East Meets West in Dance

Voices in the Cross-Cultural Dialogue

John Solomon, Ruth Solomon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134361014
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

East Meets West in Dance chronicles this development in the words of many of its best known and most active exponents. This collection of articles provides a theoretical discussion of the promises and pitfalls inherent in transplanting art forms from one culture to another; it offers practical guidance for those who might want to participate in this enterprise and explains the general history of the dance exchange to date. It also identifies the differences that are unique to specific cultures, such as the development of theatrical forms, arts education, and the status of artists. This is a first examination of a phenomenon that has already touched most people in the arts community worldwide, and that none can afford to ignore. A lively dialogue has evolved over the last few decades between dance professionals -- performers, teachers and administrators -- in the United States and Europe and their counterparts in Asia and the Pacific rim.

Part I:

An Overview

Chapter One

The American Dance Festival’s International Projects: Invention and Implementation, I

Stephanie Reinhart

Stephanie Reinhart has worked as an arts administrator since 1969, when she joined the staff of the National Endowment for the Arts. Her association with the American Dance Festival dates to 1977, and she became its Associate Director in 1982 and Co-Director in 1993. She has traveled world-wide lecturing on American modern dance and arts administration (most recently in Prague, St. Petersburg, and Moscow), and generally promoting the cause of international exchange in dance. She was instrumental in opening communications with dance officials in Japan, Korea and Indonesia, and introducing French modern dance to American audiences. Ms. Reinhart serves as panelist, consultant, and board member to many arts organizations, and is a recent Fulbright Fellow.

The international network which the American Dance Festival (ADF) has woven began in 1979, when Charles Reinhart, Director of ADF, Lisa Booth, ADF’s then-Administrative Director, and myself, at that time Director of Planning and Development, received a grant from the Japan-US Friendship Commission to explore the possibility of an ADF residency in Japan, and to inform ourselves of the state of Japanese modem dance. ADF was not without international connections before ‘79; Charles Reinhart had traveled extensively in Asia in the 1960s as manager of The Paul Taylor Dance Company, for the State Department organizing its Cultural Presentations Program, and representing Isadora Bennett, the legendary press agent and founder of the Asia Society Performing Arts Program. He therefore knew first hand the significance of dance in Asian cultures. It was that trip in ‘79, however, that really launched our international interests.

We didn’t have any idea what we would find when we wrote that first grant to the Friendship Commission. In retrospect, I think a kind of naive optimism informed our early explorations, along with a basic pragmatism. Like the surfers in the 1960s film The Endless Summer, we were following an intuitive bent—looking for the big wave: new talent in modern dance. It has taken us into “new territory,” and since 1979 we have visited over 30 countries. Both administratively and artistically our international projects have expanded our vision of reality, and, by extension, that of the artists and audiences we serve. It is important to note, though, that these projects have been assimilated organically into a general expansion of creative activity in dance. They have evolved within the context of ADF’s original mission since its founding in 1934—to support choreographers, to find wider audiences for their work, and to provide training for dancers.

Our 1979 Japan trip was aided immensely by the Japanese dance critic and historian Miyabi Ichikawa, who set up a rigorous schedule for us to see as wide a range of Japanese modern dance as possible. We saw (in the words of Martha Graham) good and bad dance! There were modem dances built on traditional forms, and those apparently influenced by US and German modern dance. The best came last—a memorable mountaintop performance in Kyoto by the remarkable Dairakudakan. Sitting outdoors in 30° weather, with no shoes, our feet in plastic bags and blankets wrapped around us against the chill, we discovered Butoh, which we introduced to US audiences in 1982.

We presented four companies from Japan in 1982: Bonjin Atsugi, Miyako Kato and Dancers, the Waka Dance Company (led by the much honored Shigeka Hanayagi) and Akaji Maro’s Dairakudakan, presenting the shocking and grotesque underbelly of Japanese society. The four companies admirably reflected the wide range of creativity occurring in Japanese modern dance at that time.

Their performances at ADF were accompanied by a public panel entitled “Dances and Their People.” In this forum choreographers, critics and historians explored the development of Japanese modem dance and, using dance as a window on culture, its wider implications for Japanese society. The panel was part of a humanities project begun in 1979 with the assistance of philosophy professor Dr. Gerald Myers. A primary goal of subsequent humanities projects over the last decade has been to explore how people and their cultures can be seen through dance, and how the dances created are a reflection of the attitudes, mores, myths, beliefs, and values (religious, philosophical, sexual) that comprise the ecology of a culture. These projects have been a vehicle for giving voice to the disparate cultural identities and political realities encountered in our international work.

“Four From Japan” paved the way for our historic rerouting of ADF in 1984 and 1986 for month-long residencies in Japan. Both of these mini-ADFs included classes by a distinguished faculty (1984: Betty Jones, Martha Myers, Bella Lewitzky, Ruby Shang, and Ralf Haze; 1986: Martha Myers, Betty Jones, Ruby Shang, Yuriko Kimura, Clarence Teeters and Pooh Kaye), and performances by Martha Clarke’s Crowsnest and Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians in 1984, and Pooh Kaye/ Eccentric Motions and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Company in 1986. Ruby Shang created a spectacular site-specific work, The Tokyo Event, in a Japanese park, using Japanese dancers from her classes.

The classes were enormously successful, attracting students from across Japan. They offered to Japanese dancers a revolutionary concept — studying simultaneously with a range of master teachers. In Japan one ordinarily studies with one teacher for life. In fact, the head of the Japanese dance educator’s organization bowed deeply to me at a reception and congratulated me on the success of our residency — apologizing for her original skepticism. Our ADF-Japan project certainly broke the rules, but the young Japanese dancers loved it, and, since then, ADF-Durham continues to receive significant groups of Japanese dancers each summer.

The big step forward in our international programming occurred in 1983, when we began thinking about ADF’s upcoming 1984 50th anniversary. We convinced USIA’s then-Director of Arts America, Juliet Antunes, to send us around the world to look for companies to be part of what was to be ADF’s First International Modem Dance Festival. In exchange, as “ACULPECS” (American Cultural Specialists Abroad), we gave lectures on modem dance and arts administration. “Around the world” meant we had to choose which direction to start: we went East, on a two-month voyage visiting Japan, The Philippines (during the Makati riots against Marcos), Indonesia, India, Israel, France and England. Packing and unpacking 50 times was painful, but the journey was remarkable.

Figure 1 Students at ADF-Tokyo in 1986 performing Ruby Shang’s site-specific piece The Tokyo Event. Photo: Jay Anderson

Our 50th anniversary celebration featured companies selected from the many we saw. They ranged from Uday Shankar’s 1930s groundbreaking modem dance depiction of man versus the machine, to Astad Deboo’s (Bombay, India) bizarre solo Asylum, to Dance Indonesia’s (Jakarta Institute of the Arts) presentation of a Muslim, martial arts, ritualistic Sumatranese modem dance, HHHHHUUUUU& Accompanying the ‘84 performing season was a series of humanities panels directed by Dr. Myers, who also edited The Aesthetic and Cultural Significance of Modern Dance, a collection of commissioned essays by dance experts from India, Indonesia, The Philippines and Great Britain.

Nineteen eighty-four marked the establishment of our trailblazing International Choreographers Workshop (ICW), heralded by Newsweek as “a decided success.” This was perhaps one of the most significant undertakings of ADF in the 1980s, and it has proven one of the most personally moving aspects of my work as an arts administrator. Each year as the choreographers arrive at ADF from their disparate countries and gather in a circle on our summer office porch surrounded by the blossoming magnolia trees I am full of emotion. It is sharing the common language of dance that has brought together these individuals, yet each retains an enormous respect for his or her cultural distinctions. I am always reminded of the words of the great Robin Howard, founder of the modem dance movement in Great Britain, when he spoke of dance as a tool for world peace, and of the spirit which informs Anna Halprin’s communal Circle the Earth dances.

With initial funding from USIA, which led to a subsequent partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation and significant support from the Asian Cultural Council and the Trust for Mutual Understanding, we conceived the idea of celebrating what we sensed was a global phenomenon. We saw that modern dance was developing in countries around the world, and we hoped to give international choreographers the opportunity to share their dance and to deepen their knowledge and experience of American modern dance. What began as the ICW program has evolved organically to the development of a four-tiered international format which now includes:

• international Choreographers Workshop (ICW)

• International Choreographers Commissioning Program (ICCP)

• Institutional Linkages Program (ILP)

• Mini-ADF’s

INTERNATIONAL CHOREOGRAPHERS WORKSHOP

That first year, relying on a network of US Embassy cultural affairs officers and our own contacts in the field, we brought 13 choreographers from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mexico, Senegal, France, Korea, India and Indonesia to ADF for three weeks during our summer season. The program was extended to the full six weeks of ADF in 1986, and continues to offer the participants the opportunity to take classes, see performances, and experience an intensive period of experimentation and in-depth exchange with artists from around the world. The choreographers can present their work in an informal showing and give a master class. They also have discussions and seminars with composers, scholars, choreographers, educators, and musicians in residence at ADF. The project is a special kind of sabbatical for the participants, who represent a range of experience and power. Some are leaders of established modem dance institutions in their country, while others work in relative isolation. One choreographer from Rwanda asked at an initial meeting, “How did you ever find me?” To date 195 choreographers/dancers from 68 countries have participated in the workshop.

INTERNATIONAL CHOREOGRAPHERS COMMISSIONING PROGRAM

It is a greenhouse. It is like being inaclosedplace. You are protected. You are given everything—food, room, space, dancers. You don’t have to worry about the things you have to in your normal life. You just dance, just do what you love to do. It is an unreal, ideal situation.¹

It is exciting and aprivilege, an honor to have 20 dancers to work with and to have everything provided. I don’t have to worry if a dancer will get home that night or have enough to eat or get back for the next rehearsal. In Ecuador it is very difficult to get a work past a certain level … because of the uncertainties of getting everyone to regular rehearsals.²

For this program, established in 1987, each year we invite three or four previous ICW participants to come back for a six-week residency. During the residency they experiment in a laboratory environment with a group of dancers auditioned specifically for this purpose. They develop new dances, share their differing aesthetics with other choreographers, and are offered the opportunity for the work to be showcased before an international audience. The brilliant fusion of modern dance forms and traditional Indonesian dance exhibited in Circle of Bliss, created as part of the program in 1991 by Sukarji Sriman, was the perfect blending of two worlds, and an absolute representation of the program’s underlying philosophy.

INSTITUTIONAL LINKAGES PROGRAM

It was Dr. Christopher (Kit) Paddack, Acting Chief of the Creative Arts Division at USIA, who advised and guided us in the early stages of building the ICW and its extension to the third aspect of our international programming, the “Linkages.” Consisting of a series of exchange projects between ADF and dance institutions world-wide, and developed in collaboration with previous ICW’s, the Linkages range from sending choreographers/teachers abroad for 2-4 weeks, to setting works on US or international companies, to mini-ADF’s offering classes and performances (Japan: 1984, 1986; Korea: 1990, 1991, 1992; India: 1990; Moscow: 1992). They have often been supported by USI A, in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation.

Figure 2 Sukarji Sriman’s Circle of Bliss, commissioned by ADF in 1991. Photo: Jay Anderson

The first linkage, a pilot program, was with China. It began in Guangzhou in 1987, in conjunction with the Guangdong Dance Academy. The project started rather simply with a provocative question from Yang Mei-qi (ICW ‘86), Director of the Academy. Mei-qi came into Charles Reinhart’s office one summer afternoon and asked why in the Limón technique the dancers drop to the floor (the principle of Fall and Recovery). ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• About the Editors
• Introduction
• Part I An Overview
• Part II China
• Part III Hong Kong
• Part IV Indonesia
• Part V Japan
• Part VI Korea
• Part VII Philippines
• Part VIII Taiwan
• Index: