Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture, Identities (review)

Dancing from Past to Present: Nation, Culture, Identities, edited by Theresa Jill Buckland for the Society of Dance History Scholars series, "Studies in Dance History," foregrounds disciplines employed to study dance as objects of inquiry. Anthropology, dance ethnology, folk life studies, dance history, and performance studies are mobilized by the contributing authors to wrestle with a range of local case studies from various parts of the world. Tonga, Java, Bosnia-Herzegovina, New Mexico, India, Korea, Macedonia, and England are represented, not to suggest any globally comprehensive approach to the study of nation and identity, culture, and history in dance, but to provide the reader with a series of provocative, reflexive essays.

In her introductory essay, "Dance, History, and Ethnography: Frameworks, Sources, and Identities of Past and Present," Buckland lays out the principle issues that run throughout this collection. Ethnography and history, as fields of inquiry and as methodologies, have typically been opposed, insofar as dance ethnographers primarily work in the "field" whereas historians are concerned with material to be found in archives. But with the crossing of disciplines, synchronic and diachronic perspectives also merge, enabling dance scholars to consider dance forms as historically situated yet ethnographically accessible cultural practices. "Folk culture," as a concept that engages ethnic and national identity in opposition to European high culture or civilization, for example, is complicated in East European scholarship, where state-funded folk cultural studies still dominate. Government-funded institutes of ethnology and ethnography were long colored by the "folk paradigm," beleaguering folk studies today with debates about "political affiliations with nationalism" (6). Similarly, uses of the past in the nation-building projects of 19th-century Europe set concepts of tradition and modernity into motion in the evolutionist paradigm of 19th-century scholarship, but were challenged by postcolonial interrogations of culture and authenticity, continuity and change.

In her essay, "Dances and Dancing in Tonga: Anthropological and Historical Discourses," Adrienne L. Kaeppler interrogates the designation of "history" as a linear account of events, replacing it with an idea of history according to which only some fortuitous "moments" are noted. Her own experience as a participant-observer of Tongan dance in the 1960s and 1998, and her use of the theoretical analogy of dance with language, style, and aesthetics, enabled her to draw an idiosyncratic picture of the evolution of dance in Tonga by juxtaposing her experience with an 18th-century record described in Captain James Cook's journals. For Kaeppler, the transformation of the dance genre now known as lakalaka is predicated upon changing social structures: whereas the more poetic and obscure form of danced poetry based on the heliaki style was prevalent in earlier periods, by the 1990s, the gesturally and rhetorically complex, and highly metaphorical, form of address was replaced by an overtly political, narrative, chronological account of local history and biography. This enabled regents to speak publicly to a wide audience about national affairs in the public celebrations at which the dance is performed. Court and national ancestors' names and deeds were now stated simply, without the gestural and rhetorical allusions characteristic of the heliaki style. For Felicia Hughes-Freeland, stories about the historical origins of court dance in Javanese culture are deeply embedded in a national rhetoric about Indonesian national identity. In "Constructing a Classical Tradition: Javanese Court Dance in Indonesia," she argues that modern Indonesian culture is largely reactive, created contrapuntally to postindependence and postcolonial modernization processes. A myth of origins is transposed onto dance forms to grant legitimacy to the Indonesian state in much the same way as tenth-century Hindu-Javanese regents sponsored dance-drama performances to claim their supremacy. For Janet O'Shea, in "Dancing through History and Ethnography: Indian Classical Dance and the Performance of the Past," bharata natyam is based on a movement vocabulary derived from the past, but contemporary dancers take some liberties with the forms. They elongate their gestures and broaden their floor patterns to accommodate proscenium...