Dance and American Art: A Long Embrace

1. Expressing the Real or Imagined Heritage of a Nation

13 Prelude to the Dance: American Beginnings F rom the earliest arrivals of Europeans on the shores of what would become the United States, a scattering of visual artists stepped off ships to gaze for the first time on new landscapes and their indigenous inhabitants. Artists’ images of Native American ceremonials were among the first records of what they saw. Often referred to as dances, they were more properly ritual enactments of ancient connections to nature and the spiritual realm. Such ritual dramas were fascinating in their diversity and their broad communal participation , and as pure visual spectacle. Despite the frequent prohibition against onsite recordings, artists often could not resist drawing or painting what they saw, working out of mere curiosity on one hand or, more subtly, as a means of experiencing more fully the unfamiliar pairings of rhythmic sacred movement and its profound connections to newly encountered places. Our intent here is not to survey that vast range of imagery, but rather to look selectively at just a few early and visually compelling responses to Native American ritual dance subjects. English artist-cartographer John White (fl. 1585– 93), arriving in the coastal territory of Virginia in 1585, made detailed watercolor drawings of the inhabitants and natural environment, with an intent to attract future settlers to the area. White’s elevated view of a circle of ceremonial dancers, The Dances at Their Great Feasts (c. 1590; fig. 1), was made into an engraving by Theodor de Bry (1528–98). White himself captioned the scene as “a ceremony in their prayers with strange gestures and songs dancing about posts carved on the tops like men’s faces.” Male and female dancers form a circle defined by the posts, in the center of which three Native women stand together. Clearly the indigenous carvers, artists themselves, created important links between their sculpted images and their ritual dance. White and his expedition colleagues, including Walter Raleigh and Thomas Hariot, were not sure what to make of the dancing they saw, but they readily associated it with nature worship. And they were right, to an extent. The proximity of ritual object and dance evokes associations facilitated by a shaman. Shamans are people with special powers, perhaps artists and dancers, who mediate between the human and the spirit world. Typically they enter trance states during which they fly, receiving communications from spirit guides in the form of animals or birds. Expressing the Real or Imagined Heritage of a Nation 1 14 art, dance, and amerIcan conscIousness Another indigenous figure John White painted during his years in Virginia seems to be demonstrating just that form of ancient and widespread power. In fact, White captioned his shamanic dancing figure The Flyer (c. 1587–88; fig. 2). In this reproduction of a watercolor in the British Museum, White’s Flyer, with his upraised arms and active stride, enacts more of the “strange gestures” the artist had noted in the ritual circle. Of special note in the watercolor is that White’s Flyer wears a small bird attached to the side of his head, likely a spirit guide and emblem of his shamanic power. The key word here is power, a palpable presence inhabiting the Flyer and invoking a certain awe, even fear, in sixteenth-century white observers. As White’s companion Hariot noted, “They have sorcerers or jugglers who use strange gestures and whose enchantments often go against the laws of nature. For they are very familiar with devils.”1 White’s careful visual record, part of a body of work with promotional as well as reportorial motives, may have helped to unleash another kind of promotional zeal: the Christian missionary impulse, which would propel many a future expedition among Native Americans. Whatever else they signify, the Flyer’s movements are unmistakably a kind of ritual dance in its broadest sense, that is, a form of powerful, rhythmic movement. In its performance and in White’s urgent visual translation, we see further evidence of the combined power of dance and visual art to extend the boundaries of human thought, feeling, and perception. Figure 1 Theodor de Bry, The Dances at Their Great Feasts, 1590, engraving after watercolor by John White. (photo courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USZX62-40055) Figure 2 Reproduction of The Flyer [The Sorcerer] by John White, c. 1587–88, watercolor, 9¼ × 6 inches. (original in the British Museum, photo courtesy Library of Congress, LC...