Universal dancing bodies

When I was a girl, my ballet teacher taught a British method known as the Royal Academy of Dance. The levels were graded like piano instruction is in the Royal Conservatory of Music, and there were exams to pass at the end of the year (“so old school”, my daughters would say). Part of the exam that I looked forward to every year was performing the National dance, a different European folk dance for each grade. I remember the Italian Tarantella with a brightly ribboned tambourine, the proud, clicking heels of the Polish Mazurka, and the swaying hips and fiery jumps of the Spanish Jota. I loved them all. They were my first introduction to how bodies moved differently in different places and cultures, though it would be a long time before I realized that what I was learning had been filtered through a colonial British world view. In my small, white world, each dance seemed like a breathe of fresh air, and I spent hours perfecting the styles, trying to capture their distinctiveness.

When I moved to Toronto, suddenly the doors to a diverse world of dance blew wide open. I could watch Chinese dancers in street festivals, attend live African soukous concerts with African Canadians down at Harbourfront, dance salsa in Latin American clubs. So many ways to move and feel music, so many ways to be human! Before I really knew anything about racism beyond that it was bad, before I went back to university at 26 and learned about the devastating impact of colonialism, I watched dancing bodies. That was how I understood difference. I followed how the movements came from different places in the body. Whereas I moved up and down, they moved side-to-side. When I hopped, they stayed low to the ground. I listened to the rhythm and the words of the songs, and I watched how their bodies responded, and found I was learning about culture, not just dance.

In my late 20’s I decided to complete an independent research project for a university credit. By that time, I’d completed 2 years of course work, mostly in critical theory in the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program, and my own critical analysis was starting to take shape. I was angry that ballet received so much government funding but what everyday people seemed to love the most, like me, was folk dance, and yet these dance troupes received next to no support. I interviewed 40 dancers from different “multicultural” dance troupes and soloists around the city: Ukrainian, Ghanaian, Mexican, Indian, you name it. I asked them how many hours they spent training. How often they performed. Whether they saw themselves as amateur, pre-professional, or professional. And how much funding they received from the Ontario Arts Council.

The OAC had just announced the creation of a new stream of funding for multicultural dance (i.e. non-Western dance, or in other words, pretty much any form other than ballet or modern/contemporary), but the amounts they were dispersing were very small. As part of the research, I interviewed the head of the OAC dance department and recorded her saying essentially that ballet received more funding because it was a “universal” dance form. I was shocked by the Eurocentrism of her viewpoint, and so I anchored my research analysis in post-colonial theory to explain why a white Canadian woman could feel ballet was anything but an upper class art form from the European courts of France, Italy, England, and Russia. I wrote up my findings and submitted it to my professor, who loved it and asked me to present it an international dance conference in Mexico. I was on the moon!

The head of the OAC dance department, however, was not on the moon. She was in a fit of rage actually. And panic. My report was critical of the new funding stream and asked if non-Western dance forms were being streamed into “non-professional” categories, while everyone else was hailing it as a breakthrough for equity in the arts. She demanded I come to her office, where she announced that the OAC would act to stop me from attending the conference, and that my passport would be blocked.

I dissolved into a puddle of tears, ashamed of losing control of my emotions in front of a stranger. This was not the first time I had been wounded by the dominator behaviours of people in the dance world; the ballet scene I came from was full of imperialist attitudes, and Mother England ran the show. However I had never been in a politicized conflict like this before. My passive, conflict-fearing, small town upbringing had not prepared me for such open war. It was years before I unlearned this fear and began to more actively resist institutional power and colonial thinking, but it only happened incrementally. I actually learned a lot about how to do it by watching the bodies of West Indian Canadians in situations of conflict, the same way I’d watched dancing bodies. Race relations work gave me a lot of opportunity to observe activists in the fray of political battle, and it helped me find my voice.

Well, to finish the story, I did end up going to the conference in Mexico. York University refused to submit to government pressure, and I learned that even the OAC can’t block your passport! I had my first deeply politicizing experience about the power of white dominance and how it seeks to “universalize” itself through government institutions and programs. I have continued to be a body watcher, observing how people move, touch, gesture, and express their emotions through their bodies. Knowing there are other ways of being has helped me to reflect on my own cultural body. This helps me cross cultural boundaries when I travel or meet people from different backgrounds, but I think it also helps me be content in my white body.

"Beauty of a Woman" performance group

That is why I choreographed a short dance last year for a local dance festival. Based on 6 dancers dancing 6 different culturally-grounded styles, the piece shows off the beauty of each style and the skill of that dancer. It included Sri Lankan, West African, Cuban, Middle Eastern, and American forms. I performed the Celtic dance. It was a small way of saying I have a dance and you have a dance, but none of our dances are universal, especially not the white ones.