Spontaneous Choreography: Improvisation in Polynesian Dance

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In many parts of Polynesia dance is well known as a highly structured activity with precise choreography and meticulous movements, performed by large (or small) groups with precision timing-characterized by Captain Cook in Tonga as follows: All their motions were performed with such justness that the whole party moved and acted as one man (Beaglehole 1967: 109). On the other hand, Polynesian dancers are also well known for their ability to perform spontaneously in dances for the occasion, such as at a Hawaiian lu'au or in a Samoan siva. This paper will attempt to separate these two activities by cultural categories in order to understand more fully the cultural implications of improvisation in Polynesian Dance in Hawai'i and Tonga will be emphasized; they constitute the geographical focusses of the author's research.2 However, at least some of the concepts developed should have general applicability throughout Polynesia. First of all, the nature of dance should be defined. The author considers dance to be a cultural form that results from the creative use of human bodies in time and space that formalizes human movement into structured systems in much the same way that poetry formalizes language. These cultural forms, though transient, have structured content, are often visual manifestations of social relations, and may be part of an elaborate aesthetic system. In many Polynesian societies there is no indigenous concept that can be precisely equated with the English concept dance. Structured movements when performed as presentation pieces for a human audience may be viewed as a separate activity from structured movements performed for the gods in ritual, and separate again from improvised or spontaneous choreography performed on informal occasions. In many Polynesian areas at least two, and in many cases all three, of these forms existed in pre-European times, and they can best be analyzed as the movement dimensions of two or three separate activities. These activities might conveniently be separated into three categories according to who was being honored: the gods, the chiefs, or the people. These were not rigid distinctions, however, because in some ways chiefs could also be considered gods as well as people. On the other hand, the people (or commoners) could not be considered part of the other categories. Although these distinctions are no longer applicable in some societies, they can be reconstructed from the literature.