Table Of Contentmoving history / dancing cultures
moving history / dancing cultures
A D A N C E H I S T O R Y R E A D E R
Edited by
ann dils &
ann cooper
albright
Wesleyan University Press / Middletown, Connecticut
Published by Wesleyan University Press,
Middletown, CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
© 2001 by Wesleyan University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7
isbn for the paperback edition: 978–0–8195–6413–9
Design & composition by Chris Crochetière,
B. Williams & Associates, Durham, North Carolina
Title page photo: Ruth St. Denis in Radha (1906). Reprinted
courtesy of the Dance Division, The New York Public Library
for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative.
The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirements for
recycled paper.
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Moving history, dancing cultures : a dance history reader / Ann Dils
& Ann Cooper Albright, [editors].
p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-8195-6412-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 0-8195-6413-3
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Dance—History. I. Dils, Ann. II. Albright, Ann Cooper.
gv1601 .m86 2001
792.8'09—dc21
2001023549
Cover photograph: Companhia Clara Andermatt, Uma Historia
Da Duvida (A History of Doubt), choreographer,
Clara Andermatt, photo by Jorge Goncalves
P
icture this: as the summer wanes, dance teachers
across the nation are bent over the photocopier
frantically trying to assemble packets for their dance
history classes. In an effort to avoid the perennial ques-
tion of whether to photocopy or not to photocopy (or
at least to reduce the quantity of copying), the editors
of this reader have tried to assemble a collection of arti-
cles and essays that will serve a variety of undergradu-
ate dance history courses. Our goal was to make some-
thing useful—to make a book that stimulated teachers
and students alike. We wanted to make a reader that
would show students that dance too was an intellectual
discipline (see, it’s available in the textbook section),
one that would guide them into new ways of thinking
creatively about what they were engaged in practicing.
Obviously, any project this extensive required the
support, help, and advice of many people. The begin-
nings of this collection lie in the countless conversa-
tions we have had with dance teachers over the past six
years about the need for an undergraduate reader. We
appreciate the generous advice and shared syllabi of the
many scholars who helped shape this project. Thanks
to the participants of the Congress on Research in
Dance conference who filled out our questionnaire and
responded with enthusiasm to the idea of this reader.
Thanks also go to members of the Dance History
Teachers Discussion Group and e-mail discussion list,
marvelously facilitated by Tricia Henry Young and
sponsored by the Florida State University Department
of Dance, and to scholars who shared their ideas at
CORD and Society of Dance History Scholars confer-
ences. Their kindness helped us face the daunting task
of selecting the readings.
This project, however, would have remained in the
realm of the theoretical if we had not had the support
of Suzanna Tamminen, editor-in-chief of Wesleyan
University Press. Over the years that she has been at
Wesleyan, Suzanna has worked tirelessly to create a
dance series that is both intellectually stimulating and
accessible to readers throughout the dance field. Her
enthusiasm for this project reflects her commitment to
expanding dance literacy within all levels of higher ed-
ucation. In addition to our editor’s support, we wish to
acknowledge the importance of Rachel Wheeler’s con-
tribution. As an editorial assistant, Rachel worked
many hours paving the way for this project to go to
press by researching and obtaining the various permis-
sions needed.
Thanks to the Dean’s Office at Oberlin College and
the Ohio Arts Council for supporting this reader in
various ways. Thanks also to faculty of the Depart-
ment of Dance, School of Health and Human Perfor-
mance, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
(Susan W. Stinson, chair, and Robert Christina, dean);
and to the Research Grants Committee and the Office
of Research Services, University of North Carolina at
Greensboro (Beverly Maddox-Britt, director), for their
support of this project. Ann Dils thanks students in
the Department of Dance, University of North Caro-
lina at Greensboro, for their many contributions.
Stephanie Barkley, Julie Boulton, Amanda Kinzer, Julie
Mayo, Karen Mozingo, Jennifer Oldham, Douglas
Risner, Melissa J. Saint Amour, Amy Jo Smith, and
Lauren Tepper were especially helpful in preparing this
volume. Ann Cooper Albright would like to acknowl-
edge the assistance of Carolyn Husted, Jason Miller,
v
acknowledgments
vi \ Moving History / Dancing Cultures
and Abby Rasminsky, as well as the intellectual contri-
butions of students in her dance history classes at
Oberlin College.
Finally, the editors want to thank their families for
putting up with crazy schedules and absent moms.
Jahan, Mitra, and Cully Salehi were especially patient
with the process, as were Cyrus Cooper Newlin and
Isabel Albright Newlin. A very special acknowledg-
ment goes to Thomas Newlin, whose intellectual and
emotional support has reached out to catch the pieces
in so many different areas. These people are the ground
for our various flights of plain and fancy.
vii
List of Illustrations x
Ann Dils and
Ann Cooper Albright
First Steps: Moving into the Study of Dance History xiii
PART I—Thinking about Dance History: Theories and Practices
Ann Dils and
Ann Cooper Albright
The Pleasures of Studying Dance History
Deborah Jowitt
Beyond Description: Writing beneath the Surface
Joan Acocella
Imagining Dance
Millicent Hodson
Searching for Nijinsky’s Sacre
Deidre Sklar
Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance
Joann Kealiinohomoku An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance
Ramsay Burt
The Trouble with the Male Dancer . . .
Ann Cooper Albright
Strategic Abilities: Negotiating the Disabled Body in Dance
Sally Ann Ness
Dancing in the Field: Notes from Memory
Further Readings
PART II—World Dance Traditions
Ann Dils and
Ann Cooper Albright
Looking at World Dance
Erika Bourguignon
Trance and Ecstatic Dance
Avanthi Meduri
Bharatha Natyam—What Are You?
Lisa Doolittle and
Medicine of the Brave: A Look at the Changing Role of Dance in Native
Heather Elton
Culture from the Buffalo Days to the Modern Powwow
Shawna Helland
The Belly Dance: Ancient Ritual to Cabaret Performance
Karin van Nieuwkerk
Changing Images and Shifting Identities: Female Performers in Egypt
Kariamu Welsh Asante
Commonalties in African Dance: An Aesthetic Foundation
Z. S. Strother
Invention and Reinvention in the Traditional Arts
Barbara Browning
Headspin: Capoeira’s Ironic Inversions
Lee Kyong-hee
Epitome of Korean Folk Dance
Judy Van Zile
The Many Faces of Korean Dance
contents
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viii \ Contents
Mark Franko
Writing Dancing, 1573
Catherine Turocy
Beyond La Danse Noble: Conventions in Choreography and Dance Performance
at the Time of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie
Lynn Garafola
The Travesty Dancer in Nineteenth-Century Ballet
Susan Allene Manning
and Melissa Benson
Interrupted Continuities: Modern Dance in Germany
Further Readings
PART III—America Dancing
Ann Dils and
Ann Cooper Albright
Historical Moments: Rethinking the Past
Sharyn R. Udall
The Irresistible Other: Hopi Ritual Drama and Euro-American Audiences
Marian Hannah Winter Juba and American Minstrelsy
Jane Desmond
Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis’s
Radha of 1906
Julie Malnig
Two-Stepping to Glory: Social Dance and the Rhetoric of Social Mobility
Ann Daly
The Natural Body
Deborah Jowitt
Form as the Image of Human Perfectibility and Natural Order
Marcia B. Siegel
The Harsh and Splendid Heroines of Martha Graham
Ellen Graff
The Dance Is a Weapon
Nancy Reynolds
In His Image: Diaghilev and Lincoln Kirstein
Brenda Dixon
Gottschild
Stripping the Emperor: The Africanist Presence in American Concert Dance
Thomas DeFrantz
Simmering Passivity: The Black Male Body in Concert Dance
Sally Banes
Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater
Deborah Jowitt
Chance Heroes
Further Readings
PART IV—Contemporary Dance: Global Contexts
Ann Dils and
Ann Cooper Albright
Moving Contexts
Bonnie Sue Stein
Butoh: “Twenty Years Ago We Were Crazy, Dirty, and Mad”
Kathleen Foreman
Dancing on the Endangered List: Aesthetics and Politics of Indigenous Dance
in the Philippines
Ananya Chatterjea
Chandralekha: Negotiating the Female Body and Movement
in Cultural/Political Signification
REDACTED
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Contents / ix
Uttara Coorlawala
Ananya and Chandralekha—A Response to “Chandralekha: Negotiating the Female
Body and Movement in Cultural/Political Signification”
Cynthia Jean
Cohen Bull
Looking at Movement as Culture: Contact Improvisation to Disco
Peter Ryan
10,000 Jams Later: Contact Improvisation in Canada 1974–95
Steve Paxton
Improvisation Is a Word for Something That Can’t Keep a Name
Susan Leigh Foster
Simply(?) the Doing of It, Like Two Arms Going Round and Round
Ann Cooper Albright
Embodying History: Epic Narrative and Cultural Identity
in African American Dance
Richard Povall
A Little Technology Is a Dangerous Thing
Lisa Marie Naugle
Technique/Technology/Technique
Ann Dils
Absent/Presence
Further Readings
About the Contributors
Permissions
Index
. Mark Dendy as “Martha, the Priestess” in Dream Analysis
xii
. Merrill Ashley dancing Square Dance
. Drawings of dances from Le Sacre du Printemps
. Sketches of “Augurs of Spring—Dance of the Maidens” from Le Sacre du
Printemps
. Sketch of one of Roerich’s costumes for the original production of Le Sacre
du Printemps
. Notation of floor patterns from Le Sacre du Printemps
. “The unpleasant thing about a danseuse is that she sometimes brings along a
male dancer.”
. Ann Cooper Albright performing a dance about disability
. Avanthi Meduri performing “Woman looking at herself in a mirror”
. Indian boy at Kainai Indian Days
. Headpiece for the mask Gindongo (gi)tshi?
. Gambetshi Kivule performs the mask Gindongo (gi)tshi?
. Mukedi of Ngunda performs Matala, the modern young man, at the “Festival
de Gungu”
. The nun’s dance, symbolizing the Korean traditional concept of harmony between
heaven and earth
. The nun’s dance, encompassing the full range of sentiments innate in human
beings
. A geometrical figure from “Chorea nympharum” in Le Balet des Polonais
. The New York Baroque Dance Company in El Sarao de Venus
a and b. Dream Figure and Space Shape from Mary Wigman’s Visions cycle
. Valeska Gert
. The Green Table
a and b. Aerial shot of the Olympic stadium, Berlin; view of dancers on the field
. Pina Bausch’s He Takes Her by the Hand and Leads Her into the Castle,
the Others Follow
. Snake Dance of the Moquis Pueblo of Hualpi by Alexander F. Harmer
. Walpi Snake Dance by William P. Henderson
illustrations
REDACTED
REDACTED
REDACTED
REDACTED
REDACTED
Illustrations / xi
. Ruth St. Denis in Radha
. Irene Castle in a typical dance dress of the period
. American social dancing,
a and b. Reclining figure from the East Pediment of the Parthenon; Isadora Duncan
. Dances of Women
. Dionysiaques
. Color Harmony
. Drawings of dance by Elizabeth Selden
. Soloists of the Workers Dance League
. Earl “Snake Hips” Tucker
a and b. Kazuo Ohno, in his tribute to the dancer La Argentina
. Drag Walk from Sri by Chandralekha
. Chandralekha
. Contact improvisers warming up
. Disco dancers
. Urban Bush Women in Bones and Ash: A Gilda Story
. Still from Ghostcatching, by Bill T. Jones, Paul Kaiser, and Shelley Eshkar
REDACTED
REDACTED
REDACTED
. Mark Dendy as “Martha, the Priestess” in Dream Analysis. Photo by Phyllis Graber Jensen.
C
horeographer Mark Dendy makes dance histori-
ans smile. A seriously tongue-in-cheek dance his-
tory buff, his dances mine the riches of early modern
and social dance forms. Sometimes these works are
personal histories, sometimes they are parodies, but al-
ways they relay the importance of moving history from
the books to the stage. One of his most recent works,
I’m Going to My Room to Be Cool Now, and I Don’t Want
to Be Disturbed, is a pop-inspired, semiautobiographi-
cal dance suite about coming of age in the s. Set to
songs by artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Ike
and Tina Turner, and Patti Smith, the dance presents
social dancing as a safe way to experiment with differ-
ent identities. It is a place to play with the expression
of sexuality, to act out frustrations and feelings, and to
try out new (hipper?) ways of being. Dendy also pre-
sents dancing as transformative. Dancing can give you
hope in a hopeless situation, it can help you find com-
munity, it can be fun, doing it well can make you—as
it has made Dendy and his dancers—a star.
Dendy’s I’m Going to My Room . . . combines histor-
ical revisioning with a remarkable eye for intriguing
movement and fashion detail. If this dance and other
Dendy dances (such as Dream Analysis, featuring dual
drag Martha Grahams and dual Vaslav Nijinskys, and
his recent remake of Swan Lake for a German ballet
company) weren’t enough to demonstrate his commit-
ment to history, he is also engaging and articulate
about his affection for and artistic debt to dance his-
tory. In a talk after the June , performance
of I’m Going to My Room . . . at the American Dance
Festival, Dendy remarked that his most important
choreographic inspiration arrived via Graham’s film, A
Dancer’s World, shown in a dance history class at the
North Carolina School for the Arts. As a teenager, he
loved Graham’s divadom. She was a woman in female
drag, and her unflinching stare, combined with her
overblown, deadly serious discussion about dancers as
chosen people—as acrobats of God—inspired both his
spiritual reverence and his sweet yet campy imperson-
ation of her grandiose style. For Dendy, dancing is a
kind of contemporary ritual. It is a spiritual opportu-
nity to share energy, join in a sense of communitas, and
to connect to one’s movement ancestors. He is also
acutely aware of critical issues surrounding the display
of dancing bodies and the ways in which meaning gets
constructed on the stage. Thus, Dendy’s dances rarely
simply repeat history; rather, they recast figures from
dance history in order to speak to a contemporary
sensibility.
As an example of (re)embodying history, Dendy’s
recent work is remarkable—indeed, memorable—for
its demonstration of how history reverberates, how
it can be artistically and intellectually engaging to
dancers now. Dendy personalizes his dance legacies,
making them a vital part of his current performance
life. In addition to validating and celebrating the use of
the past as a source of inspiration and movement mate-
rial, Dendy makes clear to his audience how these
events sit with him, live with him, provide a way of
xiii
First Steps:
Moving into the Study
of Dance History
xiv \ Moving History / Dancing Cultures
knowing himself. Any historian would recognize this
interconnectedness of past and present.
Although their style and chosen media may differ
from Dendy’s, the writers in this volume share with
Mark Dendy a personal commitment to the subject of
dance history and a fervent belief that studying dances
from other times and cultures can enrich and enliven
our own dance practices and artistic visions. As we re-
searched, edited, and prepared the contents of this
book, we looked to shape a dance history reader that
would demonstrate how the study of dance can be
both intellectually and physically inspiring for today’s
students. Like Dendy, we are enthusiastic about the
creative potential embedded in historical inquiry.
While we come to dance from different intellectual
and physical perspectives, each of us has had deeply
significant and transformative experiences researching,
writing, and living other movement histories. To be
caught up in a desire to learn more about a particular
dancing culture or historical period is one of the most
satisfying physical sensations available to dancers. Yes,
physical—for dance, even as a historical study, is al-
ways first a physical activity. For this reason, we have
endeavored to create a text that speaks to both the bod-
ies and the minds of undergraduate dancers.
Mark Dendy may dance at the most energized edge
of dance history thought and practice, but his work
underscores several points important to this volume:
. Dance historians are a diverse group of artists, jour-
nalists, and academics involved in the study of
dance as a cultural as well as an aesthetic practice.
This means that we have enlarged our interpreta-
tion of historical discourse to encompass studies
that approach dance from a variety of disciplines,
including anthropology, ethnography, the study of
art and architecture, literary and cultural studies,
feminist theory, and performance studies.
. Dance history is not a historical record set in stone
or even in print, but an evolving discussion about
the past that can take on many shapes (performed,
written, personal testimony, or public manifesto)
and can happen as memoir, biography, dance criti-
cism, ethnography, and research compilation, as
well as cultural or critical histories.
. The study of the past, whether that means studying
a dance form from a thousand years ago, a choreog-
rapher working a hundred years ago, or a dance
concert seen last week, is simultaneously of and
about past and present. We encourage a passionate
approach to the production of knowledge, for the
strength of our understanding of the past relies
upon the commitment with which we engage the
present. Our sense of dance history as a field of in-
quiry changes as scholars bring new aspects of
dance history to our attention and as current issues
in the dance world create an interest in different as-
pects of the past.
. The ultimate reward of dance history is that it is
useful. This does not mean that we “use” the past,
unfairly plundering or misinterpreting past lives
and events and misrepresenting history in order to
validate our own agendas. Dance historians study
the past to illuminate people’s lives, explicate past
dance practices, and understand the complex inter-
connections between bodies, movement, and other
social practices that are a result of specific cultural
beliefs and epistemological frameworks. Dancing is
a way of knowing the world. History helps us rec-
ognize that fact.
For dancers, the usefulness of the past is that it pro-
vides us with inspiring legacies, helps us to clarify our
own choreographic visions, gives us a sense of continuity
and belonging, and allows us to see our field with a
tempered, critical eye. Indeed, the study of dance history
can help us see how movement both reflects and shapes
important questions within many cultures about identity,
the making of community, aesthetic beauty, the physical
training of bodies, economic productivity, and the dis-
tribution of power within social groups.
