The Whiteness of Modern Dance, 1880s to 1930s: From Ethnic Hellenism to Kinesthetic Empathy

13.2.2023 2 Like 0 kommenttia

The art of dance does not exist in a vacuum, and its slowly shifting and increasingly local canons reflect what are considered as of importance at a given time and place. The canons of the twenty-first century and the histories that get told of dance ought to reflect a very different world than that of the alleged first modern dancers who made dance an art by, of, and for white people. Read more about Hanna Järvinen`s article about the whiteness of modern dance, 1880s to 1930s.

In a globalised world where learning dance over the internet is increasingly common and dances spread through social media, the edifice of the canon – what counts as art in dance –has also come under scrutiny. Not yet in media more interested in recycling hackneyed narratives of ‘geniuses’, but most definitely in scholarship.

My canon-critical work starts from tracing back fictions repeated so often that people take them as fact. Through examining archival materials scattered in different collections I can place now famous people into the more complex contexts of their day, examining the networks of people who supported or opposed them that also account for historical shifts that make past artists’ practices more or less relevant to their contemporaries and subsequent generations.

Many of the people lauded in dance textbooks construed their practices on ideologies like eugenics and colonialism, even outright racist stereotypes. Figures like Isadora Duncan or Ruth St. Denis crucial to how art dance was and is taught in the United States propagated a settler narrative where ‘America’ was the ‘land of land’, a nation characterised by the greatness of landscape empty of humans and ready for exploitation by white people.

In practice, these white dancers battled concurrent European ideas about what American dance was about. After the ‘cakewalk craze’ of the 1880s and 1890s as well as the many Black performers touring Europe’s unsegregated variety theatre circuit, many European dance advocates thought that the only genuinely new dances to emerge from America were those of Black slaves and their descendants.

Most of these Afrodiasporic dances also moved to the social sphere of dance halls and ballrooms after first having been ‘sanitized’ for white participants by white exhibition dancers. Few of the Black authors of these performances received credit for their innovations or even had the same opportunities as their white contemporaries. But this impression of American dance as Black dance only strengthened during the 1900s and 1910s, as ragtime, tango, and maxixe paved way for the jazz age in the wake of the First World War.

From the 1880s to the 1920s, white dancers and their supporters generally distinguished themselves from this fashion for Afrodiasporic dances by tracing a white genealogy to an imaginary white past in ancient Greece. Dance as an art form got separated from dance as entertainment or pastime by way of pseudoscientific racism and moralising statements about how popular tastes indicated a culture in (biological) decline.

Authorities from the budding fields of dance anthropology and dance history created a new, white ‘modern dance’ by participating in what Athena S. Leoussi has called ‘ethnic Hellenism’: a cult of the healthy body referencing ancient Greece and relocated to the open air of the countryside. In the United States of the 1880s, this ethnic Hellenism had taken the form of Delsartism, a method of ‘self-cultivation’ modelled after ancient statuary. As Shannon Walsh has shown in her excellent 2020 book Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era, the legacy of Delsartism effectively instilled a racist project in American dance and acting programmes, an ideology of white superiority masked in claims of moral superiority of physically ideal bodies of ‘classical antiquity’ who moved in ways acceptable to the upper classes.

This explicitly white discourse never marked as white or racist became the norm in literature on dance as well as in the practices propagated by dance artists. In other words, for the past century, the repertories taught by dance companies or works emphasised as masterpieces in dance pedagogy or scholarship have been overwhelmingly white because the histories and the theoretical apparatus taught to analyse the art form has favoured these white traditions and genealogies.

In the 1930s, the rise of formalism in dance analysis invented the notion of ‘kinesthetic empathy’: an immediate, empathic corporeal affinity between the dancer and the (knowledgeable) spectator. Since understanding dance was predicated on extralinguistic, sensorial affinity, if a critic failed to feel this kinesthetic empathy with a particular dance, it indicated the dance was not ‘pure’ enough. Unsurprisingly, ‘purity’ correlated with whiteness: racialised bodies and non-white dance forms could not extract themselves from cultural signification to the degree that true abstraction required, and as abstraction was the most important quality in dance, only white forms were truly worthy of canonisation.

The discourse around kinesthesia, in other words, had nothing to do with prioritising a dancer’s kinesthetic experience of a dance, and everything to do with hierarchies of value and cultural gatekeeping – it is the white racial frame of American modern dance. Through such white theoretical apparatus and a settler-colonialist history of ‘pioneers’ of modernism, dancers and dances from non-white genealogies could be excluded from the sphere of art and theoretical insights, whilst aspects of these dances were constantly appropriated as techniques for white people to regain lost spirituality and physical wellness that would save whiteness from degeneration.

Today, as, for example, Mark Singleton (2010) and Sophia Rose Arjana (2020) have shown, the wellness industry still propagates many of the same Orientalist ideas while ‘ethnonationalists’ and outright fascists propagate ‘natural bodies’ and race theories disturbingly familiar from the body culture of the ‘ethnic Hellenists’ of the late nineteenth century. The hegemonic representational regimes of dance in performance, online forums, textbooks, podcasts, museum exhibits, and the like still reflect the hagiographies cultivated in the dance literature of the first decades of the twentieth century. With the truly globalised world of post-Internet dance, where art emerges from very different genealogies and theoretical starting points, this myopic whiteness also needs to change.

By this, I do not mean to suggest ‘cancelling’ the presence of Isadora Duncan, Denishawn, or ballet’s equally problematic racist performance practices from the curricula of dance students. I do, however, emphasise that the racist underpinnings of these dances and the continuing impact of the theories that support their excellence need to be made explicit and questioned. As Ananya Chatterjea has done in her 2020 book Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance, we need to discuss how labels like ‘contemporary dance’ exclude dances that are equally contemporary but not sufficiently white for the aesthetics of the gatekeepers of European dance festivals.

There is nothing wrong in belonging to and working within this white genealogy, as long as the whiteness of that genealogy is marked instead of being represented as universal and neutral (as when kinaesthetic empathy is evoked as a ‘human’ characteristic). But stating that the ‘nature’ of natural dancers is a ‘construct’ is insufficient when this ‘nature’ explicitly signalled ‘white’ and ‘civilised’, with all the ideological underpinnings in class and race hierarchies of the late nineteenth century. These ideological underpinnings explain what kind of corporeal expression and pedagogical emphasis appealed to white audiences, and thus why specific figures succeeded in their day.

Similarly, opposing Duncan’s ‘classical dance’ to Orientalists like Ruth St. Denis, or setting these ‘modern dancers’ against ballet creates false dichotomies that mask the true exclusions in the dance discourse. All these white dancing styles were and are still very much set as the ‘neutral’ and normative, ‘foundational’ to pedagogy and art practice alike. Classicism and orientalism were not alternative aesthetics for dancers to choose from but rather complementary modes of entrenching the whiteness of art dance. It is this similarity that enabled the discourses of aesthetics and dance theory that are still used amongst dance makers, critics, teachers, and scholars – aesthetics and theories not understood as keeping dance that qualifies as art white.

The art of dance does not exist in a vacuum, and its slowly shifting and increasingly local canons reflect what are considered as of importance at a given time and place. The canons of the twenty-first century and the histories that get told of dance ought to reflect a very different world than that of the alleged first modern dancers who made dance an art by, of, and for white people. My presentation at the Uniarts Thursday Forum on 12 January 2023 was based, in part, on a forthcoming chapter, ‘Dancing Whiteness, 1890 to 1920’, in the Routledge Companion to Bodies in Performance, edited by Victor Ladron de Guevara, Roberta Mock, and Hershini Bhana Young. A very short general introduction to the topic in Finnish can be found in my chapter “Antiikin merkitys taidetanssissa” in Näkökulmia tanssitaiteen historiaan ja nykypäivään, edited by Kirsi Monni, Riikka Laakso and myself, and published by Uniarts in 2021. https://disco.teak.fi/tanssin-historia/antiikin-merkitys-taidetanssissa/

Hanna Järvinen

The author works as the university lecturer at the University of the Arts Helsinki Theatre Academy.