Defiant Itineraries

Caribbean Paradigms in American Dance and Film

Lydia Platón Lázaro

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137475534
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137471802
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

How did Caribbean rituals helped form new currents in the performing and visual arts of the United States? This book answers this question through an examination of the Caribbean-inspired dance creations of dancer/choreographer Katherine Dunham and the experimental films of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Caribbean Performance: Dancing Transformation in Katherine Dunham’s and Maya Deren’s “Haitian Excursions”

Katherine Dunham and Maya Deren embarked on similar journeys of discovery and scholarly research in their travels to Haiti during the 1930s and 1940s. Each of their travels led to a careful study and subsequent writings about the relationship between the dances of Haiti and the somatic experience of bodies that dance. Moreover, as argued by Dunham and Deren in their respective Haitian ethnographic studies, the somatic experience itself cannot be disassociated from the memory of Haitian history, starting with the human traffic of bodies in the geographical passage from Africa to the Caribbean, the memory of prior African rites and rituals enacted through dance and movement, and finally, the collective spirit of worship through Vodou1 as a danced form. These body-mind associations are also mediated by the human power of invention, strategies of survival, and belief in the power of the collective. This power fueled the Haitian Revolution and led Haiti to be the first free black republic of America.

The focus of this study is the analysis of the way the dances and spirit of collective worship of Vodou appear in African American stage dance, dance education, and cultural activism in the work of Katherine Dunham and how it serves as an inspiration for experimental film forms from the 1930s onward in the work of Maya Deren. The purpose is to highlight and take into account the social and historical importance of the inventiveness of Caribbean performative forms through the example of Vodou in artistic explorations in a non-Caribbean context. This includes the impact of the Caribbean experience on the disciplinary border crossings between anthropology, ethnography, dance, film, and literature achieved by Dunham and Deren.

The intention here is to analyze and interpret Dunham’s and Deren’s work as an example of dynamic relationships among performance forms, the continuum of the sacred and the secular, myth and history, and memory and invention particular to Caribbean aesthetics of performance. It is equally concerned with the role of Vodou in the theoretical interpretations elaborated in the publications by Katherine Dunham and Maya Deren. Both were spiritually transformed by participating in Vodou rituals and were accorded the privilege of being present inside a performance. At the same time, they attempted to recontextualize Vodou by studying it within its broader semantic, historical, and aesthetic context. Of all Caribbean religions, Vodou has suffered perhaps the most in terms of cruel and denigrating representations by scholars, travel writers, artists, movie producers, and even Haitian politicians. This was especially true between 1915 and 1934 during the US military occupation. Yet despite the inherent contradictions of their own subject positions within the Haitian context as US citizens, throughout this book Dunham and Deren are viewed on the subject of Vodou as they experienced it and not as exoticizers.

Not only do Dunham and Deren provide alternative discourses to stereotypical, demonizing notions—and other misunderstandings—about Vodou, but they also focus on the centrality of the body in movement in rituals of dance and possession, which is the core of Vodou practice. As explored in this study, they ask if the original source, the “native,” is in fact being exploited in their own modern appropriations and recordings. That insight questions whether or not the use of research and observation of Caribbean performance forms is ever free from stereotyping and negative marking by the disciplines they practiced—that is, anthropology, modern dance, and filmmaking in the context of the United States. They address important ethical issues about being outsider-insiders that promote differences in modes of representation. This recontextualization of the object of study achieved by both Katherine Dunham and Maya Deren also recalls other pioneering, border-crossing anthropologists/artists such as Zora Neale-Hurston and Pearl Primus.2 In all these cases, the results not only challenge the role of the ethnographer and artistic practice but also, as Fatimah Tobing Rony suggests when describing the achievements of Hurston and Dunham in particular, “transgress the boundaries between academic objectivity and subjective insight” (210).

This reciprocal relationship between subjectivity and objectivity replicates the combination of art and ethnography practiced by Haitian intellectuals in the 1930s concerning the ethnographic borders in Haitian literature, as the following quote from a survey of fifty years of Haitian painting (1930–1980) proposes: “L’espace physique, cristallisé et poétisé, témoigne des traumatismes de la dépossession et du reracinement originel. Car vivre, c’est aussi habiter un double lieu, a la fois réel et fictionel” (The physical space, fixed and rendered poetic, is witness to the traumatisms of dispossession and original uprootedness. So living is also dwelling in a double space that is real and fictional at the same time; Mireille, et al. 84). This milieu provided both Dunham and Deren with a consonant universe of dialogue across popular performance forms, religion, and history as an alternative to hegemonic discourse about Haiti in the United States. The work of Haitian ethnographer, politician, and diplomat Jean Price-Mars, and the ideas that helped form Haitian Indigenisme—the literary radical response of the 1920s to the American occupation—impose “la parte manquante de l’etre haitien et tente le constat du déséquilibre psychique, du mimetisme outrancier à travers ses essais ethnographiques et ses nombreuses conférences” (the missing part of the Haitian being and attempts to prove the physical imbalance, the extreme mimicry through his ethnographic essays and numerous conferences; Mireille et al. 83). Likewise, the changes that characterized anthropology from the beginning of the twentieth century through the 1950s in the work of scholars such as Melville Herskovits, Franz Boas, and Gregory Bateson—Dunham and Deren’s mentors—posited ideas about the ethos of their practices as participant-observers of experience. Certainly the importance of “humanizing” black subjects, as Herskovits is credited for achieving in his studies of Africa and the Caribbean, influenced the tone and the intentions of Dunham’s and Deren’s ethnographic incursions.

In this book about defiant itineraries, scholar James Clifford’s concept of “traveling cultures” provides a critical frame for distinguishing the “differences” in ethnographical practices in the texts of Katherine Dunham and Maya Deren. Clifford deconstructs fieldwork as a practice, pointing to how it had become a “disciplinary problem” not only because “of its positivist and colonial historical associations” (63) but also because of the realities of the “fields” themselves in postcolonial/neocolonial situations. Although Dunham and Deren spent time in the field, their artistic work was mostly conceived and practiced elsewhere. However, their ties to Haiti continued to develop outside of the fieldwork model; Dunham kept a home in Haiti and sponsored several projects, while Deren’s home in New York became a meeting place for Haitian artists traveling to and from the Caribbean. Dunham’s school and company also provided spaces of intercultural exchange “on the move,” prefiguring the ideas of the dynamics of diasporic aesthetics in metropolitan contexts and how they transform national cultures.3 Indeed, the notion of Caribbean identity as one formed in movement has been asserted by Édouard Glissant in Poetics of Relation (1991) in a proposal to combat the idea of culture as “fixed” and “static,” therefore confining its subjects to models that do not precisely account for the differences that mark Caribbean subjects as “mixed” and “multiple.” Likewise, this idea resounds throughout Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s La isla que se repite (The Repeating Island; 1989), where he too counteracts simplistic views of the Caribbean with the notion of a “union of the diverse” (author’s translation; 2).

This study follows Clifford’s model for reconceptualizing “traveling culture” by looking at the texts of Dunham and Deren as representatives of the fluid border crossing of disciplines as well as reflecting on the fragmented nature of Vodou as a metaphor for Haitian history. These ideas come alive in the performative achievements of these artists—in choreography and film as well as exemplifying groundbreaking expression of ethnographic practices in writing. Dunham was a trained anthropologist, while Maya Deren was not, but neither of them was permanently related to an academic institution. According to James Clifford’s explanations of the acceptance of scholarly writing within the discipline, this makes them a different brand of scholar. Nonetheless, these texts cannot be considered strictly as travel writing, although the literary intentions are evident and the ethos of the artistic perspective of their authors is present in both texts, as will be discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. As Clifford explains, “One way to understand the current ‘experimentalism’ of ethnographic writing is as a renegotiation of the boundary, agonistically defined in the late nineteenth century, with ‘travel writing’” (66).

Both Dunham and Deren published personally engaged narratives that can be formally considered as contributing to a positive description of postoccupation Haiti and especially valuable as novel theorizations of Vodou for their time. The objective of my analysis of Dunham and Deren is to show how performance and writing work together to construct an alternative frame of reference in order to include them in the conversation with Caribbean discourse from which so far they have been absent. Thus Benítez-Rojo’s descriptions of the Caribbean as “performance” and Joseph Roach’s careful analysis of human behavior and representation under the complex circumstances of slavery and colonialism are used to reflect upon how Dunham in fact performs Haiti and the Caribbean in her dance fusions and how Deren frees bodies in her experimental representations of rituals.

The performances of Katherine Dunham and Maya Deren, based on practices that were learned and documented in Haiti and then transported into other artistic contexts, also present fertile terrain for extending the framework of Caribbean cultural expressions into other geographies that further exemplify the fragmented connectedness of the African diaspora. In the case of Katherine Dunham, those practices served to connect African Americans with a “lost” part of their history. In Maya Deren’s case, her theories and practices helped challenge canonical views of film that had been installed by the Hollywood system and modernists’ fascination with the “primitive.” Fatimah Tobing Rony points to the centrality of cinema in racialized constructions of European and North American “Others”4 in the twentieth century, materializing the scientific determinist proposals of race of the nineteenth century: “Cinema has been a primary means through which race and gender are visualized as natural categories; cinema has been the site of intersection between anthropology, popular culture, and the constructions of nation and empire” (9).

Benítez-Rojo explains that “the culture of the Peoples of the Sea expresses the desire to sublimate social violence through referring itself to a space that can only be intuited through the poetic, since it always puts forth an area of chaos” (author’s translation; 17). This is one of the challenges posed by this book—the poetic interpretation of the languages of movement as a continuum (or as Benítez-Rojo’s ongoing repetitions of repetition). On the other hand, dance itself is experimentation laden with play, border crossings, silences, and the layering of signifiers. The Caribbean reading established here starts with the dancing body understood within its particular historical context. Stuart Hall’s theories of race and representation address not only the white/black axis present in this body but also the power structure designed by colonialism, imperialism, occupation, acculturation, assimilation, denial, and oppression that place that body in its particular sociohistorical role, as well as in its role as a dancer in performance. That body becomes a performing collective body in ritual practices. In this sense, this study echoes diverse theories of embodiment used by anthropologists to counter Hegel’s phenomenological dualisms between mind and body. Hall refers to the representational system of racial stereotyping as “the spectacle of the Other” (“Spectacle” 225). With this terminology he reminds us that these practices are “inscribed in relations of power” (225) that also refer to ways of studying the power of art in order to shift paradigms of oppression in representations of the Caribbean.

In Performance

From a performance perspective, Dunham’s and Deren’s engagement with Haitian dance and history addresses the problems evidenced in ethnographical cultural tourism and artistic modernisms that overly folklorize popular forms, often denying them the value of invention, not to speak of artistry. In other words, the denied humanity of colonialism’s Other, especially African slaves, gave way to a circulation of theories of the incapacity of a diasporic production of knowledge, disavowing precisely the knowledge that is produced, celebrated, and empowered by dancing bodies in rituals as modes of resistance, personal empowerment, or collective voicing. Instead, Benítez-Rojo insists this corporeal knowledge transforms dramatic expression and the transmission of memories in rites, song, dance, and oral narrative into possible enactments of resistance, liberating practices, and play.5

Accordingly, the analysis provided here addresses Dunham’s and Deren’s theoretical interpretations of Caribbean performance as part of the “liberating strategies” found in Caribbean theories concerned with African diasporic cultural forms and their role in transforming memory in order to reinvent history. Dunham dedicated her life to dance, while Deren used dance as part of the language of her films. While ethnographic discussions of Haitian Vodou may be the obvious interrelation between Dunham and Deren, the artistic transformation of ritual into modern dance and film without exoticizing them is the key point that encourages they be studied together. Their representation of the dancing body is based on the understanding that these are bodies whose memory of violence and displacement come alive in ritual form in order to access healing or at least as a rewriting of future possibilities.6

The dynamics involved in the transformation of Caribbean culture into “new American forms” addresses the politics of representing Otherness between 1930 and 1950. These dynamics postulate the power of performativity as nomadic and independent of existing codes of representation usually dictated by literary, dance, and film critics who determine taste, preference, and importance of art forms. In other words, Dunham and Deren conspire with Caribbean—and especially Haitian—artists through self-reflexive modes of creation. In so doing, they also prove the potential of positively viewing their own creativity, artistic production, and originality as separate from colonially assigned European preferences.

Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996) frames the proposal that dance, writing, and film “co-create” a modern aesthetics based on Caribbean experience (286). The power of the dancing body has been identified in his concept of the kinesthetic imagination and in the active possibility of “moving bodies.” Inscribed in those bodies are the memories of violence and degradation. On the one hand, Dunham’s focus on the study of dance in Jamaica and Haiti has the effect of narrating parallel processes in the United States during the slave trade. She proposes the idea of a shared past that ties the histories of the United States and the Caribbean together, both before and during, the imperialist incursions of the former into the latter. Maya Deren, on the other hand, proposes the notion of a possible erasure of difference through the perspective of a ritual aesthetic. Her films and “experimental” outlook address the body and the gaze in a different language that questions markings of race, gender, and class in cinema. The formal use of the dancing body and her writings about film reflect the “certain way” that Benítez-Rojo uses performance as the basis of Caribbeanness and Roach’s notion of the kinesthetic circum-Atlantic imagination when engaged throughout The Repeating Island. Her work directly relates to the Caribbean use of the body in Haitian Vodou practice as both a place of spirituality and a place of performance of community, privileging the body as a site for transformation as an “active” player but—above all—as the protagonist of her notion of the collective as artist.

“Agentful” Bodies in Motion

Roach points to the centrality of “human flesh” as a “revolutionary commodity” in the post-seventeenth-century economy (4). He observes the politics of the body in the slave market auction as spectacle (including the existence of both costumes and the unveiling of flesh) in New Orleans. The kind of behavior displayed in the market is seen in the same register as the observations by antebellum chroniclers of life in that city of dances performed by the slaves on Sundays in “Congo Square,” what Roach classifies as “vortices of behavior.” Dance also conjures images of kinesthetic freedom and spiritual transformation (as in Vodou and other ceremonies) through possession and play. Embedded in dance are codes that privileges movement as well as the use of space and an integration of different artistic languages, including music. Through their use of the dancing body, recordings of ritual music, filmmaking, and writing, Dunham and Deren offer the possibility of inserting Caribbean kinesthetic memory into the circum-Atlantic peoples’ knowledge of themselves and provide potential strategies to recover from what Roach considers the “disparities between history as it is discursively transmitted and memory as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its consequences” (26).

In retrospect, Katherine Dunham’s and Maya Deren’s research and fieldwork in Haiti during the 1930s and 1940s reveal themselves to be a series of philosophical and aesthetic excursions. The very word excursion signifies the dual nature of their Caribbean-inspired projects and even their engagement with Vodou practice, since it means both to travel and to digress or deviate from the “proper course” (Merriam-Webster). This deviation results in a creative exploration and representation of Caribbean and American reciprocities, or shared points of inquiry. Likewise this study seeks to go farther by surveying how the Caribbean described by Dunham and by Maya Deren also makes “the Caribbean” an aesthetic sensibility that travels poetically into experimental forms of dance and film in the context of the United States.

Katherine Dunham was born in Chicago in 1909. She studied to be an anthropologist at the University of Chicago during the early 1930s and her thesis project, Dances of Haiti, was published in 1947. Parallel to her academic career, she trained as a ballet dancer with Ludmilla Speranzeva, Vera Mirova, Ruth Page, and Mark Turbyfill. Her career as a dancer took off early wit...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Caribbean Performance: Dancing Transformation in Katherine Dunham’s and Maya Deren’s “Haitian Excursions”
• 2. Black Dance, Modern Dance, and the Caribbean: Locating the Work of Katherine Dunham and Maya Deren
• 3. Island Possessed: Dance Ethnography Performing the Caribbean
• 4. Maya Deren on Visualizing (Mediating) Vodou
• Afterword: Caribbean Dislocation
• Notes
• Works Cited