New German Dance Studies

Q:  What led to your interest in German dance?

Ruprecht:  A general interest in dance combined with an academic position in German Studies.

Q:  What distinguishes new German dance from older, more traditional styles of German dance?

Dance in Germany comprises such a range of productions and performative practices that it would be impossible to draw overarching distinctions between the field and less recent types of dance culture. Audiences can watch world-class ballet, but also dance theatre, conceptual  contemporary dance, and various kinds of performance art that cross over the boundaries of dance, opera, physical theatre, and visual art. What New German Dance Studies shows are distinctions and continuities, exploring historical genealogies of dance where older forms are restaged, but also revised and questioned by their newer successors.

Q: What do current dance styles reveal about German culture?

Ruprecht: Referring to an example of conceptual contemporary dance, a lecture performance by Xavier Le Roy entitled Product of Circumstances, our contributor Maaike Bleeker has answered this question as follows: “Product of Circumstances also illustrates what might be the ‘Germanness’ of dance in Germany in the early 21st century. Lecture performances as they emerge from within the avant-garde dance scene in Germany at the beginning of the 21st century are exemplary of a situation in which German dance has become a highly international undertaking and in which the ‘Germanness’ (if something like that is to exist at all) of dance in Germany is not a matter of the nationality of the artists involved (their being German), nor necessarily of the place where a particular work was first performed, but rather of Germany being the geographical location of the circumstances of which (to speak with Le Roy again) something that might be considered German dance is the product. In the early 21st century, Germany is a location where performances created elsewhere pass through or are being co-produced with international partners, where festivals draw international audiences, education draws international students as well as teachers, and dance conferences and symposia bring together international experts with international audiences.’ Dance in Germany today bears the hallmark of an era of global fluctuation.”

Q:  What type of dance is illustrated on the cover of the book?

Ruprecht:  The cover photograph shows a scene from William Forsythe’s Human Writes, a piece that combines the conceptual trend with a virtuosic type of contemporary movement technique.

Q:  What was the inspiration for the book?

Ruprecht:  New German Dance Studies emerged from our sense that the last decade has witnessed such a rich outpouring of scholarship on dance in German-speaking Europe that a collection was warranted.

Q:  Do you have a favorite type of German dance?

Ruprecht:  No.

Q:  What cultures or groups dominate the Caribbean?

A:  The culture of the Caribbean is distinctly “Caribbean” or “Creole,” which means it is a combination of European and African cultures mainly, but in some islands, that combination is additionally mixed with Asian and American Indian peoples.  Those combinations make it unique as (an “American”) culture sphere, but its European and African legacies are the ones that predominate historically from the 15-19th centuries and which make it “Caribbean.”  More recently, Chinese in Cuba, Javanese in Suriname, East Indians and Pakistanis in Trinidad and Tobago reveal the important Asian input within Caribbean culture.  Also, in some parts of the Caribbean, American Indian culture has blended into the mix, but these areas are limited today to Dominica and St. Vincent, and parts of Central America- like Belize and Honduras.  Over time, the Caribbean islands have had African-derived populations as the dominant group, but on some islands and mainland territories like Guyana, the East Indian populations have taken or almost taken the majority.

Q:  Where did dances like the quadrille and rumba originate, and how did they spread throughout the region?

A:  Quadrilles came from various European countries with colonization, but the European forms shifted and incorporated changes from local islands that made them distinct from their European antecedents.  Rumba, on the other hand, is a new, Creole innovation; it developed as the combination of cultures (again mainly European and African) gelled in the 19th century, i.e., as distinct Cuban culture.  The spread of both dance forms is different as well.  Quadrilles spread with each European group that settled in each island and until the early 20th century, very often islanders did not share their Quadrille variations.  Rumba music spread significantly from Cuba in the 1930s and 40s, to other islands and throughout the world with the development of the record and movie industries and with World Fair performances.  The original and most “traditional” rumba dancing lingered in African zones of Cuba until the late 20th century.

Q:  What are the most dominant dances of the Diaspora?

A:  This is hard to say because it depends on who is talking, where in the Diaspora we are focused, during which time period, and it also depends on the definition of Diaspora. For example, are there more types of social and popular dances than there are concert or tourist forms?   And if we are in the US, which do you think are the dominant dances?  We could say that right now Dominican and Haitian forms of merengue and Cuban and Puerto Rican salsa are performed most often by most Caribbean peoples, but a decade or so before, French Caribbean zouk was just as popular.  Additionally, in terms of taste, many non-specialists would say that Jamaican Reggae was “the most” popular dance from the Caribbean.

I prefer to say that there are many genres of Diaspora dance performance and no one genre dominates—because dance and dance music are critical in African-derived or African-influenced cultures. Thus, whether we examine the period of enslavement or today’s dance scene, OR whether we are in Martinique or Cuba, there are examples of several if not most dance genres present.

Q:  What sort of dilemmas confront dance in the Caribbean?

A:  In terms of survival, Caribbean dance seems to manage whatever is put in front of it, i.e., Caribbean peoples will dance no matter what, so the survival of Caribbean dance is assured with human survival.  Still, health concerns and economic security, religious persecution and political restrictions all impact Caribbean dance genres, particularly in the tourist setting.  Because tourism is the central economic resource for most Caribbean nations, dance performance is entangled in economic decisions and conditions.  Courageous, inventive, but also intimidating body responses while dancing in popular, public settings have pierced political discussions in Cuba, Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, etc.  And, the stigma of “African superstitious religions” still remains despite the beauty and intrigue of sacred dance performance throughout the Caribbean. Thus, dance—like other cultural elements—is affected by all sorts of economic, political, religious, and social dilemmas; however what most people do not factor is how dance performance can assist economic programs that support Caribbean nations and how much expertise is ignored or wasted among dance performers and choreographers who know how to structure dance performances and enhance socio-economic possibilities.

Q:  What countries served as some of the biggest influences for dance?

A:  In the Caribbean, I would not hesitate to claim that Cuba has had some of the biggest influence in dance practices and dance performance in all the Americas.  I would also quickly add Puerto Rico as another seminal country in terms of huge importance of dance.  First, Cuba has been able to guard and support the existence of more distinct styles and forms of dance than any other Caribbean locale.  Puerto Rico, on the other hand, has been central to Caribbean stylization and dance music development since the late 18th century.  I also select these nations first because the dance forms that they have originated and developed hold interest in a way that other Caribbean dances, do not.  Spanish Caribbean dance is decorated and embellished by rhythms that allow all body parts to dance; it is more complex than other Caribbean dances that are based on simple, uncomplicated although embellished also, walking steps.

Q:  Who are some of the prominent figures in Caribbean dance culture? 

A:  Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Lavinia Williams Yarborough, Jean Leon Destine, Rex Nettlesford, Beryl McBurnie, Percival Borde, Geoffrey Holder, Molly Ahye, Louines Louinis, Nereyda Rodrigues, Sylvia del Villard, the Ayala and Cepeda families, Ramiro Guerra, Eduardo Rivera, Juan de Dios, La Soso, Josienne Antonnelle, Lena Blou, Ms Clara, Marlene Silva, King Raimundo dos Santos, the capoeira masters of Brazil, Rosy Perez, Willie Colon, Celia Cruz, etc. And, there are many, many others from the ballet and modern dance worlds as well.

Q:  What are some of the dances that are used for sacred purposes?

A:  An important fact that is necessary to take into account with this question is that many dances are both sacred and secular; it depends on the situation, the cultural context of the dance performance to determine whether a dance step or certain dance sequences are for sacred purposes or not.  Given that, most parts of the Caribbean have distinct sacred dance forms: for Jamaica, Cumina and Rastafari have identifiable dances; for Haiti, the Vodou liturgy includes yenalou, mayi, zepaules, and banda among many others; for Trinidad and Tobago, there is Shango and the djab molassie in Carnival, and there are many, many dances in Cuba that are performed in Palo Monte, Arara, Santeria, and Carabali religions.  Caribbean sacred dances unite the sacred and secular worlds, the living and the dead, the invisible and the visible; they allow the ancestors and cosmic spirits to receive offerings made by humans and to give to the human community in return wisdom, counsel, and advice.

By the time I left Portland, Oregon, where I started teaching in 1948, I was dissatisfied with the way I taught ballet and modern concert dancing, but I couldn’t put my finger on the source of the dissatisfaction. I knew that the pervading sense of what was wrong was tied to the fact that dance students (whether aspiring professionals or not) were too dependent on me—on everything I said in technique classes—but I didn’t know how to fix it.

Some illumination was provided by Celia Sparger[2] at Sadler’s Wells School (now, the Royal Ballet) when I took three of my students there for study in the late ‘forties, but the fact that the English school could choose its students, thereby eliminating anyone with minor physical difficulties meant that their teachers simply didn’t face the kinds of problems that are typically found in American schools and academies of dancing. When I moved to New York, I began hearing of Dr. Lulu Sweigard. To be honest, what I heard wasn’t flattering. For example, many thought she was crazy when she said “Movement resides in the thinking, not muscle action,” but this is what intrigued me, and the rest is history—in the form of the book recently published by the University of Illinois Press. As readers will discover, teaching with ideokinetic principles provided solutions for my dissatisfaction in several ways:

1. Dancers have to be taught how to locate various points in their bodies because messages from the brain (the visual images the student has) go to sets of muscles in the body, and movement happens. If the messages in the form of visual images are incorrect, then the wrong muscles move and the movement is indefinite. It’s like dialing a wrong telephone number—wrong number, wrong person (see Chapter 1, p. 12); In other words, dancers have to be taught how to control their own bodies. They have to be taught how to protect themselves in classes where teachers use outdated, unexamined imagery; and
 
2. In order for dance students to develop precise movements of their bodies, the dance teacher has to provide them with accurate imagery.[3]  Teachers need to go over what they say in technique classes very carefully, weeding out everything that is anatomically impossible, such as “Turn your knees out,” “Tuck your pelvis under,” “Keep your spine straight,” and they should stop telling students what not to do, instead of telling them what to do, for example, “Straighten your knees” instead of “Don’t bend your knees” (see Appendix 5, p. 87).

With these clues in mind, I can say that a good dancer is in control of his or her body. Good dancers can protect themselves from the horrors that Gelsey Kirkland describes:

I have a vivid memory of one of the teachers stopping me in the middle of class to demand that I turn out my feet. There was no regard for the knees or hips, which in my case were distorted to the breaking point. The teacher refused to continue the class until I complied with her wishes. . . . During my third year of training, I was introduced to toe shoes, the standard footwear for all ballerinas since the mid-nineteenth century. . . . Misguided and caught between excessive demands for turn-out and pointe, my feet had already begun to deform. At the age of eleven, I came down with a severe case of bunions. Many of the teachers had the same malady, caused from years of strain placed on the foot. It was said that Balanchine cherished the aberration of line induced by bunions, that they contributed to the impression of winged feet (Kirkland 1986: 34-35). [4]

Kirkland was a very good dancer, but she lived a lifetime with deformed feet. She was never taught how to substitute good imagery for bad in a technique class.

Today’s dancers, whether amateur or professional, need not suffer in the same ways that many of their predecessors did. Teaching Dancing With Ideokinetic Principles explains in detail why that is the case.

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Based in Minnesota, Drid Williams is the senior editor of the Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement and the author of Teaching Dancing with Ideokinetic Principles.

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[1] The book’s title uses a phrase that was well known at the time. It was derived from a Provençal expression (gai saber) for the technical skill required for poetry writing that had already been used by Ralph Waldo Emerson and E. S. Dallas and, in inverted form, by Thomas Carlyle in The Dismal Science. The book’s title was first translated into English as The Joyous Wisdom, but The Gay Science has become the common translation since Walter Kaufmann’s version in the 1960s. Kaufmann cites The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1955) that lists “The gay science (Provençal gai saber): the art of poetry” (Wikipedia).

[2] See Sparger, Celia. 1982. Anatomy and Ballet. New York: Theatre Arts Books.

[3] Martha Graham’s famous admonition, spoken in one of her classes — “Lamb of God, that is not a plié!” — just isn’t enough.

[4] See Kirkland, Gelsey, with Greg Lawrence. 1987. Dancing On My Grave. New York: Jove Books. [Quotation is cited on page 105 of Williams's book.]