stages and in films as feminine.

606   Barbara Sellers-Young A dancer who has managed to successfully negotiate this culturally loaded position is Cairo performer, Tito Seif. Born in 1971, Tito began to belly dance at the age of 14. A technically proficient, innovative, and charismatic performer, Tito performs in either a floor length gallibeyha, the common village dress of men in Egypt with scarf tied around his hips or a pair of black pants and sequined t-​shirt with a hip belt. Unlike some male dancers found in North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia, he will not perform in anything that resembles the dress of female performers. He is not a man performing as a woman he is a man dancing belly dance or to use the Egyptian phrase raqs sharqi. With a smile of delight on his face, Tito performs a combination of gestures that combines hips, torso, arms, hands and head in intricate and very precise interpretations of the complex Arabic music. Periodically, he gestures to the audience as if to say “I am having a great time! Are you enjoying yourself as much?” Tito challenges the folkloric definition of gender via dance through the integration of the articulations of the hips and torso with props borrowed from male dances. For example, the “Asaya” or cane dance is historically a performance of masculine fighting skill. The female dancers of Egypt use the cane coquettishly to highlight a movement of the hips or torso. Tito performs with four canes which he maneuvers in a complex vocabulary of relationship between canes, canes and the body, and canes in the space around him as he twirls, throws, catches, and balances them on various parts of his body and in various states of connection. Thus, like the female dancers of Egypt, he combines the urban flare of the contemporary music with its complex rhythms and phrasings with an acknowledgment of the rural folk history of Egypt in the incorporation of the cane in his dance performances. His rendition of the cane dance demonstrates his masculine control while it maintains a general air of playfulness, a key component of his on-​stage personality. Although Tito has become famous in Cairo, where his pictures are plastered on McDonald’s cups, his company “Tito’s Oriental Dance Show” is linked to the resort of Sharm El Sheikh, a community at the end of the Sinai Peninsula on the Red Sea which is populated with numerous Europeans on vacation. And although a popular performer in Egypt, he has as a result of exposure via this tourist audience become even more popular as a teacher and performer on the international belly dance circuit. Currently, he travels throughout the world teaching his style of performance primarily to women. Tito’s performance demonstrates the potential for a male performer in Egypt to oppose current prejudices against male dancers through a carefully composed interplay of socially accepted images. Part of his success is that he resists Hollywood costume styles in favor of village or contemporary urban ones, by extension, rejects the trappings of Western orientalism in which the dance is defined as feminine. His performance as an Egyptian male dancer takes place globally on real and virtual stages alongside other male dancers such as Amir of Argentina, Tarik Sultan of New York, Viraj of Edmonton, Ozgen of London, and DaVid of Scandinavia. Each negotiates the lingering social imaginary of orientalism and the mores of their community either in opposition to or in correspondence with their masculine identity. One example from San Francisco, California is John Compton.

Men and the Happiness Dance    607

John Compton Dressed in the manner of the ancient caliph, he swirls his way into dreams, it’s as if Valentino has come back to life. … San Francisco Examiner.

John Compton was a student of Jamila Salimpour one of the early pioneers of a form of belly dance referred to as tribal. In the 1970s, he joined Salimpour’s company Bal Anat. As a dance company, Bal Anat was submerged in a collective oriental fantasy in which visual representations of North Africa and the Middle East from National Geographic were combined with general image created by Hollywood and movement styles adapted from Egyptian films. In Bal Anat performances at renaissance fairs and elsewhere, dancers explored modes of sexual expression and identity not permissible in daily life. Men beguiled the audience while balancing trays on their head. Women manipulated the emblem of maleness, the sword. Men and women provocatively maneuvered arms and veils in conjunction with pelvic circles, hip thrusts, and undulations to reveal and conceal the physical indication of their gender and the desire of their bodies. As individual bodies, they danced new gender identities in a process that reflected the contemporary interest in new sexualities and at the same time challenged prior constructions. These new gender identities were danced within an imagined space of the “Orient” created from a mix of the “lived” body of Middle Eastern dancers and a media representation of the Middle East identified by Edward Said (1979) and other oriental theorists as an extension of the colonial image. Thus, they validated commonly accepted impressions of the Middle East as an imaginary world where women and men live within a heightened state of sensuality. John Compton left Bal Anat and in 1991 founded Hahbi’Ru, a San Francisco area company often referred to as performing tribal style belly dance. John does not consistently use this designation; instead, he situates his performance as a male dancer within the vernacular of the Middle East and refers to himself as a contemporary khawal, a reference to the male dancers of nineteenth century Egypt.6 Tracing his movement style to his experience of working with a specialist in Turkish dances, Patti Farber, as well as with Jamila Salimpour, John makes an ambivalent distinction between the movement style of his group and his teachers: “We base our dances upon tradition, but interpret that tradition with a bit of creative license, change them, and make them stage-​worthy. We do sneak some modern movements but try to integrate them in an old-​style way.” Personally, John Compton is most noted for his version of the Tray Dance.7 Backed by a group of male and female musicians playing mizmar and a variety of percussion instruments, John emerges from the company dressed in a pair of loose hip-​hugging trousers, a shift-​style shirt made of assyut, a short black vest, and an Arabic-​style head scarf. In a short series of lightly articulated gestures of hip and feet that combine the fluid twisting motion of Salimpour’s pivot step with rapid turns and hip-​thrusts, John establishes his presence on the stage. This presence is at first difficult to read as definitively masculine or feminine, but easy to read as exotic other. 8

608   Barbara Sellers-Young The rest of John’s performance concentrates on his ability to complete a set of acrobatic poses—​backbends, splits—​and dance movements while balancing a tray with six lighted candles and/​or coffee cups on his head. His demeanor throughout is friendly but with a playful challenge that questions the audience’s ability to successfully realize the same level of balance, flexibility, and physical dexterity—​a relationship to the audience mastered in years of performances in restaurants and nightclubs, including Finnochio’s in the North Beach and the Sahara in Los Vegas. For example, from a position of standing, he lowers himself into a back bend while smiling at the audience. Without any adjustment to the tray balanced on his head, he rolls over and balances on one arm and leg while he completes a series of torso undulations. Still maintaining the tray’s balance, he rolls on to his stomach and begins a series of full body push-​ups, most often referred to as male push-​ups. Curling his body, he comes to his knees and to standing, tray balanced on his head, and begins a series of rapid hip movements that end in an isolated shimmy of the pelvis. Finally, he hands the tray to a musician and begins a rapid turn which ends with a leap into the air followed by landing on his back with his feet tucked under his torso in a movement commonly called a Turkish drop. Assured in his physical ability to maneuver the relationship between body and tray, John sensually dances a definition of masculinity that is as fluid as his hips and as malleable as his spine:  an enactment of the body that, until recently, would have been equated with the feminine. His performance therefore generates a set of physical metaphors that fit within the framework of the exotic, sensual Oriental other. Yet, it is a white male enacting this stereotype. John Compton’s performances and those of other American male dancers act to contest the stereotype of the Orient as innately feminine; and yet these performances continue the stereotype of the Orient as the site of the erotic. By placing themselves within the physical center of this apparent contradiction, they offer an alternative vision of masculinity. It is a vision that has no obvious referent within classical or modern dance traditions in the United States and in fact, in movement style is closer to popular social dance forms as they evolved over the twentieth century.

Conclusion Ask a friend of they would like to go see a male belly dancer and they will smile at you oddly, as the popular belief is that belly dance is a woman’s form. Increasingly, this is changing as men in all parts of the world take classes, create on-​stage personae, and perform on stages from North America to Asia. This change has impacted all parts of the global belly dance community including the only international belly dance company, the Superstars of Belly dance. This company, started by rock impresario Miles Copeland in 2002, began as an all-​female company with the goal of bringing the form

Men and the Happiness Dance    609 to communities across the globe. Their performances have been staged in cities the size of London and communities as small as Eugene, Oregon. Initially, the only male in the ensemble was the drummer, who was brought on stage to play for the dancers. Copeland, in fact, promoted it as a female form. Recently, the company has added a former Cirque du Soleil dancer, Samir aka Arthur Bulkarov, who is originally from Tajikistan but moved to the United States in 1993. He argues that his movement style is neither masculine nor feminine—​nor is he a drag queen. As he phrases it, “My dance is not really male. I’m not presenting a masculine man in the show—​not that I’m a female in the show … Sometimes it is androgynous, like a creature.”9 His approach to his performance is distinct from the other members of the company who are consciously portraying aspects of their femininity. A consideration of the performance lives of Mahmoud Reda, Tito Seif and John Compton within the backdrop of orientalism’s frame and the specific locality of the evolution of their performance personalities allows us to reflect on how the study of dance reveals what Sally Ann Ness refers to as the tensions, obstacles, and diversions associated with fields of power. As either masculine or feminine, varied forms of power have been at work in the transmission of raqs sharqi, the happiness dance. There is the power of religion and the choreophobia implicit in Islam. There is also the power of colonialist images that perceived the dance within a frame that, as Edward Said has noted, verified their interpretation of the Middle East as a site of sensual chaos in need of colonial reorganization. There is the powerful desire of individuals for self-​expression that can only be realized through the moving body, whether it be those attached to the second wave of the women’s movement or the performers of Egypt who defy community norms and become public dancers. The most significant power in terms of the happiness dance has been the global transference of the dance through what Arjun Appadurai (1996) refers to as cultural flows of the social imaginary, and the way identities maneuver through the tensions and obstacles associated with various scapes:  ethno-​, media-​, techno-​, finance-​ and ideo. With regards to raqs sharqi, the imaginary of the colonialist orient was challenged by the vocabulary and structure of Mahmoud Reda’s choreography. As an artist, he understood the political and social dynamics of Egypt and created a company which gave agency to Egypt’s specific history, thus challenging the prior social imaginary. Politically, he did not negate the populist impulse of the global belly dance community; instead, he taught his vision of the feminine to anyone in his class, male or female. In doing so he opened up the social imaginary to the possibility of other definitions of masculinity. This is a space a dancer such as Tito Seif, who would not have been permitted on an Egyptian stage 30 years ago, could inhabit. Outside of Egypt, there were other men such as John Compton who were using the designation of an Egyptian khawal and the liminal and playful spaces of the imaginary renaissance to explore new gender vocabularies. For male dancers live, as all performers do, in Victor Turner’s liminoid space of the subjunctive; there, the ambiguity of mimesis is a desirable position from which a performer uses movement to negotiate contextually unique fields of power.

610   Barbara Sellers-Young

Notes 1. Kholoud Said, “The Reda Troupe:  When Art Mirrors a Nation’s History,” Bibliotheca Alexandrina Newsletter, Alexandria, Egypt: April 2010, Issue. 7, pg 8. 2. Morocco, “Mahmoud Reda, Part 1: The Beginning, Gilded Serpent, June 19, 2003. http://​ www.gildedserpent.com/​art32/​rockyredainterviewp1.htm 3. Reda Troupe Perform a Felahi Dance, You Tube, http://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=8yfdJBCb664. 4. A detailed discussion of the Reda Troupe and other Soviet Era companies is in Anthony Shay’s Choreographing Politics. 5. Daniel Williams, “Egyptian Tradition Revived: Men Muscle back in to Bellydancing,” January 1, 2008 http://​www.bloomberg.com/​apps/​news?pid=newsarchive&sid=atLloMTgRlEg 6. An account of the Khawals of Egypt can be found in Edward Lane, An Acccount of the Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians, New York: Dover, 1973. 7. The description of John Compton’s performance is taken from a video tape of his company titled Hahbi ‘Ru Desert Wanderers. It was filmed in 1995 at Studio E in Sebastopol, California. 8. John Compton died October 2012. The online belly dance magazine Gilded Serpent had this tribute to him http://​www.gildedserpent.com/​cms/​2012/​10/​15/​memorial-​to-​john-​ comptom/​#axzz2Ya3IhT1B 9. Doug Pullen, “Belly dance goes Bollywood: Dance troupe comes back with focus on India (and a guy),” El Paso Times, http://​www.elpasotimes.com/​living/​ci_​16237094, October 3, 2010.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large:  Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bentley, Toni. 2002. Sisters of Salome. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bernstein, Matthew and Gaylyn Studlar, Eds. 1997. Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Bhabha, Homi. 2004. Location of Culture. New York: Routledge Press. Bordo, Susan. 1999. The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Burt, Ramsay. 1995. The Male Dancer. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge. Carlton, Donna. 1994. Looking for Little Egypt. Bloomington, Indiana: IDD Books. Edwards, Holly, Ed. 2000. Noble Dreams and Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America 1870–​ 1930. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Fahmy, Farida (Melda). 1987. The Creative Development of Mahmoud Reda, a Contemporary Egyptian Choreographer. M.A. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles. Fisher, Jennifer and Anthony Shay, eds. 2009. When Men Dance. England:  Oxford University Press. Franken, Marjorie. 1998. “Farida Fahmy and the Dancer’s Image in Egyptian Film.” In Images of Enchantment: Visual and Performing Arts in the Middle East, Edited by Sherifa Zuhur. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 265–​281.

Men and the Happiness Dance    611 Franken, Marjorie. 2001. Daughter of Egypt: Farida Fahmy and the Reda Troupe. Glendale, California: Armenian Reference Books. Gioseffi, Daniela. 1980. Earth Dancing:  Mother Nature’s Oldest Rite. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books. Glenn, Susan A. 2000. The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism. Cambridge:  Harvard University Press. Griffin, Susan. 1976. Woman and Nature:  The Roaring Inside Her. San Francisco:  Harper and Row. Hamera, Judith. 2007. Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City. New York: Palgrave. Karayanni, Stavros Stavrou. 2004. Dancing Fear and Desire. Ontario, Canada:  Wilfrid University Press. Keft-​Kennedy, Virginia. 2005. “How Does She Do That? Belly Dancing And the Horror of the Flexible Woman.” Women’s Studies (April/​June) 34/​3–​4, 279–​300. Kirshenblatt-​Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture:  Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Koritz, Amy. 1995. Gendering Bodies/​Performing Art: Dance and Literature in Early Twentieth-​ century Culture. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Lane, Edward William. 1973. An Account of the Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians. New York: Dover Publications. Lewis, Reina. 2004. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Lockman, Zachary. 2004. Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lorius, Cassandra. 1996. “Gaze and Desire.” Women’s Studies International Forum. 19, 3–​4. Lorius, Cassandra​. 1996. “Oh Boy, You Salt of the Earth: Outwitting Patriarchy in Raqs Baladi.” Popular Music 15:3: 285–​298. MacKenzie, John M. 1995. Orientalism: History, theory and the arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mernissi, Fatima. (1975) Beyond the Veil:  Male-​ Female Dynamics in Muslim Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Morris, Chris. 2000. “Male Belly-​Dancers Dazzle Istanbul.” BBC News, April 26, 2000. Morgan, Robin. 1984. The Anatomy of Freedom:  Feminism, Physics, and Global Politics. New York: Anchor Books. Nericcio, Carolena. 1997/​1998. “Survival of the Fittest:  The Evolution of Fat Chance Belly Dance,” Tribal Talk 1.3. Ness, Sally Ann. 2008. “Conclusion.” In Migrations of Gesture. Edited by Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 259–​280. Novack, Cynthia. 1995. “The Body Endeavors as Cultural Practices.” In Choreographing History. Edited by Susan Leigh Foster. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 177–​184. Potuoğlu-​ Cook, Őykű. 2006. “Beyond the Glitter:  Belly Dance and the Neoliberal Gentrification of Istanbul.” Cultural Anthropology. 21/​4, 633–​660. Rasmussen, Anne K. 1989. Musical Life of Arab Americans:  Performance Contexts and Musical Transformation. Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology, 5, 15–​33. Rasmussen, Anne K. 1990. “Middle Eastern Nightclub: Resurrecting Orientalism for America.” Arts Musica Denver (Spring), 28–​33.

612   Barbara Sellers-Young Rasmussen, Anne K.​1992. “An Evening in the Orient: the Middle Eastern Nightclub in America,” Asian Music, 13/​2 (Summer), 345–​365. Rasmussen, Anne K.​1998. “The Music of Arab Americans.” In The Images of Enchantment, Edited by Sherifa Zuhur, Cairo: American University Press, 135–​156. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Said, Edward W.​2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Massachusetts: Harvard University. Said, Edward W.​2003. Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward Said. Massachusetts: South End Press. Sabbah, Fatna. 1984. Women in the Muslim Unconscious (Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland), New York: Pergamon Press. Savigliano, Marta E. 1995. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder: Westview Press. Savigliano, Marta E. 2009. “Worlding Dance and Dancing Out There in the World.” In Worlding Dance, Edited by Susan Leigh Foster, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Sellers-​Young, Barbara. 1986. “The Exoteric/​Esoteric Dimension and Changing Traditions in an Arab Community in Oregon,” Northwest Folklore 4 (Winter-​Spring), 18–​28. Sellers-​Young, Barbara​. 1992. “Raks El Sharki: Transculturation of a Folk Form.”Journal of Popular Culture. 26/​2 (Fall), 141–​152. Shay, Anthony. 1999. Choreophobia: Solo Improvised Dance in the Iranian World. California: Mazda Publishers. Shay, Anthony​. 2002. Choreographing Politics. Connecticut: Wesleyan Press. Shay, Anthony. 2005. “The Male Dancer.” In Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism & Harem Fantasy. Edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-​Young, California: Mazda Press, 85–​113. Shay, Anthony​. 2006. “Dance and Human Rights in the Middle East.” In Dance and Human Rights, Edited by Naomi Jackson. New York: Routledge. Shay, Anthony and Barbara Sellers-​Young. 2003. “Belly Dance: Orientalism-​Self-​Exoticism-​ Exoticism.” (with Barbara Sellers Young). Dance Research Journal. Summer/​Winter, Volume 35, Number 1, 13–​37. Shay, Anthony and Barbara Sellers-​ Young, eds. 2005. Belly Dance:  Orientalism, Transnationalism, and Harem Fantasy. California: Mazda Publishers. Siebert, Lauren Marie. (2002) “All things that Portray Us as Individuals and a Nation: Reda Troupe and the Egyptian National Identity in the Twentieth Century.” Text, Practice and Performance. IV: 51–​63. Taussig, Michael. 1992. Mimesis and Alterity:  A  Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge. Turner, Bryan S. 1994. Orientalism, Postmodernism & Globalism. London: Routledge. Turner, Victor. 1988. The Anthropology of Performance, New York: PAJ. Van Nieuwkerk, Karin. 1997. A Trade Like Any Other Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Wood, Leona and Anthony Shay. 1976. “Danse du Ventre: A Fresh Appraisal.” Dance Research Journal. 8/​2, (Spring/​Summer), 18–​30. Zuhur, Sherifa. 1998. Images of Enchantment: Visual and Performing Arts in the Middle East. Cairo: American University Press. Zuhur, Sherifa. 2001. Colors of Enchantment: Theatre, Dance, Music, and the Visual Arts of the Middle East. Cairo: American University Press.

Chapter 27

From P ow wow to Stom p Da nc e Parallel Dance Traditions in Oklahoma Paula J. Conlon

In the state of Oklahoma, there is a tremendous diversity in American Indian music and dance due to the large influx of tribes in the 1800s into what was then called “Indian Territory.” From the 1830s through the 1870s, 67 tribes were forcibly removed to this midwest region from various parts of the United States to join the handful of Plains tribes already in this area. The General Allotment Act of 1887, dividing communally held tribal land into individually owned private property of 160 acres per Native adult paved the way for the Land Run of 1889, followed by the Curtis Act of 1898 that abolished tribal courts in Indian Territory, culminating in statehood in 1907.1 On the other hand, the indigenous nations forcibly removed to Indian Territory brought their culture, religion, and language with them along with their racial identity as American Indians. Performative expression of Native ethnicity has persevered through federal dance bans; endured the infamous residential school mandate, “Kill the Indian and Save the Man” (coined by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the first Indian boarding school in 1879); and weathered a century of unrelenting federal assimilation policies designed to force-​fit Native people into the hegemonic society. Through it all, they sang and they danced, taking pride in keeping their traditions alive against all odds. In consequence, as noted by Cherokee ethnomusicologist Charlotte Heth, “American Indian dance exists everywhere in America and in every venue” (1992, 1). Sociologist Steve Fenton notes that, “People or peoples do not just possess cultures or share ancestry, they elaborate these into the idea of a community founded upon these attributes” (2010, 3). Ethnicities exist as self-​aware identities, defined from within a culture to be compared against competing cultures. In the case of Indian Territory, the stark contrast between Native American and Western music and dance traditions brought over from Europe highlighted the readily identifiable features of artistic expressions of Native ethnicity.

614   Paula J. Conlon The opposite way to define a cultural group is by stereotyping. The seminaked Indian woman in Edward S. Curtis’s posed photograph, “Before the White Man Came” (1924) is a classic stereotype with predictable results: “While purporting to render Indian life before the advent of white people, its existence and essence were totally determined by white, Euro-​American culture [ … ] removed from time and its passage altogether” (Gidley 1992, 116–​117). The resultant dehumanization and simplification of stereotyped cultures is often contrasted against the supposed complexity and individualistic diversity of European nations. What is more, stereotypes and ethnicity are themselves tied together in a cultural back and forth. Representing “visibly different, virtually ungovernable groups of people with justifiable claims to sovereignty, land, and maintenance of cultural differences” (Niezen 2000, 6), Native dances and songs from vastly different social contexts can suddenly take on the mantle of protest. Indeed, any form of Native traditionalism can be seen as a dramatic and hostile response to outward pressure. To comprehend the history and evolution of Native dance in Oklahoma as representative of different ethnicities, two processes proved especially helpful to develop an understanding of these activities in their cultural context. First, an examination of writings on the social push and pull of outside-​created stereotyping and cultural genocide, contrasted with accounts of inside-​created ethnicity and tradition keeping from both primary and secondary sources. As noted by anthropologist Edwin Ardener, however, ethnicities “demand to be seen from the inside” (1989, 111). Hence the second process to develop an understanding, dependent on invitation, was immersion in Native cultural activities, dancing, singing, and interacting socially with people as members of complex and individualistically diverse tribal communities. This chapter utilizes these two approaches as they relate to powwow (using the southern straight dance as a focal point), and stomp dance (focusing on Mvskoke (Creek) traditions), as practiced in Oklahoma in the first decade of the 21st century—​two Native traditions from contrasting backgrounds and social contexts that have evolved along parallel paths due to similar outward pressure and shared cultural experiences.2

Federal Dance Bans and Other Restrictions In 1871 the U.S. Congress ended treaty making, albeit acknowledging their obligation to uphold existing treaties; in 1883 the Courts of Indian Offenses were established on reservations to enforce federal regulations banning dancing, traditional religion, polygamy, gift giving, and other Native customs. Federal laws in this era included edicts to send Native children to Indian boarding schools. Over a 30-​year period, more than a 100 thousand Native children were separated from their families and forced to reject Native culture from the ages of five or six until they were 18 years of age or even older.

From Powwow to Stomp Dance    615 The concentration of Native people onto small, confined areas of reservation land gave researchers easy access to Native culture. Smithsonian Institution ethnologist Frances Densmore (1867–​1957) collected over 35 hundred songs over the course of her long career for her many talks and publications. The irony was not lost on the Native singers she recorded, who asked why she, a government worker, was requesting them to perform songs associated with dances that the federal government had forbidden since the 1880s (Troutman 2009, 159–​160). Densmore’s reply that she was preserving their heritage for their children was complicated and conflicted by the fact that she was simultaneously involved in a plan to introduce her own Westernized version of their songs to Indian boarding schools and the non-​Native public. The public’s fascination with the “vanishing Indian” was fueled in large measure by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows and the proliferation of World Fairs around the turn of the 20th century. More than 27 million people, nearly half the population of the United States at that time, attended the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where the Americas’ many nations and peoples were represented. By 1913 American composers from Boston to California, known as “Indianists,” had written hundreds of Western art music pieces based on Native themes (Pisani 2005, 184–​185). President Roosevelt’s endorsement of ethnologist Natalie Curtis’s publication, The Indians’ Book (1907), made a strong impression on Francis Leupp, Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1905 to 1909. As a result, Leupp ushered in a new music curriculum for Indian boarding schools in 1907, based on Native melodies collected by ethnologists and works by Indianist composers. Ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin notes that, “in culture, context counts for more than half of meaning” (1983, 37), and the sanitized tribal music in federal residential schools was a world away from traditional indigenous knowledge. However, Slobin goes on to state that he believes that expressive culture does not really die, behaving “more as a spiral, changing, but dipping back along the way.” In this sense, the skeletal Native melodies presented to Indian children during their formative years at residential schools were at the ready, waiting for a chance to come to fruition. Ethnicity is a central theme of anthropologist Sally Beach’s research on the boarding school experience of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Caddo tribes in west-​central Oklahoma. She quotes a Kiowa male, born in 1885, who told her, “It is hard for Indians to change. No matter how far in education he has, his Indian ideas stay with him” (Beach 1983, 73). Pratt recognized as early as 1892 that the residential schools’ assimilation objective was not working. His official report for the Conference of Charities and Correction that year included the warning:  “Purely Indian schools say to the Indians:  ‘You are Indians, and must remain Indians. You are not of the nation, and cannot become of the nation’ ” (Pratt 1892, 46–​59). In 1908, he cited the failure of the nation’s first residential school (that he directed from 1879 to 1904) to meet its objective, stating, “the plan of mixing the tribes at Carlisle results in nationalizing the Indian” (Pratt 1908, 19–​20). His prediction soon came to pass with the formation in 1911 of the Society for American Indians, the result of a 20-​year effort to assemble Indian-​led political organizations (Clark 2007, 71). A key component of the society’s extensive networking system was the

616   Paula J. Conlon intertribal powwow that became the focal point of their annual meetings throughout their 12-​year existence from 1911 to 1923.

Powwow as Native Identity The first powwow is generally considered to be the Ponca “homecoming” celebration in 1876, held to commemorate the tribe’s arrival at White Eagle in northwestern Oklahoma after their removal from the state of Nebraska (Zotigh 1991). This celebratory dance, to which all neighboring tribes were invited, provided a traditional Plains introduction of the Ponca to the neighboring community. The Ponca soon became known throughout Indian Territory for their knowledge of traditional songs and dances. Their subsequent gifting of the “rights” to their Heluska Society over the next 40 years to the Osage, Sac and Fox, and Comanche tribes forms the basis of the powwow’s straight-​dance category, dancing in a clockwise circle around the center drum. Ponca Heluska songs around the “big drum” gradually became known as war dance songs, and later as intertribal songs (see Figure 27.1). When the first wave of Indian boarding school students graduated in the 1890s, they were accomplished marching musicians from years of disciplined training in residential school bands, described by historian David Adams as “patently militaristic” (1995, 117). Indeed, the cadence of military marching became so internalized it was hard to walk in a normal manner, as related by a former student of Phoenix Indian School: “Sometimes on our once-​a-​month visits to town, a talking machine would be blasting band music

Figure 27.1  Powwow drum and singers. Photo courtesy of Terry Tsotigh.

From Powwow to Stomp Dance    617 outside a store [ … ] We’d try to take long strides to break the rhythm, but soon we would fall back into step again” (Shaw 1974, 133). Upon graduation, many of these young Native adults chose to return to their own people over being assimilated into the dominant white society. Historian John Troutman (2007) discusses how these “returned students,” as they became known, openly defied oppressive federal regulations, dancing with an urgency and determination that had not been witnessed in decades. Ironically, the off-​reservation boarding schools fostered the on-​reservation dancing renaissance of the early 20th century. Historian Clyde Ellis notes that “powwows remain extraordinary for their power to mold and express identity” (2003, 26). He recalls a dance at Meeker, Oklahoma in 1996 where a Kiowa elder recounted how, as a young boy in 1910 he had seen his grandfather look the Indian agent square in the face, saying, “We don’t want your rations. We want this dance.” Native dance continued to be used in Oklahoma as a form of protest against federal restrictions. Ellis discusses how the Pawnee tribe listened politely to the reading of Commissioner Charles Burke’s Circular 1655 (the third, and final, federal dance ban in 1921)  which forbade dances, celebrations, powwows, and gatherings of any kind. When the Indian agent finished, a large contingent of Pawnee got up and headed off to “a ceremonial feast, dancing, etc.” (2003, 108-​109). Another Oklahoma group (from the Wichita, Delaware, Waco, Keechie, and Tawakoni tribes) fired back a letter of their own, lampooning Burke with a series of questions, the first of which asked him to explain the meaning of powwow. The rise in dances to welcome returning Native veterans from World War I (1914–​ 1918), coupled with the General Citizenship Act of 1924 bestowing U.S. citizenship on the remaining one-​third of Indians who had not yet assumed it, led Burke to change his stance to one of asking Indians politely not to dance, but to no avail. In Oklahoma, more and more Indians were realizing that the expiration of the 25-​year allotment trust period released them from the shackles of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ supervision. Many of these new landowners celebrated their relative freedom by hosting dances, even landowners who were still dependent on the Indian agent for rations. In 1926, administrators at Haskell Indian School (in Lawrence, Kansas) decided to host a powwow, intended as a small dance to thank the tribes who had donated funding toward the building of the new football stadium. When over 2,000 Indian participants and competitors from more than 70 tribes descended on the university, including a caravan of cars from Oklahoma carrying hundreds of Indians, an “Indian Village” was hastily erected on a nearby hill. The Indian Leader, Haskell’s student newspaper, announced that “no entertainment or program planned especially for Indians would be complete without some form of Indian Dancing Contest,” and the winner of the fancy dance contest “will be determined by applause received from the audience” (Ellis 2003, 102). The now famous contest established Ponca dancer August “Gus” McDonald as the first World Fancy Dance Champion, and the Ponca tribe as the perennial hosts of the annual fancy dance competition. Community-​ sponsored intertribal powwow dances were held throughout the Great Depression era in the 1930s, with tribes frequently co-​hosting events as a means

618   Paula J. Conlon to distribute available resources to those most in need. In 1932, the American Indian Exposition (known as the Anadarko Expo) was inaugurated in Anadarko, Oklahoma, which included a powwow and presentations of Oklahoma’s many Native dance traditions (Gaede 2009). The event became an annual occurrence, which has continued to the present day. During World War II (1941–​1945), the willingness of Native men and women to enlist was interpreted by the government and other Americans as a signal of acquiescence to assimilation. On the contrary, Native people viewed the willingness to enlist as a re-​emergence of the warrior culture they so deeply revered, especially among the Plains tribes. This led to the revitalization of dormant but never forgotten warrior societies to honor returning and lost war heroes. The focal point of these societies was the tribal or intertribal color guard, first seen in “Army Day” and “Navy Day” parades at the Anadarko Expo and now visible at every modern powwow. At the Anadarko Expo in 1955, a presentation of Kiowa gourd dancing led to the revival of the Kiowa Gourd Clan warrior society (Meadows 1999, 137). The Kiowa origin story tells of a red wolf that appeared to a young warrior, singing and dancing on his hind legs, shifting his weight from side to side while shaking a gourd rattle, and howling at the end of the song. Male dancers depict these actions by shaking gourd or metal rattles, and closing off each song with the “wolf howl.” Women dance in place on the outskirts of the circle, mirroring the men’s dance steps. The songs are accompanied by a large drum, played by male drummer/​singers who sit around the drum, with female singers, seated behind the men, joining in partway through the song. Gourd dance songs are comprised of two main parts. First, the drum beats a gentle duple pattern as male dancers move slowly about the dance area, while female dancers shift their weight from one foot to the other, dancing in place. In the second part, the drum switches to a much harder beat on the first stroke of the duple pattern and male dancers stop and bob up and down in place in time with the drumbeat, the female dancers mirroring this step. The two parts go back and forth, the second part increasing in intensity and speed toward the end of the song. Intertribal gourd dancing has become a familiar feature at powwows in the southern Plains, often taking place in the afternoon before a communal meal and during the hour preceding the evening’s contest dancing. Indeed, anthropologist Luke Lassiter notes that Oklahoma powwows might have been quite different had the Kiowa Gourd Clan not been revived (1998, 244). This comment raises questions about the authenticity of revived traditions outside their original context, as noted by anthropologist Ronald Niezen, who comments that, “ironically, it is in the revival of traditions that we find the clearest evidence of ritual transformation” (2000, 2). He discusses how the social context of the performance of revived traditions has, in most cases, been transformed completely; the needs and perceptions of the participants are no longer the same, and the ritual itself has been creatively adapted to maintain a connection to social reality. His assessment is especially pertinent regarding gourd dancing at powwows, where the outward features of the instruments, singing, and dancing are all that remain to indicate this is a gourd dance.

From Powwow to Stomp Dance    619 On the other hand, Niezen’s comments about ritual transformation of revived traditions do not apply to the revival of ceremonial Kiowa gourd dance held each July in Carnegie, Oklahoma. Unlike the gourd dancing at powwows, this three-​day ceremonial follows strict protocol, and the dancing forms only one portion of the ritual’s activities. Details about the annual gathering of this warrior society (prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s) were meticulously researched (by consulting with elders and a review of the literature) when the Kiowa Gourd Clan was revived in 1958. Indeed, Kiowa Gourd Clan member Steve Littleman (1935–​2012) (1999) proclaimed that, “you haven’t witnessed a gourd dance if you haven’t been to Carnegie on July 2nd, 3rd, and 4th.”3 Concurrent with the 1950s’ revival of Plains warrior societies was the conception of the urban intertribal powwow. Designed to counter the bewildering and disorienting effects of the federal Relocation Program of 1952 under which rural and reservation Indians were transplanted to the city, Indian centers sprang up to provide resource and support outlets for these displaced Indians, organizing weekly and monthly intertribal dances as a means to preserve and retain cultural traditions that had been left behind. It was from these community dances that the urban intertribal powwows sprang, such as the annual midsummer powwow in Tulsa, Oklahoma, inaugurated in 1952. The moniker “Red Power” was created by Ponca Clyde Warrior (1939–​1968) and Paiute Melvin Thom, co-​founders of the National Indian Youth Council in 1961 as a tongue-​in-​cheek response to the Black Power movement of the turbulent 1960s (McKenzie-​Jones 2010, 224). Native activism peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when protest powwows held on Alcatraz Island were broadcast worldwide during the 19-​month takeover by Native activists of the former federal prison on the island off the coast of San Francisco. Protest powwows were also used by Native activists in 1972, when the American Indian Movement (AIM) orchestrated a week-​long occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC, and in 1973 during AIM’s 72-​day armed standoff at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Singing and dancing around the powwow drum was an essential ingredient of the fight for Native rights. The “AIM Song” (a powwow memorial song) became the calling card of the American Indian Movement, and is still sung at gatherings across Indian Country. The Red Earth Festival was founded in 1986 as an elaborate contest powwow with large cash prizes and an entry fee for observers, held annually on the second weekend in June in downtown Oklahoma City. At its Silver Anniversary in 2011, over 1,200 dancers participated, along with cultural demonstrations, Native art exhibits, and the provision of a venue for Native artisans to sell to the public. Many of the professional dancers that contest at Red Earth, and elsewhere on the powwow trail, also participate in their tribe’s annual ceremonial dances. For example, Kiowa fancy dancer Kevin Connywerdy (1999) has traveled the powwow trail for many years, but he reserves July 2nd, 3rd, and 4th to dance with his family at the annual gathering of the Kiowa Gourd Clan in Carnegie, Oklahoma. He is representative of many powwow dancers who continue to honor the Plains warrior societies of their respective tribes that constitute the roots of the powwow. Another performance venue for powwow dancers that arose in the 1980s was performing on stage with Native-​run professional dance companies such as the American

620   Paula J. Conlon Indian Dance Theatre. Formed in 1987 by Babara Schwei, a New York-​based producer, and Hanay Geiogamah, a Kiowa theater director and writer based at the University of California at Los Angeles, the company soon assembled “the cream of the crop of native dancers nationwide” (Jones 1992, 172). Dance historian Jacqueline Shea Murphy links this burgeoning of Native stage dance in the 1980s to the political climate of the Red Power movement from which it emerged (2007, 197). The militancy of Native activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s fed the public’s fascination with the American Indian as an exotic “Other,” much as the Wild West Shows and World Fairs had done at the turn of the 20th century. As noted by anthropologist William Powers, Plains music and dance became symbolic of Native resistance to the adoption of Euro-​American culture since the turn of the 20th century (1990, 18), and every Native stage performance included songs and dances from the powwow world.

Powwow Song and Dance Powwows generally begin with the “Grand Entry,” a colorful parade with the host drum group singing an intertribal song to escort the powwow participants into the dancing area, whether an indoor arena or outdoors on a cleared field. The dancers form a circle around the center drum, usually in a clockwise direction. At the head of the line are the flag bearers (the U.S. flag and the tribal flag of the host group), followed by the Head Man and Head Lady dancers (chosen as much for their character as for their dancing ability), tribal leaders, male dancers organized by dance category, female dancers by dance category, and children at the end of the line. Dancers usually refer to their outfit as “regalia,” “dance clothes,” or “dance outfit.” Connywerdy (2000) reminds us that “these are my dance clothes, not my costume. I’m not pretending to be someone else. This is who I am.” Powwow singing styles are differentiated as Northern—​originating in the central and northern Plains, Canada, and the Great Lakes region and characterized by a high pitch and hard drum beat—​and Southern—​synonymous with Oklahoma and characterized by a lower pitch and less strident drumbeat. Numerous Oklahoma tribes host an annual powwow that includes both Northern and Southern styles of singing and dancing. A typical drum group consists of 10–​12 male drummer/​singers who sit around a large drum, with female singers, seated behind the men, joining in partway through the song at a higher pitch. Series of hard drumbeats, called honor beats, occur at specific places in the songs, honoring the drum and cueing the dancers. Dancers acknowledge the honor beats in different ways, according to their style of dance. For example, the dignified southern cloth dancer bows her head, while the energetic jingle-​dress dancer raises her fan. Northern and Southern drum groups use the same basic powwow song structure. “Straight songs” (in duple time with no deviations from the form) accompany intertribal dances and many of the traditional dance styles. Straight songs are comprised of

From Powwow to Stomp Dance    621 the “lead” (the lead singer begins the first line of the song); the “second” (the rest of the male drummer/​singers join in the song); the “first chorus” (the A section of the song); the “honor beats” (hard beats on the drum; in Southern songs this consists of three strong beats with a softer beat between each of the hard beats); the “second chorus” (the B section of the song); the repetition of the entire song (which is often sung four times through); and the “tail” (the coda or final section—​a repetition of the second chorus). Southern powwow songs generally finish with a distinctive flourish consisting of five consecutive strong drumbeats. Choctaw ethnomusicologist Tara Browner (2000) notes that this form is often termed “incomplete repetition” by non-​Native scholars (Nettl 1954, 25; and Vennum 1989, 8), and “traditional” or “war dance” by Native singers, with distinct Northern and Southern variations (217).4 Competition powwow dancers internalize the basic song form so as to smoothly coordinate their dance moves with the music. They listen for the return to the second chorus that signals the last time through to ensure both feet are on the ground when the fifth consecutive drumbeat sounds. This is essential because competition dancers are honor bound to disqualify themselves if they “understep” (plant both feet on the ground before the song is over), or “overstep” (still have one foot in the air when the song ends). As contests and prize monies expanded, specific divided dance categories were developed that were determined by dance style, age, and gender (Zotigh 1991). Traditional powwow rules such as keeping time with the beat of the drum, stopping on the last beat of the drum, and not losing a major regalia article remained in place. By the early 1990s, rules and regulations at major contest powwows were explicitly spelled out, in large part to avoid disputes with cash prizes at stake. Competition became the focal point of almost all major intertribal powwows—​sponsoring a contest served as a drawing card for the powwow and helped dancers to defray their traveling costs, as well as rewarding the best dancers. Dance preparation itself became an art, with physical stamina, dedication, showmanship, knowledge of songs, and an outstanding dance outfit as the key ingredients to produce a champion powwow dancer. The primary element differentiating competition from traditional powwows is the formal song and dance contests featured at competition dances, often with quite-​large cash prizes for participants. Powwow dance styles associated with Northern drum groups are the men’s northern traditional, grass dance, and northern fancy dance, and the women’s northern buckskin, jingle dress, and fancy shawl dances. Southern drum groups are used for the men’s straight dance and southern fancy dance, and for the women’s southern cloth and southern buckskin. In stark contrast to the competitive powwows are the older, traditional “war dances” (community powwows hosted by individual tribes), generally much smaller gatherings with relatively modest budgets and an emphasis on community friendship. Social powwow dances occurring at traditional powwows include the intertribal and the round dance. These social dances are also announced sporadically at competition powwows, such as between contest songs while the judges’ scores are being tabulated. Browner points out the aesthetic paradox that emerged in the southern Plains in the early 20th century. Although dancers from both the northern and southern Plains

622   Paula J. Conlon areas interacted in the Wild West Shows at the turn of the 20th century, “modification and transformation in pow-​wow dance style—​specifically in the regalia and footwork of Fancy Dances—​was far more acceptable than messing with the sound and form of the music” (2009, 133). The close proximity of tribes to one another in Oklahoma contributed to an overarching “Southern” powwow singing style that has changed relatively little since the late 1800s. Southern Plains traditional powwow dancing is epitomized by the men’s dance style called the straight dance.

The Straight Dance The men’s powwow dance style referred to as the straight dance (also known as southern traditional or southern straight) has its roots among Plains Heluska societies, comprised of chiefs and warriors of the Iowa, Kaw, Omaha, Otoe, Pawnee, and Ponca tribes (Zotigh 1991). A Ponca story tells how the Heluska ritual was revealed to them by an old buffalo bull, in the time when men and animals could communicate together. The long back trailer worn by the dancers formally served as a foundation display for a buffalo bull’s tail, which represented the authority or power inherent to a war leader. The term straight dance came from a description of the Osage, who danced “straight up and down,” who received the “rights” to the Heluska from the Ponca tribe in Oklahoma. Another description calls it the “gentlemen’s dance,” because of the stately posture of the dancers. The regalia of the straight dancer are complex and conform to tribal standards, with many articles denoting status and having to be earned (Zotigh 1991). The origin of the use of the otter hide stems from the Dog Soldier Society, whose members wore a heavy, decorated strap down their backs. Hairplates and otter skins replaced these straps, with the otter signifying wealth because it was considered a clever and very hard animal to obtain. Porcupine “head roaches” are worn on top of the head. The roach is the first article a straight dancer receives when he enters the dance arena for the first time, in a ceremony called roaching. A beaded or ribbon-​worked vest or long-​sleeved “ribbon shirt” covers the dancer’s upper torso, and brass or sleigh bells are wrapped over garters and worn directly below the dancer’s knees. Most straight dancers carry a dance stick or staff, sometimes replaced with wooden mirror boards (see Figure 27.2). When the drum starts, the straight dancer begins dancing with a deliberate attitude that is expressed continuously until the end of the song. When the three honor beats are emphasized in the middle of the song, some straight dancers send out “war yells,” whereas others put their staffs or mirror boards low to the ground, as if to point out the track of an animal or enemy. Most straight dancers outline a hunting or war story within their choreography, although the storyline is somewhat constrained in actual exhibition because the dance emphasizes dignified and fluid movements. As noted by Kiowa dancer Dennis Zotigh (1991), “you will never see mock fighting or explicit battle reenactments.”5

From Powwow to Stomp Dance    623

Figure 27.2  Kiowa straight dancer Terry Tsotigh, Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community powwow, August 18, 2011. Photo courtesy of Terry Tsotigh.

The public spotlight on powwows in Oklahoma makes it easy to assume these events are the only remnant of artistic expression of Native ethnicity left in this state. On the contrary, there were, and still are, ways of singing and dancing that existed before the powwow came. Eastern tribes removed to Indian Territory in the 1800s include the Caddo, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Delaware, Miami, Mvskoke (Creek), Natchez, Ottawa, Peoria, Quapaw, Seminole, Seneca-​Cayuga, Shawnee, Wyandotte, and Yuchi tribes, all of whom share the stomp dance tradition. Their descendants believe that “keeping up with our stomp dancing” allows them to continue to maintain collective social ties with other Woodland communities, sharing a world of social relationship that is augmented but not superseded by the powwow (Jackson 2005, 190).

Stomp Dance and Native Identity Deep in the woods of eastern Oklahoma, all-​night stomp dances have kept the Green Corn religion of Woodland tribes alive and well. In stark contrast to the virtuosic competition powwows the state is known for, ceremonial outdoor stomp dances remain as private communal events made up of series of song cycles with dancers in single file

624   Paula J. Conlon forming a counterclockwise spiral around a sacred fire, alternating male and female dancers, with children at the end of the line. Male dancers sing in a call and response format, supported by the percussive accompaniment of the female dancers wearing turtle-​shell or condensed milk-​can rattles strapped around their calves under long, full skirts that allow for freedom of movement (see Figure 27.3). Members of the stomp grounds travel to each other’s dances throughout the summer months to “help out,” and these ceremonial stomp dances form the backbone of the Green Corn religion of the Woodland tribes. In Oklahoma and the southeastern United States, the distinctive leg rattles worn by the women (called “shell shakers”) are considered icons of the stomp dance tradition. Using highly skilled, double-​step movements to produce a smooth, polished, gliding sound, the rattles resound in the still night air. Choctaw preservationist Gary White Deer comments that, “enough shell shakers dancing in sync can remind you of the sound and power of a freight train” (1995, 11). Women not wearing shells or cans join in after the shell shakers, with children at the end of the line. The dance step of the men and the women not wearing leg rattles is basically a walk or shuffle to the beat of the shell shakers. At the all-​night dance that culminates the Green Corn ceremony, the importance of

Figure 27.3  Stomp dance demonstration at Chickasaw Nation Festival, Tishomingo, Oklahoma, October 6, 2007. Photograph taken by Timothy Proctor. Used by permission.

From Powwow to Stomp Dance    625

Figure 27.4  Mvskoke shell shaker Linda Alexander. Photo courtesy of Linda Alexander.

the shell shakers is paramount because their constant rhythm “helps move the dances and songs forward through the long night.” Woodland tribes in the northeast United States did not traditionally wear leg rattles (Kurath 1961, 180), although some of the northeastern tribes removed to Indian Territory in the 1800s gradually adopted the practice of “shaking shells” from their neighbors in Indian Territory whose original homeland was the southeastern United States. These northeastern Oklahoma groups, such as the Seneca-​Cayuga tribe from the Great Lakes area, prefer cans over shells for the women’s leg rattles. Anthropologist Jason Jackson notes that southeastern Woodland tribes, whose use of shells extends back into antiquity, believe that shells possess a religious connotation that cans lack, the use of cans having originated in the early-​to mid-​20th century (2005, 194-​195) (see Figure 27.4). The Native religion practiced by both northeastern and southeastern Woodland tribes is called “Green Corn” (Laubin & Laubin 1976, 171).6

Green Corn Religion The Green Corn dance is the focal point for the traditional religious life of the majority of Woodland tribes, where worship and dance occur simultaneously. The Green Corn religion is comprised of a series of stomp dances that take place around a sacred fire at ceremonial grounds on tribal land. Mvskoke shell shaker Linda Alexander (1917–​2009) (1998) explains that the smoke of the fire “takes their prayers up to the Creator.” She talks about the conflict between the Green Corn religion and the Christian church: “the

626   Paula J. Conlon missionaries thought that we were worshiping the fire, but that’s not it at all.” This viewpoint is echoed by Seminole medicine man Willie Lena who says that, “for traditional Seminoles, those who have not joined a Christian church and learned that such things are the ‘work of the devil,’ ” life revolves around the stomp ground, considered the ceremonial center and, originally, as political and residential centers of Seminole society (Howard 1984, 104). The pervasive misconception of the lack of Native religion has been addressed by a number of Native scholars, including Lakota historian Vine Deloria, Jr. (1933–​2005) (1973), and Choctaw historian Devon Mihesuah (1996). The Green Corn religion involves four all-​ night stomp dances on ceremonial grounds. The first dance is held in late spring and is the opening ceremony to renew and purify the sacred fire, or, as Alexander puts it, “to bring the fire alive” (1998). Traditional ground members will only dance around a lit fire at nighttime dances at the grounds.7 The next dance in the cycle is the arbor dance, held the week preceding the Green Corn ceremony. The day of the arbor dance, fresh boughs are placed on the four arbors that face the dance area (one per side) under which the men will sit when they are not dancing. The women sit as a group on benches or lawn chairs at the outskirts of the dance area (Conlon 2009). Green Corn is considered a renewal ceremony, marking the beginning of the New Year for Woodland tribes who practice the stomp dance religion (Tilkens 2004, 130). The four-​day ceremony, held in late June or July, begins on the Thursday evening after dusk with a short stomp dance around a lit fire, “to prepare the ground for that year’s ceremony” (Alexander 1998). The following day, shell shakers, wearing colorful ribbons on their outfits or in their hair perform the ribbon dance. Mvskoke medicine man John Proctor (1926-​2012) (2004) refers to the ribbon dance as “Women’s Day,” honoring the women in this matriarchal society as the “givers of life,” equating it in religious importance to the celebration of Christmas. At the ribbon dance, the women dance in single file, alternating four slow songs, and four fast songs in a counterclockwise circle around the outer edge of the dance area (see Figure 27.5). The dancers are accompanied by two male singers shaking coconut rattles, seated under an arbor. At the end of the line are the young girls, some as young as three years of age, wearing smaller versions of turtle-​shell or milk-​can rattles. The shell shakers are joined by the men at the close of the ribbon dance for a special stomp dance that closes off this portion of Green Corn. After dusk later that evening, everyone participates in a short stomp dance (an hour or so) before retiring to their individual campgrounds situated just outside the ceremonial dance area. Daytime activities on the Saturday of Green Corn include fasting, “touching medicine” (herbal tea prepared by the medicine man), and ritual scratching “to ensure a healthy life” (Alexander 1998). In the afternoon the men perform the feather dance, each man carrying a staff with a white feather attached to the top. After the evening meal, four calls announce the all-​night stomp dance that culminates the Green Corn ceremony. The dance begins shortly before midnight and lasts until dawn the next day, with short breaks between each of the song leaders’ rounds. Ethnomusicologist Victoria Lindsay Levine portrays the aural sensation as, “sound spiraling outward from the center in

From Powwow to Stomp Dance    627

Figure 27.5  Women’s ribbon dance, Okfuskee stomp grounds, Oklahoma, July 25, 2003. Photo by P. Conlon.

concentric circles” (2001, 469). The spiritual effect of the all-​night stomp dances at ceremonial grounds is described by Alexander as, “being lifted up” (1998). Members of the ground who have chosen to fully participate must not sleep until noon on the following day. This protocol relates to the origin story of Green Corn, when the corn used to ripen overnight until someone fell asleep. A communal breakfast is served the next morning, and people return to their homes on Sunday afternoon or evening. The yearly cycle will involve one more all-​night stomp dance held in early fall (late August or September) to close the ground for that year, which Alexander describes as “putting the fire to sleep” (1998). The ceremonial stomp dance cycle will resume again the following spring.

Blended Traditions At first glance, it would appear that the Plains tribes who participate in the powwow tradition in western Oklahoma are completely separate from the Woodland tribes who practice the Green Corn religion with its associated stomp dances in the eastern part of the state. Indeed, the sheer number of dances held each summer at the 14 Mvskoke

628   Paula J. Conlon stomp grounds that have remained active (of the original 44 grounds) precludes a lot of extracurricular activities. There are, however, a number of Woodland tribes who incorporate dances from both traditions at the same event. Combination stomp dance/​ powwow gatherings are held each summer in northeastern Oklahoma by the Miami, Ottawa, Peoria, Quapaw, and Wyandotte tribes (Jackson 2005, 180). Moreover, a few communities in northeastern Oklahoma began combining elements of the powwow and the stomp dance tradition as early as the late 19th century. The Quapaw powwow (with stomp dance) was inaugurated in 1891, and the annual dance in this format has continued to the present day.8 Stomp dance contests also emerged in the powwow context of northeastern Oklahoma. Conducted on the competitive powwow model, judges evaluate the abilities of the men as song leaders and the women as shell shakers, with awards given for the best song leader and the best shell shaker. The wisdom of such activities has been questioned by some of the elders from ceremonial grounds in other parts of the state, who view the pitting of one leader against another as conflicting with the goal of ceremonial grounds to instill good will and camaraderie (Jackson 2005, 182). Not all elders share this viewpoint, however. Alexander (1998), who participated in ceremonial dances all her life, including leading the ribbon dance, recounts how one year she entered and won the shell-​shaking contest held in Miami, Oklahoma. Stomp dance contests have continued to be held at annual tribal powwows, such as the 2012 contest featured at the Iowa powwow held in Perkins, Oklahoma.9 The Caddo tribe, whose tribal lands are just outside the town of Binger, Oklahoma, takes the idea of parallel traditions to another level, hosting annual dances that include the stomp dance and other Woodland social dances alongside flag songs and round dances from the powwow world performed around the “big drum.” Regular participants at the Caddo dance ground include members of nearby Wichita and Western Delaware tribes, and this trio of tribes forms a special performance circuit connecting stomp dance and powwow traditions in their own distinctive way (Jackson 2005, 184–​185).

Intertribal Dances The 1970s saw the advent of indoor intertribal stomp dances during the winter months when the ceremonial grounds are inactive, held in school gymnasiums, community halls, and other public buildings. Primarily social in function, these indoor dances are often used as fundraisers for an Indian education program or other worthy cause, similar to the indoor intertribal powwows held in urban Indian centers in the mid-​20th century, to facilitate the distribution of resources to those in need. Indeed, many of the elements found at community powwows, such as raffle tickets, concession stands, a public-​address system, and an emcee, have been adopted by the organizers of indoor stomp dances. The indoor stomp dances range in size from relatively small dances (less than a hundred participants), such as the ones held at Kialegee Tribal Town, to five

From Powwow to Stomp Dance    629 hundred or more participants, such as the popular Valentine’s Day dance in Glenpool, Oklahoma. The popularity of the intertribal stomp dances also had an effect on the song repertoire in circulation at the ceremonial grounds. By the mid-​1990s, the songs performed at the indoor dances had become widely sung by a number of Woodland tribes, and had become like a second language. In turn, the increased familiarity with songs from other tribes resulted in more intertribal participation at outdoor ceremonial grounds. As noted by White Deer, even if the southeastern tribes in Oklahoma do not understand each other’s tribal language, they still share the stomp dance culture and its associated songs (1995, 11). The indoor intertribal dances served the function of providing a safe place for Native youth looking for weekend entertainment to go, which resulted in increased participation of Native youth at subsequent outdoor ceremonial dances (Alexander 1998). In turn, this led to an increase in stomp-​dance activities outside the Native community. The American Indian Student Association at the University of Oklahoma held their first intertribal stomp dance in 1982, which has continued as an annual event. (Their annual powwow was inaugurated in 1914.) Presented along with the standard stomp dances are specialty dances such as the duck dance, which is shared by Seminole and Choctaw tribes (Burton 2008, 82-​83). The spread of indoor intertribal stomp dances in the 1970s is reminiscent of the popularity the indoor intertribal powwow experienced in the 1950s, when tribal members relocated to cities in search of employment. Zotigh (2009) discusses how the powwows that sprang up in these urban centers to support these displaced Indians fulfilled their need to identify with other Indians, offering a sense of mutual “Indianness” at a Native gathering. He discusses the extent of the intertribal powwow phenomenon, stating that one can now find intertribal powwows wherever there is a pocket of Indians anywhere in the country, and that the intertribal powwow has also become popular internationally, both across North America and overseas. Ethnomusicologist Beverley Diamond explains why she felt compelled to include a section on the powwow in her book, Native American Music in Eastern North America: “while the powwow arrived rather recently in the regions that this volume is foregrounding, it plays such an important role in recent decades that this book would be remiss without considering it” (2008, 118). Many First Nations people in Canada have embraced the powwow into their local communities, such as the Northern Cree in the subarctic (Whidden 2007, 101–​120), and the Mi’kmaw in the Maritime Provinces (Tulk 2012, 70–​88), not to mention the powwow hobbyist movement in Europe, especially in Germany (Watchman 2005, 241–​257). Anthropologist James Howard’s suggestion that the intertribal powwow was responsible for the individual tribes in Oklahoma losing their distinctiveness and developing a nontribal “Indian culture” (1955, 215) ignited considerable scholarly debate. Ellis notes, however, that when Indian people talk about powwows and dance culture, they make a clear distinction between intertribal powwows and tribal dances (2003, 167). Indeed, the term pan-​Indian is considered an insult by many powwow people. Ellis relates how at the annual Stroud powwow (south of Stroud, Oklahoma) in 2003, a Comanche dancer told him, “I love to dance to all of that powwow music, but if it’s one of our Comanche

630   Paula J. Conlon songs, it really reminds me of who I am and why I’m here. So that’s what I’d say about this Pan-​Indian stuff ” (2005, x-​xi). On the stomp dance side, Jackson describes how ceremonial grounds in eastern Oklahoma sustain their tribal identities through participation in the Woodland social network, resulting in the stomp dance being simultaneously a tribal and an intertribal phenomenon but not a pan-​Indian one (2005, 193). He suggests that ceremonial grounds can be viewed as congregations, where memberships fostered by intermarriage, friendship, or other factors, with or without tribal ancestry of the ground itself, do not diminish the tribal identity of the ground. To illustrate how ceremonial grounds function as congregations, Jackson describes the mentoring he received as a non-​Native from an individual from the stomp dance community who facilitated his acceptance into a Yuchi ceremonial ground. Similarly, the author was mentored as a non-​Native by an individual from the stomp dance community, moving from observer, to shell shaker, to full-​fledged member of a Mvskoke ceremonial ground.

Parallel Traditions This chapter has examined the Plains powwow in Oklahoma, using the men’s straight dance derived from the Ponca Heluska Society as a case study of Southern style powwow music and dance, contrasting this with Oklahoma’s stomp dance tradition, using the Mvskoke Green Corn dance as a case study of Woodland traditions. Also discussed was how a number of tribal groups, especially those from northeastern Oklahoma, pick and choose elements from both powwow and stomp-​dance traditions to adopt for their own tribal dances. One isn’t quite sure what is happening the first time you go to Quapaw powwow, because you end up attending a stomp dance when you thought you were about to go home. For the Quapaw, however, this has been the status quo for over a century. Niezen offers an explanation for why outsiders have a problem understanding events such as the Quapaw’s tribal gathering, stating, “The appeal of ritual to the senses and imagination gives a false impression of permanence that belies tumultuous histories of suppression, defiance, and religious creativity” (2000, 1). Anthropologist Laurent Aubert goes one step further, stating, “There has probably never existed a ‘pure’ artistic tradition” (2007, 20). In the case of the Quapaw tribe in northeastern Oklahoma, the explanation of why they have an annual powwow/​stomp dance is in their history, but not in the shorthand version of encyclopedia entries. Originating in Mississippi and closely linked to the Osage tribe (powwow people), the Quapaw experienced the stomp-​dance tradition when a number of them drifted south upon their arrival to Indian Territory in 1833, where they were welcomed by the Mvskoke tribe. These members of the Quapaw tribe remained with the Mvskoke for 60 years until the early 1890s, when the government finally induced them to move back north to the tract of land designated for the Quapaw (Thompson 1955, 371-​372). The date of the Quapaw’s return to northeastern

From Powwow to Stomp Dance    631 Oklahoma from the Mvskoke stomp-​dance community lines up perfectly with the inaugural Quapaw powwow (/​stomp dance) in 1891. One expects to find a powwow taking place somewhere in Oklahoma on most weekends each summer. What one does not anticipate is the breadth and depth of the Native dance traditions in this state. On the other hand, stomp-​dance people in Oklahoma are well aware of the powwow, even those who have never attended one (Jackson 2005, 189). The maintenance of Oklahoma’s parallel dance traditions, alongside and sometimes even within the ever-​present powwow, enables Native people in former Indian Territory to maintain a link to their ancestral traditions, to experience their tribal heritage through performative artistic expression, and to ensure that Native cultural sovereignty is passed down to future generations. Along the way, they visit and share ideas with their Native neighbors at intertribal gatherings throughout Oklahoma, where they talk, sing, and dance together.

Notes 1. This chapter interchangeably uses the terms American Indian, Indian, Native American, indigenous, aboriginal, and First Nations (Canada) to refer to the First Peoples of North America, reflecting the range of nomenclature used at various points in historical documents, current literature, and communication with Native and non-​Native consultants. Oklahoma and Indian Territory are used interchangeably to refer to what is now the state of Oklahoma. The term Indian Country is used both legally and colloquially to define American Indian tribal and individual land holdings as part of a reservation or allotment; Indian Country historically referred to areas beyond the frontier of settlement, which were inhabited primarily by Indians. 2. The Mvskoke (Creek) stomp-​dance tradition was chosen as a focal point because of the author’s participation at stomp dances in Oklahoma since 1996, and her experience as a shell shaker and member of a Mvskoke ceremonial ground from 2000 to present. The author’s familiarity with powwow and gourd dance stems from her participation at dances across Oklahoma since 1996, and her experience singing with the Jacobson House Powwow Singers from 2011 to present, led by Ponca John Kemble and Kiowa John Hamilton, and Kiowa Tonia Cozad (granddaughter of Kiowa Leonard Cozad, Jr., head singer of the Southern powwow drum group, “Cozad”). Men both drum and sing, but are referred to as singers. Drum refers both to the instrument itself and to a powwow drum group, which is often made up of family and/​or extended family members. 3. The author attended the annual gathering of the Kiowa Gourd Clan in Carnegie, Oklahoma from 1998 to 2003. 4. The contrast between references to powwow form of non-​Native scholars (“incomplete repetition”) and Native singers (“traditional;” or “war dance”) points to what could be called the academic’s dilemma. Browner warns that, “Writing for two sets of readers—​ academic and Native—​requires fluency and respect for multiple musical languages, and the ability to navigate a political minefield” (2000, 215–​216). 5. Kiowa Dennis Zotigh is a powwow and gourd-​dance singer, dancer, and member of the Kiowa Gourd Clan of Oklahoma. He moved to Washington, DC to work as a cultural specialist when the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian opened in

632   Paula J. Conlon 2004. He was based in Oklahoma prior to 2004, working as a research historian at the Oklahoma History Center and as director of the Great American Indian Dance Company of Oklahoma. 6. When the author participated in the Seneca-​Cayuga tribe’s Green Corn dance in northeastern Oklahoma, she was instructed to bring her can rattles (1998; 2006; 2011). When she participated at Stokes, the Cherokee stomp ground near Tahlequah, Oklahoma, she was instructed to bring her turtle-​shell rattles (2006). 7. When a fire was lit just prior to a daytime stomp dance at a cultural celebration in Tulsa, Oklahoma in October of 2006, the author’s ceremonial ground did not participate, although the members had all made the trip planning to do so. 8. The author participated at the 1997 Quapaw powwow (/​stomp dance) held near Miami, Oklahoma as a guest of a Peoria student who told her that indeed, powwows and stomp dances can happen at the same gathering. 9. 2012 Stomp Dance Contest Flyer: “Stomp Dance Contest honoring George Gibson Sr.; Saturday, June 16th; Perkins, Oklahoma. Iowa Powwow Ground; Men Stomp Dancers—​ First place $300; Second place $150; Ladies Shellshakers—​First place $300; Second place $150; sponsored by the Gibson family.”

References Cited Adams, David Wallace. 1995. Education for Extinction:  American Indians and the Boarding School Experience 1875–​1928. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Alexander, Linda. 1998. Personal communication, July 10, 1998. Ardener, Edwin. 1989. “Social Anthropology and Population,” In The Voice of Prophecy and Other Essays, edited by Brandon M. Chapman, 134–​154. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Aubert, Laurent. 2007. Rpt. 2009. [French edition 2001] The Music of the Other: New Challenges for Ethnomusicology in a Global Age. Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Beach, Sally J. 1983. Ethnic Identity and the Boarding School Experience of West-​Central Oklahoma American Indians. Washington, DC: University Press of America. Browner, Tara. 2000. “Making and Singing Pow-​wow songs: Text, Form, and the Significance of Culture-​Based Analysis,” Ethnomusicology 44 (2), 214–​233. Browner, Tara. 2009. “An Acoustic Geography of Intertribal Pow-​wow Songs.” In Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America, edited by Tara Browner, 131–​140. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Burton, Bryan. 2008. Moving Within the Circle:  Contemporary Native American Music and Dance. 2nd edition. World Music Press, Wauwatosa, WI: Plank Road Publishing. Clark, D. Anthony Tyeeme. 2007. “At the Headwaters of a Twentieth-​ Century ‘Indian’ Political Agenda: Rethinking the Origins of the Society of American Indians.” In Beyond Red Power: American Indian Politics and Activism since 1900, edited by Daniel M. Cobb and Loretta Fowler, 70–​90. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press. Conlon, Paula. 2009. “Diaspora in Indian Territory: Stomp Dancing in Oklahoma.” In Folk Music, Traditional Music, Ethnomusicology:  Canadian Perspectives, Past and Present, edited by Anna Hoefnagels and Gordon E. Smith, 212–​220. England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Connywerdy, Kevin. 1999. Personal communication, July 2, 1999. Connywerdy, Kevin. 2000. Personal communication, February 2, 2000.

From Powwow to Stomp Dance    633 Curtis, Natalie. 1907. The Indians’ Book:  An Offering by the American Indians of Indian lore, musical and narrative, to form a record of the songs and legends of their race. New York: Dover. Deloria, Vine Jr. 1973. Rpt. 1992, 2003. God Is Red:  A  Native View of Religion. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing. Diamond, Beverley. 2008. Native American Music in Eastern North America. New York: Oxford University Press. Ellis, Clyde. 2003. A Dancing People:  Powwow Culture on the Southern Plains. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Ellis, Clyde. 2005. “Introduction.” In Powwow, edited by Clyde Ellis, Luke Eric Lassiter, and Gary H. Dunham, vii–​xv. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Fenton, Steve. 2010. Ethnicity. 2nd ed. [1st ed. 2003] Malden, MA: Polity Press. Gaede, Jethro. 2009. “An Ethnohistory of the American Indian Exposition at Anadarko Oklahoma: 1932–​2003.” PhD dissertation, University of Oklahoma, Norman. Gidley, Mick. 1992, Rpt. 1994. “Edward S. Curtis’ Indian Photographs: A National Enterprise.” In Representing Others: White Views of Indigenous Peoples, edited by Mick Gidley, 103–​119. Exeter, England: University of Exeter Press. Heth, Charlotte Anne Wilson. 1992. Rpt. 1993. “American Indian Dance:  A  Celebration of Survival and Adaptation.” In Native American Dance:  Ceremonies and Social Traditions, edited by Charlotte Heth, 1–​18. Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing. Howard, James. 1955. “The Pan-​Indian Culture of Oklahoma.” Scientific Monthly 18 (5), 215–​220. Howard, James H. in collaboration with Willie Lena. 1984. Oklahoma Seminoles: Medicines, Magic, and Religion. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Jackson, Jason Baird. 2005. “East Meets West:  On Stomp Dance and Powwow Worlds in Oklahoma.” In Powwow, edited by Clyde Ellis, Luke Eric Lassiter and Gary H. Dunham, 172–​200. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Jones, Rosalie M. 1992. Rpt. 1993. “Modern Native Dance: Beyond Tribe and Tradition.” In Native American Dance: Ceremonies and Social Traditions, edited by Charlotte Heth, 169–​ 184. Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing. Kurath, Gertrude Prokosch. 1961. “The Effects of the Environment on Cherokee-​Iroquois Ceremonialism, Music, and Dance,” In Symposium on Cherokee and Iroquois Culture, edited by W. N. Fenton and J. Gulick, 177–​195. BAEB 180. Rpt. In Kurath, Gertrude Prokosch. 1986. Half a Century of Dance Research: Essays by Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, 257–​275. Flagstaff, AZ: Cross-​Cultural Dance Resources. Lassiter, Luke E. 1998. The Power of Kiowa Song: A Collaborative Ethnography. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. Laubin, Reginald and Gladys Laubin. 1976. Indian Dances of North America: Their Importance to Indian Life. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Levine, Victoria Lindsay. 2001. “Southeast.” In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 3:  The United States and Canada, edited by Ellen Koskoff, 466–​471. New  York:  Garland/​ Taylor and Francis Group. Littleman, Steve. 1999. Personal communication, July 2, 1999. McKenzie-​Jones, Paul. 2010. ““We are among the poor, the powerless, the inexperienced and the inarticulate”: Clyde Warrior’s Campaign for a “Greater Indian America.”” The American Indian Quarterly 34 (2) (Spring), 224–​257.

634   Paula J. Conlon Meadows, William C. 1999. Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche Military Societies. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Mihesuah, Devon A. 1996. Rpt. 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2004. American Indians: Stereotypes and Realities. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press. Nettl, Bruno. 1954. North American Indian Musical Styles. Philadelphia, PA: American Folklore Society. Niezen, Ronald. 2000. Spirit Wars:  Native North American Religions in the Age of Nation Building. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Pisani, Michael V. 2005. Imagining Native America in Music. New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press. Powers, William K. 1990. War Dance:  Plains Indian Musical Performance. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Pratt, Richard Henry. 1892. Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction (1892), 46–​59. Rpt. 1978. “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites.” In Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–​1900, edited by Francis Paul Prucha, 260–​271. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Pratt, Richard Henry. 1908. Annual Report of the United States Indian School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Proctor, John. 2004. Personal communication, July 2, 2004. Shaw, Anna Moore. 1974. A Pima Past. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Shea Murphy, Jacqueline. 2007. The People Have Never Stopped Dancing:  Native American Modern Dance Histories. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Slobin, Mark. 1983. “Rethinking ‘Revival’ of American Ethnic Music.” New  York Folklore 9, 37–​44. Thompson, Vern E.1955. “A History of the Quapaw.” Chronicles of Oklahoma 33 (Autumn), 350–​383. Tilkens, Bertha. 2004. “Traditional Ceremonial Grounds.” In Innes, Pamela, Linda Alexander, and Bertha Tilkens. 2004. Beginning Creek:  Mvskoke Emponvkv, 130–​134. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Troutman, John. 2007. “The Citizenship of Dance: Politics of Music among the Lakota, 1900–​ 1924.” In Beyond Red Power:  American Indian Politics and Activism since 1900, edited by Daniel M. Cobb and Loretta Fowler, 91–​108. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research. Troutman, John. 2009. Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879–​1934. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Tulk, Janice Esther. 2012. “Localizing Intertribal Traditions: The Powwow as Mi’kmaw Cultural Expression.” In Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada: Echoes and Exchanges, edited by Anna Hoefnagels and Beverley Diamond, 70–​88. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press. Vennum, Thomas. 1989. Ojibway Music from Minnesota:  Continuity and Change. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society. Watchman, Renae. 2005. “Powwow Overseas: The German Experience.” In Powwow, edited by Clyde Ellis, Luke Eric Lassiter, and Gary H. Dunham, 241–​257. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Whidden, Lynn. 2007. Essential Song:  Three Decades of Northern Cree Music. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

From Powwow to Stomp Dance    635 White Deer, Gary. 1995. “Pretty Shellshaker.” In Remaining Ourselves:  Music and Tribal Memory—​Traditional Music in Contemporary Communities, edited by Dayna Bowker Lee, 10–​12. Oklahoma City, OK: The State Arts Council of Oklahoma. Zotigh, Dennis W. 1991. Moving History: Evolution of the Powwow. Oklahoma City, OK: The Center of the American Indian. Zotigh, Dennis W. 2009. “Powwow.” In The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, vol. 2, edited by Dianna Everett, 1215–​1216. Oklahoma City, OK: Oklahoma Historical Society.

Chapter 28

Beyond C ol oni z at i on, C om modifi c at i on, and Recl a mat i on Hula and Hawaiian Identity Christine Emi Chan

Introduction On Thursday, April 28, 2011, twelve contestants exhibited their knowledge and skill of Hawaiian language and dance in hopes of winning the title Miss Aloha Hula 2011. The competition, which has been a part of the Merrie Monarch Festival1 since the early 1970s, is committed to the perpetuation of Hawaiian language and traditions as well as the development of “a living knowledge of Hawaiian arts” (http://​www.merriemonarch. com/​home). Thus, the Merrie Monarch Festival values both traditional and contemporary performances of hula. Yet, modern interpretations of Hawaiian music and dance often raise debates among participants, judges, and observers over whether a certain costume, song, or piece of choreography signifies Hawaii and Hawaiian culture enough to be considered hula. This is because hula is crucial to Hawaiian ethnic identity. Given the history of colonization and commodification in Hawaii, it is no surprise that nontraditional performances are met with critical reception. However, in this chapter, I want to destabilize the popular binary juxtaposition of authentic Hawaiian art and (mis)appropriated tourist kitsch. First, I will address the link between hula and Hawaiian ethnic identity, particularly as Hawaiians regard hula as essential to that identity. I argue that hula has been Orientalized not only by colonizers and the tourist industry, but also by those whose response to colonization is a call for purity and authenticity in the practice of Hawaiian culture. I am specifically referring to people who romanticize and mythologize hula and Hawaii prior to European contact. Therefore, I am interested in presenting a retheorization of hula that (1) recognizes hula as a recycled tradition,

Beyond Colonization   637 (2) acknowledges the unique history of the indigenous people of Hawaii, and (3) does not limit participation to certain bodies. First, I  analyze excerpts from Nathaniel Bright Emerson’s Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of Hula and sources collected in Dorothy Barrére, Mary Kawena Pukui, and Marion Kelly’s Hula: Historical Perspectives to argue that hula was Orientalized to facilitate European colonization. I particularly highlight accounts that characterize hula and Hawaiian people as foolishly primitive, uncontrollably sexual, and followers of an inferior religion. Next, I  examine how tourist websites and tourist performances of hula perpetuate colonization by portraying hula and the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl as hyper-​ sexualized on the one hand, and hyper-​spiritualized on the other. In addition to looking at Hawaii’s Official Tourism Site and the Paradise Cove website, I also draw on the works of Joyce Hammond and Jane C.  Desmond to demonstrate how the tourist industry maintains the Orientalization of hula initiated by European colonizers. Finally, I  argue that Haunani-​ Kay Trask’s “  ‘Lovely Hula Hands’:  Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture” and Momiala Kamahele’s “`Īlio`ulaokalani:  Defending Native Hawaiian Culture” reinforce certain aspects of Orientalism. In response to their efforts in the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement, I offer a retheorization of hula that neither perpetuates nor reinforces the Orientalist tendencies of colonizers and/​or Hawaii’s tourist industry.

Hula and Hawaiian Ethnicity The Hawaiians are a subset of the Polynesians, an ethnic group defined by a common language and cultural heritage. The Polynesians speak a branch of the larger language family of Austronesian, one of the most widespread linguistic families in the world—​ from Easter Island in the east to Madagascar in the west. From Southeast Asia to New Zealand and New Guinea, Austronesian speakers began to populate the South Seas, intentionally settling all of the habitable islands in the area. But it is not only in language, but also in kinship categories, religious beliefs, and for our purposes, the use of dance in many phases of ritual and social life that connect the Polynesians. In a preliterate society such as that of precontact Hawaii, hula, especially through the mele, the poetry that contains much of Hawaiian myth and legend, which hula, through its movements and gestures, helps to visually illustrate, became a primary mode of historical documentation of Hawaiian history for the Hawaiian people. In Polynesian societies, particularly the larger ones, chiefs and kings inherited their positions by strict succession rules. “Political regimes were long and enduring and succession to chiefly office was by genealogical rules. Dance texts might tell of a chief ’s deeds and his descent from the gods, while dance movements formed a visual extension of this poetry” (Kaeppler 1983, 10). Thus, dance was an important political vehicle in those contexts in which the poetry and the accompanying movements valorized the chiefs and other

638   Christine Emi Chan high status figures, and thus, celebrated the highly stratified status quo. Furthermore, the chief lines frequently maintained the poets, musicians, chanters, and dancers who celebrated their existence in their courts. After contact, hula also became a means to both mark one’s ethnic identity, and to use the dance as a means of resisting the cultural encroachment of other, more powerful cultural groups, such as westerners who, from the middle of the nineteenth century have held the important political and economic power on the Islands. It was the progeny of the severe Calvinist missionaries who seized land and power in Hawaii, overthrew the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893, and used the hula as an excuse for the takeover. They stated that the native devotion to hula, meant that the Hawaiians would be “lazy” and refuse to engage in the backbreaking work of the sugar and pineapple plantations that white plantation owners demanded in order to enrich themselves (Silva 2004; Skillman 2014). With the arrival of the Calvinist missionaries, and other Christian proselytizers, a tug-​of-​war over the propriety of the hula, and its centrality to Hawaiian society, produced a cultural battlefield that lasted well into the twentieth century. One righteous nineteenth-​century newspaper editor, Thomas Thrum, wrote, “But here is the evil: when the feasting was over there were displayed ancient pagan hulas of the time of the deepest darkness of this people…. The songs were worthless, the words so shameful they cannot be uttered by good people, the thoughts obscene. It is impossible to tell how evil and polluting were the things done last Friday at the Royal Palace” (Quoted in Barrère, Pukui, and Kelly 1980, 52). Hula went underground and reemerged countless times in a running skirmish between Hawaiian practitioners and haole (foreign) missionaries—​an ethnic battlefield. Queen Ka’ahumanu’s conversion to Christianity precluded a shaming of hula and other aspects of Hawaiian culture. “In 1825, she publicly announced her readiness to give up her many gods and to forbid the chanting of oli and mele on the grounds that they ‘contained foul speech.’ Informers were employed to hunt out violators of the law prohibiting what was described as the ‘lewd and lascivious hula’ ” (Hopkins and Erikson 2011, 36). William Ellis, one of the missionaries wrote in his diary after viewing the hula in 1823, “I preached to the surrounding multitude with special reference to their former idolatrous dance, and the vicious customs connected therewith… ” (Quoted in Barrère, Pukui, and Kelly 1980, 30). These fulminations and pressures from the government and church, temporarily drove hula underground, where it continued as a clandestine activity because of its salience to Hawaiian identity. Thus, a running battle line between practitioners of the hula was drawn with clergy and other pious persons on one hand, and those for whom the hula constituted an important spiritual element of their lives on the other. “As late as 1958, this nineteenth century Calvinist attitude displayed itself, this time publicly, when Nona Beamer performed a dance to Pele as part of her show at the Kona Inn. The next day, the minister of Mokuaikaua Congregational Church chastised her in his morning sermon, and, a few days later, her sons got into fights at school when classmates called their mother a witch” (Hopkins and Erikson 2011, 114). Barrère et al., however, point out the centrality of hula to Hawaiian culture, “… the very fact that clandestine hula schools operated on all the islands and that people were

Beyond Colonization   639 irresistibly drawn to hula performances argues that the majority of the people never gave up this facet of their lifestyle” (1980, 43). The cultural and ethnic war over the hula, and its propriety raged for well over a century, and, in some circles, remains unresolved; sometimes the hula dancers won, sometimes the Christians. Finally, profit motives seem to have won over religion, both Hawaiian and Christian, for hula today is often synonymous with Hawaii’s highly commercialized tourist industry. In what some call the “Hawaiian Renaissance” of the 1970s, part of a general emergence of ethnic awareness and search for ethnic roots, Hawaiians, often of mixed ethnic backgrounds, sought in hula and the Hawaiian language a means of recapturing their ethnic heritage. From that time, hula has been regarded as emblematic of Hawaiian ethnicity and identity. Hula was deemed a necessary factor in the authentic (re)creation of Hawaiian identity, and its importance as an ethnic identity marker has only increased into the present.

Demean and Conquer: Hula and the Colonial Project On January 20, 1778, the crews of the Resolution and the Discovery became the first Europeans to set foot on the Hawaiian Islands. Upon arriving at Waimea Bay, on the island of Kauai, Captain James Cook claimed and named the archipelago in honor of his patron, the fourth Earl of Sandwich (“Hawaii.” http://​www.britannica.com/​EBchecked/​ topic/​257332/​Hawaii). In doing so, Cook opened the door for subsequent explorers, traders, and missionaries, forever changing the history and culture of Hawaii. From that day forward, every aspect of Hawaiian life was influenced by the presence of Europeans. In addition to introducing the land and people to goats, cattle, Christianity, firearms, and a multitude of diseases, European explorers, traders, and missionaries also began producing the first records of Hawaiian society. Prior to this, Hawaiian people primarily maintained their culture through oral traditions. Thus, journal entries by these explorers, traders, and missionaries comprise the major sources of literature on Hawaii before the twentieth century. Unfortunately, these works are by no means objective, or even accurate, accounts of Hawaiian life. Saturated with European prejudices, these reports illustrate the process by which “European culture was able to manage, and even produce, the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-​Enlightenment period” (Said, 2003, 3). In other words, European-​written histories of Hawaii successfully framed the Hawaiian Islands as Europe’s inferior Other. Specifically, European accounts written during the colonization of Hawaii2 are riddled with Orientalist characterizations of hula as childish, unrefined, feminine, and highly sexualized. For example, according to Nathaniel Bright Emerson, hula is the “door to the heart of the people … so intimate and of so simple confidence are the revelations the people make of themselves in their songs and prattlings” (Emerson 1909,

640   Christine Emi Chan 11). Emerson portrays the hula as juvenile, nonsensical, and representative of Hawaiian culture, a move that casts all Hawaiians and all aspects of Hawaiian life as the inferior Orient. A passage from Captain James Cooks’ journal similarly belittles the Hawaiian people, describing one of their hula implements, the `ulī`ulī, as “like a child’s rattle” (Barrère, Pukui, and Kelly 1980, 15). Edward Said asserts that the characterization of the Orient as “irrational, depraved (fallen), [and] childlike,” (Said 2003, 40), concomitantly characterizes the Occident as rational, righteous, mature, and able because the Orient is understood as the “contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (Said 2003, 1–​2) of Europe (or the West).3 In addition to characterizing hula and Hawaiian people as childlike and uncivilized, Orientalist writings also sexualize the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl as the embodiment of Hawaiian culture. Meyda Yeğenoğlu’s Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism expands Said’s analysis of Orientalism to suggest how individual aspects of a culture are taken to represent cultural difference as a whole.4 In recognizing the attention early Orientalist writers give to the veil, Yeğenoğlu argues that the “figure of the ‘veiled Oriental woman’ has a particular place in [18th and 19th century European] texts, not only as signifying the Oriental woman as mysterious and exotic but also as signifying the Orient as feminine, always veiled, seductive, and dangerous” (Yeğenoğlu 1998, 11). Traise Yamamoto similarly argues that “constructions of the orientalized other—​and specifically of the infantile and hyper-​feminine Asian women—​functions primarily to reassert the coherence and primacy of the Western subject” (Yamamoto 2000, 43–​56). The sexualization of the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl, in addition to her depiction as peculiar and infantile, is evident in the writings of Emerson and other Europeans—​ most of whom are men. Emerson’s comparison of “the physical resemblances of the Hawaiian dance to the languorous grace of the Nautch girls, of the geisha, and other Oriental dancers” (Emerson 1909, 11) is of particular note because by grouping the hula with the dances done by women in India and Japan, Emerson relegates Hawaiians to the realm of the feminine and Americans to the realm of the masculine. Another example of the sexualization of the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl is the musings of David Samwell, a surgeon aboard the Discovery. Saturday February 27th … The Girls we have brought with us buy Cloth here for the iron & other things they have got from their Husbands; soon after our coming to an anchor they performed a dance on the Quarter deck which we had not seen before, it might be perhaps to express their Joy on their safe arrival at this place, it was performed by two at a time –​they did not jump up as in the common dance but used a kind of a regular Step & moved their Legs something like our sailors dancing a Hornpipe, they moved their Arms up and down, repeated a Song together, changed their places often, wriggled their backsides and used many lascivious Gestures. Upon the whole we thought it much more agreeable than their common  Dance. (Beaglehole 1967, 1221–​1222 quoted in Barrère, Pukui, and Kelly 1980, 17).

Beyond Colonization   641 Although Samwell found the outing pleasant and the performance “agreeable,” there is also judgment in his description of hula as “lascivious.” Here, Samwell associates the hula, and perhaps the Hawaiian people, with sexual desire, indecent behavior, and a lack of morals. This association is accompanied by the parallel association of Europeans with decency and ethics. Similar tendencies are also evident in the writings of Captain George Vancouver, whose work employs a more condescending tone. In the following passage, he recalls a hula concert. [H]‌ad the performance finished with the third act, we should have retired from their theatre with a much higher idea of the moral tendency of their drama, than was conveyed by the offensive, libidinous scene, exhibited by the ladies in the concluding part. The language of the song, no doubt, corresponded with the obscenity of their actions; which were carried to a degree of extravagance that was calculated to produce nothing but disgust even in the most licentious. (Quoted in Barrère, Pukui, and Kelly 1980, 132).

Vancouver claims that he would have been more satisfied by the concert had the program not included the final hula ma`i (a dance to honor the genitals of the chief), yet even after being presented with other dances, he continues to reference “the disgusting obscenity exhibited in former entertainments” (Quoted in Barrère, Pukui, and Kelly 1980, 21). In doing so, Vancouver reinforces his understanding of the Orient as morally depraved and Europe as righteous and decent. Thus, Emerson, Samwell, and Vancouver Orientalize hula as feminine, lascivious, and immoral, while concurrently portraying themselves as proper, honorable European men. Such characterizations ultimately justify the presence and influence of Europeans in the Hawaiian Islands. Furthermore, the colonial project was also facilitated by the conflation of hula with other forms of patterned movement. In her study of the Hawaiian dance genre known today as hula pahu, anthropologist Adrienne Kaeppler discusses the existence of “three structured movement systems” (Kaeppler 2004, 297)  in Hawaii before the arrival of Europeans. Her sources include records written in both English and Hawaiian, illustrations produced by both foreign and indigenous artists, and historical voices, which have been passed down from generation to generation. Kaeppler acknowledges that her research is tainted by European influence—​as the majority of her sources are written by Europeans; and the fact that the oral transmission of traditions is an imperfect process. However, she maintains that in examining these sources side-​by-​side, her analysis determines common themes and presents a “credible reconstruction” (Kaeppler 1993, 1) of pre-​European Hawaiian movement systems. The first pattern of movement, used in mourning ceremonies, was associated with the recitation of lamentations, locking one’s fingers behind one’s head, stretching one’s arms toward the sky, and beating one’s breast. The second pattern, ha`a, used in the “worship of the gods in sacred situations,” (Kaeppler 1993, 6), was performed by individuals designated to carry the priest’s taboo belongings. These movements were also

642   Christine Emi Chan accompanied by text as well as the pahu drum. The third pattern, hula, was used in entertainment and included “a series of lower-​body movement motifs performed symmetrically and a wide variety of hand-​arm motifs that alluded to words of the text and were performed in conjunction with a variety of sound-​producing instruments, such as gourds and rattles”(Kaeppler 2004, 297).5 Although hula performances often paid homage to Hawaiian gods and goddesses,6 the dance primarily served to maintain the social hierarchy. Upper class individuals and families would have hula performed in honor of their ancestry and accomplishments. As what would today be considered commissioned formal entertainment, “hula performances paid allegiance to the rank-​based sociopolitical system, which honored and validated social distinctions” (Kaeppler 2004, 301). Thus, although all three structured movement systems were associated with the narration of text and some form of percussion, the context in which each was performed varied. It is particularly important to note that only ha`a served “to worship the gods, who would look favorably on the requests of the performers and the congregation, especially requests dealing with the fertility of land, sea, and people;” (Kaeppler 2004, 301)  the hula was never performed in religious settings. However, the differences between these three patterns would become indistinguishable after the arrival of Europeans. European confusion of ha`a and hula united concepts of hula and a non-​Christian religion, which was quickly dismissed by European missionaries. According to David Chidester, author of Savage Systems, the process of first denying, then discovering, and finally dismissing indigenous religion is an important part of the colonial project. Drawing from the history of comparative religion in southern Africa, Chidester notes that the discovery of indigenous religions indicates a certain degree of success in the colonial project. [T]‌he discovery of an indigenous religious system on southern African frontiers depended upon colonial conquest and domination. Once contained under colonial control, an indigenous population was found to have its own religious system. Ironically, however, the religion discovered was the same as the religion denied. (Chidester 1996, 19).

In other words, colonizers often recognized the religion in indigenous populations only after colonial power was established. In order to understand the customs and traditions of the indigenous people, eighteenth century Europeans looked to the process of comparison. “During the eighteenth century, European comparativists generally assumed that there were four religions in the world—​Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Paganism, with the last sometimes divided into ancient, heathen, and diabolical forms” (Chidester 1996, 17). Thus, indigenous religions were often categorized as Pagan—​savage, vulgar, and wicked. Interestingly, one population’s assignment of an inferior religion by people in power is not limited to the colonization of southern Africa, or even the colonization of people abroad. Chidester notes the application

Beyond Colonization   643 of imperial comparative religion in the development of a universal definition of the Other. In isolating a primitive religious mentality, which was attributed to “savages” all over the colonized world, imperial comparative religion brought its analysis home by asserting that the same mentality was shared by animals, children, women, rural peasants, the urban working class, the deaf and dumb, criminals, and the insane in Europe. (Chidester 1996, 4).

Therefore, it is no surprise that Europeans, specifically Christian missionaries, demonized Hawaiian religion to substantiate the colonial project. In their article on Orientalism, exoticism, and self-​exoticism in belly dance, Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-​Young discuss Orientalist assumptions in the study of dance. Their analysis of Curt Sach’s World History of Dance demonstrates that Oriental dances are often assumed to have religious significance (Shay and Sellers-​Young 2003, 21). Indeed, while Adrienne Kaeppler’s analysis of pre-​European dance distinguished three structured movement systems, European observers failed to differentiate between them. This led to the conflation of ha`a, used in sacred rituals, and hula, used in entertainment. Whether the affiliation of hula and Hawaiian religion was a consequence of European ignorance or strategic planning is unclear. It is possible that colonizers were aware not only of the difference between ha`a and hula but also the degree to which hula performances signified the honor and status of the reigning monarch. In such a case, the Europeans would have been cognizant of the imperial muscle behind the practice of comparative religion. Regardless of how it occurred, the conflation of hula and religion is evident in the documents of Nathaniel Bright Emerson. In Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula, he writes that the hula “gave itself to the celebration of those mythical times when gods and goddesses moved on the earth as men and women and when men and women were as gods” (Emerson 1909, 12). Thus, Emerson bombastically redefines hula as a religious ritual. And in the quintessence of Orientalist thinking, Emerson characterizes hula and the Hawaiian people as hysterically invested in lesser systems of belief, pleasure-​seeking, and uncontrollable sexual desires. The people were superstitiously religious; one finds their drama saturated with religious feeling, hedged about with tabu, loaded down with prayer and sacrifice. They were poetical; nature was full of voices for their ears; their thoughts came to them as images; nature was to them an allegory; all this found expression in their dramatic art. …They were, moreover, the children of passion, sensuous, worshipful of whatever lends itself to pleasure. How, then, could the dramatic efforts of this primitive people, still in the bonds of animalism, escape the note of passion? …when they do step into the mud it is not to tarry and wallow in it; it is rather with the unconscious naïveté of a child thinking no evil. (Emerson 1909, 12).

Emerson characterizes Hawaiian theatrics, and accordingly Hawaiian people, as inspired by nature, “superstitiously religious,” overwhelmingly passionate, and

644   Christine Emi Chan innocently childlike. For Emerson, Hawaiians effortlessly communicated with nature and fervently practiced their religion to the degree that their devotion overwhelms their performances of “dramatic art.” Again, Emerson conflates hula and religion. This passage also characterizes both hula and religion as passionate and primitive. As “children of passion,” the Hawaiian people are depicted as animalistic, hedonistic, and simplistic. Thus, hula is associated with an inferior religion. Although Emerson’s picture of hula is slightly aggrandized, his opinion was widely shared among European explorers, traders, and missionaries. In her examination of “Acculturation in Hawaiian Dance,” Adrienne Kaeppler focuses on the attitudes of Christian missionaries. With the coming of the Europeans many changes became visible in the music and dance as well as in culture values. These included song texts honoring their gods and their chiefs. Thus, the Christian missionaries declared the hula pagan, sinful, and a breeding place for lust. In spite of their efforts to destroy the hula, it only went underground, and reappeared from time to time to the disgust of the missionaries and their Christianized followers. However, some Hawaiians, who had embraced Christianity, did not feel that the hula was antagonistic to the new religious concepts, and, for the most part, hula tabus remained in force. (Kaeppler 1972, 41).

Here Kaeppler is referring to the prohibition of hula following the baptism of Queen Ka`ahumanu. After converting to Christianity, the queen regent “began to look upon the hula as a ‘heathen practice’… and forbade its performance in public” (Barrère, Pukui, and Kelly 1980, 36).7 Thus, the European conflation of hula with a pagan religion, and consequently inferiority, was so powerful that even the Queen came to look upon the practice with disgust. However, as Kaeppler mentions, not all practitioners paid attention to either the Queen’s baptism or her edict. In response to the Queen’s prohibition—​and European Orientalization in general—​ hula dancers demonstrated agency in deciding to collude with European expectations of hula. Here, I rely on Saba Mahmood’s understanding of agency as performative8 to argue that although such performances sought to please European audiences, those performing were not powerless. In his article “Dressing the Hula: Iconography, Performance and Cultural Identity Formation in late nineteenth century Hawaii,” Christopher Balme discusses the staging of hula concerts as rife with “cross-​cultural misunderstandings,” highlighting the “genuine attempts” (Balme 1999, 235). of Hawaiians to cater to what they perceived to be European expectations of authenticity. In addition to performances of hula, Hawaiians also put on boxing and wrestling exhibitions for their European visitors (Barrère, Pukui, and Kelly 1980, 19). Thus, according to Balme, Hawaiians were quite active in the theatricalization of their culture. In fact, throughout both the European and American occupations, Hawaiians chose to portray their dance and culture in a way that allowed them to perpetuate the narratives of their ancestors. Sadly, efforts to perpetuate Hawaiian traditions were and still are often eclipsed by the sensationalist tactics of Hawaii’s tourist industry.

Beyond Colonization   645 The colonial encounter was deadly for the Hawaiian people. It has been estimated that as many as one million Hawaiians inhabited the islands at the time of contact. Through disease and land seizures, by the time that the Americans annexed Hawaii as a territory in 1897, there were only 40,000 “pure-​blooded Hawaiians.” By the turn of the twenty-​first century there were only 8,000 (American Aloha, 2003). Small wonder that Hawaiians, after a century of grappling with white haole opponents, seek hula so intensely. The performance of hula has become the essence of expressing Hawaiian ethnic identity (American Aloha, 2003).

Hawaii’s Most Exotic Commodity: Hula and the Tourist Industry An aerial view of Waikiki cuts to a shot of the USS Arizona Memorial; flashes of a fire dancer’s flaming staff, Honolulu’s statue of Kamehameha the Great, the iconic hips of a “native” hula girl, and a close-​up of Lady Liberty overlooking Punchbowl National Cemetery follow. These images from the opening sequence of the CBS remake of Hawaii Five-​O (Hawaii Five-​O—​Main Title Sequence 2011) perpetuate the tourist’s fantasy of Hawaii as beautiful, exotic, and decidedly American. The thirty second clip, which juxtaposes elements associated with precontact Hawaii—​such as the fire dancer, King Kamehameha, and the hula girl—​with symbols of Western, specifically American, influence—​such as the USS Arizona Memorial and the statue of Liberty, effectively portrays the 50th state as foreign yet familiar. This collage of scenery, landmarks, and “native” bodies set to the original “Hawaii Five-​O” theme song, glosses over centuries of racial, sexual, and political conflict in the islands. There is no reference to the history of Orientalism and violence that characterized the colonization of Hawaii by both Europe and the United States; yet, since the first episode aired in September 2010, the Aloha State has thoroughly embraced the television series and the publicity it generates for the tourist industry, Hawaii’s leading employer, revenue producer, and growth sector. Because Hawaii is exceptionally dependent on tourism, it is no wonder that portrayals of Hawaii as both exotic paradise and American state; portrayals that attract tourists—​ are not only staged by Hollywood, but also encouraged by the State. While the endorsement of tourism may be economically beneficial, the tourist industry perpetuates the colonial project by continuing to Orientalize hula through the appropriation and commodification of the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl. Drawing on Laura E. Donaldson’s critique of Western fetishes of indigenous cultures, I contend that tourist descriptions and experiences facilitate imperialist tendencies, such as the reduction of an entire people to simple, one-​dimensional characters, particularly, the hypersexualized foreign woman and the spiritually attuned being (Donaldson 1999, 677–​696). In addition, the tourist industry generally seeks out the least Hawaiian-​looking dancers to perform; they prefer mixed, only part Hawaiian dancer with a slim figure and light brown skin: the

646   Christine Emi Chan romantic native. “Indeed most visitors, unaware of the history of settlement and intermarriage in the islands probably assume that most of the local population is simply Hawaiian, a supposition supported by tourist advertising” (Desmond 1999, 140). But first, I discuss how the Hawaiian hula girl has always been used by tourism to construct relationships between Hawaii and the United States. Throughout this process of occupation, annexation, and admission, the United States promoted and practiced what Adria Imada calls “imagined intimacy” (Imada 2004, 114) and “imperial hospitality” (Imada 2008, 329) in order to establish a particular relationship with Hawaii/​Hawaiians. Performances of hula by “native” women were crucial to this process. Therefore, whoever controlled these performances controlled not only the portrayal of Hawaii and Hawaiians, but also the relationship between Americans and their newly acquired land. According to Imada, imagined intimacy describes the “fantasy of reciprocal attachment” (Imada 2004, 114) between Americans and Hawaii/​Hawaiians and is a consequence of the hula circuits of the 1930s and 1940s. During this time, tourism began to eclipse agribusiness as Hawaii’s most lucrative industry; therefore, “Hawaiian bodies and Hawaiian culture…became valuable commodities” (Imada 2004, 112) in the promotion of tourism in the continental United States. Many women left Hawaii to perform in American nightclubs and showrooms where hula was staged for “middlebrow American entertainment” (Imada 2004, 112). For instance the Hawaiian Room, located in the basement of the Lexington Hotel in New York, catered to American fantasies of Hawaii and the Hawaiian hula girl. The décor and ambiance were carefully crafted to evoke images of Hawaii. Tropical plants, murals of Hawaiian landscapes, “native” foods, and vacation-​worthy drinks set the background for the Aloha Maids, the Lexington Hotel’s troupe of four hula dancers. All four women were from Hawaii, slim, slightly tanned, and brunette (Imada 2004, 126–​130). This was the ideal phenotype for hula dancers, and because these were the only women from Hawaii many Americans saw, their bodies came to represent a “feminized version of Hawai`i…offering their aloha—​ the promise of intimacy, affection, and veneration—​to the United States” (Imada 2004, 114). In addition to portraying Hawaii as open, vulnerable, and desiring of the Untied States, hula performances in the United States allowed Americans who had never visited and would never visit the islands access to a foreign yet familiar place. Imada argues that in consuming performances of hula as well as the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl, “Americans could believe that they belonged to an optimistic, playful, and tolerant nation” (Imada 2004, 135). Thus, imagined intimacy created the illusion that America and its territory were one and the same. Imagined intimacy treated hula and the Hawaiian hula girl as a commodity and invited Americans to partake in Hawaiian culture. Similarly, imperial hospitality appropriated hula and the Hawaiian hula girl in order to invite the US military to colonize the Hawaiian Islands. In Hawaii, tourism and the military (US Department of Defense spending) have always been the state’s first and second largest sources of income, respectively. Teresia Teaiwa has coined the term “militourism” to describe the “profound symbiosis between militarism and tourism,” (Teaiwa 2001, 5)  which “reduce Oceania to

Beyond Colonization   647 mere sites for the playing out of modern dramas: heroic triumph over nature/​the Native on one hand and on the other, romantic indulgences in nature/​the Native” (Teaiwa 2001, 196). The military tourism industry is on display in the US military produced film Luau: A Native Feast. Shot during World War II, the video portrays idealized social relations between US servicemen and Hawaii locals. The majority of these interactions are filmed at a scripted lū`au, at which Hawaiian men prepared the food while Hawaiian women entertained the officers with performances of hula. “[T]‌he idealized social relations portrayed in the scripted luau serve to project an illusory peace over a continuing military occupation” (Imada 2008, 331). Therefore, although the military presence generated “frequent eruptions of racial and sexual strife,” these truths were occluded from the film (Imada 2008, 336). Furthermore, Imada argues that military cameras created a “sexualized rapport” between military men and Hawaiian women (Imada 2008, 340). Again Hawaii and the Hawaiian hula girl are portrayed as desirous of the United States. Thus, “Luau portrays a harmonious, yet hierarchical relationship, with the Natives in the position of cheerful and cooperative supplicants, and the haole (Caucasians) as gentlemen callers” (Imada 2008, 432). Although the relationship between the United States and Hawaii was not as one between equals, Americans, particularly the US military, believed the relationship to be consensual. This twisted friendship is understood as imperial hospitality. The portrayal of the Hawaiian hula girl both as a familiar foreign object and as desirous of the United States was used by the tourist industry to control the relationship between Hawaii and the United States, between whites and natives. In the modern age of Google, Facebook, and YouTube, the internet is one of the Hawaiian tourist industries’ most powerful tools for maintaining imagined intimacy and imperial hospitality between Hawaii and the United States. Websites, such as Hawaii’s Official Tourism Site, (Hawaii’s Official Tourism Site—​Travel Info for your Hawaii Vacation 2011) are the primary source from which potential visitors glean information about history, weather, and entertainment on the islands. However, the information is far from unbiased. As this website and similar sites are designed to appeal to individuals, couples, families, and groups looking for a tropical vacation. Hawaii ends up being romanticized and sexualized, intoxicating yet soothing, erotic, and exciting—​ the perfect paradise. By focusing on and emphasizing beauty, drama, and pleasure, these sites gloss over Hawaii’s colonial history, while simultaneously perpetuating colonization. “The people of Hawaii would like to share their islands with you,” the homepage for Hawaii’s Official Tourism Site coaxes, “The fresh, floral air energizes you. The warm, tranquil waters refresh you. The breathtaking, natural beauty renews you. Look around. There’s no place on earth like Hawaii” (Hawaii’s Official Tourism Site—​Travel Info for your Hawaii Vacation 2011). In six short sentences, the reader is inundated with striking images of island life while being encouraged to overlook the fact Hawaii has a history rooted in colonization, white supremacy, and patriarchy. In a fashion similar to the opening sequence of Hawaii Five-​O, Hawaii’s Official Tourism Site dismisses the problems of colonization, but emphasizes the benefits of

648   Christine Emi Chan Western influence in otherwise untouched areas. The island of O`ahu is particularly highlighted as a place where “Hawaii’s timeless beauty blends with the modern luxuries of today” (“Oahu: The Heart of Hawaii.” 2011). In addition to these written descriptions, photographs of landscapes, natural phenomena, and tourists taking pleasure in these scenes from a safe, comfortable distance decorate Hawaii’s Official Tourism Site. This statement and these images imply that there are areas that remain as virginal as they were before the arrival of Europeans, yet visitors will not be without running water, cell phone reception, or English-​speaking tour guides.9 However, the fact that running water, cell phone reception, and English-​speaking tour guides are only in Hawaii because Europeans and Americans were able to wrestle the land from the Hawaiians is not mentioned. Thus, the process of romanticization glosses over Hawaii’s problematic history of colonization and ethnic contestation while encouraging tourists to emulate the imperial process. The Paradise Cove website offers further examples of romanticized descriptions of Hawaii, but these pages focus on Hawaiian culture. The Paradise Cove website is centered on the presentation of Paradise Cove as “Hawaii’s Best Luau.” According to the website, lū`au packages include round trip transportation from Waikiki, a “tropical Mai Tai greeting,” (“Luau Packages” 2011) and a buffet menu feast, along with several other activities ranging from arts and crafts to storytelling. The visitor is ensured that the lū`au packages provide guests with an “authentic Hawaiian experience” (About Paradise Cove 2011). However, rather than authenticity, the main event seems to focus on escape and pleasure. The round trip transportation from Waikiki promotes the idea that the event is a diversion and there is a boundary that must be crossed in order to participate. At the lū`au, guests are constantly offered a variety of entertainment as well as food and encouraged to delight in the merriment, which reinforces the themes of pleasure and leisure. Thus, tourists become acquainted with a romanticized version of life in Hawai`i. Fundamental to this Hawaiian lifestyle is the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl. The fantasy of the Hawaiian hula girl as harmlessly sensual is perpetuated by the maintenance of the ideal ethnic phenotype for hula dancers mentioned earlier: slim, slightly tanned, and brunette, generally the result of ethnic intermarriage. Furthermore, the hula girl can never be associated with a specific face and/​or body. The Paradise Cove photo gallery, especially the Paradise Cove Extravaganza album, both highlights the performer’s bodies while demonstrating that both the men and women possess the desired characteristics discussed earlier. No explanation or identification accompanies these images, which makes the “native” bodies more accessible (as commodities). The Paradise Cove homepage reiterates this theme. The page features links to “lū`au packages,” “custom events,” “reservations,” and a photo of four women donning ti leaf skirts, wearing flower lei, and yielding `uli `uli, a hula implement made from a hollow gourd adorned with brightly colored feathers. Although four women are in the picture, only one face is visible, and this is barely a profile. Thus, the focus remains on the tourist’s experience of the lū`au, rather than on the identity of the performers. Thus, the Paradise Cove website romanticizes and hypersexualizes the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl.

Beyond Colonization   649 Scholars Joyce Hammond and Jane Desmond also recognize the processes of romanticization and hypersexualization in their examinations of The Kodak Hula Show and Germaine’s Lū`au, respectively. As analyzed by Hammond, the Kodak Hula Show, which ran from 1937 to 2002, was designed “specifically for the benefit of tourists who wished to take photographs of hula dancers under ideal photographic conditions” (Hammond 2001, 3). Staged first on the beaches of Waikiki, then in Kapiolani Park, the show was influenced by Western expectations. Although the performances were free and open to the public, this packaging and presenting of hula has been an example of cultural commodification. The performances presented a romanticized view of Hawaii (and the Hawaiian hula girl) because the show not only highlighted beauty, but also emphasized lightheartedness. The fact that the show and the parking for the show were both free supported this theme. Furthermore, “tourist predilections [shaped] performers’ choices,”(Hammond 2001, 19) meaning the performances at the Kodak Hula Show were “idealized and romanticized distillation of elements of Hawaiian culture selected for tourist entertainment” (Hammond 2001, 19). For example, the hula kahiko used to be performed, but was abandoned because the tourists did not want to listen to the chants and watch the stronger, sterner movements. Given this observation, Hammond notes that even though the tourist industry embraces hula, where early colonization demonized it, Westerners continue to gaze upon Hawaii, Hawaiians, and hula through an Orientalist lens. In the postmodern tourism industry, tourists may seem ironically to reverse the process of colonial predecessors by valuing that (or, more accurately, a representation of that) which was formerly destroyed and/​or condemned by Western missionaries, colonial administrators, and travelers. However tourists continue the process of appropriation of Others and their resources in many of tourism’s rituals and practices. (Hammond 2001, 4).

Therefore, the Kodak Hula Show presented tourists not only with ideal photographic conditions, but also with the images they expected and demanded to see. One image that all tourists were (and still are) compelled to see was (is) the figure of the sexualized Hawaiian hula girl. Although the Kodak Hula Show employed many women, not all of which fit the ideal ethnic phenotype for hula dancers, the performance always focused on the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl, rather than on individual dancers. This is similar to the work done by the photograph of four women on the Paradise Cove homepage. By refusing to allow one specific face and/​or body to be associated with hula, the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl remains a romanticized trope, a symbol of the tourist industry’s Hawaii. The creation and maintenance of this figure is supported by tourist expectations of the Hawaiian lifestyle, philosophy, and spirituality. Thus, Hawaii and the Hawaiian hula girl are characterized as carefree, sensual, sexual, and eager to share their culture with tourists. The Kodak Hula Show’s presentation of hula and the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl as open and available for consumption by tourists it provides the audience with

650   Christine Emi Chan entertainment and optimal photographic opportunities. Although the performance was tainted by being fetishized, the degree is not as severe as that observed by Jane Desmond at Germaine’s Lū`au. This may be because unlike at the Kodak Hula Show, an important element of Germaine’s Lū`au is audience participation. Thus, the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl is hyper-​sexualized to make her more appealing to (primarily Caucasian US mainlander) tourists. Desmond notes that the tourist industry manufactures these one-​dimensional figures of the Native Hawaiian to cultivate Hawaii’s unique destination image. Again, the tourist industry’s perpetuation of oversimplified notions of Hawaii and the Hawaiian effectively erase the context in which hula is founded and performed. The complex history of immigration, colonialism, and cultural change—​involving early Polynesian voyagers; European traders; European and Euro-​American missionaries and businessmen; Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Portuguese plantation workers; US servicemen; as well as more recent arrivals from Samoa, Tonga, and the US mainland. (Desmond 1997, 85).

In her analysis of Germaine’s Lū`au, Desmond highlights the fact that tourists are led to believe that Hawai`i encourages sensual and sexual encounters. The sensuality and sexuality of the place are condensed into the image of the Hawaiian hula girl. This characterization of Hawaiian hula girls is particularly emphasized when juxtaposed beside the clumsy, white men who are called on stage to dance and interact with them. Desmond finds it interesting that male performers are allowed to display individuality, but female performers are not. Once more, the association of a specific face/​ body with hula would spoil the tourist’s fantastic image of the exotic, yet innocuous hula girl. Thus, Germaine’s Lū`au uses soft primitivism to appeal to tourist audiences. “The innocence associated with the Edenic trope prohibits knowing, aggressive deployment of sexual allure, making the hula girl nonthreatening to men and women alike and associating her more with sensuous heterosexual romance than with sex per se” (Desmond 1999, 12). Operating within the matrix of heteronormativity, Germaine’s Lū`au portrays the Hawaiian hula girl as childlike and sensual to draw the audience into participation, rather than distant observation. Desmond notes “[almost] all tourist shows incorporate some version of [the] teaching-​the-​tourist-​to-​dance motif, usually playing on the awkwardness of the neophyte and the embarrassment that is supposed to accompany shaking your hips (badly) in public” (Desmond 1997, 95). Although one can reason that the (perhaps alcohol-​induced) carefree atmosphere of tourist shows allows audience members to overcome their inhibitions more easily, I would say that audience members participate because they desire to interact with the Hawaiian hula girl. Here, Desmond would claim that the underlying impetus is heterosexual desire: men desire the attention of the sensual Other, while women desire to learn from the “ ‘primitives’ who, being closer to nature (knowing how to hang loose), are ‘naturally’

Beyond Colonization   651 more comfortable with their sexuality and hence can release that sexuality in others” (Desmond 1997, 95). However, I argue that the desire to interact with the Hawaiian hula girl goes beyond a desire to experience her sensuality and sexuality. The commodification of hula is rooted in the tourist’s hope that the romanticized lifestyle of the Hawaiian hula girl can be acquired by participating in her dance. Tourists influenced, whether consciously or not, by the New Age movement find this portrayal of the Hawaiian hula girl particularly attractive. Knowing this, the tourist industry has hyper-​spiritualized, as well as hypersexualized, the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl, moves that not only emulates but also perpetuates colonization. One example of the spiritualization of hula can be found on the website of the Polynesian Cultural Center. Founded on O`ahu in 1963 and sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints, the Polynesian Cultural Center seeks “to help preserve and perpetuate the more ideal aspects of Polynesian culture, and to provide work opportunities for students at the adjoining Brigham Young University—​Hawaii” (“What is the Purpose of the PCC?” 2011). The fact that the Polynesian Cultural Center assumes the authority to judge which aspects of Polynesian culture are more ideal than others illustrates a parallel between the mission statement of the Polynesian Cultural Center disparaging attitudes of David Samwell and Captain George Vancouver described earlier. The required approval of Polynesian Cultural Center performances by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints adds a religious element to the relationship between the “native” performers (colonized pagans) and the audience (colonizing missionaries). Although the website does not explicitly mention the role of religion in this exchange, written and pictorial descriptions of the activities and shows offered by the Polynesian Cultural Center portray the “native” body as more spiritually attuned than that of the tourist. For instance, “Hā—​Breath of Life” (“Hā—​Breath of Life 2011”) is a dramatic tale of love and bravery, set in the South Pacific. The audience is encouraged to “Come. Breathe it in. And let the island spirit live in you long after your departure” (Hā—​Breath of Life 2011). The implication here is that there is something mystical about the performance that can be transferred to (and taken home by) members of the audience. Therefore, in addition to romanticizing the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl, the Polynesian Cultural Center also imbues her with spirituality previously not present. For Laura Donaldson, the New Age movement’s “search for alternative sources of knowledge…lifestyles and spiritualities” (Donaldson 1999, 677) reinforces nineteenth century Anglo-​European imperialism by Orientalizing indigenous cultures as primitive and, thus, closer to nature and more spiritually attuned (Donaldson 1999, 684). In her article, “On Medicine Women and White Shame-​Ans: New Age Native Americanism and Commodity Fetishism as Pop Cultural Feminism,” Donaldson argues that the framing of Native American culture as prehistoric promotes the belief that Native Americans possess wisdom from ancient sources (usually thought to be Nature), while the framing of the Native American as the Other exposes cultural elements to the Oriental framing. Drawing on the work of feminist critic Mieke Bal, Donaldson’s notion of the fetish

652   Christine Emi Chan focuses on the abduction of objects from their original contexts (Donaldson 1999, 686). In other words, the fetish as a process strips cultural elements of their historical meaning, sometimes imbuing the tradition with spirituality and/​or religiosity where there previously was none. Considering the majority of people involved in New Age movements are women, it is troubling that “the description of fetishization in terms of abduction and denuding ironically recalls some of the most oppressive social processes deployed against women by a masculinist society: their reduction to sexual objects, for instance” (Donaldson 1999, 686). Yet, fetishization remains an integral part of New Age movements. Those who have been inculcated with the New Age obsession with “native” spiritual traditions comply with Mohawk poet Beth Brant’s belief that “the new-​age is merely the old-​age—​capitalism cloaked in mystic terminology, dressed in robes and skins of ancient and Indigenous beliefs” (Donaldson 1999, 680). In other words the process of fetishization is this century’s version of colonialism. Thus, the tourist industry’s treatment of hula as a commodity, stripped of complexities that might trouble Hawaii’s destination image, certainly perpetuates the colonial project. Yet, because hula is a performance tradition, there is space within tourist displays of hula to speak against tourist culture. In “Hawaiians on Tour: Hula Circuits through the American Empire,” Adria Imada contends that the tourist industry offers Hawaiians the opportunity to perpetuate their culture, though within certain restrictions (Imada 2004, 119). Christopher Balme acknowledges this same possibility in his analysis of the Polynesian Cultural Center in “Staging the Pacific: Framing Authenticity in Performances for Tourists at the Polynesian Cultural Center.” Balme notes that while attempts to provide tourists with ‘authentic’ representations of Polynesian culture perpetuate colonial ideas about the islands, the performances by the Samoan and Tongan ‘villagers’ deconstructs the tourist gaze. According to Balme, this is accomplished through the use of performative mimicry; he writes, “Instead of imitating the colonizer and developing forms of subversion by holding up a distorted image of the European, the Samoans and Tongans appear to be mimicking European projections of themselves” (Balme 1998, 60). In other words, the Samoan and Tongan ‘villagers’ turn the visiting tourists into a spectacle by subtly coercing them into reflecting on the preconceptions they have brought to the performance. Although Balme’s analysis does not include Hawaiian villagers, his observations directly apply to performances of hula, at the Polynesian Cultural Center and anywhere else tourists may be called to reassess their understanding of hula and/​or the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl. Perhaps, an adaptation of the “teaching-​the-​tourist-​to-​ dance motif,” (Desmond 1997, 95) would provide the right backdrop for performative mimicry. Rather than satisfy touristic fantasies, performers could parody caricatures of themselves as excessively primitive, exaggeratedly sexualized, and extremely two-​ dimensional. Balme’s suggestion that performative mimicry can be used to subvert colonization is an example of one attempt to expose the ugly history behind the tourist industry; however, a retheorization that goes beyond performances for tourists is needed.

Beyond Colonization   653

Retheorizing Tradition: Hula and the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement Onipa`a—​be steadfast. This was the motto of Queen Lili`uokalani, Hawai`i’s last reigning monarch (Pukui 1997). Indeed, throughout her rule, Queen Lili`uokalani strongly opposed US occupation and sought to rectify the injustices endured by the people of Hawaii. She was especially concerned with injustices that were the consequence of European and American imperialism and spoke against those crimes of colonization. Her commitment to the fight for self-​determination and reparation for the people of Hawaii inspired and continues to inspire the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement. Thus, “Onipa`a!” has become the rousing and unifying cheer of Hawaiian resistance. However, this does not mean that the movement is without internal conflict. In fact, the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement is the site of major tension between discourses of purity and discourses of hybridity in the debate over who may identify as “Hawaiian.” In the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement, discourses of ethnic purity assume that the desire for self-​determination and reparation is limited to those of Native Hawaiian ancestry. Individuals whose families have lived in Hawaii for generations or who have immersed themselves in Hawaiian culture, but do not possess authentic blood are excluded. Conversely, discourses of hybridity embrace Hawaii as a “multicultural ‘racial paradise’ ” (Franklin and Lyons 2004, 50) where everyone is included; however, this inclusiveness erases the unique experiences and historical struggles of Native Hawaiians. In “Remixing Hybridity:  Globalization, Native Resistance, and Cultural Production,” Cynthia Franklin and Laura Lyons attempt to address the tension between these discourses. Through the analysis of two creative expressions of cultural and ethnic mixing, the authors strive to reveal and critique “the unproductive binary opposition between… ‘nativist authenticity’ and diasporic or poststructuralist forms of identity and community” (Franklin and Lyons 2004, 51). Although Franklin and Lyons focus on contemporary Hawaiian music, I believe their discussion to be useful in introducing the same issues in relation to hula. “Remixing Hybridity” introduces the issue of Hawaiian sovereignty by discussing the 1999 US Supreme Court case Rice v. Cayetano. Rice, a white man from the island of Hawaii, argued that the exclusive elections policy of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, which restricted the vote to only those who possessed Hawaiian ancestry, was unconstitutional. The Office of Hawaiian Affairs, an organization that oversees the Kingdom of Hawaii, defended its policy, saying that the elections should be restricted to people of Hawaiian ancestry because the group existed to support just those people (Franklin and Lyons 2004, 49). In the end, the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Rice’s opinion that the exclusive elections policy was unconstitutional. Franklin and Lyons credit the success of his case to an overwhelming army of attorneys and “popular contemporary rhetoric on race” (Franklin and Lyons 2004, 50).

654   Christine Emi Chan Specifically, Franklin and Lyons believe that rather than viewing the world as partitioned and disjointed, people tend to see a multiracial, multicultural paradise—​one in which ethnicity and Hawaiian ethnic purity should have no place. This is especially true in America, and even more so in Hawaii. Everyone is understood to contribute to the beautiful variety that is our nation. On the one hand, this places minority populations, such as Hawaiians, on equal footing with all other ethnic and racial groups. On the other hand, this celebration of equality erases the unique situation of indigenous people. Thus, Franklin and Lyons see the Supreme Court’s ruling as a “refusal to recognize Native Hawaiians’ special political status as indigenous people, who as a result of treaties signed with the United States, maintain legal claims to 1.8 million acres of land in Hawai`i” (Franklin and Lyons 2004, 49). Economics trumps ethnicity. In other words, Franklin and Lyons suggest the Supreme Court made their decision based on the belief that the characteristics that people share are more important than the characteristics unique to each person. Just as Mexican-​American, Japanese-​American, and Italian-​American identities are valued above their nonhyphenated counterparts, Hawaiian people are subsumed under an American cultural identity. Thus, this discourse of universality weakens the claims of indigenous people who seek cultural or political identities beyond that of a hyphenated American. This is also known as a discourse of hybridity, diaspora, postcolonialism, and/​or poststructuralism. Because these systems of knowledge often set out to debunk nationalist or nativist claims, they frequently produce a dualistic understanding of the world. Such conceptual schemes assume that Hawaiians center their demands on genealogical purity or cultural authenticity; however, this is not necessarily true. In this way, both “discourses of authenticity and cultural hybridity can work to undermine native cultural and political identities and rights” (Franklin and Lyons 2004, 50). It is with this knowledge that Franklin and Lyons attempt “to critique the complicity of discourses of postcolonialism in the erasure of indigenous cultural forms and political struggles” (Franklin and Lyons 2004, 51). In their analysis of Joe Balaz’s spoken word album Electric Laulau and Hapa’s cover of U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love),” Franklin and Lyons deduce that “culturally-​mixed music can serve as a form of resistance to repressive politics—​local, national, and international—​as well as an alternative to apocalyptic visions of globalization” (Franklin and Lyons 2004, 58). Yet, the tension between indigenous rights and postcolonial analyses remain. In their conclusion, Franklin and Lyons offer a suggestion for future studies. Native politics and culture cannot be subsumed into a globalized, heterogeneous domicile, nor equated with a naïve desire to return to pre-​contact past. If postcolonial criticism is to be responsible, if not revolutionary in its effects, the least that those of us who are non-​natives can do is to recognize that what native people demand above all else is their right to self-​determination. (Franklin and Lyons 2004, 74).

While I  agree that it is important to recognize the rights of indigenous people, acknowledgment alone does not resolve the issue of ethnic purity versus hybridity. Hula plays an important role in this ethnic discourse.

Beyond Colonization   655 Therefore, in this final section, I attempt to highlight aspects of hula practices that do not perpetuate the Orientalization, spiritualization, and fetishization of European and American colonizers to name a current retheorization that is beneficial to those who identify as Hawaiian. First, I provide a brief historical overview of the Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance and the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement in order to understand the arguments in Haunani-​ Kay Trask’s “ ‘Lovely Hula Hands’:  Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture” and Momiala Kamahele’s “`Īlio`ulaokalani: Defending Native Hawaiian Culture.” Next, I discuss how the use of hula by these two Native Hawaiian leaders involved in the struggle for Hawaiian sovereignty reinforces some of the injustices they are working to push against. Finally, I offer a retheorization of hula as a performative art form that (1) recognizes hula as a recycled tradition, (2) illustrates (so as not to fetishize by decontextualization) the unique plight of the indigenous people of Hawaii, and (3) does not limit participation to certain bodies. The Hawaiian Renaissance, also known as the Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance and the Second Hawaiian Renaissance, began in the 1970s. Characterized by a resurgence of Hawaiian culture, this movement included opposition to tourist-​centered culture, interest in Hawaiian language, or `ōlelo Hawaii, the creation of a new genre of Hawaiian music, and the revival of hula. Overall, the Hawaiian Renaissance attempted to counter the spectacle that tourists believed to be Hawaiian culture and the perpetuation of that spectacle by the Hawaiian government and people. The renewed interest in Hawaiian language can be credited to Mary Kawena Pukui, who wrote several books on `ōlelo Hawaii, most notably `Ōlelo No`eau, a book of Hawaiian proverbs and poetry. As `ōlelo Hawaii regained popularity, Hawaiian music began giving prominence to the sounds of slack-​key guitars. Often, slack-​key guitarists such as Gabby Pahinui, Keola and Kapono Beamer, and the members of Hui `Ohana—​ Dennis Pavao and the Ka`apana Brothers, sang in `ōlelo Hawaii (Kanahele 2010). This style of music greatly contrasted the hapa-​haole songs of pre-​Hawaiian Renaissance Hawaii, which showcased ragtime melodies and mostly English lyrics. Just as music received a makeover, hula also experienced a revival during the Hawaiian Renaissance. Following Queen Ka`ahumanu’s prohibition on hula, the dance was rarely performed outside the realm of the tourist industry. Thus, prior to the Hawaiian Renaissance, cheapened, fetishized versions of hula dominated the scene. Then, in 1971, George Na`ope and Auntie Dottie Thompson organized the first hula competition at the Merrie Monarch Festival (Merrie Monarch Festival 2011). Amy Stillman argues that the festival was established “expressly for the purpose of attracting tourists and tourist dollars,” but the content of the event does not support the destination image associated with Hawaii (Stillman 1996, 361). Rather, hula in the Merrie Monarch Festival celebrates Hawaiian ethnicity by celebrating those aspects which are often edited out of more commercialized versions of the hula. The Merrie Monarch Festival dedicates an entire day to hula kahiko and emphasizes the use of `ōlelo Hawaii as a crucial element in all performances. The hula performed at the Merrie Monarch Festival is much less sexualized than that which is performed for tourists at the Paradise Cove Lū`au or

656   Christine Emi Chan Germaine’s Lū`au. The hula `olapa (dancer/​s) do not necessarily fit the tourist’s fantasy of the Hawaiian hula girl, and the costumes worn must be historically accurate to the time period in which the song being danced was written. Preparation for the event takes years and participation is highly celebrated, thus elevating hula to more than a trope of the tourist industry. Thus, the Hawaiian Renaissance, which influenced all aspects of Hawaiian culture, revitalized Hawaiian ethnic pride—​giving momentum to the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement, which had been at work since 1893. Although there has been resistance to the United States since Queen Lili`uokalani was overthrown in 1893, the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement gained strength and popular support when the fight for self-​ determination worked in tandem with the Hawaiian Renaissance. Following her overthrow, several organizations were established to support the Queen while she was under house arrest. Immediately following the coup, the Kingdom of Hawaii was established. This organization worked with Lili`uokalani while she was in exile to restore the monarchy. However, after the Uprising of 1895, Lili`uokalani abdicated the throne because she did not want any more blood to be shed. Several years later, in 1900, the Home Rule Party of Hawaii was established by Robert Wilcox. The group was dedicated to Hawaiian nationalism, however, their ideas were often seen as radical. Their refusal to speak English and desire to grant Hawaiian magician-​priests, or kahuna, medical licenses led ultimately to their failure in 1912. Although they did not last more than a decade, the spirit of the group was resuscitated in 1997 when Vickie Holt Takamine reestablished the organization as the Aloha `Aina Party. Other contemporary groups also perpetuate the spirit of the Royalist Organizations. These assemblies continue to seek sovereignty as well as redress for the overthrow of the monarchy and the occupation of the islands. However, the specific goals and methods of these groups vary. The Bishop Estate was established in 1915 according to the will of Bernice Pauahi Bishop, a prominent woman and descendent of Kamehameha the Great. Bishop Estate includes the Bishop Museum, which displays the largest collection of Polynesian cultural artifacts, and the Kamehameha Schools provide quality, subsidized education to Hawaiian children. In 1978, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs was established. Their website states their mission. To mālama (protect) Hawai`i’s people and environmental resources and OHA’s assets, toward ensuring the perpetuation of the culture, the enhancement of lifestyle and the protection of entitlements of Native Hawaiians, while enabling the building of a strong and healthy Hawaiian people and nation, recognized nationally and internationally. (“Vision & Mission” 2010).

When the Democratic Party of Hawaii was founded in 1900, their customs were more pragmatic than those of the Home Rule Party, and they gained sponsorship from the American Democratic Party. They also staunchly supported the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, which is a controversial project that provides Hawaiians with a

Beyond Colonization   657 certain blood quantum with cheap housing and ceded lands. It is because of these issues that the final two groups exist in the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement. The Nation of Hawaii is the brainchild of Bumpy Kanahele. In 1989, the Nation of Hawaii took over the Makapu`u Lighthouse, and refused to give up their occupation until the government offered to exchange the land surrounding the lighthouse for land in nearby towns. Another active group is called Ka Lahui, which was established in 1987 by Mililani Trask and her sister Haunani-​Kay Trask. The goal of this movement was and is decolonization and self-​government. In addition to these principles, Ka Lahui values the protection of Hawaiian culture by and for Native Hawaiian people. In “ ‘Lovely Hula Hands’:  Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture,” Haunani-​Kay Trask demonstrates that in the debate between discourses of ethnic purity and discourses of hybridity, she tends to privilege ancestry over acculturation. “`Īlio`ulaokalani:  Defending Native Hawaiian Culture” similarly exposes Momiala Kamahele’s position. Both Trask and Kamahele understand hula to be a political tool, however, I argue that their views that hula should support a discourse of ethnic purity may inevitably perpetuate European and American Orientalizations. In “ ‘Lovely Hula Hands’:  Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture,” Haunani-​Kay Trask compares Hawaii’s relationship with the tourist industry to the relationship between a sex worker and her pimp. In introducing the character of the harlot, however, Trask must also acknowledge the character of the innocent virgin. She does this by romanticizing precontact Hawaii, precontact Hawaiian culture, and precontact hula. Trask describes authentic, pure hula as natural, or without “clown-​like makeup,” solely Hawaiian, or independent of other Polynesian cultures, “powerfully erotic,” physically demanding, sacred, and a celebration (Trask, 1999, 144). Trask usually writes with a flourish, but this description goes beyond melodramatic. The passage is just as much a spectacle as is the airbrushed hula girls in Waikiki. The first requirement is the transformation of the product, or the cultural attribute, much as a woman must be transformed to look like a prostitute—​that is, someone who is complicitous in her own commodification. Thus hula dancers wear clownlike makeup, don costumes from a mix of Polynesian cultures, and behave in a manner that is smutty and salacious rather than powerfully erotic. The distance between the smutty and the erotic is precisely the distance between Western culture and Hawaiian culture. In the hotel version of the hula, the sacredness of the dance has completely evaporated, while the athleticism and sexual expression have been packaged like ornaments. The purpose is entertainment for profit rather than a joyful and truly Hawaiian celebration of human and divine nature. (Trask 1999, 144).

In romanticizing precontact Hawaii and precontact Hawaiian culture, Trask devalues all other expressions of Hawaiian identity and essentially erases Hawaii’s complex history of colonization. This is not decolonization; this disregard for context constitutes a form of fetishization. Like an American tourist who takes souvenirs across the

658   Christine Emi Chan Pacific Ocean, Trask tears the figure of the Hawaiian hula dancer across time. Thus, Trask’s description of pure tradition paradoxically perpetuates the Orientalization and fetishization of hula. Momiala Kamahele is guilty of similar romanticizations. In “`Īlio`ulaokalani: Defending Native Hawaiian Culture,” Momiala Kamahele recounts the protest of Senate Bill 8, specifically the way she and other leaders used hula to legitimize their position. Like Trask, Kamahele retells the event with grandeur. Each time the drums sounded, we heard “refuse to part with your traditions.” Each time the voices of the kumu hula chanted, we believed the central message, “defend and protect your way of life.” And each time the dancers swirled in rhythmic body movements, we implicitly understood our responsibility to “keep traditions precious, for one day they will be taken.” (Kamahele 2000, 54)

Kamahele draws on emotion and the assumption that people see great value in connecting with ancient traditions. However, the use of hula in a nontraditional setting, in a struggle that has become about maintaining tradition, does not sit right. This is because hula has been limited by restrictive definitions of ethnic tradition. In Adrienne Kaeppler’s article “Recycling Tradition:  A  Hawaiian Case Study,” Kaeppler offers the following definition of tradition:  “… tradition is a continuous process—​constantly adding and subtracting ideas and practices, constantly changing, constantly recycling bits and pieces of ideas and practices into new traditions” (Kaeppler 2004, 294). This is exactly the process that has produced the majority of hula performed today. Rather than buy into Western ideas of preservation, which is embedded in the narrative of progress, Kaeppler suggests focusing on perpetuation. Where preservation calls for judgment to be placed, perpetuation refers to the belief that knowledge of the past makes for a better future. (Franklin and Lyons 2004, 53) Daniel Heath Justice’s interpretation of Craig Womack’s definition of traditionalism offers a similar lens for viewing traditions. In Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, Womack argues for “an alternative definition of traditionalism as anything that is useful to Indian people in retaining their value and worldviews, no matter how much it deviates from what people did one of two hundred years ago.” With this pragmatic definition, we avoid the trap of requiring an absolute pre-​Columbian precedent for the continued existence of Native peoples and Native cultural expression today while leaving open the important practice of drawing on history for useful inspiration and continuity without fetishizing it as a deadening, taxidermic standard for contemporary authenticity. (Justice 2010, 214)

In other words, tradition can be recycled into anything that is useful for those who identify with it. In the case of hula, the Merrie Monarch Festival, Patrick Makuakane’s halau Nā Lei Hulu I Ka Wēkiu, and the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine Department of Native Hawaiian Health offer such presentations.

Beyond Colonization   659 These performances are an excellent example of how hula should be conceptualized, as they (1) recognize hula as a recycled tradition, (2) illustrate (so as not to fetishize by decontextualization) the unique plight of the indigenous people of Hawaii, and (3) are inclusive to all bodies. Indeed, the mission statements of both the Merrie Monarch Festival and Nā Lei Hulu I Ka Wēkiu acknowledge the need to perpetuate, not preserve, hula. Patrick Makuakane refers to the style of Nā Lei Hulu I Ka Wēkiu as hula mua—​the hula that evolves (Nā Lei Hulu I Ka Wēkiu 2010). The Department of Native Hawaiian Health similarly acknowledges how hula can be employed beyond tourist performances, or even performances in general. Currently, research is exploring how the practice of hula can be used to address the health disparities between Native Hawaiians and the general population (Kaholokula, Saito, Shikuma, Look, Spencer-​Tolentino, and Mau 2008, 218–​222). Unlike Western colonizers and the tourist industry, the Merrie Monarch Festival, Makuakane’s halau, and the Department of Native Hawaiian Health allows hula to be defined in its own right, without requiring ethnic restrictions of its participants. Another difference between previous theorizations of hula and the retheorization I am attempting to draw out is the lack of an “ideal phenotype” in the Merrie Monarch Festival and Nā Lei Hulu I Ka Wēkiu. Both the tourist industry and some groups involved in the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement limit participation to certain bodies. However, neither Merrie Monarch Festival contestants nor members of Makuakane’s company are required to be slim, tanned, brunette, or Native Hawaiian. Similarly, studies done by the Department of Native Hawaiian Health on the use of hula as a cardiac intervention do not limit their participation to a particular body type. Although the study was developed to focus on Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, the results can be applied outside the phenotype of the original cohort. Finally, the Merrie Monarch Festival, Makuakane’s halau, and the Department of Native Hawaiian Heath provide context for each class and performance. Announcers at the Merrie Monarch Festival are often experts in Hawaiian culture and share their knowledge of the song, dress, and flowers presented along with the dance with the audience before each performance. Similarly, Makuakane encourages his company members to learn about the culture through immersion rather than fetishization, and the Department of Native Hawaiian Health explain their study before allowing patients to consent to using hula as treatment. Moreover, this kind of work bridges the gap between Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders and academics and scholars trained in Western schools of thought. This promotes decolonization without erasing the history of colonization in Hawaii and in hula.

Conclusion Since Captain Cook first arrived in the Hawaiian Islands, Hawaii has been framed as the Orient by European explorers, traders, and missionaries, as well as some Hawaiians who chose to play to European fantasies of Hawaiian culture. According to Edward Said,

660   Christine Emi Chan “The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, and remarkable experiences” (Said 2003, 1). In Hawaii, hula was the primary site for Orientalization because it encapsulated so many of those qualities. By characterizing hula as childlike, feminine, and morally dubious, Orientalist accounts facilitated the European colonization of the Hawaiian Islands. However, the Othering did not end when Hawaii became absorbed into the Occident. The establishment of the tourist industry ensured the perpetuation of colonization in Hawaii. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl was employed to construct feelings of imagined intimacy and imperial hospitality between Hawaii and the United States. Today, tourist websites continue to Orientalize hula and frame Hawaii and Hawaiian culture as the Other, ripe for consumption. Thus, hula and the figure of the Hawaiian hula girl are oversexualized and overspiritualized to support the tourist industry, which is rooted in colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy—​the very powers the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement aims to subvert. Since 1893, the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement has been seeking some form of autonomy for the Hawaiian Islands. However, debates over whether non-​Native speakers, nonindigenous people, or non-​Hawaii residents should be allowed to participate in the movement has prevented the group from obtaining unity, and perhaps success. Interestingly, in attempting to celebrate hula, certain rhetoric reinforces Orientalist tendencies to romanticize hula and Hawaii. Therefore, I offer a retheorization of hula by drawing out aspects of hula presentations that (1) recognize hula as a recycled tradition, (2) acknowledge the unique plight of the indigenous people of Hawaii, and (3) do not limit participation to certain bodies. While hula remains an important expression of Hawaiian ethnicity, many like Makuakane, open their arms for all to enjoy its pleasures.

Notes 1. The Merrie Monarch Festival is an annual event established in honor of King David Kalākaua and his patronage of the arts. 2. Following the expeditions of Captain James Cook, Hawaii was visited by fleets of American whalers and flocks of New England missionaries. These groups, along with a constant flood of European explorers and traders, greatly influenced Hawaiian culture and politics. In the early 1800s, with the help of Western military technology, Kamehameha the Great united the Hawaiian Islands and established systems of government and exchange based on European models. In addition to adopting the English system of rule by monarchy, the Kingdom of Hawaii also embraced European institutions such as “churches, taverns, and mercantile establishments” (“Hawaii”). The deep connection between the Hawaiian Islands and Europe is even embodied by the Hawaiian flag, designed in 1816. The flag consists of eight alternating stripes of white, red, and blue—​representing the eight Hawaiian Islands—​with the British Union Jack suspended in the upper left corner (“Hawaii, flag of ”).

Beyond Colonization   661 By the mid-​1800s, however, England’s strong relationship with Hawaii was superseded by a new bond with the United States. The liaison appeared stable until 1893, when American conspirators deposed the reigning monarch, Queen Lili`uokalani, by a coup, imprisoning her in her own palace. The Republic of Hawaii was established, and the sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii was no more. Over the next few generations, while the United States was progressing, depressing, and engaging in a series of global conflicts, Hawaii was slowly transforming from a republic to a territory, and, in 1959, to a state. Today, the eight islands of the Hawaiian Archipelago—​Ni`ihau, Kaua`i, O`ahu, Moloka`i, Lanai, Kaho`olawe, Maui, and Hawaii—​are collectively claimed as America’s fiftieth State. 3. According to Said, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” 4. In Colonial Fantasies:  Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Meyda Yeğenoğlu explores the intersection of Said’s Orientalism and feminist criticism by concentrating on the figure of the Oriental woman. According to Yeğenoğlu, because “Orientalism is mapped powerfully onto the language of phallocentrism,” the Orient is signified as feminine, dangerous, and in need of civilizing by European men. In such cases, the Orient is also often associated with secular paganism. This classification of the Other as incapable and eager for Occidental influence is particularly evident in European accounts of hula performances. 5. Kaeppler 2004, 297. 6. Hula was often performed in the name of the goddesses Pele, Hi`iaka, or Kapo`ulakina`u, or the god La`amaikahiki. 7. Barrère, Pukui, and Kelly 1980, 36. 8. Mahmood’s discussion of agency stems from her examination of the role of women in the Islamist movement. In Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Mahmood is interested in the tendency of Western feminists to portray Arab and Muslim women as “passive and submissive beings shackled by structures of male authority” (Mahmood 2005, 6) Rather than propagate the myth that all women in the Middle East are brainwashed into subservience to men, Mahmood suggests an alternative way of conceptualizing agency, outside the binary of resistance and subordination. 9. Although visitors to Hawaii are not limited to the Caucasian US mainlander, this chapter focuses on the experiences of the (primarily white, middle class) American tourist. This is because the relationship between colonized and colonizer is most strongly demonstrated by the consumption of the figure of the hula girl by American tourists.

References “About Paradise Cove.” Paradise Cove Luau—​Hawaii’s Best Luau. Paradise Cove. 2011