Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Christian Conversion and the Challenge of Dance

This article helped me to understand the interconnectedness of dance and the sacred for the African-American slaves. This connection of the sacred and secular was lost on the slave owners, and I think continues to be lost on the majority of Westerners. The slaves, who had come from many different tribes, found a common ancestral dance in the Circle Dance, or the Ring Shout. The Shout connected all black peoples in the sacred circle in "cultural oneness". The white slave owners misunderstood the dance to be profane and obscene. They came to what they thought was a compromise: if the slaves didn't cross their legs, then the Shout was not dancing. However, there is never leg crossing in the Shout even in the native African cultures. The dance was so important to slaves that they resisted any efforts to repress it.
I thought it was very interesting that the foundations of jazz, blues and spirituals can be found in the early Ring Shouts. I was also struck by the explanation that the mind-body dichotomy can be swept away by dance so that movements can be performed without thinking. This is my problem in trying to dance, I tend to over-think the dance and so cannot get to the state where "body is mind". Stucker raised an interesting question when he noted that no other group of workers in modern history relied so much on dance in their everyday lives. Is this because dance is inherent in black culture, was it caused by the circumstances (slavery) or a mixture of both?
Martin Breu
Dance 163-A

No comments:

Post a Comment