#ethnochoreology

[lboogie1906]

Katherine Mary Dunham (known as Kaye Dunn, June 22, 1909 – May 21, 2006) was a dancer, choreographer, author, educator, anthropologist, and social activist. She had one of the most successful dance careers in African-American and European theater of the 20th century and directed her dance company for many years. She has been called the “matriarch and queen mother of Black dance.”

While a student at the University of Chicago, she performed as a dancer and ran a dance school. She went to the Caribbean to study Dance and Ethnography. She returned to graduate and submitted a master’s thesis in Anthropology. She did not complete the other requirements for that degree. She realized that her professional calling was performance.

At the height of her career, she was renowned throughout Europe and Latin America and was widely popular in the US. The Washington Post called her “dancer Katherine the Great”. She maintained the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the only self-supported African American dance troupe at that time. She choreographed more than ninety individual dances. She was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of Dance Anthropology, or Ethnochoreology. She developed the Dunham Technique, a method of movement to support her dance works. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #deltasigmatheta

[firstfootingscotland]

Shoe the Donkey, #FirstFootingDance

Greetings from my home state of Michigan where I spent this week reconnecting with friends (including my first clogging teacher Sheila Graziano), lovers, family, and performing with traditional musicians from the American Midwest at the Ann Arbor Ark! The Ark, which has been presenting folk and traditional music for over 50 years hosted their 24th annual Crossroads Céilí, a midwinter celebration of Celtic music, song, and dance. As always, this show was curated by Mick Gavin, a fiddler and melodeon-player originally from Co. Clare, Ireland who moved to Detroit in 1974 at age 28. Mick has mentored countless Michigan musicians and dancers and has been tremendously encouraging to me, sharing thoughts, history, and traditions of dancers from Ireland. I remember he once mailed me a VHS tape of Irish old style dancer Paddy Bán O'Broin when I was twelve! In 2018, the Michigan Traditional Arts Program recognized Mick with a Michigan Heritage Award for his dedication to teaching and performing traditional music in Michigan. 

I had the pleasure of performing a duet with Mr. Gavin during the concert, including the mazurka Shoe the Donkey. A popular couple's dance at Irish céilís (an Irish social dance event, similar to a Scottish ceilidh), Mick and I performed the piece as a duo. The fact that Shoe the Donkey is considered a couple’s or "social dance" also presented an interesting challenge - how to evoke the joviality, the physicality, and the specific gestures of a pas de deux with only one dancer. 

(Shoe the Donkey, www.TheSession.org)

In the first part of Shoe the Donkey traditionally, dancers execute subtle brushing steps imitating the phrasing of the tune. In performing the piece with Mick, I wanted to retain that mimetic element, using the melody as inspiration for the footwork. During the performance, I began by using the actual steps from the couple's dance, duple sets of brushes preceded by a hops, then extemporized on them, while continuing to imitate the melody percussively. In the second part of the couple's dance, pairs of dancers walk four steps with hands crossed and joined, then turn 180 degrees in tandem. I've always enjoyed the playfulness of this repeated re-orientation and wanted to pay homage to it by turning, returning, and re-turning with each phrase in the second part of the tune. I found the challenge of corporeally referencing the ways bodies turn in the traditional version of the piece to be eminently enjoyable. The 180 degree turn itself is a gesture which feels so good. Thinking about my own experience as a queer person combined with the sensation of this specific movement also reminds me of the ways that we use the term "orientation" in terms of identity, gender, and desire. There is labor, but also pleasure re-orienting repeatedly. 

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A post shared by Nic Gareiss (@nicgareisslfi) on Dec 30, 2018 at 9:07am PST

I like the idea of performing a tune typically used for partner-dance with only one dancing body - or more accurately two bodies, both of which are moving and making sound simultaneously. {After all, there's no sound without movement} In the performances in Ann Arbor this weekend, Mick Gavin and I both made sounds - and while there was no physical contact between Mr. Gavin and myself, it still felt as though we were dancing together. This reminds me of something Jazz, House, and Lindy Hop dancer LaTasha Barnes said once about solo dance: in solo dance forms, we don't touch each other but rather, we "touch the music." In my chapter in Clare Croft's book Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings, I write about this dancer+musician connection as a rapport between bodies in motion: 

Though I am the only dancer onstage and he is the only fiddler, somehow I do not feel like a soloist, but rather his dance partner ...  lifting, bearing each other’s weight, initiating sound and gesture through a reflexive, mutually-dependent process of affectual suggestion. (1)

Finally, just a quick reminder to post your First Footing dance videos, photos, and reminiscences tonight as the bells ring out for New Year! Be sure to use the hashtag #FirstFootingDance on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!! 

First Footing is a collaboration of the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland, University of Edinburgh Moray House School of Education, and the School of Scottish Studies with support from Creative Scotland. For engagement opportunities check out the First Footing website.

(1) Nicholas Gareiss, An Buachaillín Bán: Reflections on one queer's performance within traditional Irish music & dance. Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings. Ed. by Clare Croft, Oxford University Press. 2017. 

[rilm]

The international journal of traditional arts

Another new open-access journal!

Launched in 2017, The international journal of traditional arts is an international, peer-reviewed gold open access journal that promotes a broad-ranging understanding of the relevance of traditional arts in contemporary social life. The journal publishes leading and robust scholarship on traditional arts from around the world with a focus on the contemporary policy and practice of traditional…

[hobbysquig]

I found my first proper cross stitch project while I was packing. #crossstitch #cryptofthenecrodancer #slime #faketextbook #ethnochoreology #slime #justforfun

[textommendation]

“Ethnochoreology (also dance ethnology, dance anthropology) is the study of dance through the application of a number of disciplines such as anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, ethnography, etc. The word itself is relatively recent and etymologically means “the study of ethnic dance”, though this is not exclusive of research on more formalized dance forms, such as classical ballet, for example. Thus, ethnochoreology reflects the relatively recent attempt to apply academic thought to why people dance and what it means. It is not just the study or cataloging of the thousands of external forms of dances—the dance moves, music, costumes, etc.— in various parts of the world, but the attempt to come to grips with dance as existing within the social events of a given community as well as within the cultural history of a community. Dance is not just a static representation of history, not just a repository of meaning, but a producer of meaning each time it is produced—not just a living mirror of a culture, but a shaping part of culture, a power within the culture.”

Good job Wikipedia! Emphasis mine.

[danceismusic]

Kapila Vatsyayan, the most respected of India’s dance scholars, speaks about it this way: 'The Indian dancer’s preoccupation is not so much with space as with time, and the dancer is constantly trying to achieve the perfect pose which will convey a sense of timelessness.'”

- Anya Peterson Royce, The Anthropology of the Performing Arts: Artistry, Virtuosity, and Interpretation in a Cross-Cultural Perspective, p. 148, quoting Kapili Vatsyayan in Gerald Jonas’ 1992 book, Dancing: the Pleasure, Power and Art of Movement

[firstfootingscotland]

Research & Development, #FirstFootingDance

(Experimenting with vintage projectors {of which there are no fewer than 10!!} in my office at St. Leonard's Land at the University of Edinburgh. Photo by Caleb Teicher)

Exams were in full swing at the University of Edinburgh's St. Leonard's Land studios so I spent this week visiting the School of Scottish Studies archives and working in the Pleasance dance studios. After my first few hours touring the School of Scottish Studies with the generous guidance of Dr. Cathlin MacAuley, I found myself awed indeed by the wealth of information preserved across the collections. I get the sense that not even seven lifetimes, let alone the remaining seven months of my time in Edinburgh, would be enough to revel in the recordings, documents, photographs, and other media archived there. I'll be updating you as I delve into the rich resources in these archives!

In the mornings each day this week I spent time at the Pleasance dance studio working on technique, engaging new musical repertoire, and developing new sounds+new gestures. Of particular pertinence was a list of tunes shared with me by friend and piper Fergus Much who remembers First Footing for his friends and relations. His grandmother, a highland dancer, would frequently request Whistle O'er the Lave O't or Devil in the Kitchen during his First Footing visits. (According to her, Fergus is also tall, dark, and handsome) 

I wanted to familiarize myself with these melodies to see how their contours felt in my body. Both of these musical pieces have an association with highland dancing, but I wanted to engage the tunes in a percussive way, meeting the melody in the world of sound. This impulse to trace the phrases sonically, matching ornamentation note for note is inspired in part by Frank Rhodes' Appendix to Joan & Tom Flett's 1964 book Traditional Dancing in Scotland. Rhodes describes step dance as percussive footwork phrases "joined together as the dancer pleased in order to match as far as possible the notes of the music. (1, 272) Later, he describes how dancers endeavour to "follow the tune quite closely." (1, 284) Taking a nod from this historical source, I'm interested in re-imagining a step dancing body's encounter with this music as one that internalizes melodies and re-articulates them. Or as my step dance teacher Colin Dunne would say, to "make some music with the music." (2)

Alasdair Fraser's version of The Devil in the Kitchen from his record The Driven Bow with Jodi Stecher provided both inspiration and challenge as I worked to imitate the bowing and ornamentation of his masterful recorded performance. Nests of triplets, extremely subtle alternations of duple and big triplet feel, and idiomatically snapped bowing at first mystified, and eventually titillated my feet as I tried to get inside this tune. There's certainly more work to be done here on my part. My hope is that acquainting myself with the specific traditional music repertoire used for the custom of First Foot will ultimately inform my own engagement with this rich tradition which is still new to me.

This week we also launched our #FirstFootingDance social media campaign! As the year draws to a close and you venture out to visit those you love, we hope you will post videos or photos of your 2020 First Footings or share reminiscences of past years. To collate all these First Foots, use the hashtag #FirstFootingDance on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Here's my version of a #FirstFootingDance!

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A post shared by Nic Gareiss (@nicgareisslfi) on Dec 18, 2018 at 3:39am PST

First Footing is a collaboration of the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland, University of Edinburgh Moray House School of Education, and the School of Scottish Studies with support from Creative Scotland. For engagement opportunities check out the First Footing website.

(1) Joan and Tom Flett (1964) Traditional Dancing in Scotland.

(2) Quoted from Colin Dunne's beautiful show Concert which exhibits Colin's gestural+musical encounter with Dublin fiddler Tommie Potts.

[rilm]

Puls: Musik- och dansetnologisk tidskrift

A new open-access journal from Sweden!

In 2016 Svenskt Visarkiv launched Puls: Musik- och dansetnologisk tidskrift/Journal for ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology, an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal (EISSN 2002-2972). While the main focus of the journal is ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology, it also embraces adjacent disciplines, such as other aspects of musicology and choreology, folklore, literature, and related studies…

[danceismusic]

In order to fully understand what performing a choreographed movement means, one must have 'some appreciation of how getting oneself physically through a choreographed movement can affect a human being, and how it can affect one’s own cultural understanding.'

- Anya Peterson Royce, The Anthropology of the Performing Arts: Artistry, Virtuosity, and Interpretation in a Cross-Cultural Perspective, p. 4, quoting Sally Ness’ 1992 book Body, Movement, and Culture: Kinaesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community  

[danceismusic]

"Ethnography is a practice of embodiment, and as such, it is well suited to dance research since it empowers the body as a locus of knowledge."

- Catherine Foley, Step Dancing in Ireland: Culture and History, Introduction: An Ethnochoreologist in 'the Kingdom' of Kerry, pg. 11

[danceismusic]

“After landing at a festival and witnessing a session of buck dancing and guitar-playing, step-dancing and fiddling, I was hooked. I traveled to the sources where music takes place as an integral part of the culture, in kitchens or on the porch with family, friends and visitors. I felt welcomed in these communities as they knew I was so enthusiastic about their traditions. The goal for me now as an educator is to connect people to their bodies through rhythm, movement, music and listening to each other and how the traditional sources come into play.”

- Sandy Silva, originally published here