Dance Troupes Research Articles

Misnomer: Reflections on a Dance Performance

GHANA STUDIES / Volumes 12–13 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 249 MISNOMER: REFLECTIONS ON A DANCE PERFORMANCE SHERON WRAY Introduction African Dance troupes were integral to constructions of nationhood and pan-Africanism at the time of independence (Acogny 1988). There has been a tendency to forget their significance as part of a broader political culture in which building a repertoire of dances from a vast array of ethnic groups contributed to a national voice. The dancing body and drumming hands function as a form of memory and a material language forming an interlocking genealogical heritage across the continent. The term “African dance” is a misnomer, oversimplifying the weight and significance of the multiple languages of a varied cultural inheritance. The dances in Ghana are not like those in Senegal, and distinct from those in Guinea—distinctions which are not so easily detected by the untrained eye or ear (Fig. 1). Between the 1950s and 1970s, many national African national dance troupes were established including the Ghana Dance Ensemble. Keita Fodeba, founder of Les Ballets Africains de Guinea, was accused of defaming ethnic dances. In his defence, he argued that the company was creating access to “correct” ideas about life in Africa. Dances were altered by fusing diffuse regional dances, using interchangeable musical parts, extending aesthetic emphases, making visible plural gender participation, and staging them in auditoriums before secular audiences thus desacralizing their ritual function. The notion of traditional African dance is problematic (Welsh-Asante 1993); it is more reflective of post-colonial rhetorical aspirations than practice in dance performance. The dances of Africa are now part of the world stage and are equally subject to dynamic gainful scrutiny. Since the 1980s there has been a wave of NGO-funded cultural interventions across the 250 Ghana Studies • volumes 12–13 • 2011 continent that has had a significant impact on the evolution of “contemporary ” African dance. The space of contemporary African dance has thus become part of a shared heritage, which, in turn, implies the multicultural politics and aesthetic predilections of the global cultural capitols. In Africa, contemporary African dance is mainly performed for a rarefied audience made up of expatriates, NGO and corporate personnel. It remains to be seen if local audiences will gravitate towards these new practices. Whilst it is an interesting zone of experimentation, the artists themselves often divest themselves of all vocabulary that might label them “traditional” and therefore non-progressive. In general, the adoption of the contemporary African dance idioms implies attaining higher professional status within a spectrum of interconnected international performance venues and residencies. Finance and distribution of new work by and for Euro-American markets is the goal rather than an ideological debate about to purposefully breaking the rules of tradition or modernity. Figure 1. Ghana Dance Ensemble, whole company (Photo: R. Lane Clark) Wray • Misnomer: Reflections on a Dance Performance 251 Collaborative Work with Ghana Dance Ensemble, July 2009 I had the opportunity to collaborate with the Ghana Dance Ensemble (GDE), a professional dance company based at the University of Ghana, Legon, as part of a performance staged on 27 July 2009. At the University of Ghana, dance scholarship has been part of the University curriculum , initially under the auspices of the Institute of African Studies, since 1962. Working with a company grounded with such specialized historical knowledge and trajectory within dance practice was largely unknown to me in spite of my performance with African American dance idioms. I am a choreographer and director whose origins are from within the African Diaspora and my dance background might be summarized as having a European foundation. By way of England, my training and professional work stems from concert dance though my interest in my own origins that have taken me to Jamaica, Cuba, Gambia, Guinea, Trinidad, and Ghana for the first time in 2004. I came to this collaboration with a suitcase full of questions . I had only seven days to unpack, to layout how to ask them and how to process the feedback, and at the same time to construct a piece of work to share as the opening event for...

Dancing in the House of Koryak Culture

This paper explores two interrelated themes found in the anthropol- ogy of ethnic dance ensembles in Kamchatka, Russia: authenticity and the place of individual in society. I use two elite dance troupes (one professional, the other semi-professional) to analyse local categories of cultural authenticity. People in Kamchatka were vocal about representations of indigenous dance on the stage and critiqued dance performances on the basis of whether or not they lived up to their expectations for a proper representation of traditional forms. These cri- tiques are consistently made with respect to the representations themselves and are wholly detached from ethnic (or other) identities of the performers. They provide insight into the nature of authorised knowledge of cultural traditions in Kamchatka. The second part of the paper explores the role of children's dance ensembles in cultural revival movements in small villages. Performing tradi- tional indigenous Kamchatkan dance is not a case of memorising a set stock of moves and positions but entails finding oneself through an individually crea- tive engagement with a style modelled by elders. In both cases, I argue that a semiotics of dance focuses our attention on what symbols do (as opposed to simply what they mean) within a cultural field.

국내 직업무용단의 웹사이트 콘텐츠 비교 분석

본 연구는 국내 직업무용단 웹사이트 콘텐츠의 현황을 분석하기 위한 것으로 이 연구를 통해 전국 직업무용단과 무용발전에 기여할 수 있는 사이트 구축 및 콘텐츠 개발 방안에 도움을 주는데 목적을 두고 있다. 본 연구의 목적을 달성하기 위하여 무용단 단독으로 홈페이지가 운영되고 있는 8개의 무용단을 선정하여 콘텐츠 내용을 조사하였다. 연구방법에 의해 얻어진 결론은 다음과 같다. 첫째, 국내 무용단 홈페이지 중 콘텐츠 제공과 커뮤니티의 활성화는 국립발레단, 서울발레시어터, 유니버설발레단인 것으로 나타났다. 둘째, 시(도)립무용단의 경우는 경기도립무용단, 대전 부산 서울 인천시립무용단의 5곳만 활성화되고 있어 타 시도 무용단 홈페이지의 콘텐츠는 많은 보완이 이루어져야 하겠다. 셋째, 서울발레시어터나 유니버설발레단의 경우 공연소식, 단원소개, 발레이야기, 공연평, 뉴스레터 일정안내, 아카데미, 후원회 등을 통해 많은 콘텐츠를 제공하여 관객 관리와 홍보에 활용한 반면 시립 도립 무용단의 홈페이지에서는 그 규모와 자료 수가 적은 편이어서 웹사이트 방문의 호기심이 덜했다. This study is to analyze the present condition of internal dance troupes' web sites contents and through this study, we aim at suggesting beneficial plans not only for constructing better web sites and contents for national dance troupes but also for contributing to the development of national dance troupes. In order to achieve this study's object, we selected eight dance troupes that run their own web sites and examined their contents. the conclusions are as following. First, among internal professional dance troupes, Korea National Ballet, Seoul Ballet Theatre and Universal Ballet Company offer the best contents at their home pages and they have the most lively community concerned activities at their internet web sites. Second as for the web sites of municipal(provincial) dance troupes, those of Gyeonggi provincial dance troupe, Daejeon municipal dance troupe, Busan municipal dance troupe, Seoul municipal dance troupe Incheon municipal dance troupe have lots of contents briskly carried on, but those of the others need complementary measures. Third, Seoul ballet theatre and Universal Ballet Company offer lots of information about their activities to satisfy their customers and make the maximum use for public relations ; performance news, the introduction of their members, the story of ballet press reviews, new letters. On the other hand, at the web sites of Metropolitan Dance Theater Provincial Dance Company, there are much fewer contents about their activities which doesn't lead customers to visit their webs.

Reinado do Rosário de Itapecerica (MG): Da Festa e dos Mistérios, and: Folia de Reis: Tradiçāo e Fé (review)

Reviewed by: Reinado do Rosário de Itapecerica (MG): Da Festa e dos Mistérios, and: Folia de Reis: Tradição e Fé Suzel Ana Reily CD Review: Reinado do Rosário de Itapecerica (MG): Da Festa e dos Mistérios(2005), Associação do Reinado do Rosário de Itapecerica/Viola Corrêa Produções Artísticas; Folia de Reis: Tradição e Fé(2006), Viola Brasileira Show Produções e Eventos. Although Brazil has the largest population of Roman Catholics in the world, the musical traditions associated with popular Catholicism in the country have received very little academic attention. For this reason alone the two sets of double CDs, Reinado do Rosário de Itapecerica (MG): Da Festa e dos Mistérios and Folia de Reis: Tradição e Fé, are most welcome. They offer some of the first accessible recordings of two central spheres of Brazilian popular Catholic expressions amongst some of the poorest sectors of Brazilian society: The Festival of [Our Lady of] the Rosary, a quintessential form of African-Brazilian Catholicism that involves performances by several types of percussion-based dance troupes, and the folias de reis, mummer-like ensembles that go from house to house during the Christmas season to bring the blessing of the Three Kings in exchange for donations to stage a collective festival on January 6, Kings' Day. Both [End Page 173]CD sets were supported by the Centro de Memória Digital of the University of Brasília and funded by Petrobas, which has become a major sponsor of Brazil's cultural heritage. To make the recordings, the production teams took advantage of events where they would have easy access to the ensembles. However, because the two events were distinct, the two sets present rather different ethnographic approaches. The Reinado do Rosáriodocuments the various percussion and dance ensembles that performed during the Festival of the Rosary in Itapecerica, Minas Gerais, in 2004, depicting thereby local forms of a widespread form of religious expression. Folia de Reiswas recorded during the annual Meeting of Folias de Reis ( Encontro de Folias de Reis) promoted by the local government of Brasília in 2005, which attracted numerous ensembles from various parts of the country. The sets are accompanied by booklets containing explanatory texts. A special touch was added through the inclusion of direct quotes made by performers; these quotes give the reader a powerful glimpse into the ways in which participation in the ensembles is experienced by devotees. The complete sung text of each track is also provided, allowing one to follow the ritual scripts during listening. The more extensive booklet accompanies the Reinado do Rosário. Alongside an overview of the festival structure, there are three short studies. The first by historian Marcos Magalhães provides a contextualization of the festival through a general discussion of the emergence and dissemination of devotion to Our Lady of the Rosary in colonial Minas Gerais, highlighting the role of the black confraternities as havens for the preservation of black memory. This is followed by literary critic and sociologist Sebastião Rios's informed reading of the texts used by the ensembles in their toadas(songs); he shows how their themes articulate with the cultural legacy of the mainly black performers, drawing attention to the secretive—or "mysterious"—dimensions of the tradition. The section of perhaps greatest interest to ethnomusicologists comes at the conclusion, in Roberto Corrêa's discussion of the musical elements in the ensembles' repertoires, which includes musical transcriptions of some melodies and percussion parts. While the texts have been carefully crafted to avoid exoticizations, one is still left a bit disappointed by the fact that none of the writers seem to have undertaken extensive field research into the specific traditions they have represented. Thus, the texts are often rather general, at times quite problematically so. In linking contemporary practices in the Festival of the Rosary to the African context, "the Bantu" tend to be represented as a coherent and unified entity. Moreover, there are several different types of performance groups that participate in the Festival, including moçambiques, marinheiros, catoptés, vilões, but no clear explanation is provided [End...

Performing Respectability: The Berav, Middle-Class Nationalism, and the Classicization of Kandyan Dance in Sri Lanka

Among the traditional Kandyan dancers of Sri Lanka, a story circulates about the son of Nittawela Gunaya, the nation's most renowned traditional dancer of the 1940s and 1950s. After Gunaya's death, it is said, the son destroyed all evidence of his father's profession, even burning, in an act of desecration, his most prized possession, the sacred ves headdress that had been conferred on Gunaya at his initiation ceremony. Dancers recount this story to illustrate the shame and the suffering that even the most publicly esteemed of traditional dancers have experienced for more than 50 years. For even as their aesthetic legacy, the Kandyan dance, has been elevated as a national symbol of Sri Lanka, the traditional dancers and their families have increasingly become marginalized within the sphere of national public culture. At least, this is part of the story. Another part of the story is that, for over four decades, from the 1940s to the 1990s, the traditional dancers from the berava (drummer) caste of Kandy largely dominated the field of dance teaching, the only viable profession for dancers in Sri Lanka. During this period the dance was transformed from a ritual to a stage practice, and participation in the dance expanded from a small number of initiated berava dancers to virtually all of the schoolchildren of Sri Lanka's majority ethnic group, the Sinhalas. Since the 1950s the state has been the key patron of Kandyan dance, incorporating it into the school curriculum, sponsoring dance tours abroad, funding numerous national dance troupes (including those of the army and police), and establishing a variety of aesthetic teacher training institutes. Although the berava have often suffered from caste and class discrimination, the elevation of their practice to national status has also provided some space for social mobility and redefinition. Relationships between nation-states and subaltern groups have become a cynosure for understanding the experiential meanings of nationalism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In South Asia, particularly for India, there is a

Shaping Society Through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes, by Zoila S. Mendoza. 2000. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. xv + 240 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, audio compact disc, videotape. $54.00 cloth; $29.00 paper.

During the patron saint fiesta in the Andean town of San Jeronimo, Peru, crowds gather at sunset in the town square, eagerly awaiting the entrance of the colourful dance troupes, or comparsas. With their masks, music and surprising interpretations of contemporary events, the comparsas of the Cusco region are the focus of this multifaceted work. At the crossroads of folklore and ritual, mass media and local preferences, and regional and national identity, the comparsas -recorded here on video and compact disc - have become a powerful way for the local people to make sense of their place in Peru and in the world. As Zoila Mendoza shows, they do more than reflect societal changes, they actively transform society. In this fluid world, she argues, racial and ethnic identities are shaped more by notions of what is decent, elegant and modern rather than by skin colour or status. As the different troupes vie for the townspeople's recognition as the most authentic group, these notions are challenged and reworked. A fascinating look at a rich tradition, this innovative work is also a compelling example of the critical anthropology of performance.

Ethiopian Folk Dance: the emergence of organized ethnic dance troupes in Ethiopia, and changes in dance teaching methodology

Ethiopian Folk Dance: the emergence of organized ethnic dance troupes in Ethiopia, and changes in dance teaching methodology

Maja Dress and The Andalusian Image of Spain

This study examines use of maja costume to express the Andalusian image of Spain. The visual appearance of the costume is described and its wearers are identified. Portraits and other works of art, extant costumes, and travel accounts were the primary sources of data. Works of art and stage productions, including ballets with Spanish themes, traveling Spanish dance troupes, and Bizet's opera Carmen have contributed to and perpetuated the Andalusian image of Spain. The use of the maja costume to symbolize Andalusia and Spain is discussed.

Aztec Conchero Dance Tradition: Historic, Religious and Cultural Significance

The tradition of the current Aztec conchero dancers seen in Mexico and more recently in the U.S. originated shortly after the Spanish invaded Mexico in 1521. As a form of accommodation, the Native Americans that survived the invasion of the Spanish were allowed, under Spanish eccesiastical supervision, to conduct their dances in the courtyards of churches in honor of saints or virgins represented there. The dance troupes imitated a military type of hierarchy, the head being the captain (capitan), two women captains who tend the altar and who supervise other women, two sergeants (sargentos) who tend the altar and supervise trips (marchas), and two standard bearers (alfareces). The men are referred to as warriors, the women as malinches. Malinche here refers not to the concept of traitor, originating from the lover and interpreter of Cortes, but rather a positive image of the historic Malintzil, a person that assists the soldiers. These Aztec dancers use a plumed headdress, a cape, and a stringed instrument made with the armor of an armadillo; moreover, rattles from shell-like seeds known as chalchahuites or ayayotes provide a pre-Columbian native quality of sound that accompanies the intricate steps of the dancer. Also accompanying the dance is the rhythm of a tall wooden drum known as the huehuetl (from Aztec Nahuatl wewetl). It is estimated that there may be as many as 50,000 conchero Aztec dancers in Mexico; in the United States, there are conchero dance groups represented in every state where there is a sizeable population of Mestizos, i.e., those that are part Native American and Spanish. Most recently, the performance based troupes (as opposed to traditional, sacred and ritualistic) have been seen participating in North-American Native pow-wows. The origin of the conchero tradition as it is known today is the result of an accommodation between Spanish/Christian authorities and Native Americans of Mexico circa 1537.1 There are two schools of thought regarding the authenticity of the conchero tradition: (1) Those who see it

Observing a Yang Ch'in Lesson: Learning by Modeling and Metaphor

On Friday morning, May 30, 1986, my colleague Bennett Reimer and I visited the Chinese Traditional Music Department of the Shenyang Conservatory in northeast China. As team members of an arts education exchange program with the People's Republic of China, we had already spent nearly three months observing Chinese music education in nearly every possible setting, including kindergartens, primary schools, middle schools, normal (teachers) colleges, and universities; traditional opera schools, song and dance troupes, and conservatories. Today was special because we had been told that sometime during the morning we would be able to observe a yang-ch'in lesson. Introduced to China during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), the yang-ch'in is a dulcimer played with mallets and is a standard member of the traditional silk and bamboo ensemble.

Carnival at Luanda

The tradition of carnival-type street festivals and competitive dance troupes appears to be an old one in Luanda. In 1620, at the end of the most serious round of slave wars in Angola's history, political allegory and mimicry were included in the street processions celebrating the canonization of Saint Francis Xavier. In the nineteenth century the Creole community regularly adapted its public ceremonials to the shifting political and religious climate. In the age of white settlement, during the middle decades of the twentieth century, ‘native’ dance troops were officially encouraged until their potential nationalism was discerned. After independence, government tried to revive carnival for its own ends and according to its own calendar of state ceremonial. At one level the carnival continued to exorcise the fear of authority among the powerless. At another the political dimension was eclipsed by the competitive rivalries of local communities seeking identity and prestige. The structures continued to use the old ritual patterns of leadership with kings, queens, commanders and soldiers. Economic influence continued to be wielded by the great fishing families who invested important resources into conspicuous clothing and ceremonial feasting as they had done for centuries. The spectators responded at many different levels of appreciation.