Choreographic RevisionsThe Eagle Dance as Historical Hallmark of Unto These Hills Heidi L. Nees (bio) Over the past few decades, there has been an upsurge in Native and Indigenous performance arts to revisit and remember—to tell through retelling—stories of the past and how they have shaped Native and Indigenous identities and knowledges as those stories, identities, and knowledges have struggled to survive continued expropriation, abuse, and erasure. Native dance, specifically, has experienced revitalization through a number of Native artists' endeavors to interweave the traditional with the contemporary. —Shay Welch This is a story of a dramatized version of the Cherokee Eagle Dance. Or perhaps what follows are snapshots of a (hi)story of a dramatized version of the Cherokee Eagle Dance as performed in the outdoor historical drama, Unto These Hills. This essay, then, explores the ways past moments of choreographic design circle each other and enact perceptions about Cherokee culture and history. One purpose in writing these histories is to preserve them, an act that I recognize is not unencumbered, especially when discussing an embodied, Indigenous cultural practice. In doing so, I do not intend to commit these performances to the past, nor do I intend to lock down a meaning for these performances. Rather, I call attention to a particular incarnation of a long-running dance in order to consider what this signature element of a decades-old production says about this drama, modes of artistic and cultural creation, and Cherokee culture.1 By interpolating context regarding two of the show's past choreographers—Foster Fitz-Simons, the show's original choreographer, and Larissa FastHorse, who served in this [End Page 107] capacity from 2007 to 2011—in accounts of Unto These Hills, this essay explores the aesthetic styles and their mentors' legacies in their choreographies. These predecessors' histories contribute to the palimpsestic nature of the Eagle Dance, within which modern dance history, theatre history, and Cherokee history commingle. Another layer to this exploration concerns the modes by which Unto These Hills depicts the historical past while also featuring a traditional Cherokee dance, the Eagle Dance, that is not temporally confined to the past.2 That is, the traditional version of this dance enacts culturally specific epistemologies in the present. And yet, historically, the dramatized version of the dance was detached from that function. I consider the ways that Larissa FastHorse's 2011 version of the dramatized Eagle Dance called upon the past and present in its invocation of repertoire-based and intergenerational knowledge and identity transfer. I argue that FastHorse's choreography commingled styles of movement in manners that captured the tension and inextricable interdependencies of various incarnations of the dance, which reflected shifting notions of authenticity for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) and its history. To connect these various points, I turn to artist Daystar/Rosalie Jones, who simultaneously ponders and affirms the future of Native modern dance: "Be assured it will not be in a straight line, as in western thinking, a projectile speeding into the vast unknown. As in all things cyclical, the 'dance of the people' will continue naturally to circle, as ripples in a pond, filtering through history and ancestry and sacred story and back again, moving ever outward but taking meaning and substance in remembering the original source."3 The variegated visions of dance's expressive potential and the ways in which Unto These Hills' Eagle Dance has manifested those expressions circle each other, with the ripples of influential pasts infusing subsequent understandings of the ways in which notions of "traditional," "modern," "contemporary," and "history" commingle. I begin with information about outdoor historical drama as a genre, and dance's role therein, drawing on primary source materials published in the mid-twentieth century, when the form first emerged. I then provide information about Unto These Hills before addressing the Eagle Dance and tracing the dramatized version's stylistic lineage. My attention to the 2011 version of the Eagle Dance is framed by scholarship on Indigenous epistemologies and dance, as well as by anecdotal reflections by FastHorse. I locate FastHorse's dance influences within modern dance contexts related to those of Fitz-Simons, demonstrating the intermingling of...
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Apr 12, 2024
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