ALLANA LINDGREN
Is dance a valid subject for scholarly research? The twelve articles that comprise Dancing Bodies, Living Histories: New Writings about Dance and Culture answer this question unequivocally and convincingly in the affirmative. Editors Lisa Doolittle of the University of Lethbridge and Anne Flynn of the University of Calgary have assembled a strong collection of essays with a diverse range of interests and analytical approaches. How movement intersects with issues of gender representation, ethnicity, post-colonialism, consumerism, historiography, and theory are all examined. The resulting volume boldly challenges readers to think beyond the traditional boundaries of scholarly disciplines and definitions to show how dancing bodies have evinced cultural ideology and practices throughout history.
In "Gendered Movement in Romantic Ballet: An Analysis of Teresina in Bournonville's Napoli," Kristen M. Harris offers a post-feminist analysis of the female body in Romantic narratives and choreography. Previous scholars have tended to concentrate on how female dancers and the characters they portrayed during the Romantic era were controlled and victimized by male teachers and choreographers. Harris, however, presents the case study of Teresina, the female protagonist of August Bournonville's Napoli (1842), to stress that some Romantic representations of women actually celebrated female agency.
Just as Harris complicates the view of history as a chronicle detailing the continuous suppression of women, Thomas F. DeFrantz's "Ballet in Black: Louis Johnson and African American Vernacular Humour in Ballet" challenges historical narratives by charting the history of the African American presence in American classical ballet. DeFrantz shows how classical ballet—a traditionally Caucasian-dominated dance style—has been enriched by the presence of African-American dancers and choreographers. In particular, the choreography of Louis Johnson provides DeFrantz with a rich body of work to interrupt the standard historical narratives of classical ballet. Drawing on historical research and movement analysis of Johnson's large group ballets, Forces of Rhythm (1972) and Fontessa and Friends (1981), DeFrantz concludes that African American contributions to classical ballet often combine African American vernacular humour with African diaspora aesthetic principles and classical ballet technical vocabulary.
In tracing aspects of Africanist compositional traits in the ballets of Louis Johnson, DeFrantz demonstrates the kind of intertextual analysis that is the focus of dance theorist Naomi M. Jackson's article, "Dance and Intertextuality: Theoretical Reflections." Jackson advocates that all forms of dance—including those that do not draw obvious stylistic, kinetic, and cultural quotations from other dances—have intersecting influences and, therefore, benefit from intertextual analysis. To illustrate her point, Jackson references the Jewish and modern dance texts found in The Village I Knew, which was choreographed by Sophie Maslow in 1950. Jackson argues that in identifying intertextuality within a dance work, it is possible to "juxtapose methods and master narratives, showing how they shape subjectivity and either challenge or support culturally dominant views about gender, race, ethnicity, and the arts" (229). Jackson presents a convincing argument, though one wishes that she had first interrogated her implicit assumption that dance is a "language" that can be easily categorized in terms of "text" and "intertextuality" before embarking on her intertextual analysis. That is to say, why shouldn't performance and corporeality be made to fit within linguistic models?
Researchers interested in Canadian performance practices will be gladdened to learn that several of the articles in Dancing Bodies, Living Histories foreground dance in Canada. In "Choreographing Queer: Nationalism, Citizenship, and Lesbian Dance Clubs," for instance, B.J. Wray investigates how public representations of Canadian lesbian identity have been communicated through dance. Specifically, Wray asks how dance functions as a political strategy in the construction of lesbian identity and citizenship. The role of dance in forming and communicating sexual orientation and communal relationships in Canada is important and needs more research. Unfortunately, Wray's arguments would have been strengthened if she had trusted her own analytical abilities more and relied less on extensive glosses of other writers' theories.
Three of the Canadian-focused articles in Dancing Bodies, Living Histories form a triptych of different, yet complementary, perspectives on the influence of the Aboriginal Dance Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta. In "Reflections on the Aboriginal Dance Program," Marrie Mumford recounts the history of the Aboriginal Dance Program from her unique perspective as its artistic director. The Dance Program helps aboriginal dancers, teachers, and choreographers to connect and to create, while providing production and administrative training for other members of Aboriginal dance communities. The quest to strike a balance between tradition and innovation has made the Aboriginal Dance Program an exciting and vibrant artistic experience for its participants, as documented in the many photographs of Aboriginal Dance Program performers that accompany Mumford's article.
"They Were Singing and Dancing in the Mountains," another article that deals with the Aboriginal Dance Project at Banff, was originally published in the Chinook Winds: Aboriginal Dance Project (Banff Centre Press and 7th Generation Books, 1997). Part memoir, part oral history, Cheryl Blood (-Rides-at-the-) Doore's essay chronicles her personal experiences as a participant at the Banff Centre where she met dancer and musician Olivia Tailfeathers. These two women were then inspired by their time at the Banff Centre to research Nistsitapii (Blackfoot) traditional songs and dances by interviewing some of their Elders.
Jacqueline Shea Murphy's article, "Lessons in Dance (as) History: Aboriginal Land Claims and Aboriginal Dance, circa 1999," combines the history of the Delgamuukw land claim case with Shea Murphy's personal observations as an outsider/observer at the Aboriginal Dance Program's 1999 summer session. Shea Murphy begins her piece with a summary of the Delgamuukw trial, which occurred from 1987 to 1991 when the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en communities' claim to more than 58,000 square kilometres of British Columbia was heard by the Supreme Court of British Columbia. As Shea Murphy notes, the trail judge rejected evidence that included the following:
[T]otem poles, house crests, and regalia … also oral histories: Gitxsan adaaw—sacred reminiscences about ancestors, histories, and territories—and Wet'suwet'en kungax—spiritual songs, dances, and performances about trials between territories, all tying them to the land. (131)
According to Shea Murphy, the trial judge took the view that performance is not acceptable evidence and the First Nations peoples lost the case. The Supreme Court of Canada, however, later overturned part of the lower court ruling on the Delgamuukw land claim, stating that the oral, performative evidence had been presented to show occupation of the land in question. And if it had been considered, the outcome of the case might have been different. The Delgamuukw land claim case functioned in part to show that First Nations traditional performance conventions, including dance, have been recognized as affirming Aboriginal peoples' connection to the land. As Shea Murphy points out, the land claim prompted a reconsideration of performance as "historical document."
Watching the dancers participate in the Aboriginal Dance Program, Shea Murphy witnesses the same kind of rethinking of the role of performance in Aboriginal cultures. Dance at the Aboriginal Dance Program is viewed by participants as a way to reclaim ownership over one's body, one's spirit, and—as the Delgamuukw land claim case demonstrates—one's heritage and land. The performers not only use their dancing bodies, songs, and music to honour and invoke their ancestors, but through their breath and sweat—through performance—they embody and claim space for themselves in the present. In this way, the Aboriginal Dance Program at Banff is a site of cultural assertion for all indigenous peoples.
"Lessons in Dance (as) History: Aboriginal Land Claims and Aboriginal Dance, circa 1999" is a deftly crafted article; its structure demands the same kind of reassessment explored in its content. The Delgamuukw case asked why ink on paper should be deemed more truthful than mouth to ear. Similarly, Shea Murphy's combining of scholarly research and personal narrative implicitly queries why the erasure of the pronoun "I" in scholarly articles traditionally has been viewed as more objective than articles in which the presence of the writer has been openly acknowledged. Thus, in describing her private anxiety as an outsider observing aboriginal artists, Shea Murphy is really asking readers to re-evaluate "acceptability" within the conventions of academic writing. The danger of using a first-person account to frame scholarly research is that the reader will end up learning more about the author than the supposed subject. One suspects, however, that Shea Murphy is not only cognizant of this issue, but is playfully asking the reader to assess if a subject can ever be separated from an author's personal experience.
The final article in Dancing Bodies, Living Histories is "Dancing in the Canadian Wasteland: A Post-Colonial Reading of Regionalism in the 1960s and 1970s," which was co-written by Lisa Doolittle and Anne Flynn, and recently won the fifth annual international Gertrude Lippincott Award for the best English-language article on dance history or theory. Doolittle and Flynn's essay focuses on two women: Margot McDermott and Yoné Kvietys-Young, both pioneers in the Calgary dance community. Doolittle and Flynn have chosen two very different artists to examine and the comparative strategy they have adopted works well in illuminating the diversity of dance activity in Calgary during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in showing points of convergence, especially in how Kvietys-Young and McDermott have been erased from our cultural memory.
In the 1960s, McDermott was hired as the choreographer of the newly-formed dance troupe, the Young Canadians of the Calgary Stampede. In this role, McDermott was expected to choreograph in a diverse range of styles: ballet, jazz, acrobatics, ethnic, and even gun-handling. Under her tutelage, the Young Canadians became immensely popular.
Born in Lithuania, Kvietys-Young emigrated from post-war Germany to Canada in 1948. After living and dancing in Toronto and Montréal, she eventually married and moved to Calgary in 1966 where she was hired by the University of Calgary to teach movement to actors. Kvietys-Young even started her own modern dance company in the city. Despite Kvietys-Young's significant contribution to the University of Calgary and the community at large, no record of her work exists in the University's Fine Arts archives. More disturbing is the fact that although both women still live in Calgary, younger members of the local dance community are largely unaware of the importance of Kvietys-Young and McDermott within Canada's dance history.
In juxtaposing these two women's stories, Doolittle and Flynn point to larger thematic issues:
The story of Yoné's disappearance from the historical record of dance in Canada as she moves west illuminates a documentation process where erasure or forgetting characterizes the regional in contrast to inscription and remembrance that characterizes the central. Margot's story shows how work that is marked "regional" or "popular" is easily ignored by the national arts establishment, which orients itself toward urban colonial ideals of high art. (256)
Doolittle and Flynn remind readers that the assumptions underlying concepts, such as "regionalism" and the so-called "naturalization" of binary divides between "high culture" and "low culture," assist in the diminishment and ultimate dismissal of histories situated outside larger urban, cultural centres.
The body of dance-related books being published, particularly in the United States and Britain, is impressive. In Canada, however, relatively few scholarly dance books have been published to date. This dearth of home-grown literature is not only symptomatic of the marginalization of dance within Canadian universities, but is also the single most important factor in enabling that marginalization to continue. Although the book's scope is wider than just Canadian dance history, its Canadian subjects are particularly exciting because they indicate that there are caches of research materials available and waiting to be examined by scholars. The Banff Centre Press, and especially editors Doolittle and Flynn, are to be commended for their significant contribution to the burgeoning field of Dance Studies within Canada.