Narratives in Black British Dance: Embodied Practices

This book explores Black British dance from a number of previously-untold perspectives. Bringing together the voices of dance-artists, scholars, teachers and choreographers, it looks at a range of performing arts from dancehall to ballet, providing valuable insights into dance theory, performance, pedagogy, identity and culture. It challenges the presumption that Blackness, Britishness or dance are monolithic entities, instead arguing that all three are living networks created by rich histories, diverse faces and infinite future possibilities. Through a variety of critical and creative essays, this book suggests a widening of our conceptions of what British dance looks like, where it appears, and who is involved in its creation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Feb 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9783319703145

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© The Author(s) 2018

Adesola Akinleye (ed.)Narratives in Black British Dancehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70314-5_1

1. Narratives in Black British Dance: An Introduction

Adesola Akinleye¹ 

(1)

Middlesex University, London, UK

…to live at the tense borders of the skin, to live in an uneasy truce of evolution and the molting of cultural identity into something unforeseen and new.

(Wilson in Hereniko & Wilson, 1999, p. 3)

Britain’s colonial history has left a network of ‘Black’ family, particularly from Britain to the Caribbean, across Africa, and North America. While part of the legacy of colonialism exported Britain’s mainstream aesthetic of whiteness around the world, these Commonwealth connections also underwrite the day-to-day, on the ground, multicultural face of Great Britain. Sitting on a London bus, the passengers and people we pass on the streets testify to the complex range of backgrounds and values that form the British population. The dance field is no exception—although its mainstream face may appear to reflect a mono-cultural pre-war whiteness , British dance artists hail from the same colourful range of cultures over which the sun never set. These artists contribute to a dance scene that is often invisibilised or suffers by being constructed as in a continual state of early emergence. This gives a sense that those identifying with ‘Black’ dance and dancers are new to Britain, (just emerging ) rather than a contributing part across the expanse of British dance history. There is also a plethora of professional Black British dancers and choreographers who have influenced dance worldwide, ironically being identified as British outside Britain’s borders but being ‘othered ’ when they return home to her shores.

Therefore, despite a strong creative presence in the arts through a history of individual artists and companies identifying as ‘Black’ , there is a distinct lack of acknowledgement regarding dance and dancers with a relationship to the African Diaspora from the twenty-first century perspective of ‘being British’. To this end, this book presents narratives from across the UK and beyond with the aim of offering a (re)articulation of the physical and cultural mapping of the richness of British dance. In order to present the narratives in the chapters that follow, this introductory chapter discusses and challenges some of the contexts for talking about the dancing body to expose them as having concealed or drowned out Black, British dance stories in the past. I suggest that the context of blackness as ‘otherness’ contributes to this along with the context of what kinds of dance styles are valuable, particularly the notion of a divide in value between ‘cultural’ dance and ‘high -art’. I consider how we talk about dance in the West and suggest that some non-Western concepts for understanding what dance is are lost because of a lack of interest or knowledge of them in the language of Western mainstream media. I draw attention to the context of the historical legacy of abuse to the Black body and the effects that this has on how Black dancers are audienced . I draw attention to the many contexts created by dualism’s separation of mind from body and how this is contrary to many non-Western dance forms. This introduction therefore suggests that by starting to theorise the contexts that have invisibilised some dance artists we can start to create more fertile ground from which to hear them and in turn have a richer dance community in general. This book attempts to refresh contexts for future discussion of the work of dance artists through broadening the narratives heard about Black and British dancing bodies.

Challenging the Context of the ‘Other’

In the context of the post-colonial globe, living in London of Nigerian and English descent, I have been privy to the distinct experience gained from being ‘black’ living outside of the ‘Mother land’ of Africa. This experience is given a particular focus for those who identify as black yet come from a Western country—to be African -American or to be Black British. To be a part of the collective consciousness of where you live and yet experience it from the side-lines of being the ‘other ’: not British but ‘Black British’. Growing up my very existence as black and living in London seemed to contribute to my non-‘black’ neighbours confirming their own British-ness. In Chap. 7 Thea Barnes describes how for the artists in Kokuma Dance Company, dance became a safe haven to shelter from the daily experiences of being the black ‘other’ in their own local communities.

It is of course an interesting phenomenon to meet people whose role in a culture appears to be the ‘other’ within it. To this end, there is a mainstream interest in engaging with black artists in terms of how they can define their own otherness —what is ‘Black Dance’? What is ‘Black British-ness’? However, this interest in what it is like to be outside comes only from the perspective of those who consider themselves inside. In addressing the question, for instance of ‘What is Black British dance?’ there is an implication that there is something distinctly specific and universally describable about being ‘black’ . ‘What is Black British dance?’ implies that I could subtract the black from my experience of Britishness and of Dance and have a concept of what was left. The question infers that there will be something that I could recognise as ‘not black’ and be able to compare that to my ‘blackness’.

When I was eight, a classmate asked me ‘What is it like to be black?’ I said ‘I don’t know I have never been not-black’. It is equally difficult to answer questions such as ‘How have you addressed your whiteness in the choreography?’ But such questions are rarely asked of artists. Similarly, I have not met a white dancer who has been asked to define what white British dance was and how their work contributed to it? But I have met many black dancers who have been asked ‘What is Black British dance and how does your work contribute to it?’ Such questions require artists to be willing to accept themselves as ‘other’ in terms of their own work. These questions imply the possibility that we can be the ‘other’ in our own narratives, and can explain how thatotherness manifests. To respond to such questions is to suffer the burden of justifying oneself within someone else’s story: it denies the artists the liberty of telling their own stories about their work.

I am not suggesting that artists identifying as Black have been complacently silent or not attempted to articulate their own narratives on their own terms. Rather, I am suggesting that this is a problem for the field of dance in general. The context within which we consider dance is often constrained by a lack of challenge to mainstream Western values for what dance is, how it manifests, and the processes that lead to dance. Dance’s problem of marginalising people who identify outside its mainstream (and therefore losing the full potential of their contribution to the art form) extends beyond the marginalisation of black dancers and choreographers. However, in the case of artists identifying or identified as Black it has meant that before many can talk about their dance work, they are tasked with proving it is ‘dance’ at all, worth the full prestige of the dance industry listening in the first place. To this end, in Chap. 4 Tia-Monique Uzor considers the projections ofotherness on to ‘brown bodies’ as they create work within the British dance industry today. The question ‘What is Black British dance?’ is about defining a kind of dance as much as it is about defining a kind of Blackness —both are limiting. It is clear that the notion of dance from the full spectrum of the British experience consists of a number of un-listened stories, many of which converge in the territory of Blackness, Britishness, and Dance.

Challenging the Context in Which Dance Is Given Value

A challenge of globalisation in the twenty-first century is how we engage with the spectrums we have created for identifying ourselves, others, and the world around. This challenge begins with us looking at the ontological context into which each other’s narratives are received (Appiah, 1991; Smith, 1999). The constructs we have for the truth of our dancing bodies lead to frameworks for understanding the world. Dance technique training is often guilty of expecting students (and audiences ) to have a tacit acceptance of a specific philosophical construct for dance, implicitly inherited from the teacher demonstrating the movement . Students are not only taught to strive to look like the teacher demonstrating but are expected to think like them in order to attain that same aesthetic. Across many codified dance forms, this leaves a lack of encouragement for critical thinking or philosophical inquiry into what dance means beyond its visual appeal (Akinleye & Payne, 2016; Ambrosio, 2015; Sheets-Johnstone, 1984). The inheritance of unquestioning acceptance of dance as mainly a set of physical skills rather than a philosophical approach to moving in the world has left Western dance institutions, such as schools, theatres and production houses, with a powerful uncompromising hierarchy for which dances and dancers are valued. This manifests as the juxtaposition of ‘cultural’ and communal dance, which is objectified and engaged with from an anthropological perspective, against dance as codified and ‘High art’, which is highly valued and seen as involving skills of articulation that enhance the art form (Dils & Albright, 2001).

…this way of thinking implicitly sets up an evolutionary model of history in which dance developed from communal or tribal dancing to professional and technically virtuosic…. (Dils & Albright, 2001, p. 370)

The Western dance establishment seems to tacitly adhere to an inference that dance emanating from traditional African or Indigenous forms is locked in the past with the anthropological purpose of reminding us of nostalgic cultural history. Alongside this is the assumption that Modern and Post-modern dance is solely the work of skilled individual artists responding to their current Western experiences. It leaves little room for the narratives of artists that inhabit the space between the perceived polarities of traditional dances and Western High Art. This context of cultural nostalgia ‘v’ High-Art therefore acts as an echo chamber for some narratives to be heard while silencing other stories. For instance, it mutes the narratives of any contemporary dance movement that comes from the non-Western starting point of traditional or Indigenous dances, yet is the artist’s own self-expression and creation (such as Contemporary African dancers). In Chap. 12, RAS Mikey Courtney discusses traditional Ethiopian cultural practices as tools for Urban contemporary dance, and in Chap. 10, Chikukwango Cuxima-Zwa describes the spiritual and traditional practices that inform the contemporary response of his performance work. The cultural nostalgia ‘v’ High Art polarity also leaves little room for the narratives of dance artists who associate with non-Western belief systems, experiences or philosophy yet dance mainstream Western styles, such as Black ballerinas . In Chap. 5, Sandie Bourne shares historically invisibilised stories of Black British dancers.

Challenging the Contexts for Talking About the Dancing Body

Growing-up in an Anglo-Nigerian household, and later with Lakota extended family, my gut reaction continually re-sets to ‘…is this what Mama said?’, ‘…is this what Grandma told me?’ . Values from Grandmas are real-ised for me by the feeling, sensation of my body that become ideas and thoughts that resonate within me. A process that therefore starts with my connection to my elders /ancestors manifests in my body and only then can become an identifiable verbal thought. This process is clear within the realisation of choreographic work (elders and ancestors can be inside us as we dance, inside the dance studio with us) but, within the more academic Western context of printed text, we are still exploring how we evidence historical knowledge, sensation and intuition—how we write the embodied. The means by which physical experience is described or captured remains the topic of on-going discussion (Foster, 1996; Silk, Andrews, & Thorpe, 2017; Sparkes, 2002; Wellard, 2016). There is a tension between the corporeal, embodied experience of dancing and the linear static experience of reading. In other words, a book about dance would appear to be a contradiction-in-terms for my Yoruba and Lakota Grandmas.

This is because moving bodies engage non-verbal ways of knowing (Sullivan, 2001). The ‘knowing’ in dance could be described as part of our ‘felt sense’ (Gendlin, 1992), or a ‘bodily consciousness’ (Foster in Desmond, 1997): an embodied knowing that ‘speaks’ the somatic ‘language’ of movement and sensation rather than verbal words. The perception of the embodied Self is in the situation of dance, whether in the engagement of executing dance or through the empathy of remembering the sensation of movement when watching dance. Through this book, each author approaches the communication of the dancing body differently, but across the chapters it is clear that the embodied (the responding, experiencing, remembering body) is a part of the terrain of Black-ness and dance.

Because dance involves sensations, the person experiencing the sensation is a part of the story. This is because while we are making, watching, reflecting and writing dance we are making meaning of it through the first reference point of our own bodies. The embodied nature of dance involves the Self, so when dance is written about there needs to be a place for the person experiencing it to be recognised. This is a place to recognise that the writer/dancer and reader/audience are constructing the meaning of dance through their exchanges . The story of dance is filtered through the body of the ‘I’ who is experiencing it.

We are crafting dance itself when we write about it: we are crafting something, wright-ing (crafting) dance through how we write the somatic . Therefore, the ‘I’ who is filtering the dance experience through their body in order to craft an understanding of it needs to be present in the text in the first person, and the reader who is interpreting the writing needs to be aware of them. Although the communication of this somatic understanding is addressed in a variety of ways across this book, in my role as editor I have encouraged the contributors to address where they ‘are’ in the stories told through taking an ethnographic (Clifford, 1997; Clifford, Marcus, & School of American, 1986) and narrative approach (Riessman, 2008; Schiff, McKim, & Patron, 2017; Silk et al., 2017). An ethnographic and narrative approach has been encouraged in order to honour the somatic , connected experience of the dancing body. Ethnography acknowledges a place for the sensing ‘I’ in the text, while, the narrative turn is used to mediate the difficulty of telling the story of one’s own bodily-sensation in words (Sparkes, 2002). Narrative inquiry acknowledges the problem that ethnographers/writers encounter as they attempt to represent and communicate their ‘embodied experience’. It also mirrors the oral traditions of African and Indigenous Diasporas that address lived experience through story.

The ethnographic and narrative approaches allow for an acknowledgement of the difficulty of writing about dancing. They help to address awareness of the deficit left when European words alone are used to describe embodied experiences (Mahina, 2002). However, alongside this framework for writing about the dancing body is the need to acknowledge that embodiment is routed in non-Western world views. I do not mean to imply that Africanist or Indigenous values are one thing or even harmonious. But as a dancer, I find that there is a distinct separation between Western dualist-infused attitudes (that separate mind from body, bodied-Self from ancestors , time from space ) and those non-Western philosophers and Elders around the world for whom the body is not an isolated separate ‘thing’. This re-articulation of Self as embodied is often an important part of the process of de-colonisation for artists (Anderson, 2000; Hereniko & Wilson, 1999).

Challenging Contexts for Seeing the Dancing ‘Body’ and the Distraction of Representation

The dancing body urges us to consider what the ‘body’ is, what it represents and what role the body plays in terms of the knowledge that resides in the movement that dance renders. Echoing Doris Humphrey, Mark Morris notes that:

Dancing is never abstract. It’s evocative, because it’s being done by human beings. If a dancer looks at something, that means something, and if he looks away, it means something else. (Morris in Gottlieb, 2008, p. 797)

In addition to the evocative meanings that we derive from seeing bodies moving, there are the connotations placed on black bodies specifically. hooks (1992) points out that compared to advances in acknowledgment of discrimination in education and employment, there is still a struggle to counteract representations of blackness in mass media that have barely changed since the height of colonialism . For centuries, European popular culture has projected social significance on to the performer’s Black body (DeFrantz & Gonzalez, 2014; Young, 2010). For instance, the hyper-sexualisation of the black female body justifies the measure of certain body parts as a testimony to how ‘Black’ she is. This is exemplified by the treatment of the South African artist Saartjie Baartman in the 1800s, whose body was London’s most famous curiosity (Holmes, 2008). Today, black female dance performers and choreographers who by their art form have their bodies on display step into the collective trauma of many historical injuries such as Baartman’s (Young, 2006). It is important to recognise that the Black body challenges a Western audience that is yet to acknowledge the tacit all-encompassing narrative of the curious Black female body . In Chap. 11, H. Patten suggests that Dancehall , often dismissed as a valueless sexual titillation, is a form of affirmation of continued spirituality that manifests in the ecstatic body . In Chap. 15, A’Keitha Carey uses a feminist lens to relate the reclaiming of her dancing Black body in the hip wine.

To be black is to have accrued a subjectivity haunted by the spectral traces of a social , political and ideological history… The black body thus enacts a discursive politic, situated within a rubric of knowledge and power, injured and resistant. (Young, 2006, pp. 25–26)

As Europeans come to terms with the legacies of colonialism , they place the Black body in a projected cycle of victim and aggressor. The Black male body is often cast as ‘violent’, ‘native’ and ‘raw’ (DeFrantz, 2001 in Dils & Albright, pp. 342–349). For the Black body (of the dancer or the choreographer) there is an added hindrance in the written language of English texts about dance, in that this national language itself assumes in its structure a colonial-gaze that projects onto the black body further meanings and renderings of history. Similarly, dance performance work is left grappling with the preoccupation of the objectified story of the black dancer’s body rather than the narrative of the artistry of the work itself. In Chap. 2, Namron draws on his career of over 50 years as a professional dancer to narrate the importance of his artistry and what he has contributed to dance practice in the UK. In doing this, he also rejects the attention given to the spectacle of his black body as one of the first Contemporary dancers in the