Dancing from Past to Present : Nation, Culture, Identities

A Publication of the Society of Dance History Scholars The Origins of the Bolero School, edited by Javier Suárez-Pajares and Xoán M. Carreira Carlo Blasis in Russia by Elizabeth Souritz, with preface by Selma Jeanne Cohen Of, By, and For the People: Dancing on the Left in the 1930s, edited by Lynn Garafola Dancing in Montreal: Seeds of a Choreographic History by Iro Tembeck The Making of a Choreographer: Ninette de Valois and “Bar aux Folies-Bergère” by Beth Genné Ned Wayburn and the Dance Routine: From Vaudeville to the “Ziegfeld Follies” by Barbara Stratyner Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet, edited by Lynn Garafola (available from the University Press of New England) Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War by Naima Prevots, with introduction by Eric Foner (available from the University Press of New England) José Limón: An Unfinished Memoir, edited by Lynn Garafola, with introduction by Deborah Jowitt, foreword by Carla Maxwell, and afterword by Norton Owen (available from the University Press of New England) Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities on and off the Stage, edited by Jane C. Desmond Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz Writings on Ballet and Music, by Fedor Lopukhov, edited and with an introduction by Stephanie Jordan, translations by Dorinda Offord Liebe Hanya: Mary Wigman’s Letters to Hanya Holm, compiled and edited by Claudia Gitelman, introduction by Hedwig Müller The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Gennaro Magri and His World, edited by Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Bruce Alan Brown Kaiso! Writings by and about Katherine Dunham, edited by VèVè A. Clark and Sara E. Johnson Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture, Identities, edited by Theresa Jill Buckland Dancing from Past to Present Nation, Culture, Identities Edited by The University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street Madison, Wisconsin 53711 www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/ 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England Copyright © 2006 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved 13542 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dancing from past to present: nation, culture, identities / edited by Theresa Jill Buckland. p. cm.—(Studies in dance history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-299-21850-3 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-299-21854-6 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Dance—History. 2. Dance—Anthropological aspects. I. Buckland, Theresa. II. Series: Studies in dance history (unnumbered). GV1601.D36 2006 793.3109—dc22 2006008620 Preface vii Acknowledgments xi 1 Dance, History, and Ethnography: Frameworks, Sources, and Identities of Past and Present 3 2 Dances and Dancing in Tonga: Anthropological and Historical Discourses 25 . 3 Constructing a Classical Tradition: Javanese Court Dance in Indonesia 52 - 4 Utopia, Eutopia, and E.U.-topia: Performance and Memory in Former Yugoslavia 75 . 5 Qualities of Memory: Two Dances of the Tortugas Fiesta, New Mexico 97 6 Dancing through History and Ethnography: Indian Classical Dance and the Performance of the Past 123 ’ 7 Interpreting the Historical Record: Using Images of Korean Dance for Understanding the Past 153 8 Romani Dance Event in Skopje, Macedonia: Research Strategies, Cultural Identities, and Technologies 175 v vi Contents 9 Being Traditional: Authentic Selves and Others in Researching Late-Twentieth-Century Northwest English Morris Dancing 199 Selected Further Reading 231 Contributors 239 Index 241 This book has two principal goals. First, it aims to stimulate debate on the combined use of ethnographic and historical strategies in investigat- ing dance as embodied cultural practice. Second, it aims to expand the field of mainstream dance studies by focusing on examples beyond typically Eurocentric conceptualizations of concert dance. The eight essays presented here constitute a specially commissioned collection of case studies on dancing in Tonga, Java, Bosnia-Herzegovina, New Mexico, India, Korea, Macedonia, and England. Each author was asked to root discussion in her or his own long-term ethnographic inquiry and to reflect upon issues of past and present within the dance practice inves- tigated. Authors were also invited to discuss their relationship to the research. The resultant collection provides examples not only of the making of histories and identities through bodily practices, but also of the part that disciplinary frameworks, methodology, and autobiography play in determining selection and interpretation. The balance of this collection lies with researchers of dance whose investigations did not begin with history; rather they turned toward the diachronic perspec- tive in order to shed light on present cultural meanings. Scholarly examination of “the past” might not immediately suggest the research focus of the human sciences as social scientists traditionally concentrate their attention on the present, initially at least. Such was the starting point for all the contributors to this volume. Traditionally too, social scientists are concerned more with understanding communal than individual practice. Again, this is a characteristic of the essays, apart from one example ( Janet O’Shea), in which the practice of individuals is examined in relation to interpretations of shared pasts. Taken as a whole, the collection of essays sheds light upon continuities and vii viii Preface disruptions in codified movement systems, interrogates attributions of significance and power to particular dance forms, and scrutinizes social and political agency behind a rhetoric that may foreground dance as cultural expression by reference to specific “past(s).” The inquiry has been undertaken through the explicit juxtaposition of ethnographic and historical frameworks. The concentration is on dance practices typically associated with particular cultural groups professing national, ethnic, or regional identities. Such identification may be challenged within the essays, and differing interpretations of the working processes of ethnographic and historical inquiry are evident. Nonetheless, the emphasis upon empirically based studies, resulting from long immersion in what- ever constitutes the “ethnographic community,” is a collective feature. Not every writer in this volume, of course, would necessarily con- sider herself or himself first and foremost as a social scientist. Some contributors work in university dance departments or dance organizations and may have training that parallels or draws upon aspects of the social sciences; others do hold specific qualifications as social scientists and are institutionally situated in such disciplines. The resultant treatment of the selected dance practices across this volume addresses a number of research questions that reach across past and present documentation and interpretation of dance practices. In answering such questions, the research requires techniques and analytical models beyond those traditionally associated with a single framework of inquiry. What brings the authors together here is less a single shared theoretical vision and more an interest in issues and knowledge gained from dancing across both pasts and presents. Obviously, the collection does not represent every academic dis- course that utilizes ethnography as a major methodology. Evident absences are sociology and cultural studies, both fields that have made innovative contributions to advancing dance knowledge and understanding.1 The principal academic frameworks used here are anthropology, dance ethnology, folk life studies, dance history, and performance studies. The essays demonstrate variation in the ways in which the researcher, as a result of his or her training, may relate to people and their practices. Even where the authors explicitly locate themselves within one disciplinary field, there exist differences of approach. Three essays are written from within anthropology (Adrienne Kaeppler, Felicia Hughes-Freeland, and Lynn Maners), but the specific treatment emerges from the separate schools of ethnoscience, social anthropology, Preface ix and cultural anthropology, respectively. Dance ethnology may constitute the disciplinary base for the essays by Judy Van Zile and Elsie Ivancich Dunin, but each author’s treatment of the overall theme by no means suggests a uniformity of engagement. The interpretations pro- vide reminders that even if the writers have a declared “home” discipline, they also exercise individual theoretical and methodological pref- erences. Moreover, all authors respond to different influences in dealing with their material in relation to the book’s theme. Interdisciplinary ten- dencies evident in this collection may result from the author’s training in more than one academic discipline and/or her or his openness to en- gaging with literature beyond the declared home discipline. Each case study is concerned with a dance practice that is popularly seen as “other” to Euro-American-derived concert dance. The specific- ities of each essay refute any overarching tendency toward monolithic conceptualizations of world dance cultures. Hughes-Freeland’s study, for example, reveals the fluid diversity of dance practice that belies the current seeming stability and tightly defined notion of classical dance in Indonesia. O’Shea discusses differing beliefs between individuals who perform a genre that is often popularly and erroneously referred to

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