Chapter 1 1. Vodou Is the Spelling That Will Be Used Throughout This Book
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Notes Chapter 1 1. Vodou is the spelling that will be used throughout this book, following the Haitian Kreyol spelling of this spiri- tual and religious practice. Other variations include Vodun, Vodoun, and Vodú. These spellings (as well as others) are maintained in their original form in citations. Haitian Kreyol spellings of Vodou- related terms will also be used. 2. Zora Neal Hurston and Pearl Primus also embarked on anthropological quests that became the subjects of dances and cultural practices in the United States. Their trajec- tories and products, though, are very different. Hurston is best known for her contributions to African American literature and to the study of African American culture, while less known as a choreographer and arts presenter of Caribbean troupes in the United States. Primus, who was born in Trinidad, chose Africa as her source of deep connections with her heritage and future artistry and is known for her innovations on stage, fusing poetry and history with solo dance. Their work and ethnographic excursions are contrasted with Katherine Dunham’s in Chapter 3. 3. See as studied in seminal postcolonial texts such as Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), among others. 170 NOTES 4. For an explanation of this term, see entry on “Other” in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Postcolo- nial Studies: The Key Concepts, 3rd ed. (New York: Rout- ledge, 2013), 186– 88. 5. This notion is also discussed at length in Richard Burton, Afro- Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play on the Caribbean (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 6. See Joan Dayan’s Sacred Possessions Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Sybille Fischer’s Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 7. A comprehensive collection of her writings can be found in Bruce R. McPherson, ed., Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren (Kingston, NY: Docu- mentext, 2005). 8. See VéVé Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren, A Documentary Biography and Collected Works, vol. 1, pt. 2, Chambers 1942– 1947 (New York: Anthology Film Archives/Film Culture, 1988); and Joan Dayan, Sacred Possessions Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 9. See Bertolt Brecht, “Short Description of a New Tech- nique of Acting Which Produces an Alienation Effect” in The Twentieth Century Performance Reader, ed. Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (London: Routledge, 1996), 99– 112. Chapter 2 1. For this book, the 1930s up to the 1950s. 2. The term is used mostly used for film of the 1960s in the United States and in connection with experimental film. NOTES 171 3. See, for example, Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis, Museo del Barrio Exhibit, Feb- ruary 2010. 4. There is extensive literature on the topic of carnival, and the many traditions involved in the celebration of this pivotal cultural event in the different islands. The refer- ence to cross- viewing as part of the performance of car- nival stems from the analysis conducted by Errol Hill in The Trinidad Carnival (London: Beacon Books, 1972), among many others. 5. Cultural embodiment is used here to describe how dance forms, when internalized and performed in ritual and in the process of art making, become the cultural expression of a highly charged set of social relations. 6. See Lucas Hilderbrand, “Experiments in Documentary: Contradiction, Uncertainty, Change,” Millennium Film Journal no. 51 (Spring 2009), http:// mfj -online .org/ journalPages/ MFJ51/ HilderbrandIntro .html: “If docu- mentary was first conceived as the ‘creative treatment of actuality,’ influential filmmakers of the American avant- garde, such as Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage, offered creative treatments of experience. These works opened up alternatives to mainstream film that shifted focus from the state of the world to states of being. Because so much of this work is formally innovative and the subjec- tive perspectives so interior, at times we forget to ponder how such films speak to the world at large.” 7. See Lowell Fiet, “Entre la normalidad y lo extraodrinario: Performance y la lectura caribeña de Antonio Benítez- Rojo” (unpublished paper, University of Puerto Rico, 2006): “In the case of the Caribbean, the multiplicity of traditions produces the ‘sancocho,’ ‘ajiaco’ or cultural ‘cal- laloo’ of a hybrid text, that is sometimes written, but that is more frequently oral, visual, sonorous, and corporeal, 172 NOTES that emerges through performance, not as an evocation of the ritual order of other cultures, but rather as the demands of resistance, survival, and difference within systems that have been as dehumanizing as plantation, slavery, and colonialism” (author’s translation). 8. Maurer states, “I argue that the resistance/complicity and coercion/consent dichotomies are inadequate for the analysis of dance in the Caribbean because of their predi- cation upon Western bourgeois liberal constructions of an individuated subject—constructions which may not obtain in the Caribbean and which certainly remain to be demonstrated before they are assumed in any particular case.” “Caribbean Dance: Resistance, Colonial Discourse, and Subjugated Knowledges,” New West Indian Guide no. 12, Leiden, 1– 26. 9. See also George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). 10. Joseph Roach uses the term “vortex of behavior” to refer to places that serve as sites for memory: “Their function is to canalize specified needs, desires, and habits in order to reproduce them. They frequently provide the crux in the semiotext of the circum-Atlantic cityscape—the grand boulevard, the market place, the theater district, the square, the burial ground— where the gravitational pull of social necessity brings audiences together and produces performers (candidates for surrogation) from their midst.” Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum- Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 28. 11. There are other examples in current criticism includ- ing the re- reading of Josephine Baker’s dances in Anthea Kraut, “Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hur- ston, and Katherine Dunham,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3 NOTES 173 (October 2003): 433– 50; and in Shane Vogel, “Performing Stormy Weather: Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, and Kath- erine Dunham,” South Central Review 25, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 93– 113; and in Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Dur- ham: Duke University Press, 2008). 12. On intersectionality and the theory developed by Kim- berle William Crenshaw to deal with convergent “black and feminist critical issues,” see José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications, Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 8. Chapter 3 1. The Koromantee war dance as narrated in Dunham’s book: Katherine Dunham’s Journey to Accompong (New York: Henry Holt, 1946). 2. See Lynne Fauley Emery, Black Dance from 1619 to Today (Princeton: A Dance Horizons Book, 1988). 3. This study, although concerned with the way Katherine Dunham inserted her own agency into what she had learned from her mentors in anthropology, generalizes the context of anthropological disputes of the time period in which she was formed. For a deeper understanding of the prevailing theories of Franz Boas on the topics being discussed, see Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture (New York: Macmillan Press, 1940). Chapter 4 1. “Intensité de vision” is the original phrase. The lit- eral translation conveys the meaning of visuality at the 174 NOTES levels aspired to in film. One could also imagine the term “hallucination”— seeing beyond the physical realm—as the spiritual aspects of Vodou suggest. 2. Maya Deren and Gregory Bateson, “An Exchange of Let- ters between Maya Deren and Gregory Bateson” October Vol. 14 (Autumn 1980): 16– 20. 3. Louis Maximilien was a Haitian who wrote the popular book Le Vodou haïtien: Rites rada- canzo (Port- au- Prince: Imprimerie Henri Deschamps, 1945) aimed at the Haitian Creole elite. See Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 82, 102. Afterword 1. As mentioned in Chapter 4, Isaac Julien, a black, British film- maker and visual artist, is a salient example of how Deren’s artistic influence transcends historical periods and allows for a continuum— in this case of the Carib- bean based ritual aesthetic. In Katherine Dunham’s case, there are multiple examples of how her influence marked African American dance, and modern dance in general, especially in the teaching of the Dunham technique in dance training. Dance troupes such as the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater continue to uphold her legacy of turning dance into activism. Perhaps other less well-known danc- ers, filmmakers, and choreographers here in Puerto Rico also profess this philosophy in “counterpublic” spheres, as named by José Esteban Muñoz as quoted throughout this study. 2. See Bojana Cvejic, “Notes on Cinematic Procedures in Contemporary Choreography,” in Dance, Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. André Lepecki (London: Whi- techapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2012), 192. Works Cited Accaria, Diane, and Rodolfo Popelnik. “Introduction: Here We Go Again— Undermining the Myth of Cultural Purity: The Caribbean’s Creolisation of America.” Prospero’s Isles: The Presence of the Caribbean in the American Imaginary. Ed. Diane Accaria and Rodolfo Popelnick. Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean, 2004. 1–19. Print. Albright, Ann Cooper. Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1997. Print. Aschenbrenner, Joyce. Dancing a Life. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2002. Print. ———. Katherine Dunham: Reflections of the Social and Political Contexts of Afro- American Dance. Dance Research Annual XII. New York: Cord, 1981. Print. Banes, Sally. “Balanchine and Black Dance.” Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism.