Rethinking Dance History

Issues and Methodologies

Larraine Nicholas, Geraldine Morris, Larraine Nicholas, Geraldine Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138682900
• eBook ISBN: 9781134827701
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

The need to 'rethink' and question the nature of dance history has not diminished since the first edition of Rethinking Dance History. This revised second edition addresses the needs of an ever-evolving field, with new contributions considering the role of digital media in dance practice; the expansion of performance philosophy; and the increasing importance of practice-as-research. A two-part structure divides the book's contributions into:

• Why Dance History? – the ideas, issues and key conversations that underpin any study of the history of theatrical dance.

• Researching and Writing – discussions of the methodologies and approaches behind any successful research in this area.

Everyone involved with dance creates and carries with them a history, and this volume explores the ways in which these histories might be used in performance-making – from memories which establish identity to re-invention or preservation through shared and personal heritages. Considering the potential significance of studying dance history for scholars, philosophers, choreographers, dancers and students alike, Rethinking Dance History is an essential starting point for anyone intrigued by the rich history and many directions of dance.

Part 1
Why dance history?

Introduction to Part 1

Why dance history?

GERALDINE MORRIS AND LARRAINE NICHOLAS

WHY DANCE HISTORY? Our title for Part 1 was chosen in the knowledge it has two possible readings. Clipped of some words, it sounds like a challenge for us to show why we consider dance history to be an essential study. Read in another way, it asks why we still perform dances and techniques from earlier times, and how that might work as an embodiment of the past, supplementing the reading, writing and discussion. When there are so many stimulating methodologies and theories to engage with in the field of dance studies – anthropology, critical theory, neuroscience, philosophy, postcolonial theory, practice as research, sociology (just some examples) – why is it still important to locate dances and their contexts historically? While our authors also engage with a variety of theoretical areas, the essays in Part 1 are indicative of a range of answers to these questions, which remain relevant to the wider community involved in dance as well as to the dance student. Whereas we have not attempted to answer the question ‘What is dance history?’, some answers are implicit in the way our writers (in both parts) have engaged with their historical fields. We invite readers to consider and discuss.

Part 1 is also concerned with routes into history, whether through notions of personal identity, social identity or embodiment through dancing. How do we find that spark of connection that makes sense of a past moment? Our primary access to the past of dance is always through sources, whether written, pictorial or embodied. More methodological issues in relation to sources are considered in Part 2. Here in Part 1 there are some particular questions raised about the identity or authenticity of what we are studying as dance works from the past as well as the pleasures encountered in embodying them. The essays in Part 1 demonstrate the radical nature of historical inquiry, challenging received notions, such as time, heritage/tradition and the concept of the dance work.

Why dance history? Whose history?

Larraine Nicholas (Chapter 1) makes a case for everyone having a stake in history through consciousness of their own lived pasts. That being so, we must become aware of how many voices from the past have been historically inhibited by social and political power. Oral history projects documenting the participation of the many whose names are not ‘writ large’ by conventional histories are important, both to provide sources for future histories and to affirm the worth of individual lives in dance. Cara Tranders (Chapter 2) is one of those subaltern characters whose voices have been ignored, distorted or suppressed by history as written. As a corps de ballet dancer at the Empire, a variety theatre in Victorian and Edwardian London, she did not have a voice because of her insignificance as a lower-class dancer, and her perceived low moral standing, at least not until a historian spoke for her.

Other voices are commonly obscured by racist and colonial ideologies. Takiyah Nur Amin (Chapter 4) argues passionately that the dance history syllabus regularly reinforces the meta-narrative of American modern and postmodern dance as belonging to White women, whereas African American dance forms have been foundational in what is understood as American dance history. It is not so much about bringing African American dancers in from the margins of history as expanding what is seen as the central focus of the field. Amin’s argument can be applied to other geographic locations – for example in the UK, where ethnic diasporas, particularly from the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent, currently question how they are represented in dance history texts. Histories ignored or suppressed are the results of specific ideologies that conceive of dance history from a Euro-American viewpoint. Some of this unease is expressed by Royona Mitra (Chapter 3) as she reflects on perceptions that non-western dance forms are seen as fixed in the past, and not ‘contemporary’. Prarthana Purkayastha (Chapter 10) highlights how dance of the Indian subcontinent has been constructed as part of a binary notion of East and West, invented by western scholars, and therefore not integrated into the historical narrative. As Alexandra Carter discusses (Chapter 9; see also Nicholas, Chapter 1) we always need to be aware of how bias works in what is included and excluded from an historical narrative.

Memory, time and heritage

How do we find our way into thinking historically? Several of our essays deal directly or indirectly with the connection, linguistic and conceptual, between memory and history. Nicholas (Chapter 1) suggests that the connection to the past through personal memory is analogous to the ‘time travelling’ of historical study. We can also see our own past experience in dance, great or small, as the raw material of dance history, giving ‘meaning to individual experience as part of wider historical forces’. The autobiographical memories of Cara Tranders are a case in point. Akram Khan (Chapter 3) illuminates how the fluidity and emotional triggers that come with autobiographical memory provide fuel for his work.

If memory and history are ‘partners in time’ (Nicholas, Chapter 1) they suggest ways to bridge the divide between past and present. Given that histories are written about the past and that the past must be as elusive as memory, it is unsurprising that notions of time underlie a number of essays in this volume and it goes without saying that the past as experienced is a quite different thing to the ‘stories about the past’ (Carter, Chapter 9) that constitute history. Helen Thomas (Chapter 6) reflects that the perceived temporal impermanence of dance as an art form is one reason for the rush to reconstruct ‘lost’ works. Lena Hammergren (Chapter 11) discusses the tropes of time, such as ‘rise and fall’, that structure many historical narratives. However, we must remember that these tropes are culture-specific and not universal. Royona Mitra’s interview with the choreographer Akram Khan brings into focus how western notions of temporality consign dance forms like kathak to an unchanging past, whereas they evolve along with their best exponents. Khan’s works consciously embody notions of time. He weaves his embodied knowledge of the past into his ever-changing present, so that past, present and future coexist. As Mitra claims, there is thus a need to reconsider dance history, as living and dialogic across temporalities. Emily Wilcox (Chapter 13) shows how temporal values can be seen as ‘placist’, in assuming that western ideas of what is considered ‘modern dance’ should be applied to China. Further challenging our tendency to project concepts from our own time onto the past, Anna Pakes (Chapter 5) argues that we should not impose a twentieth-century concept of a dance work onto dances made in earlier centuries. Dance historians have tended to see the history of ballet and its dances as a continuous thread, each new ‘product’ building on a previous one. While accepting that continuities through time cannot be dismissed, she challenges our tendency to project our own aesthetics backwards through time: ‘[W]e should guard against a form of present-oriented conceptual anachronism which unreflexively subsumes earlier dances under modern categories’ (p. 66).

The notion of ‘collective memory’ has been theorised as a received understanding about the past that provides a group identity and cohesion, ensuring a collective connection to the past, commonly understood as ‘heritage’ or ‘tradition’. Maintaining a connection to the past of dance through its heritage works as embodied history is the subject of three essays in Part 1. Are these dances to be seen as fixed in an ‘authentic’ past or is there room for variation that accommodates change through time? Is the heritage of dance a closed book or, as Akram Khan insists, is heritage ‘like a museum, but one that keeps collecting, because its doors are always open’ (Chapter 3: 34)?

Sources and tradition

Our routes into dance history are through the sources, multifarious and complex. Written accounts, notation, film and oral history are all important but outside of those are the culturally codified constructed bodies of dancers and, as Susan Foster argues, also of historians (1995: 3). Older dancers’ bodies are living archives of past training and artistic practice, perhaps the only record of choreographed dances, and stylistic nuances that might have been lost through altered training styles. Foster (1995) contends that the objective and partisan historians treat the past in different ways. The objective voice, despite striving not to sully the evidence, treats the ‘historical subject as a body of facts’, while the partisan voice approaches the past as ‘a fixed set of elements whose relative visibility needs only an adjustment’. If, as she points out, ‘the past becomes embodied, then it can move in dialogue with historians, who likewise transit to an identity that makes such dialogue possible’ (1995: 10). She is arguing for the merging of the dancing body with the writing body of the historian.

Issues of reconstruction, reimagining and restaging are currently highly relevant as companies remount or reconstruct past works. But this is an area that is greatly disputed and it is not clear what exactly it is that we try to restage. Helen Thomas (Chapter 6) interrogates some of these issues, examining notions of revival, reconstruction, re-creation, co-authorship, reinvention and more. Scholars use these terms in a variety of ways and she reasons that each is dealing with a different approach to returning a past dance to the stage. Behind each discussion is the issue of authenticity. Even when a multitude of sources remain along with links to the choreographer, an authentic version of a dance as well-known as Mikhail Fokine’s The Dying Swan (1905) is challenged. The choreographer’s granddaughter, Isabelle Fokine, is adamant that hers is the ‘correct’ version, while the Mariinsky Ballet is equally convinced that its different and popular version is also authentic. Thomas concludes that the identity of the iconic dance must leave room for competing interpretations. ‘The construct of tradition with which I would want to work is one that lives and breathes through embodied textual practice’ (Chapter 6: 79).

Two essays outline approaches to re-embodying dances from the past that chime with the quotations of both Thomas and Khan. Karen Eliot (Chapter 7) asks how the work of Merce Cunningham can be historicised, since his ethos depended on experimentation. Because Cunningham had made plans for his material before his death, it is clear that he intended something to be preserved. In creating Dance Capsules, containing films of performances and rehearsals, his choreographic notes and details of design and music, he left a usable legacy. According to Eliot, he aimed not for exact replicas of his works but for their fluidity and protean qualities to continue. In this way his ideas and philosophy could be disseminated. This is another approach to the contested area of reconstruction and preservation and Eliot’s essay gives us access to these ideas. Henrietta Bannerman (Chapter 8) asks, ‘Can we dance history?’ In other words, ‘Can we dance the past?’ Her essay travels a similar path to that of Eliot but in different institutional contexts, specifically with vocational dance students in the UK. She reports on students developing a psychophysical understanding of dance history through learning repertoire from knowledgeable practitioners, a more profound knowledge than from reading and watching videos. Her essay is supported by testimonies of students who experienced such practical history. Both Eliot and Bannerman emphasise that there is more to understanding a dance from the past than learning steps. Each dance work needs to be understood in terms of its own cultural ethos. At the same time, as Marcia Siegel shows so eloquently (Chapter 16), historical time is ‘porous’, allowing dance from the past to speak to us in the present.

The essays of Part 1 invite our readers to consider their own experienced pasts in dance (and these pasts could be as recent as yesterday) as an entry to the nature of time and the narratives of history. Seeing ourselves as participants in history and not just passive consumers, we should approach historical studies in dance – viewing, reading, discussing and dancing – as pleasurable encounters with people who are somewhat like ourselves but nevertheless fascinatingly different.

Bibliography

Foster, Susan (1995) ‘An Introduction to Moving Bodies’, in Susan Foster, ed. Choreographing History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 3–24.

Chapter 1
Memory, history and the sensory body

Dance, time, identity

LARRAINE NICHOLAS

IREMEMBER MYSELF WALKING in bare feet (horrid tactile memory) from London’s Covent Garden underground station to the Dance Centre in Floral Street in 1968. For me, the Dance Centre was the epitome of ‘cool’: it had a wood-lined coffee bar¹ backed by a huge aquarium and there was constant music and rhythm from studios in the background. Coming from work or college, you could cross over with professionals leaving their daytime classes and feel pride by association. As I walked, my long, straight hair, my thigh-length tunic, bare legs and discarded rubber flip-flops (that had become unbearable) signified my own desire for that ‘cool’ aesthetic. My ‘hippy’ persona was naïve and short-lived, but my class is still vivid in my body, with Molly Molloy, an inspiring American jazz dancer, and her assistant, Arlene Phillips.² How I remember trying to embody Molly’s characteristic double step (a syncopated ball-change) on the upb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface to the second edition
• PART 1 Why dance history?
• Introduction to Part 1: why dance history?
• 1 Memory, history and the sensory body: dance, time, identity
• 2 Cara tranders’s reveries: the Autobiography of Cara Tranders, Ballet Girl at the Empire Palace of Varieties, 1892–99
• 3 Beyond fixity: Akram Khan on the politics of dancing heritages
• 4 African-American dance revisited: undoing master narratives in the studying and teaching of dance history
• 5 Dance works, concepts and historiography
• 6 Reconstruction and dance as embodied textual practice
• 7 Preserving the repertory and extending the heritage of Merce Cunningham
• 8 Making dance history live – performing the past
• PART 2 Researching and writing
• Introduction to Part 2: researching and writing
• 9 Destabilising the discipline: critical debates about history and their impact on the study of dance
• 10 Decolonising dance history
• 11 Many sources, many voices
• 12 ‘Dream no small dreams!’: impossible archival imaginaries in dance community archiving in a digital age
• 13 When place matters: provincializing the ‘global’
• 14 Considering causation and conditions of possibility: practitioners and patrons of new dance in progressive-era America
• 15 ‘Dancin’ in the street’: street dancing on film and video from Fred Astaire to Michael Jackson
• 16 Judson: redux and remix
• 17 Ruth page, feminine subjectivity, and generic subversion
• 18 Extensions: Alonzo King and Ballet’s LINES
• 19 Giselle and the Gothic: contesting the Romantic idealisation of the woman
• Index