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Dance History: Politics, Practices and

Perspectives Conference Proceedings

Saturday 13th March 2010

Chapman Hall, Queen’s Building, Southland’s College, Roehampton

University

Administered and compiled by Dr. Helen Julia Minors h.minors@roehampton.ac.uk

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Contents Acknowledgements 3 Preface, by Larraine Nicholas and Geraldine Morris 4 Conference Proceedings 5 Steffi Schroedter (Forschungsinstitut für Musiktheater der Universität, Bayreuth, Germany): Paris, qui danse: Movement and Sound Spaces between the July Monarchy and the Second French Empire 6 Victor Durà-Vilà (Durham University, UK): Versatility versus authenticity: a positive answer to a false dilemma 15 Hanna Järvinen and Anne Makkonen (Theatre Academy, Finland): Can We Dance History? 18 Camelia Lenart (State University of New York at Albany, USA): Turning the Tide and Reconstructing the Politics — A New Perspective on Martha Graham’s Tours to Britain in 1954 and the Response to Its Political and Artistic Complexity 23 Jane Carr (The University of Lincoln, UK): Issues of Control and Agency in Contemplating Cunningham’s Legacy 34 Henrietta Bannerman (The Place, UK): What’s in a name? - Judson Dance Theater viewed and reviewed 43 Alida Green (University of Pretoria, S. Africa): Choreographing the future: Writing children into the history of South African ballroom dancing 51 Stacey Prickett (Roehampton University): The People’s Dance: workers, politics and movement in 1930s Britain 71 Conference Programme 80 Abstracts 82 Society for Dance Research 91 Centre for Dance Research 92

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Acknowledgements

Conference Committee and Administration: Drs. Geraldine Morris (Roehampton University), Larraine Nicholas (Roehampton University), Helena Hammond (Surrey University) Dr. Helen Julia Minors (Roehampton University) All presenters have been invited to contribute to these conference proceedings. (A complete list of the presenters and their abstracts are provided within these proceedings.) There has been some standardization of the format for the papers, but otherwise these conference proceedings have been compiled from files provided by individual authors. The content is unchanged from that provided by the authors. Individual authors hold the copyrights to their papers. The Society for Dance Research is not legally responsible for any violation of copyright; authors are solely responsible.

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Preface

The Centre for Dance Research at Roehampton University was delighted to host the Society for Dance Research and its one day symposium on 13th March 2010. As members of the organising committee, our decision to focus the call for papers on ‘Dance History: Politics, Practices and Perspectives’, was motivated by our own beliefs that history remains a key area of dance research. We were delighted with the quality and diversity of the proposals we received. Our selected presenters were international, based in Germany, the USA, Finland, and South Africa as well as the UK. We welcomed more that fifty delegates. Dance in political history was discussed by Alida Green, on ballroom dancing amongst youngsters in South Africa, and by Stacey Prickett on political uses of dance in1930s London. Both of these also represented hitherto under-researched areas, for different reasons immured in ideological sensitivities. Reminding us that the accepted historical narrative can and should be re-assessed were Henrietta Bannerman, speaking on the pre-history of the Judson Dance Theater and Camelia Lenart on the first Martha Graham season in London. Steffi Schroedter and Noémie Solomon brought perspectives from their study of French dance in different centuries, Schroedter making links between dance and music in the nineteenth century and Solomon arguing for a perceptible engagement with history in some contemporary choreographers. Victor Durà-Vilà approached the issue of historical authenticity in performance from a philosophical direction. In a stimulating lecture demonstration, Hanna Järvinen and Anne Makkonen argued for an embodied, performative dance history. Michael Huxley and Jane Carr presented their research on student learning of dance history in the theoretical (Huxley) and performative (Carr) curriculum. As the organising committee, we would like to record our gratitude to our colleague Helen Julia Minors, who was the point-of-contact for presenters and delegates and who took on the major tasks of producing booklets and registration (helped by Michele Barrons on the day). Helen is also the compiler and editor of this, the SDR’s second online conference proceedings which will continue to inform scholars of some of the exciting directions currently underway in dance history.

Larraine Nicholas and Geraldine Morris (Roehampton University) and Helena Hammond (University of Surrey)

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Conference Proceedings

June 2010

Roehampton University

and

The Society for Dance Research

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Paris, qui danse:

Movement and Sound Spaces between the July Monarchy and the

Second French Empire

Steffi Schroedter

Forschungsinstitut für Musiktheater der Universität

Bayreuth, Germany

It is unappealing in ‘contemporary’ dance research to concern oneself with that kind of dance art, dance technique, or dance aesthetics labelled as “ballet”. This fact is not justified by the discipline’s current state of affairs – many sources of ‘ballet’ choreographies remain untouched and analyses of recovered sources are far from exhaustive – but rather is caused by a phenomenon pertaining to the politics of research. Ballet is considered as an elitist art through which – since the Ballet de Cour – power and control were physically exercised on the highest political and diplomatic level. At the same time, as one can read time and again in relevant dance historiographies, the body of the dancer has been ‘disciplined’ in an ‘unnatural’ manner by a primarily mechanically oriented technique and has thus been turned into a dramatic-narrative instrument. Since the dance reforms of the early 20th century, it is assumed that this supposedly archaic concept of dance has been extensively overcome – thus dance from that point onwards became more interesting to a critically reflective dance research. But one cannot fail to notice that the dance of the 20th and 21st centuries is still subject to authorities of power and control on various levels, and that it simultaneously shapes a power and control apparatus; in doing so it keeps developing new and fascinating techniques and aesthetics.

Thus dance historiography cannot be separated from dance politics. As long as scholars have written about dance, they have conveyed a specific idea of dance with a specific intention in mind, and possibly even with a specific ideology. In consequence, any dance historiographic work – regardless of the subject it examines – should above all develop a sensitivity for the formation of ideologies: both with regard to the sources, which ought to be inspected with utmost sensitivity in order not to hastily impose new ideologies onto them, and with regard to already existing research. With respect to the latter, it is also important to consider the political contexts in which the research was carried out, and to be aware of scholars’ individual motivations.

Under those conditions I consider it no longer problematic, but rather a particularly exciting challenge, to examine a chapter of European dance history that has arguably been marked by the most clichés and prejudices in its 20th-century reception, whether in dance practice or in critical dance research: dance cultures in Paris between 1830 and 1870. The continued presence of deeply entrenched

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prejudices is an important premise for my methodological approach. My intent is to steer away from a Euro-centric, apologetic dance historiography towards a topological concept that analyses structural analogies of different spaces, including artistically created spaces which are to be experienced sensually, either individually or collectively. Against this backdrop, I will use Paris as an example to demonstrate phenomena of international scope and general relevance with regard to ‘movements between listening and watching’, which in this context means, above all, music-dance-interactions within their historical dimensions, both with regard to aspects of their composition and with regard to their reception and possible perception.

It was important for my methodological approach not to concentrate on a single and outstanding artist, work, institution, area, genre or style, but to ‘synchronously’ combine (apparently) opposing tendencies in order to track down as many facets as possible of urban dance culture, from the ‘Académie royale de musique’, alias the ‘Opéra’, in the center to the ‘guinguettes’ at the outskirts. I am especially interested in transfer processes between stage productions, dance events and music performances that has stylised dance compositions in an urban context with a flourishing leisure culture. My focus is on the various social dance forms in operas and ballets and their reception beyond the stage – a reception in which music was mainly understood as an art of movement. Thus on the one hand I follow an approach derived from cultural studies that takes into consideration different levels of cultural activity within a city and directly juxtaposes them in order to demonstrate the smooth transitions between them. On the other hand, I look at different music and dance interactions to examine the tension between listening, watching and moving. In the end, I try to differentiate various kinds of listening to music in connection with dance on the stage and in the ballroom, as well as in the musical salon and concert life with its purely acoustic dance imaginations.

Due to sources, which can only offer fragmentary clues to my questions, I also rely on a historical (inter)media studies point of view. Since I am looking at highly dissimilar types of sources (music scores, iconography, monographs and journals), I must frequently question the possibilities and limitations of respective media and devise means for closing the gaps between them by combining them with one another. To further explain this approach, I will now present some individual subject areas of my study, which due to the necessary brevity of this paper can only be outlined here but will be discussed in greater detail in a book due to be published in 2013. In one of the first chapters of my book, I devote myself to dance in 19th-century music theatre’,1 which tends to be omitted from both music and dance historiograhic studies.2 Despite this omission, dance scenes give, as far as I am concerned, very illuminating insights not only into the dramaturgy of operas and their psychological facets, but far beyond into the world of dance in its everyday urban life, in its socio-cultural dimensions, and thus also into the socio-political significance of respective productions. An overview of the numerous dance scenes and musical hints at dance in different French opera genres of the 19th

1 The term “music theater” is used here in a very general sense, comprising very different genres of opera. 2 I do not want to go into the reasons for this phenomenon, which has its roots in historical contexts of the development of the research disciplines.

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century reveals that dance allowed protagonists’ private emotions and (socio-) political conflicts to be sensually perceptible. For example, balls or dance festivities of various kinds are performed (or imagined in a conversation or song) that make reference to social dance forms surely known to every theatregoer familiar with the notorious Paris ‘Dansomanie’.

Thus it is, for example, a skilfully calculated dramaturgical ploy to incorporate a ball that culminates in the murder of the monarch just before the final escalation of the dramatic action in Daniel François Esprit Auber’s Gustave III ou Le bal masqué.3 In many Grands opéras of the 19th century, dance and catastrophe became synonymous on the non-verbal plot level, which could only be deciphered acoustically and kinaesthetically. This fact seems to reflect Parisian everyday life, in which spaces formerly protected by privileges and social barriers were opened up by dance forms that had conquered a new freedom of movement. Under these circumstances, the choreographically well ordered ‘Contredanse française’ mutated into an increasingly lively and multi-adaptable ‘Quadrille parisienne’, which further evolved into the turbulent ‘Parisian Cancan’. As is often shown in illustrations and caricatures, the most prominent gesture of this dance phenomenon was the high flinging of the legs.

Cliché BnF Paris

3 Prèmiere: 27. February 1833, libretto: Eugène Scribe, choreography: Filippo Taglioni.

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In the final and fatal dance scene of Gustave III, a similar argument by analogy is suggested to the audience when in the 3rd scene of act V the stage is turned into a magnificent opera ballroom. The audience thus sees a room in which they are also themselves seated. Every year during carnival the stage and the auditorium of the Paris Opéra were transformed through lavish remodelling into a glamorous ballroom.

Cliché BnF Paris One can also make interesting analogies between the psychological space of experience in the theatre on the one hand, and everyday kinetically perceptible spaces of experience on the other. This is seen, for example, in various engravings of the annual carnival at the Paris opera ball. It was predetermined that around midnight at the latest a devastating chaos would spread, which invalidated any choreographic regulations and could have cost human lives.

Cliché BnF Paris

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In Gustave III, a comparable dance catastrophe is gradually prepared by a minuet fragment as an allusion to supposedly controlled political conditions, and, simultaneously as both a visually and acoustically discernible symbol of an obsolete political system. Then follows a Contredanse-Allemande – dance in vogue during the regime of Gustave III – that stands in for higher-privileged dance fashions. Afterwards, one hears marches associated with military discipline or administrative regulatory bodies, and a closing Galop during which the chaos takes its final course.

Whereas ballroom dances are integrated into the most dramatic scene in Auber’s Grand Opéra, one can see from illustrations of ball events at the Paris Opéra that theatrical dance performances were presented on small stages or separate spaces.

Cliché BnF Paris

The dividing line between the theatre in which societal interactions are staged and a ball event during which a dance is theatricalised is indistinct. Dance and music allow for particular socio-cultural and perception-psychological barriers to be overcome and allow the audience to participate immediately in the theatre events so that they do not only identify themselves with the stage performance on a rational and emotional level, but also on a more profound physical, kinetic level.

I will not only analyse analogies between stage and ballroom in Grands operas,4 but also in Opéra comique5 and Opéra bouffe6 productions. This comparison will allow me to trace how rudimentary dance scenes in Opéras

4 Auber: Gustave ou Le Bal masqué (1833); Halévy: La Juive (1835); Meyerbeer: Les Huguenots (1836) and Le Prophète (1849) 5 Adam: La Poupée de Nuremberg (1852) and Si j’étais roi (1852);

Auber: Le Domino noir (1837) and Manon Lescaut (1856)] 6 Offenbach: Orphée aux enfers (1858/1874), La Belle Hélène (1864),

La Vie parisienne (1866), La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867).

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comiques become caricatured dance frenzies in Opéras bouffes, and how the latter conclude neither tragically (as in Grands operas) nor conciliatorily (as in Operas comiques), but culminate in diffuse chaotic movement. What remains in Opéras bouffes of the formerly found carefully designed dance gestures and figures is a wild circumambulation through which is revealed an uncontrolled unconsciousness, which, encouraged by musical dynamics that increase gradually, culminate in ecstasy. This phenomenon is forcefully expressed in the final scene of Jacques Offenbach’s Vie Parisienne when Baron Gondremark sings “Tout tourne, Tourne, tourne, tout danse, danse, danse, Et voilà, déja, Que ma tête s’en va!”7 in Galop-rhythms while losing control of himself and falling mercy to his ‘strange Parisian friends’.

Comparable spaces of psychological experience onstage, which in the end refer to everyday realities, can also be found in the numerous ballets which were performed at the Opéra. I will examine their dramaturgical structure in combination with choreographic and musical aspects from the following angles:

- Le Diable à Paris: combinations of dance and the devil8 - Fallen daughters and fighting women –

gender-specific roles and relationship patterns on the stage9 - The military and the masses as expressions of everyday cultures10

My methodological approach of placing music/dance theatre events into an urban context – in particular examining their reception in the ballroom and in diverse concert events – is combined with analyses of the ballet scores, many of which are difficult to identify since they exist as manuscripts with only slight hints

7 Libretto Paris: Calmann-Lévy [1866], pp. 354ff [F-Po C. 6529 (4)]; Piano score by Victor Boullard, Paris: Heu [1866], pp. 213–220 [F-Pn Vm5. 2040] 8 Gide/Coralli: Le Diable boiteux (1836); Benoist/Reber/Mazilier: Le Diable amoureux (1840); Adam/Mazilier: Le Diable à quatre (1845); Pugni/Saint-Léon: Le Violon du Diable (1849) und Pugni/Saint-Léon: Diavolina (1863). For a first inside view on this chapter compare: Stephanie Schroedter, “Threshold spaces: Movement Topologies in Dance Cultures of the 19th Century”, in: Topographies: Sites, Bodies, Technologies. Proceedings, 32nd Annual Conference of the Society of Dance History Scholars, ed. by Marion Kant und Sarah Davies Cordova, Stanford/San Francisco 2009, S. 215–219. 9 Labarre/Taglioni: La Révolte au sérail, ou La Révolte des femmes (1833); Gallenberg/Taglioni: Brézilia, ou La Tribu des femmes (1835); Adam/Taglioni: La Fille du Danube (1836); Montfort/Coralli: La Chatte métamorphosée en femme (1837); Benoist/Thomas/Marliani/Mazilier: La Gipsy (1839); Adam/Perrot: Giselle, ou Les Wilis (1841) ; Adam/Albert: La Jolie fille de Gand (1842); Burgmüller/Coralli: La Péri (1843); Flotow/Burgmüller/Deldevez/Mazilier: Lady Henriette ou La Servante de Greenwich (1844); Deldevez/Mazilier: Paquita (1846); Pugni/Saint-Léon: La Fille de marbe (1847); Adam/Saint-Julien/Perrot: La Filleule des fées (1849); Pugni/Saint-Léon, Stella ou Les Contrebandiers (1850). 10 Carlini/Gide/Henry: Ile des pirates (1835); Adam/Drigo/Delibes/Mazilier: Le Corsaire (1856) and some of the above mentioned ballets.

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as to their narrative content. Prints of ballet arrangements (in combination with libretti) allow one to identify individual dance scenes, as well as extensive sequences of the danced drama. The quantity and variety of dance arrangements produced for the ballroom and musical salon or light concerts also attests to the success of a ballet (and of operas). This again proves that the ballets of the 19th century, which have mainly been reduced to story ballets by 20th dance research, where initially received musically and physically-kinetically. With this in mind, I will not only try to clarify how dance gestures and figures are to be defined or distinguished from music gestures and figures with regard to the Paris dance cultures of the 19th century, but also how they were transformed into musical gestures and figures in stylised dance compositions for the concert hall. Especially helpful in this context are contemporary piano exercises, which include arrangements of dances from operas and ballets. Dance music was a kind of ‘conditio sine qua non’ for the music education.

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Cliché BnF Paris

Finally I will examine whether and how a study of interactions between stage, ballroom, and musical salon/concert hall allow for a (re-)construction of a historiography of movement listening, movement watching, or of a dialogue between the two. Here I distinguish between a synaesthetic and kinaesthetic listening, which was associated with the mainly visual world of ballet and opera productions, kinetic listening, which developed in the ballroom, and an imaginary synaesthetic and kinaesthetic listening, which made arrangements of ballets for the musical salon – in their purely acoustic reception – comprehensible on the basis of remembered theatre scenes as well as through immediate dance experiences. With this in mind, one might discard the 19th-century myth of ‘absolute music’, which evolved in reaction to music and dance theatre,

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programme and light music in favour of a concept of different poetics or politics of listening to music with or without dance/movement.

Acknowledgements I would especially like to thank Stephanie Jordan for her helpful advice and critical comments in the progress of my research, as well as for instructions on tricky pronunciations. Copyright 2010, Stephanie Schroedter

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, die Hauptstadt des 19. Jahrhunderts”, in: Das Passagen-Werk, 5. Bd., 1. Teil, pp. 45–77.

Bouchon, Marie-Françoise. “Les Représentations du bal dans le ballet du XIXe siècle”, in: Histoires de bal: vivre, représenter, recréer le bal, ed. by Cité de la musique/Centre de ressources musique et danse, Paris 1998, pp. 153–178.

Clark, Maribeth. “The Quadrille as embodied musical experience in 19th century Paris”, in: Journal of Musicology, vol. 19, no. 3, summer 2002, p. 503–526.

Cordova, Sarah. Paris Dances. Textual Choreographies in Nineteenth-Century French Novel, San Francisco 1999.

Dubois, Claude. La Bastoche. Bal-Musette, Plaisir et Crime 1750–1939: Paris entre chiens et loups, Paris 1997.

Gasnault, François. Guinguettes et Lorettes: Bals publics à Paris au XIXe siècle, Paris 1986; “Les salles de bal du Paris romantique: décors et jeux des corps”, in: Romantisme, 38, October-December 1982, p. 7–18; “Jullien et le Casino Pagainini”, in: Revue international de musique française, November 1982, p. 61–75.; “Un Animateur des bals publics parisiens: Philippe Musard (1792–1859)”, in: Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de Paris et de l’Ile de France, 108, 1981, p. 117–149; “Le bal à Paris entre 1800 et 1870”, in: Histoires de Bal – vivre, représenter, recréer le bal, ed. by Cité de la Musique/Claire Rousier, Paris 1998, p. 55–70.

Gerhard, Anselm. Die Verstädterung der Oper. Paris und das Musiktheater des 19. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart, Weimar 1992.

Guest, Ivor. The Romantic Ballet in Paris, London1966/1980. Joannis-Deberne, Henri. Danser en société: bals et danses d’hier et d’aujourd’hui,

Paris 1999. Montandon, Alain. Paris au bal. Treize physiologies sur la danse, Paris 2000. Pasler, Jann. Composing the Citizen. Music as Public Utility in Third Republic

France, Berkely/Los Angeles/London 2009. Smith, Marian. Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle. Princeton/Oxford 2000;

“Drawing the Audience in: The Theatre and the Ballroom”, in: Verdi in Performance, ed. by Alison Latham and Roger Parker, 2001, p. 113–119.

Stierle, Karlheinz. Der Mythos von Paris. Zeichen und Bewußtsein der Stadt, München 1998.

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Versatility versus authenticity:

a positive answer to a false dilemma

Víctor Durà-Vilà

Durham University, UK

(1) Relevance: decision-making and reactions (1.1) Artistic policy: companies’ artistic direction, programming of theatres, etc. (1.2) Artistic decision making: rehearsal directors, producers, interpreters, etc. (1.3) Critical relevance: critical response to artistic decisions, critical scrutiny of standards and performances (by professional critics and aficionados) Relation to aesthetic experience? Yes (2) Two conflicting positions: (A) The need for a varied repertoire in big companies, which requires versatile dancers to do justice to different styles (B) Big companies are seen as the repository of a dance style, related to a choreographer or a tradition Conflict: (A) comes at the expense of (B) (2.1) Examples: Royal Danish Ballet and Bournonville, Royal Ballet and Ashton, New York City Ballet and Balanchine (2.1.1) This could apply in the future to choreographer-led companies (2.2) Two kinds of criticisms based on the idea of a ‘loss of style’: (I) They are not doing justice to the work because the style standard has dropped (II) All the dancers across the international scene look increasingly the same (the homogenization of style) (2.3) Several versions of criticism (I) Aesthetic satisfaction: the work is not aesthetically satisfying Authenticity: the work is losing its authenticity or is lacking in authenticity Ontology: the work performed is no longer a performance of the intended work (2.3.1) Are any of the versions equivalent?

The aesthetic satisfaction version is clearly different from the authenticity and ontological versions

The authentic and ontological versions may or may not be conflated (3) Paradigm example of authenticity: period instruments or early music movement (3.1) Conflation of historical and personal authenticity (3.2) Problem: strictly authentic performances can be quite unsatisfying (3.2.1) Historical interest, but not aesthetic (3.3) Solution: to idealize the approach: ‘as it would have sounded under ideal conditions’

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(3.3.1) Change in the leading motivation: aesthetic satisfaction takes over authenticity (3.3.2) The very point of authenticity is to be right about the criterion for authenticity (4) Motivations for style authenticity: authorial intentionalism and critical monism (4.1) Authorial intentionalism: it is how the choreographer intended the work to be (4.1.1) Works of art should be interpreted by following their authors’ intentions (4.2) Anti-intentionalism: rejection of authorial intentionalism (4.2.1) Strong thesis: authorial intentions are never relevant to the interpretation of artworks (4.2.2) Weak thesis: authorial intentions are not always relevant to the interpretation of artworks (4.3) Critical monism: there is only one right way of dancing the work (the true or correct interpretation) Critical pluralism is the thesis that artworks admit of alternative, equally acceptable interpretations, some of which are incompatible with others; it asserts that if there is a way to get an artwork right then there are many ways. The contrasting thesis is critical monism: every artwork is susceptible to a single correct, complete interpretation. (Kraut 2009: 211) (4.3.1) Critical monism can be motivated by authorial intentionalism (4.4) Criticism: authorial intentionalism and critical monism narrow down or impoverish the scope of our aesthetic experience and practice (5) Practice in other performing arts (5.1) Pluralism is part and parcel of current directorial and interpretative practices (stage direction in theatre and opera, music interpretation, etc.) (5.2) Versatility, at the very least, is not a problem, and in some cases is welcomed and even encouraged (5.3) Examples: (5.3.1) Opera: singers singing in very different styles and yet in a very idiomatic fashion (Felicity Lott, Alfredo Kraus) The limitations are physical ones in the case of opera singers (5.3.2) Music: period orchestras playing an increasingly wider repertoire, modern orchestras not renouncing 18th-century works, ‘specialist’ early music conductors playing modern pieces and early pieces with modern orchestras (Roger Norrington, John Eliot Gardiner, Marc Minkowski) (5.3.3) Theatre: actors shifting through centuries and styles (6) Back to the motivations for (I): aesthetic satisfaction versus authenticity (6.1) The aesthetic satisfaction motivation does not require authorial intentionalism or critical monism (both, in my view, undesirable positions) and it is perfectly in tune with critical pluralism (6.2) The aesthetic satisfaction motivation will only be against versatility as a matter of practical limitation, not principle (quite the contrary) (6.3) Implications for academic work concerning choreographic style and interpretation in the context of the choreographer’s intentions (7) Is there then a practical limitation having to do with dancers bodies and minds? Or having to do with companies and their collective limitations and structure? We have good examples to the contrary and we should aim at the best possible outcomes, rather than the common minimum denominator (7.1) Do we need to prioritize style fidelity over versatility in order to achieve maximum

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aesthetic satisfaction? It could contingently be the case It is not as a matter of fact It is certainly not as a matter of principle Copyright 2010, Víctor Durà-Vilà

Bibliography Currie G. 1993. Interpretation and objectivity. Mind 102: 413-428 Dickie G and Wilson WK. 1995. The intentional fallacy: defending Beardsley. Journal

of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53: 233-250 Farrelly-Jackson S. 1997. On art and intention. Heythrop Journal 38: 172-179 Kraut R. 2009. Critical monism and pluralism. In Davies S, Higgins KM, Hopkins R,

Stecker R and Cooper DE. eds. A companion to aesthetics. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell

Kivy P. 1995. Authenticities: philosophical reflections on musical performance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press

Margolis J. 1989. Reinterpreting interpretation. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47: 237-251

Stecker R. 1994. Art interpretation. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52: 193-206

Wilson WK. 1997. Confession of a weak anti-intentionalist: exposing myself. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55: 309-311

Young JO. 1988. The concept of authentic performance. British Journal of Aesthetics 28: 228-238

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Can We Dance History?:

The Presence of History in Dance Practice

Anne Makkonen and Hanna Järvinen

Theatre Academy, Finland

Anne: We are here to present our new research project Can We Dance History? for which we’ve recently received a grant from the Finnish Culture Foundation. This is an artist-led and pedagogical project about the practices of art making.

Hanna: By asking Can We Dance History, we, me and Dr. Makkonen question how history is present in the practice of dance and how can this corporeal practice be used as new kind of a source and/or method for historiography.

Anne: The project started last spring at the spring meeting of the Performing Arts Research Centre at the Theatre Academy, Helsinki, where we asked a series of questions on dance and history.

Hanna: Now we’ll share with you a short version of that performative. Anne: Where is the past of dance? Hanna: What in the past of dance can become history? Or histories? Anne: When and how does the past become history? Hanna: Who owns history? Anne: By what means do we research history? Hanna: How is the past presented or represented as history? Anne: Does the past leave us sources, traces or remnants? Hanna: Who turn the past into history? Anne: Can the past be excluded from the present? Hanna: For what do we need the past? PAUSE Anne: Does dance art vanish? Hanna: What remains of dance? Anne: What is the being of dance? Does it exist outside the moment? Hanna: Can dance be historiography? Anne: Can we dance history? Hanna: Are there historical questions that are specific to dance as an art? Anne: Are the current topics of dance history narrow and limited? Hanna: Can dance move history as a discipline? Anne: What can artist-based research give to historical research, its theories, methods and modes of representation? Hanna: What can history offer to dance? PAUSE Anne: Is history based on material documents? Hanna: Is the human body a material document?

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Anne: What is the relationship between material documents and memories? Hanna: How do we remember? Anne: How do our memories feel, look, sound like? How do they move? Hanna: Can a historical experience be generated without remembered experience? Anne: Can we share this experience of history? Hanna: How is the past present in your art and artistic understanding? Anne: Do articulated and unarticulated pasts differ in their effects in the present? PAUSE Hanna: How is history articulated in art, dance, performance? Anne: How does history signify for present practice? Hanna: What is the value of our past? Anne: Is history a vehicle for something? Hanna: Is all history ideological and someone’s history? Anne: How can we understand a past individual whose past is different from ours? Hanna: What kinds of ethical questions arise from this? Anne: Is performing historiography dangerous? Hanna: Was that a rhetorical question? Anne: Why is the history of dance self-evident? Hanna: What is the course of dance history? How do we orient ourselves? Anne: Making dances is not an ahistorical process: dance emerges from

movement material that is temporally and culturally specific. Can We Dance History? looks into the possibilities of the studio in historical research. We want to raise our students’ and colleagues’ level of awareness of where this movement material comes from; how dance is conceptualised by practitioners in practice as well as in written texts. We ask what are the possibilities for performative history, an interpretation of the past that acts on the present.

Hanna: Our project stresses that in pedagogical practice, history has to be made meaningful from the perspective of the immediate present for the lessons to signify anything for the practitioners of the future that we teach. Dance professionals cannot relate their current interests in making art to a history based on written documents that ignores most of the everyday practices of dance, such as training and rehearsing, taking care of one’s physical well-being, injuries and pain, or memories and affects associated with particular corporeal actions and expressions. We propose that for a practising artist, history lessons should offer critical perspectives to present and future practices, new questions and proposals rather than a series of fixed facts and illustrious predecessors.

Anne: We are both dance historians, and share a methodological ground for moving ideas. Our project aims to change how history is understood by dance practitioners. It also aims to make historians aware of the methods developed in the performing arts for discussing the corporeal memory necessary for the ephemeral practice of performance. To this end, we stress history as a narrative and performative formation, remembered, embodied and written.

Hanna: For answering our question if and how we can dance history, we have turned to the methods of so-called New History. Two approaches to historiography are particularly interesting for us: metahistory and genealogy. The former is Hayden White’s (1975) famous approach, where historians and their ideas of history become

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the objects of historical research. We ask, can we, in our teaching, discuss histories of dance as histories of the time of writing, as particular viewpoints into the past? How would this be possible in studio practice, in the context of movement material and dancing bodies? And what of in the everyday life of an arts school? How can studio practice be integrated into the practice of historiography? Is critical embodiment of a past practice a real possibility? What are the implications of such integration to historiography more generally?

Anne: We expand White’s metahistorical approach by combining it with the genealogical project of Michel Foucault (2001). The past is present in each one of us, so why not begin teaching history for the present from the present rather than from ancient examples of works created centuries ago. We would like to see what kinds of narratives this produces and how our students understand themselves and their dancing as embodying history through this approach.

Hanna: By co-operating with dancers, we study how their past and our historical examples can inform their practice, help them to put their training into a context of changing pedagogical and aesthetic ideas. Rather than ask what is being discussed, our students are encouraged to ask how it is discussed: for example, who creates dance – who is its author and why – or (re)presents its history? What are the consequences of the agendas of such gatekeepers to dance's past and present? By paying attention to how different modes of transmission of an ephemeral performance practice affect that practice, dancers realise both the potential this ephemerality offers for their art form (see e.g. Lepecki 1999; Franko 1995) and the conflicts that arise from trying to fit a performative art into the aesthetic vocabulary developed for literature and fine arts, where ‘a work’ or ‘an author’ are more stable entities than in dance. For artists belonging to a minority, understanding history as something changing and something created in the present and for the present can also be an empowering experience: if history is not stable and fixed, it can be changed to include us.

Anne: We both are affiliated postdoctoral researchers at the Theatre Academy. My research interests focus on the relatively recent past of dance in Finland in the 1980s. My principal question is how to use dancers' bodies, how to get them to remember and articulate their knowledge in words as well as movement? In my PhD thesis, One Past, Many Histories - Loitsu (1933) in the Context of Dance Art in Finland, I already participated in the discussion on dance construction and reconstruction by examining the potential of new historical processes in performative constructions of partly lost works. I argued for performative dancing histories alongside written ones by including a DVD, Loitsu: Danced Histories? as a part of my dissertation. (Makkonen 2007.)

In Can We Dance History?, my research consists of working in cooperation with mainly non-canonical Finnish dancers and dance makers of the 1980s. The collaboration has already started with two dancers, Leena Gustavson and Jaana Klevering. The actions of these dancers reveal the embodied traces of past practices in the present. In my PhD thesis I claimed that historical performative as historical narrative can be the birthplace of the meanings of the past and the present. As dance historians, we therefore have to construct not only written narratives, but also innovative, transformative and performative dancing histories.

Hanna: By contrast and in juxtaposition to Anne, I am a cultural historian by training without professional experience in dance. My research project will study whether the approaches we develop can be used to study dance of which no living informants remain. What are the alternatives to moving bodies and moving images

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that a dance historian can draw upon to address the everyday practices of dance in the past? Beyond written or transcribed reminiscences, contemporary interviews, images, costumes, and other ephemera can be used to research the attitudes of dance makers towards their own bodies, those of their colleagues, and of projected ideals such as the aesthetic demands of dance instructors and critics.

Certainly, what remains in a given culture and historical period places its particular limitations to such an exercise. My historical period specialisation is in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art dance, and in this project, I will focus on the emergence of new staged art dance forms (c. 1880-1920) that later became known as modern dance and modern ballet. With such new forms, new training systems and a new language for discussing corporeal experience emerged that drew heavily on non-European dance cultures. Changes in material circumstances as well as aesthetics influenced how dancers trained and what their bodies came to be, but little so far has been written of this in dance history. I want to address the possible significances of this no-longer-living dance practice to today's dancers in an effort to embrace both historical change and long-term similarities in corporeal experience. As such, my part of the project links with the current research interest on the history of the body in historiography and shows how focal dance, as an art of the body, is to it.

Anne: Finally, we would like to share with you my latest research work with dancer Leena Gustavson. First, a brief introduction to that. My motive to ask how does dance history exist and how could it exist probably arises from the following rhetorical question presented by Dutch historian Frank Ankersmit (2005, 76): “Do we not all feel that language has a problem if confronted with the arts, with paintings, with music, with the world of love (and hate), of all of our most intense and most personal feelings - and of our experiences.”

I very much agree with dance historian Alexandra Carter (2007) that dance history, like dancing, is both an intellectual and a physical activity. Be careful now - I consider all sorts of histories important and useful, and I am producing them also in my own research. However, at the same time I have a feeling, experience and intuition that mostly written dance histories are primarily framing, contextualising and legitimating dancing, and it is not enough for me. I am greedy and think historical research does not pay enough attention to dance as the corporeal activity of dancers. This activity is not really included and presented as a part of history. Sometimes I have to ask myself how much I, as a dance historian, actually tell and present things and issues that are not that relevant to dancing.

Although dance is considered ephemeral, happening at the moment, it does not totally vanish. It leaves traces in dancing people and their bodies. We can not get rid of these traces, and these latent, sometimes almost absent traces become visible and present when they are danced and embodied again. They reveal a past which is somehow still present, not as it was, but as we are recalling, imagining, interpreting, presenting and dancing it at the present moment.

Now, the edited videoXnot as it was, but as Leena recalls, imagines, interprets, presents, dancesX

© 2010 Anne Makkonen and Hanna Järvinen

Bibliography: Ankersmit, Frank R. (2005) Sublime Historical Experience. Standford: Standford University Press.

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Carter, Alexandra (2007) “Practising dance history: reflections on the shared processes of dance historians and dance makers.” In Ann Cooper Albright, Dena Davida & Sarah Davies Cordova (ed.): Society of Dance History Scholars 30th Annual Conference Proceedings, Paris: Centre national de la danse, 126-130. Foucault, Michel ([1994] 2001) Dits et écrits 1954-1988, tome I: 1954-1975. [Paris]: Quarto Gallimard. Franko, Mark (1995) “Mimique.” In Ellen W. Goellner, Jacqueline Shea Murphy (ed.): Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 205-216. Gustavson, Leena & Makkonen, Anne (2009) Xnot as it was, but as Leena recalls, imagines, interprets, presents, dancesX DVD produced by Anne Makkonen. Lepecki, André (1999) “Maniacally Charged Presence.” In body.con.text. The Yearbook of Ballett International Tanz Aktuell, 82-87. Makkonen, Anne (2007) One Past, Many Histories - Loitsu (1933) in the Context of Dance Art in Finland. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Surrey. Includes DVD Loitsu: Danced Histories? www.wwwmakkonen.kotisivukone.com White, Hayden V. ([1973] 1975) Metahistory: Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore, ML and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Turning the Tide and Reconstructing the Politics — A New

Perspective on Martha Graham’s Tours to Britain in 1954 and the

Response to Its Political and Artistic Complexity

Camelia Lenart

State University of New York at Albany, USA

“London was hard,” Martha Graham wrote from Europe in the spring of 1954 to her long time friend, the musician Louis Horst. “It was mixed but a critic turned the tide for me. The houses were small at first but then we finished with filled houses and bravos. It seems that the thing most amazing is that we as Americans have a culture other than the movies or Russian ballet transplanted,”11 concluded the American artist. The 1954 European tour, and particularly the “London moment,” has a special significance in the trajectory of Martha Graham’s long life and career. It was a moment when the dancer enriched her role as a cultural diplomat started in 1950 and, most significantly, it was the moment when “the tide was turned” for American modern dance in Europe. My paper brings a new perspective to the chronology of both, showing that Graham’s role as a cultural ambassador started before the Asian Tour of 1955, usually considered its inception, and that the summit of her European triumph, namely the Festival in Edinburgh in 1963, had its precedent on the London stage during the tour in 1954.

Mentioned in biographies and in the literature but not analyzed in depth, Graham’s role as a cultural diplomat in Europe, and especially her London appearance, which was the most important, complete, and complex event of the entire tour in 1954, remained somehow obscured and “lost,” an artistic enterprise without clearly defined borders. It has fallen through the cracks of Graham’s life and career, between her national phase, started during the twenties when she created her own company, elaborated her major works and established her fame, and the international one, considered to have begun officially only in 1955, with the State Department tour to Asia. My work rescues the 1954 tour from an undeserved minimization of its place and importance in Graham’s story, showing that already in 1950 and even more in 1954 her tours were viewed as instruments of the American cultural diplomacy, and also that unlike in France four years earlier, in London Graham started to build her international success.

In February 1954 Graham, a company of fourteen dancers, and the musical director Simon Sadoff sailed from New York on the Queen Elizabeth. Martha Graham’s relationship with Europe was from the beginning not to be an easy one. She had briefly toured the continent when she was a member of the Ruth St. Denis Company during the twenties, but her own company received its first invitation to Europe in 1936 from Hitler, who asked Graham to dance at the opening ceremonies

11 Don McDonough, Martha Graham: a biography (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 232

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of the Berlin Olympiad. The dancer refused, and this act of defiance made the Nazi cultural arbiter Joseph Goebbels put Graham on a list with people “to be taken care of” once Germany conquered the USA, a gesture which the artist declared was one of the biggest complements she ever received. In 1938 Dorothy Elmhirst invited Graham to London, but she did not want to travel because of the European political situation.12

In 1950 she and her company planned to tour Paris and London. After a few unsuccessful evenings in Paris, Graham traveled to London, but she and her company did not dance there.13 Her absence was noticed and regretted by dance lovers and by British professional dancers, as evidenced by letters sent to the dancer on behalf of Dance Magazine, The Dancing Times magazine, and British performers,14 all culminating with an invitation from Dame Ninette de Valois, who, out of solidarity or curiosity (or maybe both), asked Martha Graham to attend a party organized by her in California at the end of the summer of 1950 (but the invitation was not honored).15

If in 1950 the initiative to go to Europe was considered to have belonged more to Erick Hawkins and Bethsabee de Rothschild,16 than to Graham herself, in 1954 the situation was different. The artist herself wanted to make her art known in Europe, as shown by the fact that in 1955, when Martha Hill and Walter Terry were charged by the dance panel of ANTA with persuading Graham to go to Asia as a cultural ambassador, she declared to them that at that point she was not interested in the Orient, but that she was “wishing to return to Europe.”17 Even if she seemed more interested in Europe than four years before and consequently in the “internationalization” of her art, Graham was aware that a tour could not have been done relying on the very modest means of her school and company. The costs of traveling with a company were very high, and because cultural diplomacy in the Europe of the fifties was complicated by the very powerful and carefully organized Russian cultural offensive on Western stages, Graham needed strong financial and logistical support overseas.

For deciphering the complex and nuanced relationship Martha Graham had with Europe, one has to look behind the stage in order to discover who helped Graham’s tours to become a reality, or, using Frances Saunders’s metaphor, to find out “Who paid the piper.”18 Graham’s patronage, private and official, has not been analyzed at large and in depth thus far, and her official involvement in American cultural diplomacy is assumed to have started with the Asian Tour in 1955. Pearl Lang, the soloist of Graham’s company, who premiered Ardent Song on the London

12 Larraine Nicholas, Dancing in Utopia: Dartington Hall and Its Dancers (London: Dance Books Ltd, 2007), p. 46 13 Agnes De Mille, Martha. The Life and Work of Martha Graham (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 335 14 Letters to Martha Graham, Martha Graham Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 229 15 Letter of Arthur Todd to Martha Graham, unknown date, Martha Graham Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 229 16 Pearl Lang, Interview with the author, October 2008, tape recording 17 Naima Prevots, Dance for Export (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), p. 44 18 Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (New York: The New Press, 2000)

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stage in the spring of 1954, suggested that when Graham attempted Europe again, “she was little interested in who helped her art as long as it could be promoted”19 outside of the American borders, a statement indicating that she received help for the 1954 tour, and that there were more sources from which she could receive support. Indeed, once the Cold War started, Martha Graham along with other American artists such as Jackson Pollock, discovered that beside private sponsorship (Bethsabee de Rothschild and Lilla Acheson in Graham’s case, and Peggy Guggenheim in Pollock’s), they were also offered the State Department’s support in order to extend the artistic message beyond of the theatrical stage and the exhibition hall, and to help the effort of their country in the competition for cultural supremacy.

Already considered a national pride, Martha Graham had in fact been chosen to represent her country abroad much earlier, as shown by a recently discovered document which proves that Graham’s official quality as a cultural diplomat started with the 1950 tour to Europe. In a letter sent by Gertrude Macy to the British general consul in New York, Sir Francis Evans, Macy informed the consul about Martha Graham’s intention to tour London, and inquired about any “official interest” of Britain in the American artist, praised by Macy as “one of the greatest – if not the greatest – of our artists in any field.”20 What makes the letter even more interesting is that Miss Macy answered the question “Who paid the piper?” acknowledging that “Miss Graham will be going under private auspices, but with the official blessing and the well wishes of our State Department.”21 That Graham’s trip to Europe was not just an artistic enterprise but a mission which clear diplomatic aims is reflected by the fact that Macy hoped that “sending her would combat the current misleading propaganda that the Americans’ productivity is limited to commercial and material fields,” and that “the artist’s presence would be a compliment to the countries that have sent us of their best.”22

Concomitantly with Macy’s letter, the Cultural Relations Department of the Foreign Office in London received two very important letters from the US. The first was from the British Information Services in New York, which informed the office that Martha Graham “would like some engagements in Britain,” and that she was suggested “to take the up the matter through the American Embassy.” The British Information Service Department also asked the British Cultural Relations Department to support Graham and to inform the British Arts Council about the American artist’s “availability,” as “she was a really outstanding performer.”23 The second letter came from the British Embassy in Washington as a result of a visit from “Mr. Craig Barton, interviewed at “the request of the Department of State,” who “was anxious to secure the help of the Art Council for Martha Graham’s tour to London.”24 This statement,

19 Pearl Lang, Interview with the author, October 2008, Tape Recording 20 Letter of Gertrude Macy to Sir Francis Evans, date unknown, 1950, FO 924, CRL 48/5, The British Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey 21 Ibid. 22 Letter of Gertrude Macy to Sir Francis Evans, date unknown, 1950, FO 924, CRL 48/5, The British Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey 23 Letter from the Office of British Information Services to the Cultural Relations Department of the Foreign Office in London, March 24, 1950, FO 924, CR/L 48/5, The British Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey 24 Letter of the Education Office in Washington to the Cultural Relations Department of the Foreign Office in London, April 12, 1950, FO 924, CR/L 48/8, The British Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey

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which clearly indicates State’s direct involvement in Graham’s tour, next to Gertrude Macy’s 1950 reference to “the official blessing and well wishes of our State Department,” demonstrates that even without public acknowledgement, Graham’s prospective appearances in Europe were considered by Washington to be serving American cultural diplomacy, before what was described as “the first formal notice the U. S. State Department had ever taken of her,” namely an April 1954 intervention for Graham’s tour by the American Ambassador in Brussels.25

After these letters were received the Foreign Office contacted the British Arts Council directly for “assistance” related to Graham’s tour to Britain.26 If in the first reply, the Council’s secretary general, Ms. Glasgow, said that the Arts Council could not help Graham’s tour because the negotiations for engagements came too late,27 in a second letter, apparently after another flurry of official correspondence, rather dryly Ms. Glasgow stated that she received “a visit from Mr. Green, acting as a manager of Ms. Graham,” who, “out of sheer personal persuasiveness has apparently clinched arrangements for presenting the company for three weeks in London. He also got Mr. David Webster, the General Administrator of Covent Garden to organize the visit for him.”28

The exchange of letters between Graham’s entourage and the top diplomatic British offices, completed by the “official blessing” of the State Department, confirms the official diplomatic quality of the 1950 tour in American cultural diplomacy. Not just a display of artistry and innovation, the Americans considered Graham’s presence in Britain “an outstanding occasion of the year whereby American dancing could be presented to our British friends,”29 as the officer of Public Affairs of the American Embassy in London, Mallory Brown, stated in a letter sent directly to Graham shortly after the cancellation of the tour. The American diplomat also conveyed to Graham the huge disappointment the tour’s cancellation had created among the embassy’s members, ready to applaud Graham the dancer but also Graham the cultural ambassador of her country.30 Because of the unexpected developments of the tour in 1950, the moment had to wait another four years.

Official involvement in Graham’s tour to Europe in 1954, and especially in Britain, is no less documented. Shortly after the tour, Ms. Mary Stewart Frances, the chief of the International Exchange Program in the Department of State, received a letter from an unidentified member of the dancer’s entourage. He/she thanked Stewart Frances for “all the help while we were there” and asked for further support for another European tour, which appeared at that point as a serious possibility, but the writer also cautioned Ms. Stewart Frances that it “will have to be without the Foundation underwriting” (one can easily understand that it was referring to de Rothschild’s Foundation). Finally, the sender asked Stewart Frances to indicate to Graham and her company which locations would be the best and most safe to try

25 De Mille, Martha, p. 316 26 Letter from A. L. Mayall to Miss Glasgow, April 24, 1950, FO 924, CRL 48/8, The British Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey 27 Letter of Miss Glasgow to A. L. Mayall, April 29, 1950, FO 924, CRL 48/9, The British Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey 28 Letter of Miss Glasgow to A. L. Mayall, May 17, 1950, FO 924, CRL 48/10, The British Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey 29 Letter of Mallory Brown to Martha Graham, August 15, 1950, Martha Graham Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 229 30 Ibid.

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again, while also requesting comments and reports provided by the various embassies to the State Department, on Graham’s “appearance there,” which could be helpful “for planning the next tour.”31

A further confirmation of the official involvement of the State Department in the tour is the letter sent by Bennett and Pleasant, Graham’s press representatives, to her and her staff while she was in Europe. Letting them know how proud they were of their success (“thrilled with the wonderful reports”), Bennett office also reported that “The Voice of America” had reprinted 70,000 copies of an article about Martha Graham and distributed them throughout Europe, demonstrating that Graham’s trip overseas was by no means just an artistic venture with no diplomatic parameters.32 While in London, Graham also received a letter regarding the publicity with which the company and its leader were assisted by the State Department and USIA in Germany, prior to their appearance there. The explanation lies in the fact that Baroness de Rothschild, who promised her father that she would never spend a dime on German soil, was unable to help the company;33 therefore the State Department and USIA took over the task.

The Baroness Bethsabee de Rothschild’s support of Graham’s Company, School, as well as of her tours to Europe and afterwards to the rest of the world, was a reality which was never contested but also has not been at extensively explored.34 As Gertrude Macy mentioned in her letter, the State Department’s “official blessing” of Martha Graham’s tours did not mean that private sponsorship was not involved.35 1950 and 1954 tours were an interesting mélange of private and State Department support, a situation which did not lack drama and complications, but which was strongly beneficial to the development of Graham’s art in general, and its international promotion in particular. Bethsabee de Rothschild told Graham after the unsuccessful Paris debut in 1950, “Whenever you are ready - if you are ever ready – do come back and try again. I will have the means to see that you do. Don’t ever worry about that,”36 it therefore was not a surprise when the Baroness, who was also a member of ANTA’s first dance panel, a benefactor of this organization, and already a sponsor of the dance festivals held in 1953 and 1955 in New York,37 with her family’s help,38 became involved in the 1954 tour to Europe. In a photograph from that time, one can see the Baroness on the deck of RMS Queen Elizabeth ready to leave New York harbor on a hazy morning, posing next to Graham and the dancers

31 Letter of unknown sender to Mary Frances Stewart, February 22, 1955, Martha Graham Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 230 32 Letter of Isabella Bennett to Young Woodely, May 21, 1954, Martha Graham Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 230 33 Agnes De Mille, Martha. The Life and Work of Martha Graham (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 316 34 Camelia Lenart, “Martha Graham and Bethsabee de Rothschild — An Artistic Friendship in the Service of Modern Dance” (Paper presented in NYSAEH Conference, Brockport , October 2009) 35 Letter of Gertrude Macy to Sir Francis Evans, date unknown, March 1950, FO 924, CRL 48/5, Kew, Richmond, Surrey 36 Agnes De Mille, Martha. The Life and Work of Martha Graham (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 300 37 London, Private Collection 38 London, Private Collection

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Paul Taylor, Linda Hodes and Helen McGehee.39 With her tiny but neat handwriting, the Baroness noted under the picture: “to Europe, 1954.”40 That the Baroness was to not only a sponsor of the tour but also that she was a key factor in the decisions related to it is shown an exchange of letters between the European impresarios and Graham’s New York “headquarters” prior to the tour. They reflect the fact that the benefactor was positive that the tour was to start in Britain, but also that France had to be included on the list of the company’s appearances; otherwise “Miss de Rothschild would not be interested in this venture at all without Paris.”41 A year after the tour, in a letter from Bennett & Pleasant (Graham’s press representatives), Bethsabee de Rothschild was informed about bills from the tour, which were expected to be paid by her.42

The presence of Martha Graham in Britain in 1954 was also the commencement of a unique relationship, which was the harbinger of Graham’s international triumph and popularity, namely between the artist and the British public. It brings a new perspective to the relationship between Graham and Europe, which is considered not to have been a successful one during the fifties. This assumption is contradicted by a closer analysis of the reactions the tour drew in Britain from dance critics, dance “connoisseurs,” and from the audience which was not previously “exposed” to modern dance. What makes the moment even more significant is that this happened while at the same time and in a neighboring cultural space, France, Graham encountered a different attitude.43

The person who “turned the tide” was the dance critic Richard Buckle, who, when Graham arrived in London, as Lincoln Kirstein recalled, told her that he did not at least like the idea of her dances and that he would be immune to them. A week later he changed his mind,44 and conjured “every idle habit-formed fellow, in need of a third eye to see new beauty, that he should visit the Saville theatre and watch Martha Graham. She is one of the great creators of our time. I hope all thoughtful people will see her, for she enlarged the language of the soul.”45 Graham also liked and appreciated Richard Buckle, because as she felt “they connected intellectually,”46 her only bad memory related to him being the pork he served and the chilly house of the critic, when he invited Martha Graham to dinner. Richard Buckle himself was conscious that he had opened a door for Graham, as shown by an interview he gave four decades later: “and another little pat on the back of myself was when Martha Graham came in 1954. She was a new taste to English people. But I thought her invention was absolutely wonderful and I wrote and wrote and wrote about herX She

39 London, Private Collection 40 London, Private Collection 41 Letter of unknown sender, Gertrude Macy Papers, July 20 1953, 1953-1976, New York Public Library, Box 1 42 Letter from Benett & Pleasant Office to Bethsabee de Rothschild, date unknown, 1955, Martha Graham Center of Dance Records, 1944-1955, New York Public Library, Library, Box 1 43 Camelia Lenart, “Martha Graham’s Modern Dance and its Impact on Europe during the Fifties”, New Readings, vol. 9 (November 2008) 44 Clipping, “Martha Graham Dance Company” by Francis Mason, date unknown, Martha Graham Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 225 45 Don McDonough, Martha Graham: a biography (New York, Praeger, 1973), p. 229 46 Clipping, “Martha Graham Dance Company” by Francis Mason, date unknown, Martha Graham Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 225

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said: The man was a power”.47 Other critics also fell under Martha Graham’s spell by the end of the season,48 led by Andrew Porter, who stated that Graham’s dance was “angular and intellectual as geometry, yet fascinating in a way difficult to define.”49

Not only the dance critics but other artistic personalities appreciated and praised Graham’s art during her tour. The grand dame Marie Rambert, after the impression of the first night in London came to Martha Graham’s dressing room, and after she embraced the dancer the level of her enthusiasm rose so high, with loud weeping and cries of admiration, that it worried the rest of the crowd.50 Martha Graham’s dressing room was the place where Kenneth Tynan, the drama critic known for his irony and very high artistic standards, met Graham and was in awe, “confined to monosyllables” while noticing her “formidable sort, enigmatic, ambiguous beauty;” nonetheless, he became an admirer of her.51 James Roose Evans, actor, dance critic and director, the founder of the Hampstead Theatre Club and Member of the Royal Society of Arts, also became a devoted supporter of the artist and her art. The young actor’s letters to Graham, which he started to send to her right after her trip to London in 1954, when he was still a student at Oxford, spanned several decades. Displaying an admiration and sense of amazement toward the dancer and her artistry, which can be compared only with Robin Howard’s, he recalled seeing Martha Graham as “the best experience I ever had as an artistXseeing you gave me a sense of direction and showed me kind of dance I respond with my whole being.”52 Also, while in 1950 the dancer and her company’s presence in the City of Lights did not have a noticeable impact, neither on the cultural life of the city nor in the lives of some of the most refined members of the audience, in Britain the situation was different. In Paris, besides the negative articles of some dance critics, the presence of Martha Graham remained unnoticed, and the biographies, autobiographies and correspondence of some important pillars of French culture during that time do not mention her appearance in France, or their desire to see her dancing once in the USA. (The American dancer who most captured the attention of the intellectual elite of Paris during that time was Katherine Dunham. In a letter to Nelson Algren, Simone de Beauvoir mentioned Dunham, misspelling her name (Catherine), calling her dance “ballet,” but also describing Dunham as “an American colored girl, both an anthropologist and a dancer.”53) In London in 1954, the artist and her company were invited to parties and dinners where she met British artistic personalities who later would became her friends and came to see her on stage, either in the USA or in Britain. At a party thrown by Dr. Patrick Woodcock, the celebrities’ psychiatrist in London, Martha Graham met John Gielgud, who at that

47 Paul Jackson, “Richard Buckle at Eighty”, Dance Now, vol. 5, 1996 48 Ibid. 49 Clipping, “Martha Graham Dance Company” by Francis Mason, date unknown, Martha Graham Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 225 50 DeMille, Martha, p. 314 51 Kenneth Tynan, “Martha Graham”, Robert Gottlieb, ed., in Reading Dance. A gathering of Memoirs, reportage, Criticism, Profiles, Interviews and some Uncategorizable Extras (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), p. 724 52 Letter of James Roose Evans to Martha Graham, August 5, 1950, Martha Graham Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 230 53 Simone de Beauvoir, A Transatlantic Love Affair, Letters to Nelson Algren (New York: The New Press, 1997), p. 243

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point was “ill and depressed.”54 It is not clear if the fact that the actor attended a party given in her honor is a sign that he saw Graham on stage in London, but afterwards, whenever Gielgud was in New York, “playing on Broadway, [he] did not miss any occasion to attend her shows again”.55

She had the chance to meet again British friends she made prior to her tour, such as Henry Moore, who met Graham in New York in 1946 while he was socializing in the artistic circles of the city. It is true that one of his first memories of Graham was “falling asleep in a taxi with his head in Martha Graham’s lap,” most probably after a party, but he also remembered having long talks about the sense of space in sculpture and modern dance.56 New York was the city where in the winter of 1952 Graham met Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, who were visiting the United States and were living in the “shabby genteel establishment at Chelsea Hotel.”57 They met through the writer and editor Rose Slivka, an original character of New York’s social life, they enjoyed each other’s company, and they also liked to party together. It is true that Dylan preferred to meet his female friends (“ardents”, he called them) instead of attending the dancer’s spectacles, but his wife Caitlin became a regular of Graham’s entourage and shows.58

Two heretofore uncited letters to Graham, also attesting to the admiration Graham received during that time from British intellectual luminaries, are from E. M. Forster. In September 1963 the novelist wrote to her on King’s College letterhead, on the occasion of Graham’s participation in the Edinburgh Festival, and while expressing admiration for her work Forster mentioned their previous acquaintance: “My dear Martha Graham, I wonder whether you remember meeting me in the late forties, and driving with me one evening towards New York. I remember well, and also the pleasure I had from your work, and I am delighted at your outstanding success in Edinburgh.”59 In the second letter Forster thanks her for Graham’s “kind wire” and makes plans for meeting her as the dancer suggested.60

It is very likely that E. M. Forster met Martha Graham on the occasion of one of his two visits to the US, either when he first came to the States in April 1947, invited by Harvard61, or in 1949, at the invitation of the Academy of Arts and Letters, this time accompanied by his friend Bob Buckingam.62 In New York he lived with the family of William Roerick, an American actor, and together they went frequently to

54 Letter of Patrick Woodcock to LeRoy Leatherman , May 28, 1954, Martha Graham Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 230 55 Sheridan Morley, The Authorized Biography of John Gielgud (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2001), p. 197 56 Roger Berthoud, The Life of Henry Moore (London, New York: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 77 57 Andrew Lycett, Dylan Thomas. A New Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2003), p. 325 58 Ibid. 59 Letter of E. M. Forster to Martha Graham, September 9, 1963, Martha Graham Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 357 60 Letter of E. M. Forster to Martha Graham, date unknown, 1963, Martha Graham Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 357 61 William Roerick: “Forster and America”, in Aspects of E. M. Forster (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), p. 62 62 Ibid., p. 67

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Broadway.63 Forster also loved to travel in the US, his favorite place was the Berkshires in New England, and there are strong reasons to believe that the ride together he mentioned was when he and Graham came from the Berkshires.64 But because he did not clearly specify where he first encountered the “pleasure from her work,” it cannot be totally excluded that it happened in London in 1954.

The analysis of the impact Martha Graham had in 1954 and even before on the British audience would be incomplete without talking about the impression Martha Graham’s modern dance had upon people for whom this art and its American promoter were an abstract and distant notion before the tour. The most relevant example in this respect was Robin Howard, who after first seeing Graham declared, “I was completely bowled over. It was one of the greatest-perhaps the greatest-theatrical evenings of my life, and I changed my entire program for the fortnight and saw every performance. I vowed that I would never look at dance again until I brought the Graham Company back to London.”65 Indeed his life changed because of the immense impact modern dance had upon him, but so did the company’s, because he became a generous, admiring and devoted supporter of Graham and her company for the rest of his life. The artistic relationship between Martha Graham and Robin Howard, with its moments of sublime and human bitterness and disappointments, is a topic to which my future work is devoted.

Martha Graham’s tour to Britain in 1954 had a special significance for Graham’s career, but also for the history of American cultural diplomacy and the way the artist and her art were received in Europe. Even if not fully recognized as a part of American cultural diplomacy in Europe, still in the process of organizing itself, Martha Graham’s presence in London cannot be considered by any means just a solitary and individual venture, restricted solely to an artistic message. The letters and documents exchanged between the State Department, American Embassy in London, and the Voice of America, which showed that Graham’s presence was expected, observed, and analyzed in the British capital as it was all over Europe during the same tour, confirm that even without an official label in London in 1954 Graham and her Company were fulfilling their role as cultural ambassadors in Britain, an activity started already in 1950.

The different way in which the British audience reacted vis-à-vis Martha Graham and her Company, compared to the way the French audience did just four years before, brings a new perspective on the dancer’s relationship with Europe, and it is an incentive for deconstructing and rethinking the importance of the tour in writing the story and history of the artist. The words from one more letter received by Graham during her time in London are relevant: “it was for me a glimpse into a whole new world of hope, courage, and complete greatness. You brought to us the idea that here was something that no sacrifice could be too great for – because it holds such beauty,” and, continued “thank you, thank you for giving us that moment! And now it is for us to preserve it, to cherish it, and perhaps from time to time, to challenge it.”66 As only a great and complete artist can do, Martha Graham continues to bring us beauty, and also hope. And, indeed, it is for us to preserve it, and cherish it, and from

63 Ibidem, p. 64 64 Ibidem, p. 77 65 Agnes De Mille, Martha. The Life and Work of Martha Graham (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 314 66 Letter of unidentified sender to Martha Graham , Unknown date, 1950, Martha Graham Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 230

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time to time, through our work as researchers to challenge, or, I would rather say, to be challenged by it. Acknowledgements: I would like thank my adviser Professor Dan S. White, for the outstanding, constant, and kind support he offered me in all the steps I took in my career, including the research, writing, and presentation of this paper. Copyright 2010, Camelia Lenart Bibliography: Primary sources: Library of Congress, Washington, USA

Martha Graham Legacy Archive Martha Graham Collection Erick Hawkins Collection Lucy Kroll Papers

London, Private Collection National Resource Center for Dance, Guildford, Great Britain

Materials related to Martha Graham, her Company and tours to Great Britain Victoria and Albert Theatre and Performance Collections, London, Great Britain

Contemporary Dance Trust Archive, 1957-1999 National Archives, College Park, Maryland, USA

Materials related to Martha Graham, her Company and tours to Great Britain New York Public Library for Performing Arts, New York, USA

Martha Graham Center of Dance Records, 1944-1955 Gertrude Macy Papers, 1953-1976 Isadora Bennett Papers, 1945-1966

Interviews and correspondence: Pearl Lang, October 2008, New York, tape recording Stuart Hodes, April-May 2009, email correspondence

Secondary sources: Agnes DeMille, Martha. The Life and work of Martha Graham (New-York, First

Vintage Books Edition, 1992) Larraine Nichols, “Fellow Travelers: Dance and British Cold War Politics in the Early

1950s”, Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research, Vol.19, No. 2 (Winter, 2001), pp.83-105

Ernestine Stodelle, Deep Song: the Dance Story of Martha Graham (New York: Schrimer Book, 1984)

Don McDonough, Martha Graham. A Biography (New York: Popular Library, 1975) Robert Tracy, Martha Graham’s Dancers Remember (New York: Limelight Editions,

1997) Naima Prevots, Dance for Export(Wesleyan University Press, 1998), p.40-41 Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War. Raising the Iron Curtain

(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003) David Caute, The Dancer Defects: the Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the

Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press Inc, 2003) Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (New York: The New Press, 2000)

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Richard Pells, Not like us: how European have loved, hated and transformed American culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997)

Helen McGehee, To Be a Dancer (Lynchburg: Editions Heraclita, 1989) Bethsabee de Rothschild, La Danse artistique aux U.S.A.Tendances modernes

(Paris: Elzevir, 1949) Andree Grau and Stephanie Jordan, Europe dancing-perspectives on theatre, dance

and cultural identity (London, New York: Routledge, 2000)

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Issues of Control and Agency in Contemplating

Cunningham’s Legacy

Jane Carr

The University of Lincoln, UK

During January and February 2010, Laban students learned Cunningham’s 1967 work Scramble from the Cunningham dancer and teacher, Patricia Lent. Planned before Merce Cunningham’s death, the project took on another dimension as those involved contemplated his legacy. This, then, is the context for the following discussion of Scramble that considers Cunningham’s significance to a new generation of dancers. While it is informed by the views of Patricia Lent and the students (including a very short, voluntary, student questionnaire), it must be made clear at the outset that this account is also shaped by issues that are of concern to this writer. Current historiography would suggest that I acknowledge how my own interests bring certain issues to the fore (Carter, 2004). However, reading others’ accounts of Cunningham’s work, and listening to the students’ discussions of their experiences of Scramble, also suggests to me that it is almost impossible to write about his work without revealing something of one’s own ideas about dance. This perhaps relates to the particular ethos of Cunningham’s choreographic practices which, by virtue of his not seeming to present a particular idea beyond the activities on stage, leave the audience to make sense of his works for themselves. Hence, the following account is offered as a particular perspective on Cunningham whilst recognising that it is just one view among many. Scramble 1967- 2010

Scramble the fleet Scramble the code Scramble uphill Scramble eggs Scramble in flight space or scientific jargon

Cunningham, 1968

Scramble, contains all the hallmarks one would expect of a Cunningham work, and a few surprises. Some aspects of indeterminacy meant the students had to make choices in performance, for instance in terms of when or where to perform certain actions. However, in exercising some limited freedom of choice, the dancers had to be very precise and acutely aware of the other dancers. That the piece comprises up

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to eighteen sections, which are not all presented in each performance and can be organised differently, was highlighted by the fact that the two casts had different performance orders which did not use all the same sections. In the Cunningham manner, not dancing to the music67, or not even rehearsing with sound, was a new challenge for some students; without musical signals on which to rely they had to work with rigorous attention to their own and each others’ rhythm. Similarly the formal demands of the choreography in combination with aspects of indeterminacy meant they also had to pay particular attention to their relationship to others in the space. While for this project the set was not recreated, the dancers were aware that the movable strips of colour Frank Stella designed would have added spatial complexity and another layer of indeterminacy to the performance.

In contrast to there being clear elements of indeterminacy in Scramble, in relation to Cunningham’s famous use of chance procedures, there is no evidence that he used them to create the movement sequences in this work.68 But we do know Cunningham’s stated intention was ‘to make a dance without flavour’ (Cunningham 1968) and the sensibility that informed his use of chance is evident. Given the indeterminate structure, no one sequence could be thought of as belonging to a particular place in the duration of the whole and there is a juxtaposition of actions that look as if they might have been borrowed from sources as diverse as a Graham lift or a Vaudeville number 69. Further, some of the combinations have that lack of habitual organisation that is often associated with movement sequences created through chance procedures. For example in the beginning of the slow trio there is a strangely disassociated combination of small movements of hip, leg and head that looks as awkward as any combination derived through rolling a dice. In the aptly named fast dance section, there are many actions that might now be expected in a Cunningham sequence; but as a ballet trained dancer who came late to contemporary dance, I can remember experiencing how performing leg actions closely related to ballet was initially hard to do because the phrases broke up those movement patterns that had become habitual. The use of the torso at the end of the fast dance seems particularly tricky and indeed it was the use of the upper body that the students, experienced in basic Cunningham step patterns, found difficult to get right. This aspect of the choreography perhaps signals an approach to thinking of the relationships between actions of different body parts that became increasingly complex from Torse in the 70’s to CRWDSPCR in the 90s and is in keeping with the choreographic implications of this statement:

you do not separate the human from the actions he does, or the actions which surround him, but you can see what it is like to break these notions up in

67 The music for Scramble was an indeterminate score, Activities for Orchestra. composed by Toshi Ichiyanagi. The Laban performances used an archive recording of a live performance. 68 Although since Patricia Lent stated that she could not find any notes for Scramble there is nothing to prove that Cunningham didn’t subject movement ideas to chance prior to rehearsals, even though Calvin Tomkins (1978) discounts this. 69 For example, Susan Sentler, a former Graham dancer recognised the male female meetings in the slow walks as the basic structure of a Graham lift, while Cunningham’s 1968 solo seems to have steps from a jazz /tap number along with a balletic circling of the space and a screaming action.

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different ways, to allow the passion, and it is passion, to appear for each person in his own way.

Cunningham, 1968

Roger Copeland (2004) has discussed how breaking up what comes intuitively can be interpreted as a means of questioning cultural habits, or even as resisting pressures to behave a certain way. In the context of late capitalism, today’s students may find it difficult to comprehend a time when it was thought possible to resist the lure of advertising, but the potential for chance to be used as a tool to unleash less habitual movement patterns is now an accepted part of their education. This perhaps highlights how Cunningham’s position as a canonical figure in the dominant narrative of contemporary dance history means this new generation of contemporary dancers come to his work with a number of preconceived ideas about it. However, some of their expectations were challenged by actually learning a piece of repertory; for instance in Scramble the students commented that the movement was less ‘robotic’ than many had expected. Admittedly the students had only a little prior knowledge of Cunningham’s work: they knew of his use of chance, had seen recent work, and had learned some technique. But their reaction suggests his work is vulnerable to becoming understood as a series of mechanical demands made of the body that constrain the person of the dancer. Dancing Cunningham The manner in which the work was taught by Patricia Lent was very important in counteracting students’ preconceptions. Lent, one of the trustees of the Cunningham ‘Legacy Plan’ is able to distinguish between being clear in relation to the formal demands of Cunningham’s work and being ‘rigid’. In teaching Scramble she also revealed something of how, in Cunningham’s choreographic process, his dancers are the ultimate ‘problem solvers’ (Personal communication, 5th February, 2010). By studying with someone able to communicate Cunningham’s way of working, the students seemed to come to terms with the formal requirements of the choreography without losing a sense of personal agency.

Some students also valued the opportunity to focus, in a contemporary context, on what, when and where to move. This for me emphasised the difference between them and the generation of British dancers who teach them. Dancers from a previous era may have encountered the radical innovations in contemporary dance that emanated from America in the 1960s and 70s as exciting challenges to the accepted conventions of both ballet and modern dance. For my own part it was only late in my dance life that I recognised how the technical and qualitative limitations of my dancing might be ‘freed up’ through ’release’ or a somatic approach. Those of us who tensed all the ‘wrong’ muscles in the 70’s became determined to free our students of extraneous effort and provided exercises and images aimed at developing a bodily awareness that can aid movement efficiency. While many students have thrived on this approach, in this project, others seemed to enjoy the freedom not to have to feel a particular sensation as they moved or to or to worry about having to find a particular point of movement initiation. Theirs is a generation for whom the experiments of the past have now become part of the curriculum. Hence some of them were able to see Cunningham as offering one of many alternative approaches to dancing. Teachers who work from a somatic approach may feel their work is marginal in relation to dominating discourses in dance (Fortin,

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Viera and Temblay 2009). However, it can be argued that for today’s students in an institution such as Laban, the foregrounding of a somatic approach has been an essential ingredient of the current episteme that informs their training. In this context, some students seemed to discover aspects of Cunningham’s approach to be quite liberating. For those who have struggled with the demands of a Cunningham technique class, freedom may not be the first thing that comes to mind; but it was a word he used:

Our ecstasy in dance comes from the possible gift of freedom, the exhilarating moment that this exposing of the bare energy can give us. What is meant is not license but freedom, that is a complete awareness of the world and at the same time a detachment from it.

Cunningham, 1997/1952

While some students really did not know what to make of these words, others offered comments such as:

That we can have a kind of freedom in this ‘controlled’ technique

Whilst performing Cunningham ‘s work I felt freedom from the music which took pressure off exact timing and put an energy into feeling the rhythm on stageXIt was a much more exciting energy to watch and feel the movement around me.

The work is a focus around the movement of the whole body and keeping it alive and yet free, instead of focussing on order.

Xthe freedom of dancing gives us an awareness of the world Xhe is talking about all the elements that make up a pieceXand being able to

have them co-existX For Patricia Lent, the difference between licence and freedom was an important distinction. She described Cunningham dancers as ‘striking a balance between accuracy and pushing the movement as far as it would go’. This however had taken her some time to achieve:

In the beginning, just managing the phrases and getting everything correct, the counts all right, was all I could manage. As time went by I began to see places where I could push the movementX. It was freedom, not licence, but it was interesting. Personal communication, 5th February, 2010

Freedom, control and agency It was this sense of enjoying the challenge of managing the demands of Cunningham’s work that, in relation to my interest in embodiment, provided a fresh perspective on how dancers might be thought to embody a sense of agency. For many dancers control is a matter of daily concern. Today’s Laban students are thus

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often quick to see similarities between previous or traditional training models (especially in ballet), and Foucault’s (1977/75) description of the ‘projects of docility’ that he presents as emerging in the eighteenth century:

Xan uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the activity rather than the result and it is exercised according to a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement.

Foucault, 1979 /1975, 137 This then raises the question of whether the precise technical demands of Cunningham technique demands ‘docile bodies’. In contrast, a whole rhetoric that, from Duncan onwards, has valued the freedom of personal expression and the ‘natural’ movement of the individual body suggests dance can embody the spirit of freedom. Talking to Patricia Lent, it became apparent that she understood how a focus on formal clarity in Cunningham technique had, in the recent past, alienated those dancers who sought a more process-based, individualised approach. Form, she commented, had come to be seen as ‘bad’ as opposed to the ‘good’ of release (Personal communication 5th February, 2010). But does the change of focus to the dancers’ awareness of internal sensation serve to shift the locus of control rather than evade the ensnarement of the body within power relations? That is, rather than the teacher monitoring that their students’ actions are accurate in space and time, are today’s dancers encouraged towards an internalised self monitoring that may be thought to parallel Foucault’s (1979/75, 202) description of the effects of panopticism?

For contemporary dance students studying a combination of ballet, release, Cunningham, Graham, Limon or even Jooss techniques, perhaps what Foucault offers is the recognition that freedom and control are not polarities that can be embodied in opposing forms of technique. Rather how someone dances might manifest a specific relationship in which, at least since the onset of Modernity, normative controls and agency are inevitably intertwined. It is an oft made criticism of Foucault that while he suggested power was productive, he described its effects in largely negative terms. Certainly, in much of Discipline and Punish (1979/75) the body seems to be presented as the passive object of power operations; the epistemic shift Foucault describes suggests a change in the locus of control from the body to the mind that controls the body. However, in the context of the 1970s, this may be accounted for by reading Discipline and Punish as questioning the attitude that modern democratic societies are indeed ‘free’. It can also be argued that how the organic body is a source of power is a theme that emerges, even in this text:

The body required to be docile in its minutest operations, opposes and shows the conditions of functioning proper to an organism. Disciplinary power has as its correlative an individuality that is not only analytical and ‘cellular’, but also natural and organic.

Foucault, 1977 [1975], 156

Foucault noted how early disciplinary methods which attempted to consider the body as a machine resulted in an awareness of bodily nature, which in turn could be utilised towards efficiency. Hence even in Discipline and Punish it can be argued that

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there is already an understanding of the potential for a sense of embodied agency70 which also recognises how even this can become enmeshed in the operations of power. However, for those who seek some sense of political engagement with the social world, such a formulation of agency is limited. Terence Turner, for example criticises Foucault for situating resistance to power in bodily rather than social engagement.

‘’Resistance’’ is thus explained as a sort of natural (i.e. pre social and apolitical) emanation of the body, as ‘’power’’ is conceived as a natural (trans-historical and trans-cultural) emanation of society. Neither has a definable political purpose or specific social or institutional source. In being thus depoliticized and desocialised, Foucault’s resistance thus ironically becomes, in effect, a category of transcendental subjectivity situated in the body.

Turner , 1994, 36

For Turner, this is related to the sense of disengagement from any actual political strategy that he criticises in Foucault. From a similar perspective, Cunningham is similarly vulnerable to the criticism of seeming little interested in the potential of dance as some sort of strategic political intervention. This has been countered variously by Moira Roth’s (Roth and Katz, 1998) contextualisation of his and his associate’s work in terms of cold war politics, Jonathan Katz’s (1998) further discussion of the performative aspect of ‘having nothing to say and saying it’ (Cage cited in Roth and Katz, 1998, 62) and Roger Copeland’s (2004) suggestion that freeing the audience’s perception was similarly political.

Speaking from a dancers’ point of view, perhaps the issue is that dancers recognise only too well how the organic body is enmeshed in power relations and that they seek self discipline as a means to assert a sense of personal agency within structures over which they may feel they have little overt control. In later writings and interviews Foucault focussed more on forms of ‘consensual’ discipline and it his discussions of technologies of the self that have been welcomed by some practitioners of somatics and performance (Fortin et al 2009 and Chance 2009). Yet the kind of ‘self mastery and ascetic practice’ that they discuss, for me relate to my own experiences of dance training -even in ballet- and to what I understand in Cunningham’s statement that ‘dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form’ (1992/1952, 39).

One issue today’s dancers confront is that this kind of self discipline has become increasingly associated, less with ascetic concerns, than the pursuit of the body beautiful as a commodity. However in a Cunningham performance, the manner in which the movement can face the dancer this way and that mitigates the potential for the self conscious presentation of body as object, as does the rhythmic precision in which there is little opportunity to indulge in a sense of dynamic excess. As Patricia Lent pointed out, in a Cunningham work dancers are ‘too busy’ dancing to be thinking about much else (Seminar discussion 26th January, 2010). In this way what may sometimes seem an impersonal approach to dance perhaps allows for dancers to

70 Which would be would be further explored in later works as discussed by McNay (1994) and Chance(2009).

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retain a sense of personal agency in the face of consumerist pressures to conform to a ‘desirable’ look.

It has been commented that by the mid 1990s Cunningham dancers seemed to have lost that sense of agency visible in performers in his early works. (Franko, 1995)71. Certainly, over time Cunningham became more distant from increasingly younger dancers (Brown 2007, Franko 1995) and it is also worth noting that as Cunningham became more established dancers entered his company having been trained in his style and thus with perhaps less obvious differences in the ways they danced. Moreover as technical training in Cunningham developed in terms of virtuosity and precision, elsewhere, a new generation pursued ways of moving such as release and contact. In their performances, in contrast to Cunningham’s by now larger, highly trained company, the person of the dancer was more easily visible and this perhaps affected how dancers in the now more established Cunningham company were perceived. However, according to Patricia Lent, Cunningham, always present in rehearsals, remained constant in his response to his dancers as individuals, even if as the company became bigger and he got older he could not respond to them all in this way at any one time72. Significantly Lent suggests that Cunningham enjoyed the opportunities a larger company provided in choreographing for groups and this interest can be seen in Scramble which grew in numbers with the company. Even in the early versions (Cunningham [motion picture] 1968 and 1970) it is fascinating to see how groupings become ordered and scrambled up again.

For someone who in making Summerspace (1958) nearly ten years previously had shown he was perfectly aware of how to utilise a non-hierarchic or decentred space, that Cunningham had choreographed a circle dance around centre was one of Scramble’s surprises; more so when you consider that in an early version (Cunningham [motion picture] 1968) he danced a solo on absolute centre within it. Some members of the recent audience took this to show how Cunningham’s work had only later developed in terms of decentring space. In relation to my own preoccupations with agency and control, it struck me that it might also relate to a view of order and chaos as interrelated. Cunningham is known to have been interested in how physicists were conceiving of the world in new ways (Brown, 2007). One of the students, considered the relationship between Cunninghams’ approach to choreographic structures and the ideas of scientists such as Turing, Lorenz and Mandelbrot For them order and disorder were to be conceived not as polarities but as part of the same processes in which simple, ordered equations when feeding back on themselves give rise to unpredictable complexities (British Broadcasting Corporation, 2010).. For dance perhaps this could suggest how the possible permutations of basic actions could lend themselves to various unpredictable organisational possibilities, only some of which would be recognised as ordered. Consider the different approaches to order in two sections of Scramble: In the huddle dancers scramble to keep up with a preordained, code like sequence of moves and holds; whereas in the slow walks simple instructions might, or might not, give rise to seeming moments of unity. For Cunningham such ideas could well have also resonated with his and

71 Franko seems to suggest that this was due to the dancers’ sense of what had become recognised as the Cunningham aesthetic. 72 Lent also pointed out that with Cunningham ever present the one thing dancers had little freedom to do was to introduce a way of dancing his work that he didn’t find interesting and therefore his aesthetic was not being undermined by his dancers.

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Cage’s interests in Zen. Another student pointed my attention to Cage’s title for a text he read in performances with Cunningham in the same year Scramble was choreographed: Diary, How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse). Cunningham’s legacy In contemplating Cunningham’s legacy, I have suggested how the opportunity for students to learn Scramble revealed some key aspects of Cunningham’s approach to dance. Contemplating his significance to a new generation of dancers I have also touched on some issues of agency and embodiment in part to emphasise the significance of encouraging students to enjoy Cunningham’s work as a series of challenges in a new context. By virtue of its indeterminacy Scramble is a work that, within clearly defined limits, sets its own legacy in motion. Patricia Lent commented in her introduction to the Laban performances of Scramble that she

Xtried both to insist upon form and accuracy and to welcome the variations in how each dancer accomplishes the movement. My aim has been to offer the dancers an authentic experience grappling with the challenges of Merce’s work, and at the same time to allow the dance, Scramble, to shift and evolve. Lent, performance introduction, 2010

Watching Patricia Lent guide the students towards performance suggested to me that while Cunningham ultimately faced the issue of not being able to predict what would happen to his work, he set up the means by which he could trust what did happen would be ‘interesting’.

Acknowledgements With thanks to Patricia Lent from the Cunningham Dance Foundation who was so generous with her time and knowledge and to Laban BA2 students who engaged themselves whole heartedly in the project. Copyright: 2010, Jane Carr Bibliography Brown, C. (2007) Chance and circumstance: Twenty Years with Cunningham and Cage. New York: Alfred Knopf British Broadcasting Corporation (2010) The Secret Life of Chaos [Television Broadcast] 25 Mar 2010, 20:00 on BBC Four. Carter, A. (2004). Destabilising the discipline: Critical debates about history and their impacts on the study of dance. In A. Carter (Ed.), Rethinking dance history: A reader (pp. 10-19). London: Routledge Cunningham, M. (Choreographer) (1968) Scramble [Motion picture of performance in Buffalo]. New York: Cunningham Dance Foundation Cunningham, M. (Choreographer) (1970) Scramble [Motion picture of performance in Holland]. New York: Cunningham Dance Foundation Cunningham, M. (1968). Changes: Notes on choreography. New York: Something Else Press

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Cunningham M. (Choreographer) and M. Brockway (Director) (1977) Event for Television [Motion picture]. New York: Cunningham Dance Foundation (First Performed: WNET Nashville, TN. November 1976) Cunningham, M. (1992) Space, time and dance. In R. Kostelanetz (Ed.) Dancing in space and time. London: Dance Books (First published 1952.) Cunningham, M.(1997). The impermanent art. In D. Vaughan, (Ed.) Merce Cunningham: Fifty years. Romford and New York: Aperture Foundation (First published 1952.) Chance, V. (2009) On the production of the body ideal. Performance Research, 14 (2) pp.96-102 Fortin, S., A. Vieira and M. Tremblay (2009) The experience of discourses in dance and somatics. Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices. 1 (1) pp. 47-64 Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. [trans. Sheridan, A.]New York: Random House (First published in1975.) Franko, M. (1995) Dancing modernism/performing politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press McNay, L. (1994) Foucault: A critical introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Roth, M. and J. Katz (1998) Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Amsterdam: GB Arts International Shapiro, S. (Ed.) (1998) Dance power and difference. Illinois: Human Kinetics Tomkins, C. (1978) An appetite for motion. In M. Nadel and C. Miller, The dance experience. New York: Universe Books (First published 1968) Turner, T. (1994) Bodies and antibodies: Flesh and fetish in contemporary social theory. In T. Csordas, (Ed.) Embodiment and experience pp.27-47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Vaughan D. and M. Harris (Eds.)(1997). Merce Cunningham: Fifty years. New York: Aperture Foundation

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What’s in a name?

Judson Dance Theater viewed and reviewed

Henrietta Bannerman

The Place, London, UK

This paper concerns the historical and artistic context of a few very strategic years in the history of contemporary dance, years of intense experimentation and radical innovation which have come to be represented by the name of Judson Dance Theater. The Judson years, I propose, give rise to many questions such as the issue of postmodernism in dance and to which I refer several times in this paper. However I am also interested in other matters. The first is the place of the Judson movement in the early 1960s in what I argue was a more general American avant garde especially in view of the fact that in the early to mid 1960s Merce Cunningham, Anna Halprin, James Waring and others were constantly breaking new ground in dance performance and dance-based events.

My second question concerns the writing that Judson has generated and which tends, I propose to allow the Judson movement to surface in dance history as the defining moment of artistic revolution in dance. The third issue I tackle is an interrogation of the ontology of Judson. Can we agree with the critic Clive Barnes (2001) when he describes Judson as an idea about newness in dance?

This paper is written with Foucauldian theory in mind especially aspects of his concept of “author function” (1994). Foucault’s author function does not describe either a real person or a particular writer but refers rather to “a set of beliefs or assumptions governing the production, circulation, classification and consumption of texts” (Contemporary Critical Theory, 2010). It is the author function or the set of ideas generated by Judson that fuels our continued interest in the movement and which mark the name of Judson as synonymous with certain key notions. For example, Sally Banes is not alone in regarding Judson as “the seed-bed for post-modern dance”, (1983, p. xi) and in making this statement, there is a tendency to exclude choreographers such as Cunningham, Halprin and Waring from the category of postmodernism.

Foucault’s author function also describes “the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society” (1994, p. 211). The Judson discourse formed by the books, articles, papers, scant video footage, interviews and comments prompts us to continue to think of the movement as the total rewriting of visual and performing arts rules and the introduction of pedestrian movement as art. With such a discourse in circulation, does Judson become an author in its own right in the way that the movement speaks its own history?

I want to return for the moment to my first question concerning the centrality of Judson to the ferment of the 1960s American avant garde. I was in New York during the early 1960s studying at the Martha Graham Studio but also doing the rounds of

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other dance schools and classes. Despite the fact that I often passed very close to Washington Square, I did not step into the Judson Memorial Church to witness its landmark performances. I am relieved to report that I was not alone in bypassing Judson as I discovered when I read the following anecdote from Wendy Perron:

One day as I was walking to Washington Square Park between classes, I saw one of the modern dancers from the Joffrey class [X] on the steps of a church on Washington Square South. She called out to me saying, “You should come to some performances here. They’re really interesting.” I just said, “Uh huh.” I didn’t go to see modern dance unless my mother dragged me” (2003, pp.138-139).

Unlike Perron I went eagerly to performances of modern dance. I recall sitting

in the New York State Theater watching a programme that included Lucas Hoving’s Icarus (1964) and Cunningham’s uncharacteristically dramatic Winterbranch (1964), which thrilled me to the core. Its searchlights turned dazzlingly onto the audience attacked our vision as much as the cacophonous La Monte Young score assaulted our ears. I froze in my seat as the audience attempted to catcall the dancers off the stage - for me this was not an artistic insult but an invigorating glimpse into what was surely the avant garde in dance and theatre.

The point at stake is that Judson Dance Theater far from being a discrete movement in time and place was part of the melting pot of a network of anti-traditional and rebellious art-making from Happenings launched in the late 1950s by Alan Kaprow and described by him in 1968 as “today’s only underground avant-garde” (1968, p. 28), to the interdisciplinary events comprising the neo-dadaist Fluxus movement instigated by George Maciunas in 1961. In dance, we must acknowledge that as well as Cunningham we had the inventions of idiosyncratic choreographers such as Alwin Nikolais and also Erick Hawkins’ development of a new “serene” and ”soft-muscled” style of moving (Jowitt, 1988, p. 311). Judson Memorial Church itself before becoming home to the collective of JDT was the location for experimental arts initiatives such as the Judson Poets’ Theater, Happenings, film screenings and the Judson Gallery (Banes 1983, p. xi).

Perhaps without Sally Banes’ thorough documenting of the JDT initiative in Democracy’s Body (1983) we would not have received an account of the group’s discrete identity within the maelstrom of activity that constituted the 1960s American avant garde. Banes, in fact, draws attention to the short lived nature of authentic JDT performances when she states that:

the original Judson Dance Theater – that is, the cooperative group that originally took on this name and produced concerts that grew out of weekly workshops at the church – no longer was an entity after [X] Concert of Dance #16, on 29 April 1964 (1983, p. xiii).

We know also from the chronology published in Ballet Review (1967, pp. 54-

72) that the Judson group’s first performance - Concert of Dance#1- was given on July 6, 1962 and that amongst the thirteen choreographers listed there are names that continue to resonate in 21st century dance such as Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, David Gordon and Steve Paxton. The roll call also included the visual artist, Alex Hay, the experimental composer John Herbert McDowell and a member of Andy

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Warhol’s set, the talented but flawed Fred Herko. Concerts taking place later in 1962 and in 1963 presented dances by those such as Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Elaine Summers and Carolee Schneemann (ibid, p. 54).

Combining the detailed chronology found in Ballet Review (1967) and evidence from Banes, it is clear that authentic Judson performances lasted for only two years and four months. In a footnote to one of the pages of her coverage of Judson, Deborah Jowitt confirms that “[X] the most radically experimental and collaborative period of Judson was over by 1964”, but she adds, “the search for new definitions of dance and dancer that characterized the sixties lasted at least ten more years” (1988, p. 309).

Jowitt’s words permit us to extend the Judson era to the 1970s and to place within it a performance of Rainer’s Trio A with Flags given at the opening of the People’s Flag Show held in the Judson Memorial Church that year. The performers were Rainer herself, Barbara Lloyd, David Gordon, Nancy Green, Steve Paxton, and Lincoln Scott. Writing about Clarinda Mac Low’s 1999 reconstruction of this performance Ramsay Burt says (2006, p. 134) that the dancers enter the space clothed, undress in a corner, tie the American flag around their necks – and each begins in their own time dancing the Trio A phrase through twice and then returns to their clothes to dress and neatly fold their flag.73

This near-nude performance of Trio A in November 1970 reflects the climate of political activism surrounding Judson from events in “angry arts week” of 1967 to the anti-war “street action,” M-Walk, organised by Rainer in the spring of 1970 (Rainer 2006, pp. 343-346; Banes, 1987, p. 15)74. Trio A of November 1970 was also polemical in its critique of art censorship. This concerned the New York Police’s confiscation of Marc Morrell’s anti-Vietnam war sculpture comprising an American flag stuffed with foam rubber and hung in chains (Shiner, 1990). Not only was the sculpture Flag in Chains confiscated but the gallery that displayed it was fined under a state law.

Trio A with Flags originated from Rainer’s Trio A of 1966, perhaps the most notable mould-breaking moment associated with Judson but also falling outside its most radical years. Much has been written and said about this dance in its many variations such as the one we have just seen that it has become the blueprint for a specific approach to movement. The four-and-a half minute phrase stripped of any intended meaning and comprising relatively ordinary, uninflected movement distinguishes “post-modern dance from other forms of theatrical dance” write Copeland and Cohen (1983, p.233). I contend, however, that what Rainer et al call post-modern is better described as a form of minimalism closer perhaps to late modernism than to postmodernism per se and I shall return briefly to ideas of the postmodern later.

It is not an easy matter for any historian to make sense of the complex conglomeration of artistic enterprise that comprises the context in which JDT

73 Clarinda Mac Low is the daughter of Jackson Mac Low, one of the writers to be involved with the original Judson group and even perhaps instigating the first score for dancers to follow because according to Waring Mac Low wrote “instructions which could be interpreted” (Waring in Croce and MacDonagh, 1967, p. 35). 74 Rainer performed Trio A in a convalescent condition as a comment on the frailty of the human body which she associated not only with her own diminished strength but also with soldiers wounded and maimed through fighting in Viet Nam (Banes, 1987, p. 15; Burt, 2006, p.17).

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flourished and waned. Banes acknowledges that the historical account of Judson Dance Theater thqat she wrote “is a collection of images, narratives, partial recollections, imperfect reminiscences, and a few scores” (p, xiv). Clearly then she had to make choices about who was in and who was out of Judson. On the basis that he choreographed only one dance in one Judson concert and that he did not attend Robert Dunn’s seminal workshops, James or Jimmy Waring (as he is called) does not count as a Judsonite. This is fair enough in the light of Banes’ claim that “he did not consider himself, nor did the group consider him, part of Judson Dance Theater” (ibid, p. xiii). Yet Waring was amongst those, like Anna Halprin who were very influential on the Judson choreographers. Waring was particularly important to Rainer who acknowledges that she learnt a good deal “from his dry, rigorous balletic approach to dance” (2006, p. 203). Banes points out that he also taught his protégés “[X] about collage techniques, music, theatre, and art.” She continues,

Waring, Paul Taylor, David Vaughan, Aileen Passloff, and several others were involved in Dance Associates, a choreographers’ cooperative organized in 1951. And socially, Waring was a link between the dance world and a group of poets – including Diane di Prima, Alan Marlowe, and others who were also connected to the Living Theater (1983, p. xvii).

Banes refers to the laboratory atmosphere of the pre-Judson years in which

artists had long departed from mainstream forms of art and were already organising themselves into democratic collectives. Yet for many choreographers of present times, Judson stands as the first instance of postmodernism in dance and as the first example of a group of artists and dancers who democratically pooled their creative resources. The composer John Herbert McDowell talking in 1967 to Arlene Croce and Don MacDonagh sheds further light on these years of exploration when he commented that,

[t]he kind of dance teaching that Jimmy [Waring] did in his composition courses, and that Bob [Dunn] and Judy [Dunn] subsequently did in their composition course, which went directly into

James Waring in Two More Moon Dances (1960)

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the Judson group, is historically important. I think the important thing about the Judson group was that it was a focus for a number of things that already had been happening over [X] five, ten years, over a very broad view (1967, p. 31)

If Waring was influential on the Judson choreographers, according to Jowitt he was out of step with their aesthetic: “Waring”, she says, “always sympathetic to the Judson dancers, a sort of floating component of Judson, was drawn to illusion, pathos, camp, and other elements the new choreographers wished to avoid” (1988, p. 311).

Perhaps it was a refusal of the camp sensibility of Waring’s choreography as much as it was of the more conventionalised styles of modern dance that prompted Rainer to form her now-famous “aesthetics of denial” – “NO,” she said to “spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformation and magic [X] no to camp” no to just about everything to do with the theatrical and the expressive (in Banes, 1987, p. 43). Since Rainer studied and performed with Waring, we must assume that his style of choreography was included in this aesthetics of denial. She has written, for example, “Jimmy had an amazing gift which – because I was put off by the mixture of camp and balleticism in his work – I didn’t appreciate until much later” (2006, p. 205). Banes explains that in the mid-1950s Waring created:

atmospheres (often nostalgic), referring lovingly and archly to variety dancing and ballet, and mixing musical as well as dancing styles (including ordinary and idiosyncratic gestures) (1987, p. 8).

According to Leslie Satin Waring’s choreography was a hybrid of “high and

popular art” (2003 p. 63) which combined Cunningham, ballet, “vaudeville, the circus [...] and movie musicals” (p. 64). An almost baroque style such as this clashed with the major Judson aesthetic which Jowitt calls a “Cartesian process of stripping away everything” (in Carroll 1981, p. 110) and Banes describes as its “analytic, reductive side [X] (Banes, 1983, p. xviii). But Waring’s eclecticism chimes, I suggest, with the architect Charles Jencks’ notion of double-coding in postmodernist architecture. This double focus calls for the postmodern building – and by extension the postmodern dance – to:

speak [X] on at least two levels at once: to other architects and a concerned minority who care about specifically architectural meanings, and to the public at large [X] who care about [X] traditional building and a way of life. Thus Post-Modern architecture looks hybrid and, if a visual definition is needed, rather like the front of a Classical Greek temple (In Bertens, 1995 p. 60).

The dances that Waring created were hybrid in the way that they referred at

one and the same time to Cunningham’s contemporary innovations as well as to the traditional art of classical ballet. But he appealed also to other more popular traditions in the way that he recalled the past ages of vaudeville and Hollywood (Banes, 1987, p. 8; Satin, 2003, p. 64).

Waring may not have been a genuine Judsonite but in a tribute written six years after his death in 1975, David Vaughan calls him “one of the most influential figures in the New York avant garde in the fifties and sixties. From 1952 onward he

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regularly presented extraordinary dance works” and, writes Vaughan, he acted as a “guru” to Judson personalities including Childs, Gordon, Hay and Rainer (1981, p. 108). Satin points out that Waring anticipated choreographers such as Mark Morris, Twyla Tharp and Karole Armitage (2003, p. 55), and I would add Matthew Bourne. Waring foresaw the styles of these choreographers in the way that he played with ballet and mixed various dance genres producing the hybrid double-coding that we associate with postmodernism in dance (see for example, Copeland, 1997).

As we move further away from the 20th century it seems that we are constantly drawn to the rebellious Judson years in ventures such as Mikahil Baryshnikov’s White Oak project. His PASTForward programme of 2001 included reconstructions of 1960s works by artists such as Paxton, Brown, Childs, Rainer and Gordon, choreographers who have come more than any others to represent Judson. This rekindling of the Judson flame was disappointing for Clive Barnes who said in a 2001 article, “[t]o my mind when we got back, the future just wasn’t there.”

Barnes goes on to state that Judson was “an idea as much as it was a place.” He reminds us, “already in the late ‘60s other more formally organized venues, such as Jeff Duncan’s Dance Theater Workshop had come into being”75 and, he continues, “Nor does Judson embrace all of the experimentation of that time – it doesn’t include, just for example, Merce Cunningham or Anna Halprin” (2001), and as I have argued JDT also excludes James Waring.

Barnes echoes McDowell who spoke in 1967 about Judson as the focal point for a decade of exploration and invention; (1967, p. 31) these views return us to the notion of Judson itself as the author of its own legend and to Foucault’s concept of author function: “the author’s name”, he writes:

Manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture [X]. As a result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there are a number of discourses endowed with the ‘author function’ [X] (p. 211).

Following Foucauldian theory, I consider that the name of Judson is “a founder

of discursivity.” Judson inspired the people I have cited to produce texts that have come to exceed their own writing or to enable as Foucault says: “the possibilities for the formation of other texts” (Foucault, p. 217). These are texts which open up a space for the interplay of interpretations and which start a new line of history. Could we refer, then, to a genre of Judsonian history or theory? Judsonian history produces Judson as a text or discourse in which language and dance meet to generate ideas

75 Dance Theater Workshop is a New York City performance space and service

organization for dance companies. Located on West 19th Street in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, DTW was founded in 1965 by Jeff Duncan, Art Bauman and Jack Moore as a choreographers' collective. In 2002 DTW opened its new Doris Duke Performance Center, which contains the 192-seat Bessie Schönberg Theatre. Such notable artists as Mark Morris, David Gordon, Bill T. Jones, Susan Marshall, Ron Brown, Donald Byrd, H.T. Chen, David Dorfman, Doug Elkins, Molissa Fenley, Whoopi Goldberg, Janie Geiser, Bill Irwin, LadyGourd Sangoma, Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller, Michael Moschen, David Parsons, Lenny Pickett, Merián Soto, Pepón Osorio, Paul Zaloom and hundreds of others found an early artistic home at Dance Theater Workshop

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about a group of artists’ forays into revolutionary practice, and which categorise Judson as the first exploration of postmodernism in dance. But, I suggest, as a founder of discursivity, Judsonian theory risks marginalising artists like Waring whose achievements become sidelined by its discourse.

Judsonian text produces itself and is produced as a testament to an era of artistic innovation teeming with artists from a variety of disciplines and which continues to resonate in 21st century art circles. As Barnes writes, “it was a heady time, a time mad and antic with the invention of the new. And dance,” he says, “was not only new, it was news.” The idea of Judson has so successfully imprinted our consciousness with its magnetism and charisma that contrary to Roland Barthes’ notions of the demise or destruction of the author figure (1977), in its capacity as author, Judson, I propose, refuses to die. Copyright 2010, Henrietta Bannerman

Bibliography Banes, S. (1983). Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater – 1962-1964. Ann

Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press. Banes, S. (1987). Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance with a new

Introduction. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. Barnes, C. (2001). Judson Revisited – Judson Dance Theater Works – Brief Article.

Retrieved February 9, 2010 from: httpfindarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1083/is_75/ai_78681574/

Barthes, R. (1977) (Trs. Heath, S.). The death of the author. Image, music, text. London: Fontana, pp. 142-148.

Bertens, H. (1995). The Idea of the Postmodern- A History. London: Routledge Burt, R. (2006). Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces.London: Routledge. Carroll, N. (1981). Post-modern dance and expression. In Fancher, G. and G. Myers,

eds. Philosophical essays on dance. USA, Brooklyn: Dance Horizons, pp.95-114. Contemporary Critical Theory (2010). Reader’s Guide to Foucault’s What is an

author? Retrieved March2, 2010 from http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/english/courses/60SA/Handouts/author.html

Copeland, R. and M. Cohen, (1983) eds. What is Dance? (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Copeland, R. (1997). Mark Morris, Postmodernism. Dance Theatre Journal 13, (4), 18-23.

Croce, A. (1967), ed. Judson: A Dance Chronology. Ballet Review. 1 (6), 54-72 Foucault, M. (2000). Michel Foucault Aesthetics – Essential Works of Foucault 1954-

1984 Volume 2. Harmondsworth: Penguin Jowitt, D. (1988). Time and the Dancing Image. Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press. Kaprow, A. (1968). On Happenings. Arts and Society: Happenings and Intermedia.

USA, Milwaukee: The University of Wisconsin, 28-38. McDowell. J.H. (1967). Judson: A Discussion. Ballet Review. 1 (6), 30-53 Perron, W. (2003). One Route to Ballet from Postmodern. In S. Banes, ed.

Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything was Possible. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 137-150.

Rainer, Y. (2006). Feelings are Facts: A Life. USA: The MIT Press.

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Satin, L. (2003). James Waring and the Judson Dance Theater. In S. Banes, ed. Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything was Possible. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 51-80.

Shriner, L. (1990). When Outrage Meets Arrogance: Controversial Art and Public Funding. Retrieved February 28, 2010 from: http://www.lib.niu.edu/1990/ii900423.html

Vaughan, D. (1981). James Waring: A Remembrance. Performing Arts Journal. 5 (2), 108-111.

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Choreographing the future:

Writing children into the history of South African ballroom dancing

Alida Maria Green

University of Pretoria, South Africa

Introduction A year after the first democratic election in South Africa, a Sunday newspaper carried a report on the aptitude of young ballroom dancers of a poverty-stricken community: In a run down hall Xyoung children swirl expertly, feet skim over the floorX[as] scuffed shoes fly across the floor, tatty school uniforms become ballgowns and the stereo becomes a grand brass band.76 While the article vividly emphasized the social injustices that presented itself in the makeshift studio, the compassionate description of the dance resonated with the growing transformational spirit of the time. The dance lesson described also highlighted how ballroom had become part of the children’s township lives and elevated them above the squalor of their surrounds.

This art form has to varying degrees formed an integral part of the social activities of much of South African urban and rural society for centuries. It has been practiced professionally since the 1920s and children have actively participated in these events from early on. However, besides a few studies and passing references77 children dancing ballroom do not feature much in South African historical writing.78 This paper will trace the development of children’s ballroom dancing in South Africa from the early colonial period, highlighting its ever increasing popularity. It will also consider the determining role that the founding of official organizations and the media had in promoting ballroom dancing amongst the youth from the early twentieth century onwards. Finding dance in South Africa’s history Dance as a topic does not exist as an identifiable section in any particular archival series or document collection in South Africa. Often time even as organized formal societies, records are hard to trace thereby relegating the study thereof to the realm of “ignored histories”. However, through painstaking effort information can be gleaned from a range of sources in both the official and informal arenas. For the

76 T. Beaver, “Spin on the floor is dream come true for township children”, The Sunday Independent, 24/09/1995, p. 4. 77 A.M Green, "Dancing in borrowed shoes: a history of ballroom dancing in South Africa”, (MA Cultural History, University of Pretoria, 2009), pp. 6-24. 78 In contrast, as noted by the leading cultural historian Peter Burke, “[d]ance history, once the province of specialists, is now taken seriously by [international] cultural historians and discussed in relation to politics and society.” P. Burke, What is cultural history?, (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2006), p. 91.

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earlier colonial period, when ballroom dancing was first introduced to southern Africa, references are found in travel documents and early colonial texts such as journals and diaries. Examples include the works of English socialite Lady Anne Barnard (1793-1803) and colonial traveller William Bird (1822). Social commentary in the press and popular magazines as well as memoirs and reminiscences of late nineteenth and twentieth century individuals also highlight the existence of ballroom dancing within society. The correspondence and minutes of officials, various organisations as well as public records and central government policies also provide glimpses of the subject. Examples of these include, amongst others, the governor-general (GG) archival series, minutes of the Bantu Men Social Centre (BMSC), correspondence of the African National Congress (ANC) and minutes of the Garment Workers Union.

While the primary record is relatively scant and scattered, the secondary record fares little better. Some literature of an anthropological, sociological and socio-historical nature has included studies of urban communities which have references to the existence of ballroom dancing within South African society.79

In this study the social commentary of specifically two Johannesburg based newspapers: the Rand Daily Mail and The Bantu World provided crucial information regarding the place and state of ballroom dancing and its young participants. Aimed respectively at the English-speaking communities and “Bantu people”, these papers commented on political, social and economic events concerning, mainly, urban South Africa. Reports detailed not only social events but often recorded the operations of official dancing organizations and closely followed the development of competitive ballroom dancing.

The South African Dancing Times which was first published in 1933 provided information on dancing up to the mid-1950s.80 Like the Rand Daily Mail and Bantu World this popular monthly magazine, which was lavishly illustrated with self-help articles and a range of advertisements, was based in South Africa’s economic hub, Johannesburg. The South African Dancing Time’s focus on the training and achievements of young boys and girls highlights the popularity and extremely competitive nature of children’s ballroom dancing.

Other primary sources used in tracing children dancing ballroom in South Africa include specific articles in popular magazines, regional papers and newsletters. These random articles on ballroom dancing mainly portray it as a “fun pastime” in South Africa aimed at “participants of all ages”.81 1 Opening the ballroom for little feet Learning from example As Europeans came to settle permanently on the southern tip of Africa from the late eighteenth century onwards, social activities, including ballroom dancing, followed.

79 R.E. Phillips, The Bantu in the city: a study of cultural adjustment on the Witwatersrand (South Africa, The Lovedale Press, 1970), pp. xiii-xiv; M. Brandel-Syrier, Reeftown elite a study of social mobility in a modern African community on the Reef (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971). 80 Anonym, “Ourselves”, South African Dancing Times, April 1946, p. 3 81 K. Ngwenya. “Queen of the ballroom”, Drum, 23/10/2001, pp. 86-87; A. van der Walt, “The beauty of movement”, South African Philatelist, 79(4), August 2003, pp. 116-117.

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Travel journals82 and diaries83 comment extensively on every day life in South Africa, making it possible to not only determine when and how much people danced but also what people danced and what they associated with the dancing.84 Although ballroom dancing did at least form some part of the late seventeenth century European social life in Cape Town, D. Fairbridge notes in her introduction to Lady Anne Barnard’s journal that it was only in the early 1780s that social dancing truly began in South Africa.85 Fairbridge traces the beginning of social dancing to the arrival of French troops (The Regiments of Waldner, Luxembourg and Pondichery) in the Cape in 1781. These troops were brought in to help the Dutch protect the Cape against a possible attack by England. Their military skill was never needed, but the “French sabreurs” apparently instilled in the “serious Dutch ladiesX.a passion for dancing”.86 The regiments were believed to have been a definite “stimulus” for ballroom dancing, so much so that Cape Town was dubbed as “Little Paris” and it was reported that one ball after another was offered in honour of the “French protectors”.87

The prominence of social dancing was especially evident in early nineteenth century Cape Town society, probably due to the larger and more established colonial settlement and the second occupation of the British. M. Le Valliant, an eighteenth century French traveller to the Cape, for example observed the splendour and frequency of balls. He states that “Xupon my arrival, the governor used to give a public ball every month, and the principal people of the town followed his example”.88 Dancing was indeed regarded as the “Xfavourite amusement of the Cape ladies”.89 The grand balls were very exclusive events catering for adults of middle and high society, however as the colony grew so did the cultural background and ages of the ballroom dance participants.

82 R. Semple, Walks and sketches at the Cape of Good Hope. A journey from Cape Town to Blettenberg’s [sic.] Bay (London, C & R. Baldwin, 1803); William, J. Burchell, Travels in the interior of Southern Africa; W. Bird, State of the Cape of Good Hope in 1822 (Cape Town, C. Struik, 1966), facsimile reprint as well as J.L.M. Franken, Duminy-Dagboeke, Duminy diaries (Kaapstad, Die Van Riebeeck-vereniging, 1938). 83 A.M.L. Robinson, The letters of Lady Anne Barnard to Henry Dundas from the Cape and elsewhere,1793-1803. Together with her journal of a tour into the interior and certain other letters (Cape Town, A.A. Balkema,, 1973); D. Fairbridge, Lady Anne Barnard at the Cape of Good Hope 1797-1802 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1924). 84 A. Gordon-Brown’s introduction to William, J. Burchell, Travels in the interior of Southern Africa, p. 7. commenting on the indispensable contribution that travelers’ made to the understanding of South Africa’s history. 85 D. Fairbridge, Lady Anne Barnard at the Cape of Good Hope, pp. 19-20. 86 D. Fairbridge, Lady Anne Barnard at the Cape of Good Hope, p. 19. 87 D. Fairbridge, Lady Anne Barnard at the Cape of Good Hope, pp. 19-20. Also see Anonym, South Africa’s heritage. How our forefathers lived, worked and played. From Van Riebeeck to XIXth century times. Part three: their customs, amusements and sport, p. 14; H.W.J. Picard, Masters of the castle, p. 175. 88 M. Le Valliant, Travels into the interior parts of Africa by way of the Cape of Good Hope in the years 1780, 81, 82, 83, 84 and 85 I (s.a; Robinson, 1790), p. 31. 89 W. Bird, State of the Cape of Good Hope in 1822, p. 165; A.M.L. Robinson, The letters of Lady Anne Barnard to Henry Dundas, p. 43.

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The slaves in the Cape community played an important part in sustaining these ballroom dances amongst the Europeans. The white settlers found that because of their musical ability the slaves were ideally suited to provide the music for the balls.90 The slaves however did not only provide the music but, in South Africa, the “mazurka”, “polka”, waltz and “cotillion” developed a new dimension when the slaves, working class whites, free blacks, Mozambiquers, Madagascans and descendants of indigenous people took up the dances as part of their “underclass subculture”.91 Travel journalists give far more attention to these “rainbow balls”, describing them in greater detail than the exclusive official balls. Pointing out that the slave community danced what they saw their masters “borrowing”92 from overseas Semple for example states that:

It is in these dances that the slaves show themselves off to best advantage. The women display much taste and even elegance in their dress, nor are their dances wild, irregular or unaccompanied with proper music. They are faithful imitators of what they see daily performed among the white inhabitants, and display an easiness of motion, and a justness of ear which never fail to surprise and please an European unapprised of this circumstances.93

Bird describes the “High life below Stairs” and the “denominated rainbow balls” as follows:

The ladies imitate the manner, conversation, and dancing of their mistresses, and nearly equal them in dress: and when the dance is over, it is not necessary to follow the parties into retirement. Besides these rainbow dances there are others in which the negroes are engaged; and although a few of these dances take place every night, yet the grand display is in the outskirts of town to which the black population rush on a SundayX94

These dances were distinctly different to the high society balls: dress, because of a lack of funds and time, was less fancy; the underclass danced on a Sunday afternoon (one of the few times that they did not have to work) while the upper class danced on Saturdays or weekdays, Sundays being reserved for God and family; the underclass danced in more public spaces (bars, the beach) while the upper class society danced in more private spaces (homes, club halls). It could also be presumed that, given the more informal nature and place of the so called “rainbow balls”; younger members of the lower class society would indeed have participated. In essence though, these events were the same: the festivities were organized around

90 C.G. Botha, Social life in the Cape Colony with social customs in South Africa in the 18th century, p. 51; V. de Kock, The fun they had! The pastimes of our forefathers, p. 49. 91 V. Layne, “Square roots at the Cape”, Rootz Africa, 5(4), November 2003, p. 18. 92 For a discussion on the “borrowed” dimension see: A.M Green, "Dancing in borrowed shoes: a history of ballroom dancing in South Africa”, (MA Cultural History, University of Pretoria, 2009). 93 R. Semple, Walks and sketches at the Cape of Good Hope; A journey from Cape Town to Blettenberg’s [sic.] Bay, p. 31. 94 W. Bird, State of the Cape of Good Hope in 1822, pp. 165-166.

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the dancing; both groups were accompanied by live music; and both groups danced “quadrilles”, “polkas” and waltzes. 95 Oh what fun they had! It was perhaps both the perception that ballroom dancing was an “exclusive” event and this idea that dancing could harm the “innocent” that can explain why children and especially children dancing ballroom are ignored in the early colonial record. However, given the descriptions as recorded by cultural historians, it is clear that by the late eighteenth century, children were becoming not only keen aspiring observers of the formal dance events, wherever they took place, but also, active participants.96 Considering the popularity of these social dances, it is not surprising that as in London and New York, dance teachers were appointed to instruct children in dancing schools and teach “Xnew dances [like the polka, waltz, lancers and gallopades] from overseas as quickly as possible”.97 Dancing amongst the young further helped to sustain ballroom dancing deeper into the interior where favourite past times amongst the white colonist were more docile activities like playing cards and cooking.98 Describing social life in the late eighteenth century, cultural historian, C.G. Botha, concluded that “amongst the wealthy who had young folks in the house a dance was a regular pastimeX” and that, with reference to these young dancers, “Xwhere farms were within easy distance of each other dancing was one of the few social amusementsX”.99 It is also evident that deeper in the interior dancing was forming a part of special family events, like New Year celebrations, marriages and in the slave community, the birth of a child, were all apparently celebrated with good food, wine and dancing.100

By the late nineteenth century records reveal that ballroom was not only danced by the upper middle classes, but these borrowed dances also formed a habitual part of the social life of people of lesser affluent society and draw families to the dance floor.101 In these written and visual records teenagers from both black and

95 A.M.L. Robinson, The letters of Lady Anne Barnard to Henry Dundas, p. 43; W. Bird, State of the Cape of Good Hope in 1822, pp. 165-166. 96 V. de Kock, The fun they had! The pastimes of our forefathers, p. 23 ; C.G. Botha, Social life in the Cape Colony with social customs in South Africa in the 18th century, pp. 86, 98. 97 D. Dymond, “Dancing Ballroom”, in D. J. Potgieter (ed.), Standard Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa III, p. 558; E. Witherspoon,The perfect art of modern dancing, (London, The Butterick publishing co; c1894), n.a. 98 J.L.M. Franken, Duminy-Dagboeke (Kaapstad, Die van Riebeeck-vereniging, 1938), pp. 5-30. 99 C.G. Botha, Social life in the Cape Colony with social customs in South Africa in the 18th century (Cape Town, C. Struik, 1973), pp. 51, 85. 100 V. de Kock, The fun they had! The pastimes of our forefathers, pp. 29-31, 53 ; C.G. Botha, Social life in the Cape Colony with social customs in South Africa in the 18th century, pp. 86, 98. Also see H.W.J. Picard, Masters of the castle, p. 146. 101 C. Jeppe, The kaleidoscopic Transvaal. 2nd edition (Cape Town, J.C. Juta and Co.,1906), p. 89; B. Theron, “George Jesse Heys (1852-1939) in Pretoria”, Historia, 50(2), November 2005, pp. 119-148.; B. Theron, “George Jesse Heys (1852-1939) in Pretoria”, Historia, 50(2), November 2005,

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white communities are depicted dancing ballroom in open, informal spaces. Charl Jeppe describes, in his memoirs of the Transvaal, how the X young people had a gay time indeed, by a bucksail spread over ground cleared from grass provided each evening a good floor to the beautiful and magnificently ventilated hall, domed by the blue sky and lit by the stars, while the notes of a fiddle or concertina was as much appreciated as the strains of the Blue Hungarian band in a London ball-room.102 Gradually ballroom dancing also became part of the leisure activities of white, black and coloured miners in the booming mining towns like Kimberley and Johannesburg, as they began to harbour more women and various secondary industries, like shops and clubs.103 According to Louis Cohen’s reminiscences, fancy dress balls in the city of gold, Johannesburg, were “X the [sic.] things - when they did take placeX” and the Rand balls “pleased the ladies and delighted mankind, from the slopes of Witwatersrand to the plains of the Whitechapel”.104 In 1888 Beatrice William, a Johannesburg miner’s daughter recalls “Xwhat fun it was meeting fresh partners at every dance and ball – handsome faces, new steps, men from all over the worldX”.105 There is again little mention of children’s social activities in these cosmopolitan mining towns and, given that they were often associated with liquor, violence and vice, it is highly unlikely that children would have been present at these social dances.106 However, during this time, dancing became an event where, for a few years at least, all social boundaries seemingly disappeared. Thereby ballroom dancing was established not only as a popular customary activity for adults but also as a tool that would, in the decades to come, be used to educate and uplift children. Taking steps on the white dance floor At the beginning of the twentieth century, rapid global changes transformed not only the manner and style of dancing but also how it was perceived. Industrialisation, urbanisation and the First World War (1914-1919) created a large middle class, cities with global connections and an inevitable rise in slum areas. The “new” urban family

pp. 119-148; J. Bouws, Solank daar musiek isXMusiek en musiekmakers in Suid-Afrika (1652-1982), pp. 112-113. 102 Carl Jeppe, The kaleidoscopic Transvaal, p. 89. Also see H.J. Duckitt, Hilda’s diary of a Cape housekeeper, being a chronicle of daily events and monthly work in a Cape household, with numerous cooking recipes, and notes on gardening, poultry keeping, etc (London, Chapman and Hall, 1902), pp. 14-15 where she describes quickly a makeshift ballroom could be created 103 L. Cohen, Reminiscences of Kimberley (London, Benette & Co, 1911), p. 202. 104 L. Cohen, Reminiscences of Johannesburg and London (Facsimile reproductions of the 1924 edition with new Forward and Illustrations, Johannesburg, Africana Book Society, 1976), pp. 168-169. 105 W. Botha & L. Husemeyer, The city that leapt to life: A 1986 diary celebrating Johannesburg’s flamboyant origins 100 years ago (Johannesburg, Perskor, 1985), p. 26. 106 L. Cohen, Reminiscences of Kimberley, p. 202; R. Blennerhassett & L. Sleeman, Adventures in Mashonaland, p. 9;

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in South African not only had disposable income and leisure time but also passionate aspirations to keep up with the rest of the world. 107 In general South African histories, much emphasis is placed on the political and economic development in the country of this time.108 It was an era characterised by the creation of sizeable secondary industries on the one hand and burgeoning segregationist laws on the other.109 It was these political, economic and social forces that also influenced the availability of commodities that made ballroom dancing a viable, desirable, social event. Furthermore, the unremitting influence of urban centres, industries, and the media along with South Africa’s continued connection and reliance on foreign, especially British, powers created a younger generation that was particularly receptive to ballroom dancing. Raising money through dance The British victory after the South African War (1899-1902) placed a “foreigner” as figurehead on state level, through assigning a governor-general to the country.110 This ushered in an era, particularly during the early twentieth century, in which the British influence was especially apparent. According to the new post-war dispensation, the British governor-generals acted as official British representatives,

107 P. Joyce, The making of a nation, (Cape Town, Zebra Press, 2007), pp. 52-59; J. Wentzel, A view from the ridge: Johannesburg retrospect (Cape Town, David Phillip, 1975), pp. 97-98. 108 The beginning of this era saw the loss of independence for the Boer states after the South-African war (1899 -1902) and establishment of British control over the entire country. Although the creation of the Union in 1910 was generally welcomed (especially in Afrikaner circles) as a way to strengthen the country economically,108 it did not result in economic, social or even political unity. On the political front the predominantly Afrikaner South African Party (SAP) faced resistance from the establishment of the opposition political party, the National Party (NP). Although the First World War fuelled general unrest and protest movements (e.g. 1914 Rebellion, creation of the Industrial and Commercial workers Union (ICU) and the 1922 Strike or Rand Revolt) it also demanded economic and industrial development. The 1920s saw the creation of the Pact government, the ignoring of black demands regarding housing and political representation, the acceptance of Afrikaans next to English as the official language, as well as the creation of sizeable secondary industries (e.g. ISCOR). For more information see: R. Ross, A concise history of South Africa, pp. 84-113; T. Cameron & S.B. Spies (reds.), Nuwe geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika. Johannesburg, 1991; O.J.O. Ferreira, P.G. Nel & J.C. Pretorius, “Kultuurgeskiedenis as wetenskap”, Handhaaf 19(2), November 1981; L. Thompson, A history of South Africa (New Haven, 1995); N. Worden, The making of modern South Africa: Conquest, Segregation and Apartheid, pp. 37-57. 109 R. Ross, A concise history of South Africa, pp. 84-113; T. Cameron & S.B. Spies (reds.), Nuwe geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika; O.J.O. Ferreira, P.G. Nel & J.C. Pretorius, “Kultuurgeskiedenis as wetenskap”, Handhaaf 19(2), November 1981; L. Thompson, A history of South Africa; N. Worden, The making of modern South Africa, pp. 42-58. 110 For a discussion on the role of the governor-general in South Africa see J. Lambert, “The Earl of Athlone and South Africanism: A united South African nation and not merely a South Africa peopled by Africanders and English’: the Earl of Athlone and the attempt to forge a Dominion South Africanism in the 1920s”, Kleio 34, 2002. pp. 128-130;

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as well as symbolic heads of state.111 The prominent social position and royal inclination or image of the governor-generals and their wives played a considerable role in reinforcing ballroom dances in South Africa. The governor-generals were at the top of society’s social ladder and their attendance at functions validated social activities (e.g. clubs, garden parties and other leisure activities associated with the British middle class). The prominent social role that both the governor-generals and ballroom dancing had in South Africa is evident in the growing number of dance invitations that the governor-generals received as the years progressed.112 Ballroom dancing became an extremely popular way to raise money because of its social appeal and the governor-generals patronage and or attendance at a specific charity dancing event both validate the ball itself and set an example for supporting specific causes through dances. Ballroom dancing events to benefit children financially were popular and included, amongst others, the Police Orphans’ Fundraising balls,113 Pretoria Civic Society ball, 114 Children’s Seaside Fund ball, 115 South African League of Youth ball, 116 Northern Districts Zionist Youth Society ball, 117 Johannesburg Children's Home, 118 Louis Botha Home for Children,119 and the Spring’s Debutante ball. 120 The joys and woes of dance By the late 1920s ballroom dancing had the capacity both to support children indirectly, as the popularity of charity balls in aid of children suggest and developmentally by promoting, as indicated by the quote, health and entrenching acceptable social behaviour. As the popularity of ballroom grew, so did the social necessity for young children to be able to dance well. As indicated by the popular Afrikaans magazine, Die Huisgenoot¸ in the 1920s, dancing formed part of children’s

111 J. Lambert, “The Earl of Athlone and South Africanism: A united South African nation and not merely a South Africa peopled by Africanders and English’: the Earl of Athlone and the attempt to forge a Dominion South Africanism in the 1920s”, Kleio 34, 2002. pp. 128-130. 112 SAB, Pretoria: GG 2343, 2/9, 2: W. Smillie-The secretary of His Excellency the Governor General, 07/04/1937. 113 SAB, Pretoria: GG 2337, 1/25, G.W. Klerck-Commisioner of the South African Police, 11/05/1940; SAB, Pretoria: GG 2337, 1/25, G.W. Klerck-Commisioner of the South African Police, 07/05/1938; SAB, Pretoria: GG 2337, 1/25, G.W. Klerck-Commisioner of the South African Police, 28/05/1937. 114 SAB, Pretoria: GG 2302, 1/172, Pretoria Civic Society –Earl of Claredon, 1931. 115 SAB, Pretoria: GG 2237, 1/117, Children’s Seaside Fund –Prince Arthur of Connaught, 1921. 116 SAB, Pretoria: GG 2321, 2/347, South African League Of Youth –Earl of Clarendon, 1937. 117 SAB, Pretoria: GG 2347, 6/89, Northern Districts Zionist Youth Society –Sir Patrick Duncan, 1937. 118 SAB, Pretoria: GG 2351, 6/175, Johannesburg Children's Home –Sir Patrick Duncan, 1938. 119 SAB, Pretoria: GG 2354, 6/288, Louis Botha Home for Children –Sir Patrick Duncan, 1939. 120 SAB, Pretoria: GG 2424, 6/259, Mayor and Council of Springs –Dr. E G. Jansen, 1955.

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upbringing. 121 Especially children approaching marriageable age had to be able to dance so as not to be considered “ghaboe” (stupid or bad).122 Media reports further declared ballroom dancing to be beneficial to the physical development of young girls as it taught them grace and elegance and prepared them for life’s challenges.123 Even medical practitioners emphasized the “profound effect onXadolescent girls”.124 It was this value of ballroom dancing as a physical and psychological developmental tool that would lead to a call by local and international dance teachers to implement it as formal school or , at least, extra mural activity.125 Dancing and especially ballroom, it was argued, was very well suited to fit into “modern educational methods” where each child should be treated as an individual within a collective group.126 The South African Dancing Times cautioned against opening a studio without sufficient practical experience, an understanding of the “child mind” and pointed to the expertise required in training very young children. 127 While sections within the South African community were reluctant to approve of dancing at any level especially with regards to children, the obvious popularity and benefits of ballroom dancing saw an increased number of children participating at allocated events.128 Professionalizing dancers Not unlike Britain, the increased popularity of ballroom led to a need to standardize the various dancing steps. A major factor in the history of ballroom dancing was the establishment of the Ballroom Branch of the ISTD (Imperial Society of Teachers Dancing) in Britain during 1924. This society created uniform rules for ballroom dances, making it easier to compare, teach and judge the standard of the dances and consequently turned social dancing into a competitive activity. The South African counterpart of this organisation, the SADTA (South African Dance Teachers Association), was formed in the early 1920s under the guidance of a South African dance teacher, Madge Mans.129 This organisation at first focused on operatic dancing

121 E. de Roubaix, “ Pieterjie en Johannatjie”, Die Huisgenoot, Junie 1920, pp. 59-60 122 E. de Roubaix, “ Pieterjie en Johannatjie”, Die Huisgenoot, Junie 1920, pp. 59-60 123 T. Violl, “Dancing and the ballroom: The ‘pets’ come to life-Children dancing-‘Puss in boots’- The ‘Come as somebody’ dance by Treble Violl”, Rand Daily Mail, 17/12/1927, p. 3. 124 Anonym, “Dancing as aid to health advocated by ,any doctors”, South African Dancing Times, November 1936, p. 3 125 Terpsichore, “The road to success”, South African Dancing Times, October 1936, p. 14; H. Nöckler, “Ballroom dancing in schools?”, South African Dancing Times, August 1937, p. 4. 126 Terpsichore, “The road to success”, South African Dancing Times, October 1936, p. 14. 127 Terpsichore, “The road to success”, South African Dancing Times, October 1936, p. 14. 128 Luli Callinicos, A people’s history of South Africa Volume 2 Working life 1886-Factories, townships and popular culture on the Rand, p. 216; P. C. Alegi, “Playing to the gallery? Sport, cultural performance, and social identity in South Africa, 1920s-1945”, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 35(1), 2002, p. 34. 129 A. Grant-Smith “Dancing notes”, Rand Daily Mail, 26/02/1924, p. 9; Anonym, “Controlling dancing affairs: S.A. Dancing Teachers’ Association”, Rand Daily Mail,

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and ballet as competitive art forms, but in about 1928 the ballroom branch of the SADTA was formed with branches in Johannesburg and Cape Town.130 The competitive ballroom dancing sections was at first only danced by adults with children’s competitive dancing focusing on musical performances; operatic dancing; classical acrobatic tap; ballet; Scottish and mime dancing.131 Despite this division at competitions, young children were also exposed to ballroom dancing in their operatic, tap studios as dance teachers often specialized in a range of dances- thus allowing these children to witness and participate on the side-line. 132

However, by the beginning of 1930 it was clear that as the years progressed the SADTA’s largest support base would come from children between 5 and 17 years of age. A substantial amount of time was therefore put into organising children’s balls and appointing judges for the events that ran more or less simultaneously with the provincial adult dancing heats.133 These children and youth ballroom dancing sections at the SADTA’s competitions were, according to newspaper reports, extremely popular drawing “exceptionally talented” dancers from the “Xvery tiny totX to the well-set-up little ladyX”.134 The children’s ballroom dance competition required them to dance the “polka”, waltz and quickstep and required, as in the case of the adult competitions, very specialized training.135 During the introduction of these children’s dances, a lot of emphasis was placed on the dresses that were worn and “special prizes” were awarded to the “most original” dress.136 The Rand Daily Mail remarks that “X the talent shown by the children, from tiny tots of five to growing boys and girls of seventeen, must have been a revelation to many of the hundreds of

02/10/1931, p. 14; T. Violl, “Dancing and the ballroom”, Rand Daily Mail, 05/03/1932, p. 3. 130 P. Joyce, Reader’s Digest: South Africa’s Yesterdays, pp. 102-103; Anonym: Advertisement “SADTA Championship”, Rand Daily Mail, 13/02/1925, p. 6; A. Grant-Smith, “Dancing notes”, Rand Daily Mail, 26/02/1924, p. 9; Anonym, “Controlling dancing affairs: S.A. Dancing Teachers’ Association”, Rand Daily Mail, 02/10/1931, p. 14; T. Violl, “Dancing and the ballroom”, Rand Daily Mail, 05/03/1932, p. 3. 131 SAB, Pretoria: GG 2339, 1/52, programme of the “Fifteenth Pretoria Musical festival”, pp. 58 – 65; Anonym, “ Natal Studio Notes”, South African Dancing Times, August 1935, p. 23. 132 Anonym, “ Bloemfontein Notes”, South African Dancing Times, October 1936, p. 22; Anonym, “ Pioneers in dancing”, South African Dancing Times, September 1945, p. 21. 133 T. Violl, “Dancing and the ballroom”, Rand Daily Mail, 09/04/1932, p. 3; Lancer, “In the dancing world: SADTA’s annual election of officials”, Rand Daily Mail, 17/02/1934, p. 3. 134 Lancer, “In the dancing world: Brilliant success of the children’s night”, Rand Daily Mail, 24/02/1934, p. 6. 135 Lancer , “In the dancing world: Royal visit causes a rush to studios”, Rand Daily Mail, 10/02/1934, p. 6; Lancer, “In the dancing world: Success of Amateur Dancers Association”, Rand Daily Mail, 03/03/1934, p. 6; L. Kehl, “The dancing master’s corner”, South African Dancing Times, 6(1), August 1937, p. 10. 136 Lancer, “In the dancing world: Royal visit causes a rush to studios”, Rand Daily Mail, 10/02/1934, p. 6; Lancer, “In the dancing world: Success of Amateur Dancers Association”, Rand Daily Mail, 03/03/1934, p. 6.

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parents and friends present...”.137 Public requests were even made that the “Children’s Fancy dress competition” should be an annual ballroom dance event.138 Christmas holiday seasons saw various functions and shows where children preformed “Xit is pre-eminently”, noted the Rand Daily Mail, “their dancing time”.139 Dancing across the “great divide” Drawing the lines: black and white The above mentioned “rainbow balls” of the early colonial period, that were danced on the “outskirts of town” remained part of South Africa’s ballroom dance history throughout the early twentieth century.140 Whereas ballroom dancing was being established as a professional sport in white communities, amongst the black youth, the ballroom dancing scene and reason for dancing was radically different. While the dancing steps and attire of the townships and suburbs appeared alike, in the “subordinated” communities dancing was a “way-out” of everyday life. Furthermore, it would be both overcoming this “struggle” to dance and the township children’s love for the ballroom that sustained it into the transformation years.

Although the white authorities did not specifically ban ballroom dancing, various segregationist laws influenced the manner and style in which ballroom dancing was practiced among black society. The devastating effects that the depression, droughts and Land Acts of the late 1920s and 1930s had on the southern Africa countryside drew a continuous flow of workers, and potential dancers, to work, as miners, textile worker or servants, in big cities.141 However, Acts like the 1930 Natives in Urban Areas Act,142 and 1931 Regulation of Public Entertainment Act143 made it illegal for the black dancers to freely visit white dancing halls in their spare time, and it became seemingly impossible for dancing to thrive under these restrictive conditions.144 The evolving race legislation, that was indeed becoming more restrictive in nature from the 1920s onwards, ironically reinforced the presence of ballroom dances within

137 Lancer , “In the dancing world: Brilliant success of the children’s night”, Rand Daily Mail, 24/02/1934, p. 6. 138 Lancer , “In the dancing world: Success of Amateur Dancers Association”, Rand Daily Mail, 03/03/1934, p. 6. 139 A. Grant-Smith, “Dancing notes”, Rand Daily Mail, 18/03/1924, p. 9; T. Violl, “Dancing and the ballroom”, Rand Daily Mail, 08/12/1928, p. 5. 140 W. Bird, State of the Cape of Good Hope in 1822, pp. 165-166. 141 R. Ross, A concise history of South Africa, pp. 106-107. 142 Statutes of the Union of South Africa 1930, Act No. 25 of 1930: Natives in (Urban Areas) Act (Cape Town, Government Printer, 1930), pp. 178-201. 143Statutes of the Union of South Africa 1931, Act number 28 of 1931: Regulation of Public Entertainment Act (Cape Town, Government Printer, 1931), pp. 130-140. 144 E. Hellman, Rooiyard: a sociological survey of an urban Native slum yard. p. 93; V. Erlmann, “‘Horses in the race course’: the domestication of ingoma dancing in South Africa, 1929-1939”, Popular Music, 8(3), African music, October 1989, p. 267.; Anonym, “Western Township News: the Communal Hall”, The Bantu World, 26/05/1934, p. 23; SAB, Pretoria: BNS. 1/1/503, 16/8/85.: Provincial secretary – The secretary for the interior, 28/11/1940 where local residents of a Cape Town municipality requested that the Sunday observance law be specially amended to prohibit dancing on a Sunday because of the dangers of “undesirable developments”.

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the black community. As it was, for example, “illegal” for blacks to be outside during a certain time in the night (due to the various curfew laws), dance parties then became all night affairs creating ample time to practice and learn from one another within a confined space. Economic restraints and other everyday problems, like the lack of sufficient transport to and from late night dance competitions, also served to keep ballroom dancing within the confines of the areas in which black society were resident.145

No evidence could be found indicating that black children were formally being taught ballroom dances or participated in competitions as in the white communities during the 1930s. However, reports in The Bantu World clearly show that teenagers were encouraged to dance ballroom. At a dancing event held in the “Inchcape hall” in Johannesburg during 1932, reference is made to both old and young couples that “Xpolish the floor of the Hall with the soles of their shoes to the utmost brilliancy”.146 Halls and youth clubs were also created in the black segregated areas where ballroom dancing was specifically encouraged. The “Recreation and Social Department” of the Johannesburg municipality147 developed “unemployment clubs” in halls where black and coloured boys between the ages of sixteen and twenty could meet daily to participate in constructive leisure activities.148 These included activities like boxing and craft making, and those clubs also regularly hosted social evenings which included dance.149

By the middle of the century it becomes apparent that the black ballroom infrastructure was expanding and turning into a lucrative business in townships and other black areas. Ballroom dancers were able to visit several clubs and dancing halls and call upon a variety of dance bands catering specifically for black ballroom couples, despite the various economic, legal and social constraints that existed. Anthropological and sociological studies of the time highlight the prominence of dancing clubs near and in Johannesburg where members could dance rather than

“roaming the streets and getting into mischief”. 150 The Second World War, along with the new 1948 political dispensation,

completely changed the economic, social and political situation in South Africa. Both the consequences of the War and the reality of Apartheid intensified the racial

145 D. B. Coplan, In township tonight!, p. 77. Also see Anonym, A better understanding of our culture, Drum: Drum woman, April 1989, pp. 84, 86. Where the South African dancer, Nomsa Manaka, explains how she overcame various problems in Soweto. 146 Anonym, “Popular jazz band fully enjoys their vacation in the Golden city”, The Bantu World, 09/07/1932, p. 9. 147 Anonym, “City Council provides recreational and social facilities for Africans: Unemployed Clubs”, The Bantu World, 10/11/1934, p. 14. 148 Anonym, “City Council provides recreational and social facilities for Africans: Unemployed Clubs”, The Bantu World, 10/11/1934, p. 14. 149 Anonym, “City Council provides recreational and social facilities for Africans: Unemployed Clubs”, The Bantu World, 10/11/1934, p. 14. 150 R.E. Phillips, The Bantu in the city: a study of cultural adjustment on the Witwatersrand, p. 293; also see “Popular jazz band fully enjoys their vacation in the Golden city”, The Bantu World, 09/07/1932, p. 9; Anonym, “Bantu Sports Club requests Europeans to visit grounds”, The Bantu World, 26/08/1933, p. 15; Anonym, “Soccer and dance create new culture”, The New Nation, 3(46), 23/11/1988, p. 1; S. Dalton, “Ritmes, passies en swier”, Insig, Maart 2000, p. 36.

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division that existed within the ballroom dance fraternity. With separation being entrenched in the Population Registration Act, Group Areas Act, Separate Amenities Act, Immorality Act and a plethora of other racially based pieces of legislation in the 1950s, the social dance – and competitive dance floor – remained divided along black, white and coloured lines.151

As the century progressed, there was an increasing concern, from both mothers and the government, that dancing halls were becoming more and more “dangerous” for the youth. Being a leisure activity, dancing became very much associated, with the breaking of laws, late nights, explicit sexual activity152 and the misuse of alcohol.153 Echoing the apprehension in a study that was done in United States in the 1920s, the question was asked if these young children should even be admitted to the dance halls?154 Concern for the safety of the youth escalated especially when the popular social dance crazes of the 1950s and 1960s hit the South African dance halls. These dances often seem to cater for, as a newspapers stated: “primitiveXhordes of sloppy, aggressive, be-jeaned loutsX”.155 Unlike the white concern for physical contact between the various gender and races, the black concern here appears to be more focused on the place and reputation of the halls themselves. However, while it was these lively new dance crazes that drew the youth to the dance floor, it would be the artistry and century’s long appeal of ballroom dancing that kept them there.156 This can for example be seen in an article published in The New Nation reporting on the African middle class that danced the “respectable” waltz, foxtrot and tango, to the “popular European strains” and how this, along with soccer, helped to form a “new

151 A.M Green, "Dancing in borrowed shoes: a history of ballroom dancing in South Africa”, (MA Cultural History, University of Pretoria, 2009), pp. 159-193 152 See for example the early twentieth century comment and picture of two apes dancing the tango in the South African Musical Times cited in Peter Joyce (ed.), Reader’s Digest: South Africa’s Yesterdays, p 103. 153 P. C. Alegi, “Playing to the gallery? Sport, cultural performance, and social identity in South Africa”, 1920s-1945, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 35(1), 2002, p 25; D. B. Coplan, In township tonight!, p. 128. Primary sources concerning the prominent role that liquor played in ballroom dancing include: TAB, Pretoria: MGP 124, 12968/01, n.a., Louis Wertheim- Major Therson, 01/10/1901, requesting to sell liquor at a dance; W.M.B. Nhlapo, “Are our dance halls becoming the haunts of the most vicious class?”, The Bantu World, 18/06/1932, p. 9. 154 E. Gardner, Public dance halls, their regulation and place in the recreation of adolescents, (Washington, U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1929), pp. 1-2; W.M.B. Nhlapo, “Are our dance halls becoming the haunts of the most vicious class?”, The Bantu World, 18/06/1932, p. 9. 155 C. Hamm, “Rock n’ Roll in a very strange society”, Popular music 5, 1985, pp. 159-160. 156 National Cultural History Museum, Pretoria: Marabastad exhibition, visited 1 August 2007; WITS, Johannesburg: A 410, B 2.8.13, M Ballinger, Correspondence: individuals: E. Louw 1943-1960; Anonym, “Fine effort for medical aid for Russia”, Guardian, 4 March 1943, p. 7; National Cultural History Museum, Pretoria: Marabastad exhibition, visited 1 August 2007. Also see A 410/ B 2.8.13, M Ballinger, Correspondence: individuals: E. Louw 1943-1960; Anonym, “Fine effort for medical aid for Russia”, Guardian, 4 March 1943, p. 7; C. Hamm, Rock n’ Roll in a very strange society”, Popular music, 5, pp. 164-168.

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culture of the city”.157 The efforts that were made earlier in the century to promote ballroom dancing amongst the younger generations appeared to have been successful. While ballroom dancing was still regularly practiced by married educated black couples between the ages of twenty six to forty five, de Villiers’ anthropological study found that it had a definite following amongst young adults between the ages of sixteen and twenty five.158 During the height of Apartheid, there were cases of experienced ballroom dance teachers offering free lessons in township for “devoted dancers” as part of “gemeenskapsdiens” (community service) and thus these lessons continued to form part of the life of some township children.159

Despite the fact that black ballroom dancing events were not an “economic burden” for the government and could indeed socially “uplift” the youth, the Apartheid government was reluctant to recognized its existence as either a black sport or black social activity. Under the Entertainments (Censorship) Act, Act 28 of 1931, a dancing venue was classified as a “public entertainment” venue, and this allowed, especially later in the century “members of the police” to patrol dance functions.160 Furthermore, citizens and their children were often informed that they could not open a dance hall or attend a dance without giving a detailed motivation. This requirement underlines the fact that government did not accept black people as anything other than “temporary workers” (without children) in urban areas who did not need permanent recreational facilities within the boundaries of “white” South Africa. By the 1960s the government’s trepidation for the political influence that could possibly be exercised on the youth at the dancing events was mounting. While ballroom dancing events were used by trade unions and political parties to further their cause, this appears to be more the exception than the rule.161 Correspondence amongst departments and dancing organisations indicate that the Apartheid government felt that there was no need to promote ballroom dancing amongst black and coloured youth.162 Furthermore, media reports as late as the 1970s, 1980s and even the 1990s present glimpses of how government forcefully tried to prevent ballroom dancers from different racial groups from dancing together. Newspaper articles in this regard containing phrases like “When the dancing stopped”,163 “all-white dancing”,164

157 Anonym, “Soccer and dance create new culture”, The New Nation, 3(46), 23/11/1988, p. 1 158 C.M. de Villiers, Die vryetydsbesteding van volwasse manlike Bantoe in die gebied Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereniging, pp. 567, 569, 570, 571 159 S. Dalton, “Ritmes, passies en swier”, Insig, Maart 2000, p. 36; K. Ngwena, “Queen of the ballroom: It was a historically white pursuit for most of her career, but that didn’t stop her becoming a champion”, Drum, 468, 23 August 2001, pp. 86-87; T. Beaver, “Spin on the floor is dream come true for township children”, The Sunday Independent, 24/09/1995, p. 4. 160 Statutes of the Union of South Africa 1931, Act number 28 of 1931: Entertainments (Censorship) Act (Government Printer, Cape Town, 1931), p. 140. 161 WITS, Johannesburg: Ad2186, M7.5, Carmeson & B.P. Bunting- O Tambo, 14 December 1955. Also see WITS, Johannesburg: AH1092, Bbe 2.13: Garment Workers Union: Cape branches, East London Correspondence A-F: Secretary Garment Workers Union East London – General Sectrary, 26/11/ 954. 162 KAB: LDC 290: Arthur Murray School of dancing, 11/06/1965-27/02/1980; SAB: BAO 21/63, R144/11, Ondersekretaris sport en ontspanning, 25/10/1973 163 B. Streek, “When the dancing stops”, Daily Dispatch, 24/05/1979, p. 6. 164 Anonym, “Dance shock for black rep”, Cape Herald, 01/09/1979, p. 3.

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“Xgeen gemengde dansery toegelaat nie [no mixed dancing allowed]”, 165 “Gekleurdes weggewys by dansery [coloureds showed away at dance]”166 reflect on the deep division within ballroom dancing society and how difficult it was for the township children to achieve a successful competitive ballroom dancing career. Blurring the lines: media, music and motion pictures Despite stringent laws, media, music and motion pictures help to transcend racial barriers and allowed children of all races to experience international ballroom dancing from wherever they lived. The second half of the twentieth century in South Africa was not only marked by pro-white Nationalist rule, but also revealed a time of “rapid economic growth”, which saw an increase in the influx of international records, tape recorders and better radios that allowed music and thus ballroom dancing inside family homes.167 Children were especially influenced by the media’s imagery of ballroom dancing. They had access to the latest technology and were eager to learn. Moreover, a substantial amount of media attention was directly aimed at children’s dancing. Conclusion: Ballroom dancing for all As South Africa moved towards becoming a democratic country in the 1990s so did the white and black ballroom dancing worlds become all inclusive regardless of race, class or age. Not only did the beginning of the 1990s see the official acceptance of ballroom dancing as a black sport with the creation of the South African National Council for Amateur Dancers (SANCAD), but in 1994, in the new post-Apartheid South Africa, the black and white dancing organizations finally amalgamated to form the Federation of Dance Sport South Africa (FEDANSA). Moreover, in 2006, the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (SASCOC) recognized FEDANSA as the “sole representative for Dance Sport in South Africa”.168 At these FEDANSA competitions, dancers and spectators of different races become active, “Xclapping, shouting, and rhythmically movingX” participants in the dancing scene.169 With its close links with the International Dance Sport Federation (IDSF) and the World Dance and Dance Sport Council (WD&DSC), FEDANSA actively oversees, organizes and grades provincial and national competitions to identify the best amateur and professional ballroom dancers in South Africa.170 Moreover, FEDANSA created five special categories in regional and national ballroom

165 C. Bosman, “Dansvoorval onnodig, sê bestuurder”, Die Transvaler, 04/06/1980, p. 14. 166 L. Laubscer, “Gekleurdes weggewys by dansery”, 07/09/1995, p. 11. 167 W. Beinart, Twentieth-century South Africa, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 163, 165, 175, 176; C. Hamm, “The constant companion of Man: Separate development Radio Bantu and Music”, Popular Music, 10(2), May 1991, pp. 163-161. 168 FEDANSA.org, <http://www.fedansa.org/history.php>, 2006. Accessed: 25/02/2008. 169 Y. Daniel, “Dance in the African diaspora”, in M. Ember, C.R. Ember, I. Skoggard (eds.), Encyclopedia of Diasporas, p. 354. 170 F.E.D.A.N.S.A. Federation of Dance Sport South Africa Rule book, 1998 (amended 2001), <http://www.fedansa.org/docs/rules/RULE%20BOOK%20FEDANSA%2006%20(2).doc>, 2006. Accessed: 20/02/2006.

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competitions dividing the competitors by age group and experience- thereby making the youth an official integral part of the ballroom dancing fraternity. While there still remains an underlying division between the classes of children that are dancing, today in South Africa at these “rainbow” ballroom competitions it is true to say that “social dancing reflects the Spirit of the Age more faithfully than any other Art”.171 Copyright 2010, Alida Green Bibliography Alegi, P. C. “Playing to the gallery? Sport, cultural performance, and social identity in South Africa, 1920s-1945”, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 35(1), 2002, pp. 17-38. Anonym, “A better understanding of our culture”, Drum: Drum woman, April 1989, pp. 84. Anonym, “Bantu Sports Club requests Europeans to visit grounds”,The Bantu World, 26/08/1933, p. 15. Anonym, “Bloemfontein Notes”, South African Dancing Times, October 1936, p.22. Anonym, “City Council provides recreational and social facilities for Africans: Unemployed Clubs”, The Bantu World, 10/11/1934, p. 14. Anonym, “Controlling dancing affairs: S.A. Dancing Teachers’ Association”, Rand Daily Mail, 02/10/1931, p. 14. Anonym, “Dance shock for black rep”, Cape Herald, 01/09/1979, p. 3. Anonym, “Dancing as aid to health advocated by any doctors”, South African Dancing Times, November 1936, p. 3. Anonym, “Fine effort for medical aid for Russia”, Guardian, 04/03/1943. p. 7. Anonym, “Natal Studio Notes”, South African Dancing Times, August 1935, p. 23. Anonym, “Ourselves”, South African Dancing Times, April 1946, p. 3. Anonym, “Pioneers in dancing”, South African Dancing Times, September 1945, p. 21. Anonym, “Popular jazz band fully enjoys their vacation in the Golden city”, The Bantu World, 09/07/1932, p.9. Anonym, “Popular jazz band fully enjoys their vacation in the Golden city”, The Bantu World, 09/07/1932, p. 9. Anonym, “Soccer and dance create new culture”, The New Nation, 3(46), 23/11/1988, p. 1. Anonym, “Western Township News: the Communal Hall”, The Bantu World, 26/05/1934, p. 23. Anonym, “Advertisement “SADTA Championship”, Rand Daily Mail , 13/02/1925, p.6. Anonym, South Africa’s heritage. How our forefathers lived, worked and played. From Van Riebeeck to XIXth century times. Part three: their customs, amusements and sport, (Cape Town, Caltex publication, 1962). Beaver, T. “Spin on the floor is dream come true for township children”, The Sunday Independent, 24/09/1995, p. 4. Beinart, W. Twentieth-century South Africa, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994). Bird, W. State of the Cape of Good Hope in 1822, (Cape Town, C. Struik, 1966).

171 Lancer, “In the dancing world: Official results of the examinations”, Rand Daily Mail, 11/05/1935, p. 8

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Blennerhassett, R & L. Sleeman., Adventures in Mashonaland, (Bulawayo, Books of Rhodesia, 1969). Bosman, C. “Dansvoorval onnodig, sê bestuurder”, Die Transvaler, 04/06/1980, p. 14. Botha, C.G. Social life in the Cape Colony with social customs in South Africa in the 18th century, (Cape Town, C. Struik, 1973). Botha, W. & L. Husemeyer The city that leapt to life: A 1986 diary celebrating Johannesburg’s flamboyant origins 100 years ago, (Johannesburg, Perskor, 1985). Bouws, J., Solank daar musiek isXMusiek en musiekmakers in Suid-Afrika (1652-1982), (Kaapstad, Tafelberg, 1982). Brandel-Syrier, M. Reeftown elite a study of social mobility in a modern African community on the Reef, (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971). Burchell, W, J. Travels in the interior of Southern Africa, (Cape Town, C. Struik, 1967). Burke, P. What is cultural history?, (Cambridge Press, 2006). Callinicos, L., A people’s history of South Africa Volume 2 Working life 1886-Factories, townships and popular culture on the Rand, (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1987). Cameron, T. & S.B. Spies (reds.), Nuwe geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika. (Johannesburg, 1991). Cohen, L. Reminiscences of Johannesburg and London (Facsimile reproductions of the 1924 edition with new Forward and Illustrations), (Johannesburg, Africana Book Society, 1976). Cohen, L. Reminiscences of Kimberley (London, Benette & Co, 1911). Coplan, D. B., In township tonight! South Africa’s Black city music and theatre, (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1985). Dalton, S. “Ritmes, passies en swier”, Insig, Maart 2000, p. 36. de Kock, V. The fun they had! The pastimes of our forefathers, (Cape Town, Howard B. Timmins, 1955). de Roubaix, E. “Pieterjie en Johannatjie”, Die Huisgenoot, Junie 1920, pp. 59-60. de Villiers, C.M. Die vryetydsbesteding van volwasse manlike Bantoe in die gebied Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereniging, (D.Phil.-tesis, Universiteit van Pretoria, 1972). Duckitt, H.J., Hilda’s diary of a Cape Housekeeper, Being a chronicle of daily events and monthly work in a Cape household, with numerous cooking recipes, and notes on gardening, poultry keeping, etc. (London, Chapmann and Hall, 1902). Ember, M., C.R. Ember, I. Skoggard (eds.), Encyclopedia of Diasporas. (UK, Springer, 2005). Erlmann, V. “‘Horses in the race course’: the domestication of ingoma dancing in South Africa, 1929-1939”, Popular Music, 8(3), October 1989. F.E.D.A.N.S.A., Federation of Dance Sport South Africa Rule book 1998 (amended 2001), http://www.fedansa.org/docs/rules/RULE%20BOOK%20FEDANSA%2006%20(2).doc>, 2006. Accessed: 20/02/2006. Fairbridge, D. Lady Anne Barnard at the Cape of Good Hope 1797-1802, (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1924). FEDANSA.org, <http://www.fedansa.org/history.php>, 2006. Accessed: 25/02/2008. Franken, J.L.M. Duminy-Dagboeke, (Kaapstad, Die Van Riebeeck-vereniging, 1938). Gardner, E. Public dance halls, their regulation and place in the recreation of adolescents, (U.S. Govt. Print. Off., Washington, 1929). Grant-Smith, A. “Dancing notes”, Rand Daily Mail, 26/02/1924, p. 9.

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Green, A.M "Dancing in borrowed shoes: a history of ballroom dancing in South Africa”, (MA Cultural History, University of Pretoria, 2009). Hamm, C. “Rock n’ Roll in a very strange society”, Popular music, 5, 1985. Hamm, C. “The constant companion of Man: Separate development Radio Bantu and Music”, Popular Music, 10(2), May 1991, pp. 163-161. Hellmann, E., Rooiyard A sociological survey of an urban native slum yard, (Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1948). Jeppe, C. The kaleidoscopic Transvaal, 2nd edition (Cape Town, J.C. Juta and Co., 1906). Joyce, P. The making of a nation, (Cape Town, Zebra Press, 2007). Joyce, P. (ed.), Reader’s digest: South Africa’s Yesterdays. (Cape Town, Reader’s Digest Association of South Africa,1981). Joyce, P., South Africa in the 20th century chronicles of an era, (Cape Town, Struik Publishers, 2000). KAB, Cape Town, LDC 290: Arthur Murray School of dancing, 11/06/1965-27/02/1980. Kehl, L. “The dancing master’s corner”, South African Dancing Times, 6(1), August 1937, p. 10. Lambert, J. “The Earl of Athlone and South Africanism: A united South African nation and not merely a South Africa peopled by Africanders and English’: the Earl of Athlone and the attempt to forge a Dominion South Africanism in the 1920s”, Kleio , 34, 2002, pp. 128-130 Lancer, “In the dancing world: Brilliant success of the children’s night”, Rand Daily Mail, 24/02/1934, p. 6. Lancer, “In the dancing world: Official results of the examinations”, Rand Daily Mail, 11/05/1935, p. 8. Lancer, “In the dancing world: Royal visit causes a rush to studios”, Rand Daily Mail, 10/02/1934, p. 6. Lancer, “In the dancing world: Royal visit causes a rush to studios”, Rand Daily Mail, 10/02/1934, p. 6. Lancer,“In the dancing world: SADTA’s annual election of officials”, Rand Daily Mail, 17/02/1934, p. 3. Lancer,“In the dancing world: Success of Amateur Dancers Association”, Rand Daily Mail, 03/03/1934, p. 6. Laubscer, L.“Gekleurdes weggewys by dansery”, Beeld, 07/09/1995, p.11. Layne, V.“Square roots at the Cape”, Rootz Africa, 5(4), November 2003, p. 18. Le Valliant, M. Travels into the interior parts of Africa by way of the Cape of Good Hope in the years 1780, (Robinson, 1790.). National Cultural History Museum, Pretoria: Marabastad exhibition, visited 1 August 2007. Ngwena, K. “Queen of the ballroom: It was a historically white pursuit for most of her career, but that didn’t stop her becoming a champion”, Drum, 23/10/2001, pp. 86-87. Nhlapo, W.M.B. “Are our dance halls becoming the haunts of the most vicious class?”, The Bantu World, 18/06/1932, p. 9. Nöckler, H. “Ballroom dancing in schools?”, South African Dancing Times, August 1937, p. 4. O.J.O. Ferreira, P.G. Nel & J.C. Pretorius “Kultuurgeskiedenis as wetenskap”, Handhaaf, 19(2), November 1981. Phillips, R.E. The Bantu in the city: a study of cultural adjustment on the Witwatersrand,(South Africa, The Lovedale Press, 1970).

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Picard, H.W.J. Masters of the castle, (Cape Town, C. Struik, 1972). Potgieter, D.J.(ed.), Standard Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa, III- V. (Cape Town, NASOU, 1971). Robinson, A.M.L.The letters of Lady Anne Barnard to Henry Dundas from the Cape and elsewhere, 1793-1803. Together with her journal of a tour into the interior and certain other letters,(Cape Town, A.A. Balkema, 1973). Ross, R. A concise history of South Africa, (United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 1999). SAB, Pretoria: BAO 21/63, R144/11, Ondersekretaris sport en ontspanning, 25/10/1973. SAB, Pretoria: BNS. 1/1/503, 16/8/85.: Provincial secretary – The secretary for the interior, 28/11/1940. SAB, Pretoria: GG 2237, 1/117, Children’s Seaside Fund –Prince Arthur of Connaught, 1921. SAB, Pretoria: GG 2302, 1/172, Pretoria Civic Society –Earl of Claredon, 1931. SAB, Pretoria: GG 2321, South African League Of Youth –Earl of Clarendon, 2/347, 1937. SAB, Pretoria: GG 2337, 1/25, G.W. Klerck-Commisioner of the South African Police, 11/05/1940. SAB, Pretoria: GG 2337, 1/25, G.W. Klerck-Commisioner of the South African Police, 07/05/1938. SAB, Pretoria: GG 2337, 1/25, G.W. Klerck-Commisioner of the South African Police, 28/05/1937. SAB, Pretoria: GG 2339, 1/52, Programme of the “Fifteenth Pretoria Musical festival”. SAB, Pretoria: GG 2343, 2/9, W. Smillie-The secretary of His Excellency the Governor General, 07/04/1937. SAB, Pretoria: GG 2347, 6/89, Northern Districts Zionist Youth Society –Sir Patrick Duncan, 1937. SAB, Pretoria: GG 2351, 6/175, Johannesburg Children's Home –Sir Patrick Duncan, 1938. SAB, Pretoria: GG 2354, Louis Botha Home for Children –Sir Patrick Duncan, 6/288, 1939. SAB, Pretoria: GG 2424, 6/259, Mayor and Council of Springs –Dr. E G. Jansen, 1955. Semple, R. Walks and sketches at the Cape of Good Hope. A journey from Cape Town to Blettenberg’s [sic.] Bay (London, C & R. Baldwin, 1803). Statutes of the Union of South Africa 1930, Act No. 25 of 1930: Natives in (Urban Areas) Act (Cape Town, Government Printer, 1930) pp. 178-201. Statutes of the Union of South Africa 1931, Act number 28 of 1931: Regulation of Public Entertainment Act (Cape Town, Government Printer, 1931), pp.130-140. Streek, B.“When the dancing stops”, Daily Dispatch, 24/05/1979, p. 6. TAB, Pretoria: MGP 124, 12968/01, n.a., Louis Wertheim- Major Therson, 01/10/1901. Terpsichore,“The road to success”, South African Dancing Times, October 1936, p. 14. Theron, B.“George Jesse Heys (1852-1939) in Pretoria”, Historia, 50(2), November 2005. Thompson, L. A history of South Africa, (New Haven, 1995). van der Walt, A. “The beauty of movement”, South African Philatelist, 79(4), August 2003, pp. 116-117.

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Violl, T. “Dancing and the ballroom: The ‘pets’ come to life-Children dancing-‘Puss in boots’- The ‘Come as somebody’ dance by Treble Violl”, Rand Daily Mail, 17/12/1927, p. 3. Violl, T. “Dancing and the ballroom”, Rand Daily Mail, 05/03/1932, p. 3. Violl, T. “Dancing and the ballroom”, Rand Daily Mail, 08/12/1928, p. 5. Violl, T. “Dancing and the ballroom”, Rand Daily Mail, 09/04/1932, p. 3. Wentzel, J. A view from the ridge: Johannesburg retrospect, (Cape Town, David Phillip, 1975). Witherspoon, E. The perfect art of modern dancing, (London,The Butterick publishing co; c1894). WITS, Johannesburg: A 410 B 2.8.13, M Ballinger, Correspondence: individuals: E. Louw 1943-1960. WITS, Johannesburg: Ad2186, M7.5, Carmeson & B.P. Bunting- O Tambo, 14/12/1955. WITS, Johannesburg: AH1092, Bbe 2.13: Garment Workers Union: Cape branches, East London Correspondence A-F: Secretary Garment Workers Union East London – General Sectrary, 26/11/ 954. Worden, N. The making of modern South Africa: Conquest, Segregation and Apartheid. (Oxford, Blackwell, 1994).

The People’s Dance: Workers, Politics and Movement in 1930s

Britain

Stacey Prickett

Roehampton University, UK

In deciding on a title for this paper about politically inspired dance practices in 1930s Britain, it seemed significant to differentiate between ‘dance’ and movement based performance. On the surface, a fruitful environment existed for a left wing dance movement to flourish but this did not happen. Except for Margaret Barr, the few dancers discussed here have fallen into relative obscurity; their forays into the new modern dance dissipated or at least fell out of the limelight. I begin to address this gap here, summarising work undertaken by a small number of British based modern dancers and musicians – Margaret Barr, Teda de Moor, Katie Eisenstadt and composer Alan Bush. Their dances were inspired by communist ideologies, reinforcing working class identities and agitating for social change through dance, at times as part of a larger choreographed spectacle. I touch on some historical issues that arise in the process of recovering work which sits outside the canon, of writing about those absent for over half a century from accounts of British dance. There are similarities to the left wing dance movement based in New York City, but distinctive differences contributed to the invisibility of this aspect of the British modern dance narrative.

A significant research problem is linked to the absence of detail -- there was not a sufficiently large critical mass to generate the level of scrutiny in print about the dance seen in the numerous contemporary accounts of the American movement. I first became aware of British leftist dance activity from a 1936 article in the American publication, New Theatre. Four English workers’ dance groups are identified by Leslie Daiken: Margaret Barr’s Dance Drama Group; the Workers’ Propaganda Dance Group; The Workers’ Ballet Group using music composed by Alan Bush; and the Workers’ Dance-Drama Group which drew its membership from trade unions, factories and Cooperative societies in London.172 Questions remain regarding the interrelationships between the groups and the dancers’ identities, due in part to policies of anonymity which precluded listing individual names in dance and theatre programme notes. Larraine Nicholas’ recent research into the history of Dartington Hall and its dancers provided multiple leads, however, while Fernau Hall’s Modern English Ballet assesses Margaret Barr’s socially conscious choreography. It is difficult to pin down whether the groups were a ‘workers’ dance more in name than in membership and sponsorship. From the material uncovered, it is evident that multiple constituencies and motivations existed: some dancers advocated for professional standards, other groups were comprised of amateur workers, while pageant dances reinforced a larger ideological message, drawing together amateurs and

172 Leslie Daiken (1936) ‘English Letter’, New Theatre, p.30

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professionals on a grand scale. While the summaries that follow here open up numerous investigative paths, this presentation sets out the foundations of a little known aspect of British modern dance. Margaret Barr Margaret Barr (1904-1991) developed a movement philosophy derived in part from her training at the hotbeds of modern dance activity in the USA: the Cornell School in Washington, classes with Geordie Graham, Martha’s sister in Santa Barbara and at the Graham School in New York. Theatre training occurred at the San Francisco Little Theatre where she studied under Maurice Brown. Provided with space, dancers and collaborators, Barr established the Dance Drama Group at Dartington Hall in 1931 on which she developed a highly theatrical and socially conscious aesthetic. Innovative inspiration was found in the world around her, seen in the 1933 dances Colliery about miners and Mothers which depicted scenes from a man’s life ending in war. In addition to setting up Dartington’s dance drama programme, Barr led an outreach group that interacted with the local community. The Liverton Village Players -- farm workers, labourers and foresters – were drawn from the surrounding neighbourhood to support the professional members of the troupe in Colliery. 173 Returning to London in 1934 when Kurt Jooss and his company became the resident dance troupe at Dartington, Barr threw her energies into different projects.

Between 1934 and 1938, Barr’s Dance Drama Group appeared in diverse venues -- town halls, small theatres and studios – creating a repertory that would satisfy a range of audience expectations. Support came from political groups and avant-garde theatre, including the leftist actor-director-producer André van Gyseghem. In one of its earliest documented London performances, the Dance Drama Group shared the stage for the premiere of van Gyseghem’s Experimental Theatre’s production of Aubrey Menon’s Pacific (1934). At the Political and Social Evening programme sponsored by the Epsom-Ewell Branch of the Communist Party, cultural offerings dominated the event, with a dance demonstration preceding the Dance-Drama Group’s Red, White & Blue: Women of Britain (Imperialism, Pacifism and Militant Labour), in which ‘revolution won out over conservatism’.174 Performances also took place in Unity Theatre’s Brittania Street studios.

Barr’s dance suites explored different aspects of the same theme, using mime alongside formal movement patterns. Sketches of the People: Eviction, Breadlines (1935) commented on economic and social degradation while Routine examined the military. The Three Sisters (1932) utilised Chekov’s literary structure to frame an anti-war statement and was performed repeatedly for six years. The five scenes centred around strong characterisations of the Spinster, the Prostitute (danced by Barr) and the Young Girl. Hebridean interwove various movement styles, including folk-based forms in its evocation of daily dramas in a Scottish fishing village. Barr straddled aesthetic camps, combining mimetic sections within a modern dance movement vocabulary.

A Times critic defined Barr’s style as being ‘only one degree more abstract than the spoken drama, into whose territory they occasionally step’. In contrast to ballet, ‘here the story is the informing purpose; ornament is cut away, and each

173 Hall, Fernau (1950) Modern English Ballet, p.140-141 174 Larraine Nicholas (2007) Dancing in Utopia: Dartington Hall and its Dancers, Alton: Dance Books, 115, Caryl von Sturmer (1993) Margaret Barr: Epic Individual, p.30

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single gesture is free to contribute its point with peculiar force.’175 Amongst the praise, however, overt political messages were seen to disrupt the power of gesture. Inspired by repetitive acts of manual labour, Factory included calls of “Swine!” “Slaves!” and “Unite!”, with the ‘emotive function’ of the words not taken into sufficient account.176

Accounts of lecture-demonstrations emphasise core principles of alternation between tension and relaxation, with the breath providing the movement impetus which echoes aspects of Graham’s early technique. Hall explained that Barr’s dancers ‘avoided the spins and beats of classical balletX they used the top half of their bodies with exceptional flexibility; instead of seeking to defy gravity, their movements were often directed down into the ground.’177 She promoted her style as the ‘modern alternative to the older folk dancing’, dramatising the rhythmic and muscular tensions of manual labour with a revolutionary potential existing in a synthesis of ‘sound, colour, light and movement’.178

Barr’s attempts to establish a permanent professional company were thwarted by financial hardships although her group’s fifteen members subsidised productions and rehearsal costs, working in pubs and even the zoo to contribute to a communal fund. South African dancer Teda de Moor drew from her family fortune as well although in 1938 she wrote to composer Alan Bush for financial assistance to help bring the work ‘to a standard which would enable us to dance to the “unconverted”X Now, our standard never rises as our people cannot afford to work for nothing so we keep losing the members just as they get fairly well trained.’ An annual budget of £500 was proposed, including studio rental charges, pianist fees and £200 to sustain five dancers.179 Dances were produced on a financial shoestring, with handmade musical instruments and minimal design costs.180

Alan Bush Some workers’ dance groups found their genesis within organisations affiliated to other arts, such as the Workers’ Ballet Group (WBG), which grew out of the 1934 Pageant of Labour at London’s Crystal Palace.181 Composer Alan Bush (1900-1995) was the catalyst, bringing to fruition his long-held idea of combining ‘a ballet with orchestra and choral commentary which should symbolise the upward struggle of the working class’.182 Bush became involved in politics during the 1920s and met Bertolt Brecht and leftwing composer Hans Eisler while studying in Berlin. He joined the Communist Party in 1935 and became Chairman of the Workers’ Music Association.183 Bush fulfilled multiple roles for dance groups, essentially functioning

175 Anon., The Arts Theatre, Dance-Drama Group, The Times, February 12, 1935, 12 176 Larraine Nicholas, op cit, 113 177 Fernau Hall, ‘The Modern Scene in Ballet’, op.cit. 178 Kaye Russell (1938) ‘Dancing for Progress’, The Millgate, pp.407-408. 179 Teda de Moor letter to Alan Bush, April 13, 1938, MS Mus 453, v. 128, Alan Bush Collection, British Library (BL). 180 Russell, op.cit., p.408. 181 Bush, Nancy (2000) Alan Bush, Music, Politics and Life, p.36. 182 Alan Bush letter to Edward P. Glenn (Pageant Director, Festival of Labour Pageant), February 2, 1934, February-July 1934 correspondence file, Alan Bush Collection, #56441, BL. 183 O’Higgins, Rachel ‘Rhapsody in Red’, summary of BBC Radio 4 programme, July, 2002, www.alanbushtrust.org.uk.

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as artistic director, accompanist and musical director, striving to achieve a solid music-movement relationship. The extent to which his ideals were achieved remains speculative due to the lack of detail about the performances.

A prolific correspondent, Bush’s letters to other artists reveal debates about the relationship between art and society based on Marxist principles and the manifestation of class issues in dance and music for the workers. The aim of the WBG was ‘to develop a dance style which workers of England could feel themselves at home inX no difficult steps – no jazz about it. But neither does it derive from folk dance. What we try to do is to set forth the various burning questions of the day, the situation of the workers in the economic system, the causes of war, etc., in our dancesX184 Although the workers dance did not receive the press coverage seen in New York dance of the period, similar debates about the relationship between art, aesthetics and politics took place in private.

Details of group membership during its first year are unknown although correspondence establishes later connections to Ausdruckstanz. By late August 1935, Laban-trained German dancer Kate Eisenstaedt had relocated to England because of her Jewish heritage and began working with the group.185 With his musical commitments requiring extended periods of time away from London, Bush wrote letters to convey his ideas about the dance, including the timing indications so Eisenstaedt could start choreographing a new four act ballet prior to having the music. The composer asked for a close movement-music correspondence: ‘every particularity of the rhythm should be accompanied by a suitable rate of step or movement.’ Another letter revealed a schism which threatened the existence of the group due to the differing levels of technical competence and ambitions. One dancer summarised that there were ‘The two elements are those who like myself believe in mass effects; and those, whoX want more individual technique developed. I consider that [our] propaganda could be more direct, more subtle and more telling if we each didn’t hamper the other.’ 186

Unity Theatre The left-wing Unity Theatre proved a fruitful venue and ideological partner for both Barr’s and Bush’s groups which appeared alongside plays. The 1937 gala event celebrating the opening of Unity’s new Goldington Street theatre featured the London Labour Choral Union and Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, a seminal agit-prop import from the USA, while Paul Robeson sang Negro spirituals.187 Under Bush’s direction, they were joined by the Workers’ Propaganda Dance Group (WPDG) who danced A

184 Alan Bush letter to Editor of Railway Times, August 6, 1935, August, 1934-June 1935 correspondence file, Alan Bush Collection, MS #56442, BL. 185 An advert in the February, 1934 Dancing Times lists Kate Eisenstaedt from Berlin as teaching at the Rutherston Dubsky School of Rhythmic Movement in Great Ormond Street, London. Jeannette Rutherston was affiliated with the Bodenwieser School in Vienna. A notice in the April 1934 Dancing Times, p.57, gives details of a performance-demonstration by Eisenstaedt and students from the Rutherston-Dubsky School. 186 Gertrude Watts letter to Alan Bush, 20-4-38, MS Mus 453, vol. 128, Alan Bush Collection, BL. 187 According to Colin Chambers, Paul Robeson sang ‘Ol’ Man River’, changing the words ‘tired o’ livin’ and scared o’ dyin’ to ‘must keep strugglin’ until Ah’m dyin’’, finishing off with the ‘Internationale. See The Story of Unity Theatre, p. 117.

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Comrade has Died, about Spain and ‘the brutality and inhumanity of fascism and the inevitability of its overthrow in the workers’ revolution.’188 Rehearsal space and performance opportunities were offered to the group, which was renamed the Unity Dance Group in early 1938.189 Although archival documents are inconsistent, cross-referencing titles of dances indicate that Bush was associated with one group, referred to at various times as the Workers’ Ballet Group, the Workers’ Propaganda Dance Group and the Unity Dance Group. 190 Barr’s Dance-Drama Group alternated appearances with Bush’s group during the three week run of Where’s That Bomb? in February 1938. Dancers such as Margaret Leona were involved in staging movement for plays in ‘mass declamations’ which established correspondences between movement, rhythm and the meaning of words within the plays.

Pageants The mass pageant form utilised large casts in usually highly simplified movement patterns and can be traced back to the country-wide pageantry movement of the early 1900s, led by English school headmaster Louis Napoleon Parker. An ideological agenda existed in Parker’s pageants, tinged with an anti-modernist nostalgia through which ‘the moral principles of the past could reach a wider audience.’191 Mick Wallis’ analysis of the Parkerian pageant highlights the form’s educational function while prioritising a sense of community rather than celebrating heroic individuals, establishing symbolic and often mythic representations of the past. 192 Wallis identifies them as ‘ideological projects’ in which class divisions dissolved but only for the duration of the event.193

The Parkerian form was transformed into a tool of the political left. In contrast to a local community as hero, a generic version of ‘the people’ emerged as heroes who ultimately rise up in revolt. Wallis examines episodes where the workers are transformed from happy peasants to downtrodden factory labourers. Left wing pageants essentially functioned as a ‘mass medium’, bringing together amateurs and professionals, committed communists and fellow travellers, endowing those involved

188 anon., ‘The Workers Theatre Opens’ New Theatre, no. 3, January 1938, p. 1, THM/9/3/1, Victoria & Albert Museum, Archive of Art and Design and Theatre Museum Collection (V&A). 189 anon., ‘What Unity is Doing’ New Theatre, February 1938, p. 4, THM/9/3/1, V&A. 190 The programme for Where’s that Bomb? in the Unity Theatre archives (Series 6, THM 9/6/1, V&A), lists three dances under the name Workers’ Propaganda Dance Group: A Comrade Has Died, His War or Yours, Miners, all of which are linked to the Young Workers’ Ballet Group, according to Alan Bush correspondence to the group’s secretary, Gertrude Watts. MS Mus 453, vol. 128, Alan Bush Collection, BL. 190 According to Colin Chambers, Paul Robeson sang ‘Ol’ Man River’, changing the words ‘tired o’ livin’ and scared o’ dyin’ to ‘must keep strugglin’ until Ah’m dyin’’, finishing off with the ‘Internationale. See (1989) The Story of Unity Theatre, p.117. 191 David Glassberg (1990) American Pageantry, p.44. 192 See Mick Wallis (1994) ‘Pageantry and the Popular Front: Ideological Production in the ‘Thirties’, New Theatre Quarterly, 10(38), 132-156; (1995) ‘The Popular Front Pageant: Its Emergence and Decline’, New Theatre Quarterly, 11(41) 17-32 and (1988) ‘Heirs to the Pageant: Mass Spectacle and the Popular Front’, in A Weapon in the Struggle: the Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain, edited by Andy Croft, Pluto Press, 48-67. 193 Wallis, op.cit., 1994, 18

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with a sense of historical agency and offering opportunities for audience participation.194

Between 1934 and 1939, at least three leftwing pageants integrated dance as part of the visual spectacle. Produced on a grand scale with large budgets and casts, their political agendas were aimed at a broad audience. Bush took on various roles in all three, with choreographic contributions from Barr, Eisenstaedt, Leona and other dancers associated with various groups. A 1938 Co-operative Society anniversary pageant was just one aspect of a day-long event celebrating the international organisation. Bush was on the planning committee and composed music for the July 2, 1938 event, Towards To-morrow: a Pageant of Co-operation, part of the Festival of Co-operation held in London’s Wembley Stadium. Sixty thousand people attended as participants and spectators, with clowns, bands and community singing exemplifying the family orientation. The Co-operative movement emerges as a significant ideological match to the dance groups, with folk dance functioning on multiple levels as leisure entertainment reinforcing strong common bonds of those drawn together by their socialist beliefs.

Two hours were allotted for the Towards To-morrow pageant, commemorating the growth of the Co-operative Movement in relation to the rise of the working class, from feudal times to the aftermath of World War I. London area Co-operative Societies drew on the energy and enthusiasm of their membership to create a cast of 3,000. A forty minute commercial film and extensive coverage in various co-operative society publications facilitate a rare vision of pageant dances. 195

Eight episodes chronicled a history of industrialisation and struggles between workers and owners, evoked through text, symbolic imagery, movement and song, combined to create a grand spectacle. The vision of England’s past necessarily drew from a limited nostalgia to reinforce perceptions of the evils of industrialisation symbolised by two large effigies of capitalism – ubiquitous top-hatted, cigar-smoking fat cats wheeled on by masked overseers with whips. The mechanical age and its devastation of the idyllic community were represented metaphorically and figuratively with groups of machine men in robotic outfits. Special effects included smoke bellowing from a tall smokestack which arose out of an ivy bush, a vivid image of the transformation from nature to machine. Villagers were driven into factories, their early attempts at revolt crushed by the capitalists’ intimidating henchmen. The historical depiction of stages in the conflict between capitalism was couched in displays of unity which temporarily thwarted capitalism’s advance which gathered strength only to return to cries of war. Mounted horsemen --‘the four horsemen of the apocalypse’ -- scattered the crowds as troops and fake tanks surged forward behind smoke screens and fake guns.

Dance segments were most prominent in the final representations of death, grief and the power of unity, advancing the narrative of the last three episodes. Following the onslaught of war, darkly cloaked figures interlinked arms in a march towards the central platform. Helmets and small skulls dangling from their garments enhanced the oppressive atmosphere. Eisenstaedt’s basic movement motifs in The

194 Wallis, op.cit. 1988, 50 195 I am grateful to John White for providing copies of pageant souvenir programmes and sharing his recollections of the events. Unless otherwise stated, pageant details are extracted from the programme and viewings of To-wards Tomorrow produced by Frank W. Cox for CWS National Film Service, held at the National Cooperative Archive, Manchester.

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War Ballet were necessitated by the scale of the venue, and possibly by the technical skills of the dancers. Once the figures of death mount the two levels of the circular stage, they lunge from side to side, facing inwards with arms held shoulder height. Forward steps flowed into a low turn with outstretched arms, flaring out capes attached to their wrists. Moving out of the turn, the dancers crouch down, arms thrust forward to hide their faces, the phrase repeated as they circle the platform. In another phrase, unison steps travel forward, followed by a backward lean with head and arms suddenly thrown back as if reacting to a gunshot.

The Ballet of Mourning Women opened the seventh episode, choreographed by Margaret Barr and danced by her Workers’ Dance Drama Group. Brief close-up shots facilitate a more extensive movement analysis. As with other characters, the costumes enabled easy recognition by spectators even in the farthest seats in the arena, the dark cloaks reinforced a choral lament which starts: We are women. Is to weep The last privilege we keep? We are women, and we bore All the fighters in your war.196 Additional stanzas convey their various roles as nurses, mothers, lovers, and wives. The dancers kneel down with bowed heads, hands crossed over their chests, then cover their faces. Mounting the platform, some collapse to the floor, while others stand with arms raised, creating a spatial arc of colour and bodies, shaped by the contrasting black cloaks and glimpses of long grey dresses underneath. The women gather strength from each other, as the words shift from the questioning of loss to a defiance found in unity.

Photograph of Mourning Women, Workers’ Dance Drama Group, from International Co-operative Day Souvenir Programme, Empire Stadium, Wembley, July 2, 1938, p. 38, courtesy of personal archives of John White, photographer unattributed

196 International Co-operative Day Souvenir Programme, from the personal archives of John White, p.38.

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To the strands of the Marsaillaise, a group of workers (identified by overalls and carrying red scarves) process in to choreography by Teda de Moor. The mourning women’s capes are removed and used by the workers to topple the effigies of Capital. After the ominous figures are destroyed, the choreography builds to a celebratory and unified climax as the mourners and workers intermingle, waving scarves in set patterns. Barr’s dancers separate, encircling the workers standing on upper levels of the platform. Facing outwards, they repeat a simple side-to-side swinging pattern, one hand holding the long skirt, the other a scarf, their arms moving in a lateral figure eight path. Close-ups reveal a more sophisticated dance sequence than seen in earlier sections. A strong attack at the start of the swing sets the impetus travelling sequentially up through the torso to the head in a full body wave. Some of the women then kneel, facing each other in pairs, swinging flags overhead as the workers stop in powerful poses reminiscent of Soviet socialist realist statues. Conclusion The brief clips in the Towards Tomorrow film provide a rare ability to analyse a left wing dance of the 1930s, revealing the potential of a vibrant dancer-activist form. In Britain its development was thwarted in part by the outbreak of war and Margaret Barr’s decision to leave Britain in 1939, eventually settling in New Zealand and Australia. Alan Bush’s correspondence shifts from concerns about the arts to those of the safety of his family. In addition to the political situation, British modern dancers were in an artistic milieu without the kinds of institutional structures that supported the leftwing dancers in the USA, such as critical support and educational links to colleges, for example. The connections to left-wing theatre provide intriguing avenues for further investigation to determine whether the movement component of those productions provided amateurs with choreographed movement opportunities that fulfilled the functions of workers dance. In developing these research strands, a more complete narrative of British dance emerges, although complete recovery is impossible.

Acknowledgements I am extremely grateful for the insight into the cultural politics of the period provided by John White. In addition to sharing his memories, his souvenir programmes of the pageants offered a wealth of detail about the events. I would also like to thank the staff at the Victoria & Albert Museum Archive of Art and Design and Theatre Museum Collection; the National Resource Centre for Dance; National Cooperative Archive, Manchester; and Dr Nicolas Bell of the Music Collections, British Library. Dr Larraine Nicholas has also helped construct a more complete picture of the period and shared numerous leads to research paths. Copyright 2010, Stacey Prickett Bibliography Bush, Nancy (2000) Alan Bush, Music, Politics and Life, London: Thames Publishing Chambers, Colin, The Story of Unity Theatre, London: Lawrence and Wishart O’Higgins, Rachel (2002) ‘Rhapsody in Red’ (summary of BBC Radio 4 programme)

http://www.alanbushtrust.org.uk/articles/article_rohiggins2.asp?room=Articles, accessed May 10, 2005

Von Sturmer, Caryll, 1993, Margaret Barr: Epic Individual, Syndey: Wild & Woolley

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Bonham-Carter, Victor (1958) Dartington Hall: The History of an Experiment, London: Phoenix House, Ltd

Daiken, Leslie (1936) ‘English Letter’, New Theatre, June, III, no. 6, p. 30 Glassberg, David (1990) American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the

Early Twentieth Century, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press Hall, Fernau (1950) Modern English Ballet, London: Andrew Melrose Hall, Fernau (1938) ‘Modern Dancing at King’s Cross: The Dance-Drama Group’,

Dancing Times, no. 328, 527 Nicholas, Larraine (2001) ‘Dancing in Utopia’, Transmigratory Moves – Dance in

Global Circulation, CORD Conference Proceedings, 230-233 Nicholas, Larraine (2007) Dancing in Utopia: Dartington Hall and its Dancers, Alton:

Dance Books Russell, Kaye (1938) ‘Dancing for Progress’, The Millgate, VXXXIII, Pt. II, no. 391,

April, 407-408 Wallis, Mick (1988) ‘Heirs to the Pageant: Mass Spectacle and the Popular Front’, in

A Weapon in the Struggle: the Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain, edited by Andy Croft, Pluto Press, 48-67

Wallis, Mick (1994) ‘Pageantry and the Popular Front: Ideological Production in the ‘Thirties’, New Theatre Quarterly, 10, no. 38, 132-156

Wallis, Mick (1995) ‘The Popular Front Pageant: Its Emergence and Decline’, New Theatre Quarterly, 11, no. 41, 17-32

MacColl, Ewan (1990) Journeyman: An Autobiography, London: Sidgwick & Jackson

Non-print sources White, John, interview with author, August 11, 2005

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Dance History: Dance History: Politics, Practices and Perspectives

Saturday 13 March 2010

Conference Programme

9.00: Registration and coffee 10.00 - 11.15: Panel 1 Chair: Stephanie Jordan (Roehampton University) Steffi Schroedter, Forschungsinstitut für Musiktheater der Universität, Bayreuth, Germany: Paris, qui danse: Movement and Sound Spaces between the July Monarchy and the Second French Empire Noémie Solomon, New York University, USA: Unworking Dance, Redoing Gesture: The Reinvention of History and Subjectivity in French Contemporary Choreography Víctor Durà-Vilà, Durham University, UK: Versatility versus authenticity: a positive answer to a false dilemma 11.15: Coffee break 11.45 - 12.45: Panel 2 Chair: Jane Pritchard (Victoria and Albert Museum, Chair Society for Dance Research) Michael Huxley, De Montfort University, UK: "It’s a different way of thinking about dance history isn’t it?" — a student perspective on dance history Hanna Järvinen and Anne Makkonen, Theatre Academy, Finland: Can We Dance History? 12.45: Lunch 1.45 - 3.00: Panel 3 Chair: Helena Hammond (Surrey University)

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Camelia Lenart, State University of New York at Albany, USA: Turning the Tide and Reconstructing the Politics - a New Perspective on Martha Graham’s Tour to Britain in 1954 and the Response to Its Political and Artistic Complexity Jane Carr, Laban, UK: Issues of control and agency: Contemplating Cunningham’s Legacy Henrietta Bannerman, The Place, UK: The Author Revived in the Name of Judson 3.00: Coffee Break 3.30 - 5.00: Panel 4 and Plenary session Chairs: Geraldine Morris and Larraine Nicholas (Roehampton University) Alida Green, University of Pretoria, South Africa: Choreographing the future: writing a South African children’s ballroom dance history Stacey Prickett, Roehampton University, UK: The People’s Dance: workers, politics and movement in 1930s Britain A book stall is available to view copies of dance journals published by Edinburgh University Press, Routledge and Intellect Books.

For further event details, directions or queries about the programme please contact Dr. Helen Julia Minors, h.minors@roehampton.ac.uk

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Abstracts Panel 1 Steffi Schroedter, Forschungsinstitut für Musiktheater der Universität, Bayreuth, Germany Paris, qui danse: Movement and Sound Spaces between the July Monarchy and the Second French Empire I would like to present my research project “Music in Motion: Dance Cultures of the 19th Century” as an example of a new approach to dance historiography (this project is subsidized by the DFG, German National Academic Foundation). This study aims at combining analytical methods from dance-, music-, media- and cultural studies. My starting point for this research is Paris dance and music theatre between the July Monarchy and the Second French Empire (1830-1870), though I will also combine this with urban dance (musical) cultures beyond the stage. My work takes as its starting point that the theatre is a privileged place for the artistic processing of socio-cultural and (socio-) political everyday life. Theatre productions can be analyzed both as reflections of everyday (social/political) conditions and (urban/industrial) contexts, but they can also document how these conditions and contexts change the perception of reality, that is the temporal/spatial horizon of experience. Based on this thesis, I will discuss libretti and scores with regard to the movement as well as sound spaces on the stage. I will then define the terms “gesture” and “figure” on the basis of theoretical and pedagogical publications (especially dance books and piano schools) and using the extremely popular dance arrangements of ballets and operas for the ballroom and the musical salon. Finally, I will draw upon approaches towards a historiography of the hearing and seeing of movements, in which the stage, ballroom and musical salon paradigmatically stand for different kinds of perceptions of music and dance: a synaesthetic, kinetic and kinaesthetic hearing. Noémie Solomon, New York University, USA Unworking Dance, Redoing Gesture: The Reinvention of History and Subjectivity in French Contemporary Choreography This paper examines a series of choreographic interventions in French Contemporary Dance as they address, connect and refigure the contours and potentials of dance history. I analyse Xavier Le Roy’s gestural research, combining acts of conducting and dancing the intensively cited Le Sacre du Printemps; Mathilde Monnier and Jean-Luc Nancy’s dialogical experiments intersecting and rewriting the practices of dance and philosophy in Allitérations; Jérôme Bel’s Véronique Doisneau staging the linguistic materiality of a dancing sujet in relation to the operations of subjectification resident in the institutions of classical ballet. I argue that these choreographies enact a twofold movement which simultaneously engages with a specific history of dance while reinventing its many forms: this presentation thus considers the ways in which these works refute the abstract and unified impulse of both body theories and mainstream artistic practices by mapping atypical and ethical

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conceptions of the dancing subject, and constantly redefining its relation to history, the body, discourse, movement, time and music. As they tear open and undo possibilities for coherent bodies and histories, these singular choreographic acts implement the question of unworking as illustrated by the French term désoeuvrement––the affective withdrawal of the work. Yet this choreographic withdrawal can only be grasped through a series of affirmative gestures: these works appear as creative and critical redoings which, by activating figures of potentiality, reinvent the choreographic as an autopoetics of subjectification. Select Bibliography Lepecki, André. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York: Routledge, 2006. Louppe, Laurence. Poétique de la danse contemporaine. Bruxelles: Contredanse. 1997. Monnier, Mathilde and Jean-Luc Nancy. Allitérations. Paris: Galilé, 2005. Víctor Durà-Vilà, Durham University, UK Versatility versus authenticity: a positive answer to a false dilemma Every so often, the following debate arises in one fashion or another: dancers in the big ballet companies, under the pressure of a varied repertoire that requires an enormous amount of style versatility, are losing the authentic style that is perceived by many loyal supporters as being the key cultural inheritance and identity trait of the given company. To name two very prominent examples of company-style association: in the case of the Royal Ballet: Ashton; for the Danish Royal Ballet: Bournonville. The argument then goes on to claim that all the dancers in the ballet-world ‘tend to look increasingly the same’ as a result of the loss of a particular style which would have given them a particular character; instead, an increasingly homogenised international repertoire has them becoming more uniform and less distinctive. So we have a dilemma: whether to preserve a more authentic style at the expense of a more varied repertoire, and, consequently, to encourage more specialized dancers at the cost of less versatile dancers. I want to argue that this is a false dilemma. In my talk I will explain under what conditions the dilemma might really obtain and then show that these conditions are artificial and ultimately false. I will also draw some comparisons from neighbouring art forms and assess whether those comparisons are illuminating or simply provide further evidence of the idiosyncrasy of the problem under consideration. Finally, I will argue that if the dilemma were indeed valid, it would mean bad news for both the big ballet companies and the art form in general. Select Bibliography Armelagos, A. and M. Sirridge. 1978. The identity crisis in dance. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37: 129–140. Armelagos, A. and M. Sirridge. 1984. Personal style and performance prerogatives. In M. Sheets-Johnstone. Ed. Illuminating dance: philosophical explorations. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses. Margolis, J. 1981. The autographic nature of the dance. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39: 419–427. McFee, G. 1992. Understanding dance. London: Routledge, chapter 9.

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Panel 2 Michael Huxley, De Montfort University, UK "It’s a different way of thinking about dance history isn’t it?" — a student perspective on dance history This case study identifies benefits that can arise from the learning of dance history, and foregrounds the importance of dance history in the curriculum. The paper focuses on the experience of students learning dance history. A year long pedagogic research project was undertaken in 2008-09 in a British University to investigate how reflection can be developed through research-based dance history in the undergraduate curriculum. The theoretical assumptions for the research drew on and acknowledged recent theoretical shifts in the teaching of dance history by Carter and others, commensurate with a broader debate about the nature of history. The research differed substantially from previous published research into dance history pedagogy by focusing on the student experience. Three year-groups of students, and graduates, took part in the year-long project. Qualitative data was gathered using co-constructed research questions, with the students taking an active role in devising the research. The students who took part in the project had a lot to say. One of them summed up the value to dance history for them when she said, “it’s a different way of thinking about history, isn’t it?” Analysis of the results of the research drew on grounded theory and revealed a range of significant outcomes with wider value for student learning on the one hand and how we write dance histories on the other. Notable, and central, has been the production of evidence that supports the idea that students have greater engagement with dance history if they are able to relate to it to make sense of where they are and what they aspire to. Through an analysis of the students’ responses, this paper shows how students’ understanding of historical and dance historical concepts change. It reveals ways in which students relate their experience to a broader historical context. Select Bibliography CARTER, A. (Ed.) (2004) Rethinking Dance History: a reader, London, Routledge. CARTER, A. (2007) Dance history matters in British higher education. Research in Dance Education, 8, 123-137. GOODYEAR, P. & ELLIS, R. (2007) The development of epistemic fluency: learning to think for a living. IN BREW, A. & SACHS, J. (Eds.) Transforming a university: the scholarship of teaching and learning in practice. Sydney, Sydney University Press. JÄRVINEN, H. (2009) Dance of the past in the present: teaching a metahistory. In RANDALL, T. (Ed.) Global Perspectives on Dance Pedagogy Research and Practice. De Montfort University, University of Illinois Press. TOSH, J. (2008) Why history matters, Basingstoke, Palgrave. WILSON, M. (2009) Dance pedagogy case studies: A grounded theory approach to analyzing qualitative data. Research in Dance Education, 10, 3-16.

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Hanna Järvinen and Anne Makkonen, Theatre Academy, Finland Can We Dance History? In our current project Can We Dance History?, Dr. Hanna Järvinen and Dr. Anne Makkonen ask how history is present in the practice of dance and how can this corporeal practice be used as new kind of a source and/or method for historiography. For Dance History: Politics, Practices and Perspectives we propose a lecture demonstration. First, starting from our genealogical (Foucault 2001) and metahistorical (White 1975) method, we ask series of questions of dance and history. We then follow with a theoretical discussion and a practical experiment on how to approach past corporeality. Because dance works change from performance to performance, dance is conceived as simultaneously ephemeral and having a stable canon of masterworks and authors. Dancers often find this incongruent with their practical experience. Moreover, dance history seems not to concern itself with the everyday practice of making art: training and rehearsing, injuries and pain, or memories and affects associated with particular corporeal expressions that are central for a practitioner. Our project asks how, beyond re-creation in reconstruction, we can access the corporeality of past dancers, to the everyday practice of which few archival traces remain. Dance does not disappear. It leaves traces in dancing people. These latent, almost absent traces become visible and present when they are danced again (Gustavson & Makkonen 2009). Embodied traces reveal a past which is somehow still present, not as it was, but as it is recalled, imagined, interpreted and presented. Based on Ankersmit (1994) and Briginshaw (2000) we claim that performative as historical narrative can be the birthplace of the meanings of the past and the present. As dance historians we have to construct and present innovative, transformative and performative dance histories alongside written ones (Makkonen 2007). Select Bibliography Ankersmit, Frank R. (1994) History and Tropology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Briginshaw, Valerie A. (2000) Postmodern Play with Historic Narratives in the Reconstruction of Lea Anderson’s Flesh and Blood (1989) in Jordan, S. (ed) Preservation Politics Dance Revivied, Reconstructed, Remade. London: Dance Books, 227-240. Gustavson, Leena & Makkonen, Anne (2009) Znot as it was, but as Leena recalls, imagines, interprets, presents, dancesZ Video produced by Anne Makkonen. Foucault, Michel (2001) Dits et écrits 1954-1988, tome I: 1954-1975. [Paris]: Quarto Gallimard (1994). Makkonen, Anne (2007) One Past, Many Histories: Loitsu (1933) in the Context of Dance Art in Finland. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Surrey. White, Hayden V. (1975) Metahistory: Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore, ML and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press (1973).

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Panel 3 Camelia Lenart, State University of New York at Albany, USA Turning the Tide and Reconstructing the Politics - a New Perspective on Martha Graham’s Tour to Britain in 1954 and the Response to Its Political and Artistic Complexity Taking place during the sensitive times of the Cold War, Martha Graham and her Company’s tour to Britain in 1954 had all the ingredients of a unique spectacle, the show on stage being complemented by another carefully directed one backstage, that of arts and politics together. During this tour, the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham was invested with the role of a cultural ambassador of her country in Britain, becoming an important “element” of the complex and nuanced cultural exchange between Great Britain and the USA. In spite of her new quality as a cultural diplomat, of the tour’s political and artistic complexity, and of the fact that the artist herself considered that “the tide” for the American modern dance and role on the European stage was “turned” then and there, the tour is perceived half a century later as a failure. But, as my paper questions, was it? While during the previous tour in Paris in 1950, privately sponsored, Graham’s art was entirely criticized and denied any artistic value, in 1954 Britain there was a positive reception. Started by the critic Richard Buckle, it was continued by other critics, and enriched by highly revered British intellectuals, such as Kenneth Tynan, E. M. Forster, Dylan Thomas, Henry Moore, and Marie Rambert; most significantly, Graham’s art also transcended the artistic audience, igniting the special encounter between modern dance and Robin Howard. Reconstructing the audience’s response to the spectacle of art and politics on the stage of the Saville Theatre, deciphering the dynamics of the positive response Graham received in Britain, and its importance for the history of modern dance and of American cultural diplomacy in Europe, my paper demonstrates that the dancer’s Pearl Lang cry “in Britain they loved us” was undeniably true. Select Bibliography Primary sources: Library of Congress, Washington, USA Martha Graham Legacy Archive Martha Graham Collection Erick Hawkins Collection Lucy Kroll Papers Rothschild Archive Bethsabee de Rothschild Collection National Resource Center for Dance, Guildford, Great Britain Materials related to Martha Graham, her Company and tours to Great Britain Victoria and Albert Theatre and Performance Collections, London, Great Britain Contemporary Dance Trust Archive, 1957-1999 National Archives, College Park, Maryland, USA Materials related to Martha Graham, her Company and tours to Great Britain New York Public Library for Performing Arts, New York, USA Martha Graham Center of Dance Records, 1944-1955 Gertrude Macy Papers, 1953-1976

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Isadora Bennett Papers, 1945-1966 Interviews and correspondence: Pearl Lang, October 2008, New York, tape recording Stuart Hodes, April-May 2009, email correspondence Secondary sources: Agnes DeMille, Martha. The Life and work of Martha Graham (New-York, First Vintage Books Edition, 1992) Larraine Nichols, “Fellow Travelers: Dance and British Cold War Politics in the Early 1950s”, Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research, Vol.19, No. 2 (Winter, 2001), pp.83-105 Ernestine Stodelle, Deep Song: the Dance Story of Martha Graham (New York: Schrimer Book, 1984) Don McDonough, Martha Graham. A Biography (New York: Popular Library, 1975) Robert Tracy, Martha Graham’s Dancers Remember (New York: Limelight Editions, 1997) Naima Prevots, Dance for Export(Wesleyan University Press, 1998), p.40-41 Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War. Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003) David Caute, The Dancer Defects: the Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press Inc, 2003) Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (New York: The New Press, 2000) Richard Pells, Not like us: how European have loved, hated and transformed American culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997) Helen McGehee, To Be a Dancer (Lynchburg: Editions Heraclita, 1989) Bethsabee de Rothschild, La Danse artistique aux U.S.A.Tendances modernes (Paris: Elzevir, 1949) Andree Grau and Stephanie Jordan, Europe dancing-perspectives on theatre, dance and cultural identity (London, New York: Routledge, 2000) Jane Carr, The University of Lincoln Issues of control and agency: Contemplating Cunningham’s Legacy The body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.

Michel Foucault, 1975 Our ecstasy in dance comes from the possible gift of freedom, the exhilarating moment that this exposing of the bare energy can give us. What is meant is not license, but freedom. . .

Merce Cunningham, 1952 The impact of Michel Foucault is such that his work informs many critiques of how, within the traditions of western theatre dance, training regimes may produce ‘docile bodies’. In contrast less traditional approaches to dance, especially those informed by somatic practices, are presented as in some ways resisting dominant discourses to ‘allow individuals to make choices for their own well being’ (Fortin, Vieira and Tremblay, 2009, p.48).

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The extent to which dance artists exercise agency may be revealing in explorations of those dance events that rarely feature as part of the ‘established canon’ of dance works. However, it will also be suggested that, for works by the ‘big names’ of Modern dance, their place in dance history can sometimes make it difficult to engage with them as radical innovations of their time. In this regard, particular consideration will be given to the Laban BA2 students’ recent experiences of learning and performing excerpts from Scramble (Cunningham, 1967). Cunningham’s stated plan for this work was ‘to make a dance without flavour’ (cited in Vaughan and Harris 1997, p.158). Reflection upon how these twenty first century contemporary dance students experienced learning and performing this work will inform discussion not only of the dance but also of issues of control and agency that perhaps inform how Cunningham’s work is appreciated. Select Bibliography Brown, C. (2007) Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cunningham and Cage. New York: Alfred Knopf. Chance, V. (2009) On the production of the Body Ideal, Performance Research, 14 (2) pp.96-102. Cunningham M. (Choreographer) and M. Brockway (Director) (1977) Event for Television [Motion picture] New York: Cunningham Dance Foundation. (First Performed: WNET Nashville, TN. November 1976 Cunningham, M. (1992) Space, Time and Dance. In R. Kostelanetz (Ed.) Dancing in Space and Time. London: Dance Books. (First published in 1952) Fortin, S., A. Vieira and M. Tremblay (2009) The Experience of Discourses in Dance and Somatics, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices. 1 (1) 47-64. Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. [trans. Sheridan, A.]New York: Random House. (First published in 1975) Franko, M. (1995) Dancing Modernism / Performing Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McNay, L. (1994) Foucault: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Roth, M. and J. Katz (1998) Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Amsterdam: GB Arts International. Shapiro, S. (Ed.) (1998) Dance Power and Difference, Illinois: Human Kinetics Tomkins, C. (1978) An Appetite for Motion. In M. Nadel and C. Miller, The Dance Experience. New York: Universe Books. (First published 1968.) Turner, T. (1994) Bodies and Antibodies: Flesh and Fetish in Contemporary Social Theory. In T. Csordas, (Ed.) Embodiment and Experience pp.27-47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Vaughan D. and M. Harris (Eds.)(1997). Merce Cunningham: Fifty years. New York: Aperture Foundation. Henrietta Bannerman, The Place, UK The Author Revived in the Name of Judson This paper concerns Judson Dance Theater described in 1967 by the American critic Arlene Croce as “one of the most important phenomena of Off-Off Broadway [and the] focus of excitement and controversy since its inception in the summer of 1962” (1967, n.p.). Three or so decades since the original Judson “team” went their separate ways, Judson itself has lost none of its stimulus and influence for current dancer-choreographers. The name Judson constitutes what Michel Foucault calls

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“the author function” in the way that the name and the artists associated with the movement, mark “a particular discourse or set of discourses and authorises them to circulate within a society” (Danaher et al p. 154). We may be unable to differentiate between an ordinary event and a dance, between a lecture and a theatrical performance but if any of these more pedestrian occurrences are presented within the spirit of Judson we are more likely to understand them as ‘W’orks (ibid). Since as authors, the Judson choreographers still exert tremendous influence Foucault would argue that the concept of the “author simply refuses to die” (ibid). But who exactly are these authors? Although the history of the movement has been well documented most notably by Sally Banes in Terpsichore in Sneakers the names of some of Judson’s precursors and instigators hardly figure. Such is the case with the choreographer James Waring who in the late 1950s and 1960s taught innovative dance composition classes at places such as the Living Theater (1967, pp. 30-31). As the composer John Henry McDowell explained, “[X] the important thing about the Judson group was that it was a focus for a number of things that already had been happening over what, five, ten years, over a very broad view” (ibid). I am interested in delving into the pre-history of Judson in order to better understand how the name Judson has come to authenticate specific dance knowledge and how it founded new disciplines that continue to engage 21st century dance artists. Select Bibliography Croce, A. (1967). After five years. Ballet Review. 1(6) 3 - 5. Banes, S. (2003). Reinventing Dance in the 1960s. Madison, Wisconsin: The Wisconsin University Press. Danaher, G., Schirato, T. and Webb, J. (2000). Understanding Foucault. London: Sage. Johnston, J. (1967). Judson 1964: End of an Era. Ballet Review. 1(6) 7 - 14. Jowitt, D. (1988). Time and the Dancing Image. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Waring, J.; McDowell, J.H et al (1967). Judson: A discussion. Ballet Review. 1(6) 30 - 53. Alida Green, University of Pretoria, South Africa Choreographing the future: writing a South African children’s ballroom dance history In recent years there has been a drive to promote ballroom dancing, especially amongst the children of South Africa’s poorer communities. Ballroom dancing has indeed formed a part of the cultural identity of many throughout southern Africa’s colonial history and studies found that children dancing in these township areas not only advanced ballroom in South Africa but also uplifted communities as a whole. Despite its social and cultural significance, this leisure activity and sport has largely been ignored in South Africa’s history writing. However, in what historians describe as a “post-modern globalising world”, it has become apparent that while historical studies tend to be more thematic, focusing on specific topics, there is also a tendency to focus more on previously “ignored histories” of the marginalized or suppressed groups. Moreover, there is a need now to write the “new kinds of history

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making, the histories of families, of sport or musicX”. This paper aims to bring about a historical portrait of children’s dance which will contribute to a general understanding and appreciation of the development and place of ballroom dancing in South Africa. It will, mainly, focus on the development of children’s ballroom dancing in the rapidly changing urban milieu of Johannesburg and Pretoria during the early twentieth century. This paper proposes to discuss how the history of children’s ballroom dancing is reflected outside of the mainstream history books in the social commentary of travel journals, diaries and newspapers. Select Bibliography Anonym, “City Council provides recreational and social facilities for Africans: Unemployed Clubs”, The Bantu World, 10/11/1934, p. 14. W. Bird, State of the Cape of Good Hope in 1822 (Cape Town, C. Struik, 1966) Burke, P. What is cultural history?, (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2006 Green, A.M "Dancing in borrowed shoes: a history of ballroom dancing in South Africa”, (MA Cultural History, University of Pretoria, 2009) Terpsichore, “The road to success”, South African Dancing Times, 5(3), October 1936, p. 14. Violl, T. “Dancing and the ballroom”, Rand Daily Mail, 21/03/1931, p. 16 Stacey Prickett, Roehampton University, UK The People’s Dance: workers, politics and movement in 1930s Britain During the interwar years, a small number of British based modern dancers created works inspired by communist ideologies, reinforcing working class identities and agitating for social change. Themes ranged from class tensions (Breadlines), anti-war sentiments (His War or Yours) and the plight of workers (The Miners). Margaret Barr led the Dance Drama Group, developing a movement philosophy gleaned in part from her studies with Martha Graham in New York. Katie Eisenstadt brought European modern dance influences into choreography for the Unity Dance Theatre, created with input from the communist composer Alan Bush. Mass choreography is exemplified by Towards Tomorrow, a 1936 Co-operative Society anniversary pageant held in Wembley Arena for an audience of 60,000. Unlike the New York based leftwing dance movement, the British version was short-lived, disappearing abruptly with the outbreak of war. We are left with a partial history, revealing agitation-propaganda proponents in one camp, arguing against dancers who strived for more sophisticated content with challenging technique. In summarising the brief history of the groups and an analysis of their dances, I also explore the problematic nature of historical recovery in researching beyond the canon. I consider the extent to which the counter-hegemonic themes and individualised choreographic approaches were unsustainable at that point in time, for they were at odds with the institutional environment that dominated British dance training and challenged the ideological imperatives of a nation on the brink of war.

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Society for Dance Research

From ballet to hip hop, from court dance to trance, from Kathak to cyberdance, contemporary to ballroom - the Society for Dance Research (SDR) offers stimulating events and publications covering a broad range of dance forms and dance related issues. Society for Dance Research members embrace a wide cross-section of the dance world: scholars. critics, teachers, lecturers, students, librarians, dancers, choreographers, archivists and interested dance-goers. Members come from the UK and abroad and their interests span all forms of dance and associated disciplines, such as music, theatre, design and literature.

Dance History: Politics, Practices and Perspectives: A one-day conference

Roehampton University Saturday March 13th

Dance and Spectacle:

Society for Dance History Scholars Annual Conference

University of Surrey/The Place, London July 8-11th

The Society for Dance Research will be represented at this event

Ballets Russes Centenary Film Season Bfi Southbank

September-October

Philip Richardson: Centenary event to mark the founding of The Dancing Times in 1910

Autumn 2010

Other events that are regular staples of the SDR year include the Popular Dance and Music Symposium (University of Surrey)

and the Society’s AGM, held in the late Autumn

For further details on these and other future SDR events, and for information on how to join the Society, please visit: www.dancebooks.co.uk/sdr-uk/

Society for Dance Research, Reg. Charity no. 286595

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Centre for Dance Research

The internationally recognised Centre for Dance Research (CDR) is a meeting ground for scholars and students from all over the world, and an umbrella for a wide range of research projects in historical, analytical, anthropological and cultural studies and professional choreography. Research Professor Stephanie Jordan has been Director of the CDR since its inception.The 2008 national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) rated Roehampton number one in the UK for its dance research. Acclaiming 55 % of its work in dance as ‘world-leading’, grades also indicate that this represents the fifth highest concentration of world-class activity of any department in the country in any subject, higher than can be found in most of the old as well as other new universities. This is also the best record in any RAE for dance.

Recent research outcomes include four monographs: • The Cecchetti Legacy (2007), by Toby Bennett and Ann Hutchinson Guest • Stravinsky Dances: Re-Visions across a Century (2007), by Stephanie Jordan • Dancing in Utopia: Dartington Hall and its Dancers (2007), by Larraine

Nicholas • ReConstructing Dance and RePresenting Dance: Exploring the

Dance/Archaeology Conjunction (2007), by Alessandra Lopez y Royo. We have also produced edited books, including:

• Anthropologie de la danse: Genèse et construction d’une discipline (2005), edited by Andrée Grau and Georgiana Wierre-Gore

• Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904-1986): A Visionary Architect of Indian Culture and the Performing Arts (2005), edited by Avanthi Meduri.

Jordan and Nicholas have also compiled the internet database Stravinsky the Global Dancer: A Chronology of Choreography to the Music of Igor Stravinsky (2003). In addition the CDR runs seminars and international conferences: on the work of Sir Frederick Ashton, a collaboration with the Royal Ballet (1994), the politics of dance preservation (1997), Baroque dance (2001), practice as research (2003 and 2006), and music and dance (‘Sound Moves’), in collaboration with Princeton University and the Society for Dance Research (2005).

Forthcoming Research Seminars

Mark Franko, Professor, Bard College, New York March 25th, 2010 at 6pm

Title tbc. Venue: Michaelis Theatre

For more information go to

http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/researchcentres/cdr/index.html

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Published on the website of The Society for Dance Research

June 2010