Dance Returns to American Cultural Diplomacy: The U.S.State Department's 2003 Dance Residency Program and Its After Effects

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks in the U.S., American policymakers reevaluated how the U.S. presented itself to the world with renewed urgency. Cultural diplomacy—the branch of diplomacy that includes cultural products and encounters ranging from English-language libraries abroad to arts and student exchanges—frequently was named in Congressional hearings and policy directives as a potential antidote to ill will and fractured relationships. This article examines the heightened interest in cultural diplomacy post-9/11 and cultural diplomacy's relationship to American dance. I consider, first, how federal policymaking discourse gave rise to a 2003 dance residency program, the first signs since the early decades of the Cold War of a reinvigoration of dance in diplomacy programs. My greatest concern in this examination is to refuse comparisons between the Cold War and post 9/11 periods that are too simple, and rather to examine twenty-first century cultural diplomacy as a product of its geopolitical context.

After mapping the broader political landscape, I focus on a 2003 U.S. State Department-sponsored dance program that sent dance artists to work in countries considered to have large Muslim populations. I focus specifically on a collaboration that developed from the 2003 government program: a four-year exchange between San Francisco, California-based choreographer Margaret Jenkins, who leads Margaret Jenkins Dance Company (MJDC), and Kolkata, India-based choreographer Tansuree Shankar, who leads Tansuree Shankar Dance. Shankar and Jenkins saw gaps in the U.S. State Department programming and found ways to work beyond the parameters of the government-funded program. The collaboration of the two women, which included creating and touring the piece A Slipping Glimpse (2005), offers a potential blueprint for future federal efforts, particularly those interested, as cultural diplomacy legislation tends to be, in forging long-term, international relationships. The piece, in process and on stage, embodies a central tension of cultural diplomacy: on one hand, a desire for Americans and non-Americans to better understand one another and, on the other, increasing American global power and standing.

Studying the 2003 program, which was created during the G.W. Bush administration—an administration cited for its inattention to diplomacy—is important because the U.S. State Department recently announced permanent funding structures for international dance tours, including DanceMotion USA, which sends American dance companies abroad, and Center Stage, which brings Haitian, Pakistani, and Indonesian artists to the US.¹ These new programs should be seen in relationship to both recent cultural diplomacy history and Cold War history. They are not merely products of a changing of the guard from Bush to Obama in Washington, DC. Nor are they direct corollaries to early Cold War cultural efforts, even though the Obama campaign's art platform draws such a comparison, describing artists' efforts abroad as helping "win the war of ideas against Islamic extremism" just as Cold War arts ambassadors demonstrated "to the world the promise of America" (Obama/Biden Arts Platform 2007). The post-9/11 interest in cultural diplomacy has come from across the political spectrum and is driven by twin desires to export the so-called "best" of American art, while also using arts diplomacy as a tool for Americans to engage with foreign publics.

Studying the policies that guide cultural diplomacy while also studying how artists work in these programs offers a sense of how cultural diplomacy is imagined by policymakers, implemented by both policymakers and artists, and, sometimes, reimagined by artists. This layered research approach requires multiple methodological strategies, including analysis of documents charting post-9/11 ideas about cultural diplomacy; transcripts of Congressional hearings and government-and nongovernment-produced white papers; interviews with artists who participated in the 2003 program and the subsequent Shankar-Jenkins collaboration; and performance analysis of A Slipping Glimpse, which I witnessed through video and in live performance. All these angles forge a record of the 2003 program and its nongovernment offshoots and facilitate an analysis of dance in cultural diplomacy...