Tag Archives: dance

Dancing Spirit, Love, and War

Today we present an interview with scholar and author Evadne Kelly, whose book Dancing Spirit, Love, and War is part of our Studies in Dance History series. In this piece she talks about what this book is about, how she acknowledges her role in researching this topic, and why this book needs to exist.

Why was there a need for this book?

Dance is often romanticized, tokenized, and overlooked as a source of knowledge.

I hope to show how the study of dance and movement can reveal a great deal about the world. Dance sheds light on how power operates and governs moving bodies while simultaneously emerging from the movements of bodies. Because of the ways in which bodies connect in time and space through movement, dance is a particularly important source of knowledge in the context of histories and legacies of British colonialism in Fiji and Canada.

In particular, the Fijian song-dance performance tradition, called meke, provides a uniquely embodied perspective on the postcolonial tensions embedded within relations between Indigenous and Western notions of reciprocity, responsiveness, and return. In this regard, meke reveals a great deal about shifts in power over time and space.

Why was it important to acknowledge your own implication in British colonial histories and legacies?

There is no legitimating or securing way forward that does not include messy and uneasy rhythms. But, as Nancy Peters wrote in “Learning Shame: Colonial Narratives as a Tool for Decolonization,” stories that unsettle colonial thinking are “animating” projects (In Visioning a Mi’kmaw Humanities: Indigenizing the Academy, edited by Marie Battiste 2017). Being uncomfortable and disoriented is a key part of the process for non-Indigenous people to move from being enemy to adversary to ally. This became clear over a long process of coming to terms with the ways in which I, as a white Canadian settler and granddaughter of a British colonial Fiji Civil Servant, am implicated in the history and legacy of colonization.

The process of researching and writing this book had the potential to build relations or create obstacles to relations. It all depended on how I listened and payed attention. It also depended on how I remembered the past, including all the stories my ancestors told about themselves. The project taught me to remember differently—to not romanticize the stories of the past but remember them from a new angle of the kinesthetic body, whereby visceral sensibilities, movements, rhythms, and sounds emerge in-between bodies implicated in uneven relations of power. As Nancy Peters explained, learners understand new viewpoints and become skeptical about single truths when they experience a collision of viewpoints (Peters 2017).

It took the research and writing of this book for me to finally understand and be ready to implicate my own body and the bodies of my ancestors in the stories and legacies of colonialism. I expose my own implication in colonialism in the hopes of creating dialogue about decolonizing processes and working towards an ethical space for engagement with communities impacted by British colonialism.

Why is the body and its movements important to ethical engagement?

The body and its movements are a site for governance and control as well as resistance to that control. A close look at the archives of the Colonial Secretaries Office, which was responsible for the administration of British colonial Fiji, shows that the British colonial administration sought to control the movements, behaviors, sensibilities, and comportment of Fijians as a way of eliminating difference and absorbing Fijians into the British Christian, colonial worldview.

I was also aware of the colonial history of extraction, ownership, and objectification of culture. Wanting to follow a decolonizing approach, I aimed for a visceral and relational engagement, involving cross-sensory perception, direct and indirect speech, non-verbal sounds, rhythms, and kinesthetic experiences, that co-constituted dialogue while acknowledging historical and contemporary inequities. Relations of dialogue and kinesthetic and performative exchange were spaces of encounter where uneven power was negotiated.

Why spirit, love, and war?

Spirit, love, and war are all notions that have been romanticized in writing about dance and performance. But they are also expressions that generate indeterminate relations of power between bodies. They disrupt and distribute normative values and are expressions by which power locally and translocally governs and organizes bodies. Christian colonial and postcolonial restructuring of meke occurred through expression of spirit, love, and war. But expressions of spirit, love, and war have to do with negotiating boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within new categories of citizenship in Fiji and in diaspora.

Why did you feel it was important to discuss meke as a translocal performance practice?

My choice to focus on performances of meke in multiple sites helped me to gain a clearer sense of how and why Fijians were performing meke in differing ways and in resonance with local and national politics in Fiji and Fiji’s diaspora. In addition, the long-term and long-distance connections fostered by meke spanned over a crucial period of change in Fiji and enabled me to see the effects of these changes translocally—across time and space.

But the translocal aspects of meke also brought attention to the privileges and barriers to global movements and migrations, including my own, and who gets to move, where, when, and how. In addition, this book has always been implicated within a postcolonial story about local and translocal responsiveness and transmission between bodies. The whole project is a reminder of the complexities of global, postcolonial networks of identification and exchange.

Evadne Kelly is an independent artist-scholar. Her research focuses on the political and social dimensions of dance traditions and her publications appear in Pacific Arts Journal, The Dance Current, Performance Matters, and Fiji Times.

Flamenco Nation

Today we present a piece from author Sandie Holguín. Her recently released book Flamenco Nation explores how Flamenco dance became tied to Spain’s national identity. In this personal essay, Sandie details her journey of writing and researching the book, and the challenges of writing about a topic distant in regard to both geography and time.

If, as L.P. Hartley once said and historians like to quote, “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” what happens when a scholar grapples with the history of a foreign country? Can an outsider twice-removed by time and place contribute meaningfully to a discussion of that place’s past? These are questions I have wrestled with over the years while trying to write about the history of Spain, especially about ephemeral cultural phenomena. My questions are really no different from those that underrepresented communities ask when mainstream historians write about marginalized groups, and yet as a historian, I have to believe that one can engage in historical analysis about people, places, and times far removed from one’s own experience—otherwise, why does anybody practice history? Still, there seem to be greater barriers to understanding a culture and its past when the country, society, and language are not part of your cultural patrimony. Overcoming those barriers, or at least recognizing how to maneuver around them, requires experience in historical practice, patience, a willingness to listen, and the help of insiders.

When I began to imagine a cultural history of flamenco in Spain, I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount that had been written on the subject, especially by people who were experts on the art form. Many scholars and flamenco aficionados could easily rattle off the names of performers, songs, rhythmic styles, and situate them in their places of origin. What could I, a North American with no background in music, have to say about something that seemed ubiquitous in Spanish culture (or at least in the culture that was presented to the world outside of Spain)? The only way for me to enter this study was to think in structural terms. How did cultural forms in various countries come to be dominant? For example, were there similar processes that made the tango popular in Argentina, the samba in Brazil, jazz in the United states, and flamenco in Spain? The answer was yes. Of course how those processes differed from country to country is what makes for engaging historical analysis. My grounding in nationalism studies and cultural history made it possible for me to begin to write something meaningful about flamenco and its role in Spanish history, despite the challenges present when speaking about a culture that is not one’s own.

The work of writing a history about a foreign country is fraught with danger, however. Language might be the primary one. If one is not a native speaker, then one cannot always attend to the nuances of humor, metaphor, or slang. And although a place’s culture (or multiple cultures) may have changed over time, one imagines—wrongly, no doubt—that one’s own historical culture is accessible in a way that a foreign country’s historical culture might not be. Immersing oneself in the country’s native scholarship and culture helps to soften these barriers, but having friends and colleagues from that place help even more because they aid in cross-cultural translation and, sometimes, just literal translation.

I have begun to view the distance in time and space as an advantage to understand Spanish history. Outsider status has granted me certain insights that might be harder to gain by those immersed within Spain’s many cultures, only because I am less personally invested in the national narratives that unfold in my research and writing and because I am at a remove from such horrors as Spain’s civil war and dictatorship. The anxiety I feel about “not getting it right” is mitigated by the knowledge that I am trying to listen both analytically and empathetically to the voices of the past to make sense of them. It is this journey toward cross-cultural, cross-temporal understanding that guides my work and gives me hope—however misguided—that the study of history can be used to understand our shared humanity, despite our many cultural differences.

Sandie Holguín is a Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches European cultural and intellectual history and European feminist thought and gender studies. She specializes in Spanish history and is the author of Creating Spaniards: Culture and National Identity in Republican Spain.

AIDS Readings

December 1 is World AIDS Day. HIV/AIDS has wrought enormous suffering worldwide and caused more than 35 million deaths. The nine books that follow are testimony to that devastation.

The Pox Lover: An Activist’s Decade in New York and Paris

Anne-christine d’Adesky

A personal history of the turbulent 1990s in New York City and Paris by a pioneering American AIDS journalist, lesbian activist, and daughter of French-Haitian elites. Anne-christine d’Adesky remembers “the poxed generation” of AIDS—their lives, their battles, and their determination to find love and make art in the heartbreaking years before lifesaving protease drugs arrived.

“Never far from the mad joy of writing, loving, and being alive, even as it investigates our horribly mundane capacity for horror, this book is a masterpiece.” —Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave

In the Province of the Gods

Kenny Fries

Kenny Fries embarks on a journey of profound self-discovery as a disabled foreigner in Japan, a society historically hostile to difference. When he is diagnosed as HIV positive, all his assumptions about Japan, the body, and mortality are shaken, and he must find a way to reenter life on new terms.

“Fries writes out of the pure hot emergency of a mortal being trying to keep himself alive. So much is at stake here—health, affection, culture, trauma, language—but its greatest surprise is what thrives in the midst of suffering. A beautiful book.”—Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door

AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures

David Caron

The deluge of metaphors triggered in 1981 in France by the first public reports of what would turn out to be the AIDS epidemic spread with far greater speed and efficiency than the virus itself.

“Literary and cultural analysis come together here as Caron casts brilliant light on the disastrously inadequate public response to the AIDS pandemic in France. . . . He shows how literature supplied the communitarian voice that would otherwise have been lacking.”—Ross Chambers, author of Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author

How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS

David Gere

“Anyone interested in dance or in gay culture or in art and politics should, as I did, find this a fascinating book, impossible to put down.”—Sally Banes, editor of Reinventing Dance in the 1960s

Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS

Edited by Edmund White

In Cooperation with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS

“A poignant reminder of the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic on the arts.”—Library Journal
“A searing, and often bitingly funny collection of personal essays by almost two dozen writers—John Berendt, Brad Gooch, Allan Gurganus, and Sarah Schulman among them—Loss within Loss remembers over twenty creative artists lost to AIDS.”— The Advocate

Tentative Transgressions: Homosexuality, AIDS, and the Theater in Brazil

Severino J. Albuquerque

Co-winner of the 2004 Roberto Reis BRASA Book Award

“Albuquerque’s work . . . provides an archaeology of theatrical representations of homosexuality in Brazil, an alternative history of Brazilian theater from the margins, a critical analysis of canonical and non-canonical plays infused with the insights of feminist and queer theory, as well as a history of the representation of AIDS in Brazilian culture.”—Fernando Arenas, University of Minnesota

Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo

Michael Schiavi

The biography of gay-rights giant Vito Russo, the man who wrote The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, commonly regarded as the foundational text of gay and lesbian film studies. A founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and cofounder of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Russo lived at the center of the most important gay cultural turning points in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing

G. Thomas Couser Foreword by Nancy Mairs

A provocative look at writing by and about people with illness or disability—in particular HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, deafness, and paralysis—who challenge the stigmas attached to their conditions by telling their lives in their own ways and on their own terms.

A Letter to Harvey Milk: Short Stories

Lesléa Newman

“Although pain plays a part in this volume, many of the tales celebrate with warmth and good humor the courageous maintenance of the Jewish tradition in radical relationships. . . . Contemporary characters confront both timely issues, like AIDS, and eternal ones, such as a lovers’ quarrel or a mother-daughter misunderstanding.”—Publishers Weekly

Margaret H’Doubler and Dance Publishing at UW Press

Dance as an academic field of study has deep roots at the University of Wisconsin, where Margaret H’Doubler (1889–1982) founded the first university courses in dance in 1917. She established the first university degree program in dance anywhere in the world in 1926. As dance educator and historian Janice Ross shows in her book Moving Lessons: Margaret H’Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education (UWP, 2000), H’Doubler was both emblematic of her time and an innovator who made deep imprints in American culture. An authentic “New Woman,” H’Doubler emerged from a sheltered female Victorian world to change the way Americans thought, not just about female physicality but also about higher education for women.

Margaret H’Doubler, c. 1965.

In her efforts to create a curriculum, the “Wisconsin Dance Idea” was born:

“We’ll begin on the floor, relieve the body of the pull of gravity and explore movement in a basic way. We’ll rediscover the body’s structural limitations and possibilities, we’ll attend to movement sensation. We’ll create movement out of our knowledge of body structure, no imitation. We’ll study movement as movement first. We may never arrive at dance, but we’ll make an honest beginning.”

Eventually, H’Doubler would write a pioneering book, Dance: A Creative Art Experience. UWP published it in 1957 and issued a second edition in 2001 with an essay by Mary Alice Brennan of the UW-Madison Dance Department. Dance Magazine noted that “as a dance pioneer, Margaret H’Doubler combines both vision and down-to-earth practicality. It is she who established dance as a part of the college curriculum [and] organized the first campus performing group.”

UWP continues to publish books on dance, including publishing the series Studies in Dance History in collaboration with the Society of Dance History Scholars.

You can browse the full list of UWP dance books, covering American and global dance traditions, criticism, and issues, on our dance subject page.

Read more posts about the University of Wisconsin Press’s eighty years of publishing here or subscribe to receive all our blog posts!

New Books for May 2016

We are pleased to announce these five books debuting in May.

May 11
Primed for Violence
Murder, Antisemitism, and Democratic Politics in Interwar Poland

Paul Brykczynski

The assassination that changed a nation

“The interwar period was an often violent time in which the demons of the twentieth century increasingly had their way. Brykczynski places the assassination of President Gabriel Narutowicz in the context of growing antisemitism and the emerging challenge to democracy in the recently independent Polish nation. An important story, thoroughly researched and compellingly told.”
—John Merriman, Yale University

May 11
The Athenian Adonia in Context
The Adonis Festival as Cultural Practice

Laurialan Reitzammer

Wisconsin Studies in Classics

Rediscovers the influence of women’s rituals on Lysistrata, Plato, and diverse Athenian works

“Persuasively reinterprets the Adonia as a ritual that brought Athenian women’s dissenting voices into the public arena to critique male social institutions and values. This innovative work draws on an immense range of ancient sources—literary, documentary, artistic, and material.”
—Laura McClure, series editor

Wong-Contemporary-Directions-in-Asian-American-Dance-c May 11
Contemporary Directions in Asian American Dance

Edited by Yutian Wong

Studies in Dance History

An essential guide and model for current studies of Asian American dance

“A methodologically diverse and eclectic approach to Asian American dance studies, where dance is both method and content. These essays illuminate the ways that dance shapes, troubles, and pushes against the contours of what counts as Asian American cultural production.”
—Priya Srinivasan, author of Sweating Saris

May 25
The Invisible Jewish Budapest
Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle

Mary Gluck

A groundbreaking, brilliant urban history of a Central European metropolis in the decades before World War I

“A magnificently consequential book. Gluck examines the vibrant modernist culture created largely by secular Jews in Budapest, in counterpoint to a backward-looking, nationalistic Hungarian establishment and a conservative Jewish religious elite.”—Scott Spector, author of Violent Sensations

Available now
Worse than the Devil
Anarchists, Clarence Darrow, and Justice in a Time of Terror
Revised Edition

Dean A. Strang

An unjust trial, as patriotism, nativism, and fear swept the nation

“A riveting account of a miscarriage of justice relevant to our times, when fear of radicals of a different stripe may infect our system of justice.”—Booklist