I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom
200
I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom
200eBook
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Overview
"Danielle Goldman's contribution to the theory and history of improvisation in dance is rich, beautiful and extraordinary. In her careful, rigorously imaginative analysis of the discipline of choreography in real time, Goldman both compels and allows us to become initiates in the mysteries of flight and preparation. She studies the massive volitional resources that one unleashes in giving oneself over to being unleashed. It is customary to say of such a text that it is 'long-awaited' or 'much anticipated'; because of Goldman's work we now know something about the potenza, the kinetic explosion, those terms carry. Reader, get ready to move and be moved."
---Fred Moten, Duke University
"In this careful, intelligent, and theoretically rigorous book, Danielle Goldman attends to the 'tight spaces' within which improvised dance explores both its limitations and its capacity to press back against them. While doing this, Goldman also allows herself---and us---to be moved by dance itself. The poignant conclusion, evoking specific moments of embodied elegance, vulnerability, and courage, asks the reader: 'Does it make you feel like dancing?' Whether taken literally or figuratively, I can't imagine any other response to this beautiful book."
---Barbara Browning, New York University
"This book will become the single most important reflection on the question of improvisation, a question which has become foundational to dance itself. The achievement of I Want to Be Ready lies not simply in its mastery of the relevant literature within dance, but in its capacity to engage dance in a deep and abiding dialogue with other expressive forms, to think improvisation through myriad sites and a rich vein of cultural diversity, and to join improvisation in dance with its manifestations in life so as to consider what constitutes dance's own politics."
---Randy Martin, Tisch School of Arts at New York University
I Want To Be Ready draws on original archival research, careful readings of individual performances, and a thorough knowledge of dance scholarship to offer an understanding of the "freedom" of improvisational dance. While scholars often celebrate the freedom of improvised performances, they are generally focusing on freedom from formal constraints. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Houston Baker, among others, Danielle Goldman argues that this negative idea of freedom elides improvisation's greatest power. Far from representing an escape from the necessities of genre, gender, class, and race, the most skillful improvisations negotiate an ever shifting landscape of constraints. This work will appeal to those interested in dance history and criticism and also interdisciplinary audiences in the fields of American and cultural studies.
Danielle Goldman is Assistant Professor of Dance at The New School and a professional dancer in New York City, where she recently has danced for DD Dorvillier and Beth Gill.
Cover art: Still from Ghostcatching, 1999, by Bill T. Jones, Paul Kaiser, and Shelley Eshkar. Image courtesy of Kaiser/Eshkar.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472026616 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 05/18/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 459 KB |
About the Author
Danielle Goldman is Assistant Professor of Dance at The New School and a professional dancer in New York City, where she recently has danced for DD Dorvillier and Beth Gill.
Read an Excerpt
I WANT TO BE READY
Improvised Dance as a Practice of FreedomBy Danielle Goldman
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Danielle GoldmanAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-05084-0
Chapter One
Mambo's Open Shines: Causing Circles at the Palladium
Mura Dehn's The Spirit Moves, a three-part film of social dance from 1900 through the 1950s, offers a rare opportunity to see the mambo dancing that flourished in midcentury New York City. In grainy black and white, the film contains two types of mambo footage: scenes of masses dancing at the Palladium and the Savoy, two famous New York City ballrooms, and more carefully staged improvisations that Dehn recorded in a studio. In the film's dance hall scenes, people gather in crowded spaces to watch the evening's most exceptional dancers. The spectators look on with rapt attention, occasionally swaying or shifting in response to musical breaks. Meanwhile, dressed for a night on the town, the dancers weave in and out of each other's spaces, spinning intricate mambos on a packed wooden floor.
With mambo, couples alternate between partnered embraces and solo improvisations poetically known as "open shines." Several couples in Dehn's film display stunning improvisational skill, but one couple's stealthy rhythmic sensibility quickly focuses our attention: a long-limbed man, clad in a pale suit and dark tie, and a woman with cropped hair, wearing a shiny tank dress and open-toe, high-heeled shoes. Delicately touching the man's left hand, the woman circles counterclockwise, taking small steps, punctuating the clave with a regular 2/4 beat. Meanwhile, her hips swing side to side, flesh pressing against satin in an aching rubato. She slaps her left thigh repeatedly as her partner moves on the musical downbeat, carving his own concentric circles as he slowly descends toward the ground.
Elsewhere on the dance floor, two partners circle widely around each other. The man stops repeatedly during the course of his open shine, halting expansively before reentering the music's rhythmic pulse. At one point, he executes a whirling inward turn on one leg, breaking with his back arched. Time freezes. And then he languidly pitches forward to pick up where he left off. Meanwhile, his partner circles around him, purse clutched in her raised left hand. She takes small steps, forward and back, projecting awareness from every surface of her body. Surveying the scene, she inscribes a delicate moat around herself as she goes. But with impeccable smoothness, she rejoins her partner, and they continue their mambo with arms intertwined.
In addition to the dance hall footage described earlier, The Spirit Moves contains more carefully staged improvisations that Dehn filmed in a studio. As in the dance hall scenes, Dehn's studio footage reveals virtuosic improvisations. But in the studio, the walls and floor are covered entirely in white, suggesting an attempt to render the room "neutral," so one can focus on the dancing. No space, however, is ever neutral, and no dancing occurs in a vacuum. Ngugi wa Thiong'o makes this point in his response to Peter Brook's famous pronouncement that any empty space could be a bare stage. According to wa Thiong'o: "Performance space is never empty. Bare, yes; open, yes; but never empty. It is always the site of physical, social, and psychic forces in society." Obviously, the dancers in Dehn's studio scenes were dancing in a particular time and place-in a studio in the 1950s, in front of Mura Dehn, a Russian woman who had studied at the Moscow Art Theatre and the Academy of Arts in Vienna and became fascinated by jazz and black social dance upon moving to the United States. What's disturbing is that the whiteness of the studio suggests an attempt to erase context. One cannot distinguish floor from walls from ceiling. The dancers, in this case mostly people of color, appear in a created "nowhere," fetishized in a freaky, floating world.
Although it is unlikely that this was Dehn's intention, the juxtaposition of studio and dance hall scenes in The Spirit Moves emphasizes the importance of context when considering the political significance of mambo. What's at stake when a woman spontaneously clutches her purse above her head, while taking small steps and surveying the scene? What does it mean to emphasize a musical break, choosing when and how to move again? What's significant about a white Russian woman, camera in hand, who is utterly fascinated by black social dance in New York City? One cannot remove dance from its social and historical contexts and expect to understand its political meaning. This chapter's discussion of mambo therefore focuses on a particular time and location: mambo as it was danced in the mid-1950s at the Palladium ballroom, an extravagant dance hall located in midtown Manhattan on the corner of Broadway and 53rd Street.
The Palladium's racial integration was unique for its time, enabling many people to step away from their everyday lives to dance and be glamorous for a few hours. Reflecting on their evenings at the Palladium, dancers frequently explain in golden terms how they were transformed and greatly moved by their experience. But the Palladium was not a "free" space where everything was equal and anything was possible. A variety of constraints, imposed by racism, sexism, and physical training, shaped how people moved within the Palladium on any given night. Although people engaged with social norms and expectations in multiple locations-as they ordered drinks, or walked up the stairs, or paid their admission fees-these negotiations achieved particular brilliance on the dance floor, especially in mambo's improvised breaks.
As partners split apart to dance solo improvisations-with elegant circles and swinging hips-they negotiated the social strictures of the space in both rhythmic and choreographic terms. The results were neither uniform nor guaranteed, but that is what made the improvisations most powerful and urgently live. For the most skilled improvisers, the Palladium was not a place in which constraint could be completely or straightforwardly ignored. On the contrary, dancers became intimately acquainted with a shifting landscape of tight places, rigorously exploring its contours. Night after night, they moved their bodies in relation to those strictures, testing limits and creating fleeting new spaces in which to shine.
Traversing Borders
Scholars typically begin their histories of mambo by describing a variety of charged scenes. Robert Farris Thompson begins his particular tale in Havana, 1939, with a dramatic incident emphasizing the presence of Kongo religion in mambo. As Thompson tells the story, Orestes López, a composer and instrumentalist who guided one of Cuba's most prominent danzón orchestras, introduced the religious term mambo into the dance hall. López believed that singing the word mambo from a bandstand had the potential to inspire vivid reactions. As he predicted, chants of "Mambo! Mambo!" transformed into deep, staccato orchestral syncopation. On the dance floor, couples spontaneously split apart to dance, with men circling women and women circling men. According to Thompson, this dance hall event had tremendous implications, splitting the Western couple dance and introducing African forms and religious feeling into symphonic music.
In telling the story of Orestes López, Thompson describes a significant evening that possibly instigated the naming of dance hall mambo. But the deep African presence in the dance did not emerge on account of an individual's singular inspiration, on a particular night. Yvonne Daniel's careful study "Cuban Dance: An Orchard of Caribbean Creativity" sketches the various European and African antecedents that contributed to the formation of mambo. Daniel begins by discussing the European influences within Cuban dance culture, which came from southern Spain but also from French colonists who left Haiti for Cuba around the time of the Haitian revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth century. She explains that the European seeds within Cuban dance contributed "straight back posture, touching of male and female partners, stanza with verse song-style, and interest in rhythm (seen in stamped foot patterns and some hip movement)." Interestingly, Daniel attributes this early emphasis on the hips to the presence of North African culture that existed within Spain from the Moors' invasion, beginning in the eighth century. Revealing the complex ways in which movement travels across borders and cultures, and highlighting the problem with simple origin stories, Daniel suggests that early African traces within Cuban dances came from within Europe.
The later African influence came as Africans from the coasts of West and Central Africa were brought to Cuba as an enslaved labor force to aid in sugar production. Daniel claims that, out of the many African ethnic groups brought to Cuba, four distinct dance and music traditions emerged into prominence: "(1) Kongo (or Kongo-Angolan, Bantú, or Palo), (2) Arará, (3) Carabalí (Abakuá or Ñáñigo), and the best known, (4) Yoruba (or Lucumí, Oricha, or Santería)." Although significant differences exist among these traditions, Cuban dance forms have been influenced greatly by their similarities, most notably an emphasis on polyrhythm, played on percussion instruments as well as danced with isolated body parts; a call-and-response pattern between singer and chorus; accentuated use of the lower body, with dynamic hip movement; and, of course, improvisation.
During the mid-nineteenth century, several uniquely Cuban dance forms emerged out of the diverse movement traditions that made their way onto Cuban soil. Daniel outlines five major developments: el son, la rumba, el danzón, el punto guajiro o campesino, and la canción cubana, a song-form that is not danced. According to Daniel, one can see blended variations of European and African cultures in son, which is danced to a rhythm called son clave-a syncopated rhythmic pattern that repeats as either "one, two / one, two, three //" or "one, two, three / one, two //." This rhythmic pattern exists throughout Cuba's African-derived traditions and in various musical traditions with African roots across the Caribbean and North America. Musicians in Cuba initially played sones with Spanish guitars, but the form expanded to include African drums, woodwind instruments, and even pianos. As for the dance, couples touch in a European manner, with relatively straight backs. But the dance accentuates the hips, allowing a division between the upper and lower torso, which creates visible polyrhythms within the body. All of this takes place over an intricate, rhythmic foot pattern.
Mambo emerged in the 1940s and 1950s as one of son's most popular international variations, traversing numerous borders. Travel, immigration, and the circulation of movies and records resulted in mambo's wide dispersion and caused changes in its form and significance. Daniel provides an excellent description of mambo, noting differences between Cuban and New York styles during the 1940s and 1950s. According to Daniel, the Cuban mambo had a bouncy quality, with a "touch, step" foot pattern alternating between the right and left foot. She writes: "The toe of the right foot touches the floor momentarily and then the whole right foot takes a step; this pattern is repeated on the left and continues to alternate. Above, the hips (really pelvis) move forward and back with each touch, step of the feet. The hands and arms move alternately forward and back, each arm in opposition to the feet." Daniel explains that outside of Cuba, particularly in New York, mambo retained a "short, short, long" foot pattern along with "the suave and seductive sense of its earlier son heritage." In Cuba and elsewhere, partners engaged in a series of partnered turns, and in the United States, couples broke from the closed partner stance to improvise separately in open shines before rejoining in a closed-partner position. This was the Palladium dancers' claim to fame, and it was where dancers tried most to develop individual style.
Dancers in Cuba danced mambo throughout the 1940s, as a variety of composers, including Arsenio Rodríguez and Dámaso Pérez Prado, transcribed Orestes López's orchestral innovations. Then, by the early 1950s, the recording industry helped to instigate the musical form's global popularity. When Prado moved to Mexico City in 1949, he frequented one of RCA Victor's studios and recorded hugely popular mambo renditions that were played on radios and sold internationally. Of course, a desire for Cuban music within the United States had been growing well before mambo became popular, with executives from record companies making regular trips to Cuba as early as 1890 in search of promising performers. The fascination with Latin music and dance then grew markedly during the era of Franklin Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor Policy." In the president's inaugural address in 1933, signaling what he said was his desire to improve relations with Central and South America and to distance the United States from past interventionist policies, Roosevelt pronounced, "In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor-the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others." As part of Roosevelt's opposition to armed intervention, he abolished the 1903 treaty with Cuba that granted the United States the power to intervene militarily in Cuban affairs in order to "preserve [its] internal stability or independence." The "Good Neighbor Policy" had a cultural arm as well, with the State Department suggesting that Hollywood might breach the cultural divide between the United States and Latin America. Although its aim was to eradicate racist stereotypes and cultural bias, the "Latin explosion" in cinema hardly succeeded on these terms. In "Of Rhythms and Borders," Ana López discusses portrayals of Latin American music and dance in classic Hollywood cinema. She argues that Hollywood's fetishistic interest in "all things Latin" presented utter disregard for national specificity. To illustrate this point, she notes:
Carmen Miranda is incongruously "Brazilian" in a studio-produced Argentina (Down Argentine Way, Irving Cummings, 1940) and Cuba (Weekend in Havana, Walter Lang, 1941); Desi Arnaz [plays] an Argentine conga-playing student in New Mexico college in Too Many Girls (George Abbott, 1940); Ricardo Montalbán [plays] a Mexican classical composer that dances Spanish flamenco in Fiesta (Jack Cummings, 1947); and Gene Kelly [plays] an Anglo sailor on leave who happens upon a stage version of Olvera Street in the Los Angeles of Anchors Aweigh (Stanley Donen, 1945) and dances a "Mexican Hat Dance" to the Argentine tango "La cumparsita."
Classic Hollywood films frequently mangled cultural specificity in their representations of cultural others. Still, one must be careful that analyses of appropriation don't obscure other complex modes of exchange and reception.
For example, careful study of mambo suggests that a one-directional story of pure subaltern origin followed by hegemonic appropriation is too simple. As illustrated in Daniel's complex genealogy of music and dance traditions in Cuba, where dance forms like son are already deep amalgamations, one can't say that mambo originated in Cuba and then moved directly to Hollywood, where it was monolithically appropriated and Anglicized. While appropriation did occur, seen not only in movies but in dance studios where upright versions of "Latin" dances with minimal syncopation and virtually no improvisation were taught, mambo's movement, especially in the early to mid-1950s, was complicated and multidirectional.
(Continues...)
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