Europe Dancing

Perspectives on Theatre, Dance, and Cultural Identity

Andree Grau, Stephanie Jordan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134696536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Tanz

Europe Dancing examines the dance cultures and movements which have developed in Europe since the Second World War. Nine countries are represented in this unique collaboration between European dance scholars. The contributors chart the art form, and discuss the outside influences which have shaped it.
This comprehensive book explores:
* questions of identity within individual countries, within Europe, and in relation to the USA
* the East/West cultural division
* the development of state subsidy for dance
* the rise of contemporary dance as an 'alternative' genre
* the implications for dance of political, economic and social change.
Useful historical charts are included to trace significant dance and political events throughout the twentieth century in each country.
Never before has this information been gathered together in one place. This book is essential reading for everyone interested in dance and its growth and development in recent years.

1

INTRODUCTION

Stephanie Jordan and Andrée Grau

Newspaper headlines for the New York festival ‘Dancing in the Isles: British Invasion 97’ informed readers at various stages that ‘The Troupes are on the Way’, ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ and ‘The British are Leaving’. There was reference to a ‘Brit Pack’ while Clive Barnes, noting that virtually all Siobhan Davies’ teachers were American imports, suggested that ‘coming here, she remains something of a colonial showing off her art in the home country’ (Barnes 1997).

American quotations may seem incongruous to introduce a book on dance in Europe. Yet these bombastic headlines and titles highlight in their own way what this volume is about: they barely conceal a number of ironies clustering around issues of identity, difference, history, power, and centre-periphery debates. Just how British was any of the dance showcased during this festival, for example? Several of the performing companies are international in personnel: the Jonathan Burrows Group reputedly appears more frequently on the continent of Europe than within Britain and the Ricochet Dance company show was dominated by the work of Javier de Frutos, a Venezuelan choreographer now resident in London. Making a flying visit to speak on ‘Anti-dance’ was Lloyd Newson, Australian director of DV8 Physical Theatre, which was touring elsewhere in the US at the time and must surely be one of the most nomadic, root-eclectic of all companies based in Britain in the late 1990s.

Speaking the international lingua franca often renders people rather parochial, imagining that their world-view is the only existing one, or at least the only one of any real importance. This leads us to a second reason why the ‘American’ start is appropriate. Wanting to look at post-war dance in Europe has undoubtedly a political element in it. The US dominated the world economy for the past five decades and Europe has responded through the creation of the European Union and over the years through the incorporation of more and more countries within it. A book on dance in Europe could then be seen as paralleling this movement, showing that, although the American imports have been invaluable to the development of dance in Europe, there have also been many indigenous currents that are just as important.

Starting from an American standpoint also highlights the United Kingdom’s ambiguous relationship with ‘Europe’. Crossing the Channel, for example, the British ‘go to Europe’ or ‘to the Continent’ as if the British Isles somehow did not quite belong to this larger land mass. In dance, the UK has generally been closer to the US than to its European neighbours whether it is in terms of artistic styles, criticism or scholarship. London critics are often at one with their American counterparts. This has been shown, for example, in their attitude towards Maurice Béjart’s work, described by some as ‘the tabloid of dance’! Whether one likes Béjart’s choreographies or not is irrelevant (the plural is used deliberately because the works are so eclectic that one cannot really talk of one overall style). One cannot, however, ignore the fact that he has been immensely influential throughout Europe either through the ballet of the twentieth century or through the company dancers who then went on to develop independently, often introducing ‘contemporary’ dance where ballet was the norm. This is well illustrated in the different chapters of this book. Neither can one ignore that so many of the great dancers of our era, from Suzanne Farrell, Maya Plisetskaya, Sylvie Guillem to Rudolf Nureyev, have all wanted to work with Béjart. Yet British scholars and critics have generally chosen to follow their American colleagues and pretend that the ‘phénomène Béjart’ does not exist.

Considering the diversity of the dance scenes in Europe, however, questions are raised as to the possible nature of a book attempting to bring them under one umbrella and about the structure that such a book may take. Indeed, looking at the British situation mentioned above, the evidence is of a messy, pluralistic, ambiguous picture, a situation likely to be similar in other European countries. Can one then talk about British, French, Italian, let alone ‘European’ dance? Is it even remotely interesting to do so? Do we talk about ‘national’ or occasionally ‘block’ culture for reasons of nostalgia or for more invidious reasons? Is it relevant to talk in these terms, or is it not far more relevant to examine why these terms are used at all, to look at what is concealed behind ‘natural’ boundaries and what more productive imaginings of community they might hide?

Certainly, in recent times, competing conceptions of the place of individuals in the world have become exacerbated. In her paper ‘Nomadic Subjects: The Ethnoscapes of Postmodernity’, Rosi Braidotti pointed to a central paradox of our historical condition:

On the one hand we see the globalization of the economic and cultural processes, which engenders increasing conformism in life-style, consumerism and telecommunication (a global commodification of culture), on the other hand, we also see the fragmentation of these same processes: the resurgence of regional, local, ethnic, cultural and other differences not only between the geopolitical blocks, but also within them: European integration and regional separatism simultaneously.

(Braidotti 1996:30)

Certainly, today’s international economy has signalled the decline of nation states as economic-political units of organization. The European Union has for a long time signified the end of the old nationalisms that began to develop power at the end of the eighteenth century. After the Second World War, we embarked on a process of supranational integration, initially in an attempt to stop Fascism ever happening again in Europe, then to build a strength of opposition to the Soviet bloc. The issues of the arts and education reached the agenda much later and only recently European networks dealing with them have been developed. Many of these networks remain in embryonic state. Braidotti suggests that this situation tells ‘something about how complex and potentially divisive culture is, in the broad context of a project that ultimately aims at undoing the European nation states and to re-group them in a federation’ (ibid.: 33).

During these processes, we have learned to understand something of the fictions behind the old divisions of nations, these ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991); the redistribution of lands and peoples with no necessarily logical match between language, culture and nation boundaries; the patriotisms cultivated by groups in power in order to maintain the status quo; the myth of cultural homogeneity which ignores the waves of migrations from the East and South and the persistence of Jewish and Muslim presences (Braidotti 1996:34). Given these perspectives, we might too look differently at any new configurations and hegemonies that might emerge.

A key area for current European debate, for instance, is one about difference within ‘the same’ culture as opposed to between cultures, given the patterns of post-war migration challenging the alleged homogeneity of European nation states. This has been interpreted by some as a respect for the separate identity and kinship needs of communities in exile. Salman Rushdie has drawn attention to the explosive potential of such difference, arguing in a recent interview that

it’s as if there is this terrible rupture in the surface of the world and this other reality underneath which comes cracking through before the surface closes over it again. Both are real. They are different realities that lie on top of each other and are not compatible with each other. It is a strange thing about life that it’s full of incompatibilities; that realities which describe one world could not possibly contain the other.

(Mackenzie 1995:15)

Some, including Rushdie himself, have seen the need to explore alternatives to dualistic oppositional conceptualizations that ultimately maintain power imbalance and control cultural diversity. They support more dynamic modes of thinking and a concept of ‘hybridity’ that, while prompted by the migrant condition, envelops all of us, as we all occupy multiple positions within culture. This was the concept of hybridity shared, for example, at the 1997 London conference ‘Re-inventing Britain’, celebrating ‘impurity…[and] mongrelization’ (Gilroy 1993:223), and ethnicity as ‘an infinite process of identity construction’ (Rushdie 1991:394), always changing, always renegotiating itself. Looking at dance with this in mind can open our perspective: the essence of ethnicity being room to manoeuvre, flexibility of strategies and tactics of choice, attitudes and engagements of choreographers and dancers can be interpreted in a new way.

And yet, in contrast to such toleration and embrace of diversity within our current global-local conceptions, very different patterns of behaviour manifest themselves at precisely the same time. As Benedict Anderson has pronounced: ‘the end of the era of nationalism, so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight’ (Anderson 1991:3). Important upsurges of nationalism, many with long-rooted histories, have emerged in Europe mobilizing popular support in active opposition to the modern state and to supranational integration, as in Brittany, Catalonia, Corsica, Flanders, Scotland, Ulster or Wales. The process further accelerated after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, especially among the people within the sphere of influence of Soviet Russia.

The arts, including dance, can reflect, reinforce, prompt, challenge as well as be appropriated in the quest for identity. They are never politically innocent: they operate in dialogue with both exclusive and inclusive ideologies. Ethnomusicologist Ankica Petrovic, for example, has shown how the rural polyphonic musical form of ganga, found in Hercegovina, and in parts of Bosnia and Croatia, has at times been an expressive symbol of all rural people who once shared the same kind of pastoral life: people of Muslim, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian religions alike. At other times, during the Second World War or since the 1980s for example, it has also been used by Croatian ultra-nationalists as a symbol expressing ‘exaggerated feelings about ethnic identity and hatred against another nearby ethnicity—the Serbs’ (Petrovic 1995:68). In a similar vein, ethnochoreologist Colin Quigley (1994) discussed how, despite contemporary discourses in the United States about multiculturalism and diversity, a white nationalistic ideology exists. This is so to the extent that in the 1980s a bill was put forward no less than four times to Congress to designate the square dance as the American folk dance of the United States because it was seen as representing universal ‘American’ values cutting ‘across all of the ethnic backgrounds that make up [US] society’ (US Congress 1988:30, cited in Quigley 1994:93).

How the arts have been used as propaganda for German National Socialism and Soviet communism is common knowledge. Rather less well known to a broad public is the fact that America too used its arts as ‘a weapon of the cold war’. President Eisenhower argued, for example, on 27 July 1954 to the House Committee on Appropriations:

I consider it essential that we take immediate and vigorous action to demonstrate the superiority of the products and cultural values of our system of free enterprise.

(Prevots 1992:2)

Dance was one such product, and, as already noted, the impact of American dance across Europe has been immense and recognized by all. Sometimes, as a result of this, narrative, socio-political voices, of a kind raised earlier in Europe than in America, became temporarily quietened by high modernist giants from across the Atlantic, like Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. Thus, Lena Hammergren spoke of the major influence of Cunningham on Sweden’s ‘Fridans’, at a 1992 conference entitled ‘American Dance Abroad: Influence of the United States Experience’:

This specific development has…prevented some of the tendencies from the late 60s and 70s to blossom, since it has helped creating a very singular minded cultural policy concerning the dance and its possibilities to grow as a multifaceted body of movement. So, the acceptance and appreciation of the new compositional form helped diminishing variety instead of enhancing it.

(Hammergren 1992:184)

‘Trade agreements’ are what export of the arts is really all about today, says Greg Nash of the British Council in London (1998), building the image profile of a country, ultimately for economic purposes, and usually with designated priorities. The extraordinary rise of French dance in the 1980s could be interpreted as a massive promotion and a ploy to reinforce the French position as a cultural centre within the European Union. Similarly, the Kylián project, part of the Dutch Programme Cooperation with Eastern Europe, as these countries broke from the USSR, could be perceived in a number of ways. This project, given Jiri Kylián’s dual nationality, was established with the purpose to support the development of modern dance in the Czech Republic. Yet dance historian Onno Stokvis reports that ‘cultural imperialism’ has been spoken about and he acknowledges that ‘a certain pay-off’ for the project ‘gives a more human face to the capitalistic revolution that now takes place in the Czech Republic and in which The Netherlands as producer of many services and products have a big share’ (Stokvis 1995:244–6).

Funding means power and presence, in two senses. Of course, it means that an artist is able to produce and perform work that is more or less expensive, an issue that is experienced most acutely of all in eastern Europe today, since the collapse of communism and, with it, massive state subsidy. But it also means power and presence ‘abroad’. Belgian, French, German work travels, assisted by major subsidy from home. In this respect, Britain has been singularly unable to reciprocate, often having to rely on other countries’ funds to enable its own artists to perform abroad and often missing out on hosting the big names from those other countries. Ironically, now, Nash suggests (1998), British artists may have become especially attractive and marketable in a recession-burdened Europe, accustomed as they have become to low subsidy and fees. Other countries, such as Hungary, for example, are even more disadvantaged as until recently they operated within a different circle.

Selling art products under a ‘national’ umbrella, then, contains its ambiguities and ironies. It uses as well as supports artists; it answers to government priorities for political and economic development while it may also be prompted by the urge to share exciting work across borders. It might be considered a dangerous game by some, outmoded, by others (though perhaps appealing to a ‘feel-good’ nostalgia, entertaining a hint of self-mockery), of primary political importance, by others still. The UK chapter, for example, shows how Scotland, the new ‘nation’ wants to build its own dance culture and how, for perfectly understandable reasons, when it looks internationally, it is not to its neighbour south of the border. In contrast, the new debates of its neighbour south of the border are about difference within its own heterogeneous culture, and England now prefers to sell itself abroad according to these terms.

As Mike Featherstone has said: ‘strongly defined stereotyping “we-images” and “they-images”’ give little space to ‘more nuanced notions of otherness’ (Featherstone 1995:100). Emphasizing difference between one country and another often goes hand in hand with minimizing difference within the country. The dance historian Ira Tembeck (1995) describes how a cultural community such as Quebec invents remarkably misleading myths about itself. As part of Quebec’s quest for a distinct identity, its choreographers and presenters have, until recently, stressed purity, a flow of virgin-birth works untainted by the outside world, a ‘culture de résistance’—and all of these images have been powerful marketing tools. But Tembeck sees the reality of this ‘tradition of no tradition’ as one of a distinctive pluralism and eclecticism, drawing indeed on many other sources, and she proposes that Montreal choreographers must now answer to this in a modification or reinvention of their self-image.

It is also fascinating to note how, at the 1995 Toronto ‘Border Crossings’ conference, a new generation of Spanish dance scholars arrived in force to critique what they perceived as dangerous new nationalist impulses. Undoubtedly provoked by the image of their recent, repressed nationalist past (Franco died in 1975), they noted the return of the traditional devils of Spanish reactionary thought, in particular the neoplatonic Fascist definition of Spain as a ‘unit of destiny of the universal’ (Franco’s words) (Carreira in Colomé et al. 1995:277). There was condemnation for the ‘isolationist’ intellectual trends, with the big question reversed: is there such a thing as Spanish dance? There was condemnation too for the fact that

Being ‘national’ is still a value that artists brandish when seeking the publicity or the protection of the administrators of public funds… It can be said that many artists are considered ‘good’ just because they are ‘ours’… In Spain, not a few artists offer us Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Basque, etc. ‘national’ art.

(Ablanado in Colomé et al. 1995:276)

A significant undercurrent of the Spanish chapter in this volume, for example, is an anxiety about the country’s position on the edge of, or even outside, the rest of Europe.

It might also be claimed, however, that calls today to turn our back on our American heritage are equally misguided, encouraging us to situate ourselves too solidly within a new sovereign centre of ‘fortress Europe’. Although we may deplore the most crass aspects of Americanization of the world, we should not deny what has been meaningful as a contribution from America, not least in dance, and be open to what continues to be so. After all, in the end, the most interesting and challenging dance resists easy categorizations. So often, the label ‘typical’ simply cannot be applied.

Despite all the questions raised, the current book on dance in Europe is largely framed in chapters identified by nations within the larger configuration of Europe. As the book came into being, we pondered as to the continuing relevance of such a structure, but, for 1999, it seems still relevant to be so. Numerous dance networks now operate with this European conceptual and institutional framework in mind, including scholarly networks in dance. We have, however, opted to have a chapter on Flanders, rather than Belgium, because we felt that in dance today no one would deny the importance in recent years of the ‘Flemish phenomenon’ and that it was an apt illustration of the fact that, on occasions, the ‘regional’ is more significant culturally than the ‘national’ in terms of identity. The organization of the book also reflects the fact that the different countries of Europe have their own systems, institutional structures and heritages that play a major role in any consideration of dance culture. Indeed, an important factor of difference might be that the various countries feel the pressures of their own dance systems and heritages to varying degrees, France perhaps most of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2  Flanders
• 3  France
• 4  Germany
• 5  Hungary
• 6  Italy
• 7  The Netherlands
• 8  Spain
• 9  Sweden
• 10  United Kingdom
• Index