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A DANCE OF IDENTITY
Notes On The Politics Of Dancing
(Previously
published in Contact Quarterly and Footnotes: six choreographers inscribe the page.)
I first used the form the Politics
of Dancing in 1986 as a rehearsal tool while working on Adolfo und Maria, a piece with a large multiethnic cast, which dealt
with the complicity of artist in the racism and fascism of their governments. I needed to get 14 people to really look at
and work with one another. Earlier that year I had had a conversation with Liz Lerman about art/political work she was doing
in Washington, D.C. She described a performance there, and now I can't remember if it was an actual event or just a proposal,
at which audience members were given 3 cards. They would receive either black or white cards depending upon responses to
questions placing them inside or outside American dominant culture. The 3 categories were sex, race and sexual orientation.
Since the classification for this performance assumed male Caucasian heterosexuals to be the dominants in our society, straight
white men would receive 3 white cards while black lesbians would receive 3 black ones. Those who had some dominant traits
but not all would get 2 of one color and 1 of the other. My memory of what Liz described was that the audience was then seated
in 4 sections of the hall based upon how many white cards they had- 3, 2, 1 or none. With Liz's description of this performance
vivid in my memory, I began rehearsals.
I wanted something more multifaceted that would address the more elusive
ways in which people perceive others and make assumptions about what those perceptions might mean. I wanted to explore some
of the subtle and not so subtle ways people act upon those perceptions and assumptions. I also wanted people to feel what
it was like to be in a minority facing a much larger group. I was interested to know which groupings caused people discomfort
and which ways they liked to be grouped; when they would lie or resist the categorizing. I wanted to break down knee jerk
responses and for people to look beyond the superficial things they were seeing and find the origins of the responses they
were having.
The form as it first existed:
The fantasy of Adolfo und Maria was that there was a troupe of minstrels
performing in the cabarets of pre-WW II Germany. The entire cast was in black face and as in the tradition of both minstrel
shows and cabaret they performed skits of topical political satire. The main show was a burlesque about the German choreographer
Mary Wigman and her dubious connection to Hitler, which culminated in her choreographing the opening ceremony of the 1936
Olympics for him.
I gathered the cast in a large clump, standing very near one another. I explained that we were on
a railroad track and a train was approaching. I instructed that if you were a "MAN" you should go to one wall and form a
group with the other men. If you were "NOT A MAN" you should go to the opposite wall and group with the others who were not
men. What was key at this moment, and as it turned out to be most difficult, was that I wanted the two groups (the "MEN" and
the "NOT MEN") to look at the members of their own group first and not back at the "others." I asked them to look for similarities
and differences, to check themselves for expectations, assumptions, and surprises regarding the others with whom by this one
factor alone they had been grouped. Since this was the first division, I allowed this inward looking at one's own group to
take a longish amount of time. At a certain point I instructed the two groups to turn outward as a unit and to face and see
the other group across the room. To see them as a mass and as individuals. To look for the same things (differences, commonalities,
etc.) as they had while looking inward. After time, I had the two groups merge in the center of the room and divided them
a different way. ("BLOND"-"NOT BLOND"; "HOMOSEXUAL"-"NOT HOMOSEXUAL"; "BOTH PARENTS LIVING"-"AT LEAST ONE PARENT DEAD").
Besides going through the original check list of observations and responses, I now asked people to notice how each grouping
felt compared to the ones that came before. Did one feel differently being one of 11 "RIGHT HANDED" people looking across
at 3 "LEFTIES" than one felt being one "ASIAN" woman looking across at 13 "NON-ASIANS." If so, how differently? The form
allowed no talking, only noticing observations and the emotional responses to them. We spent about 45 minutes splitting apart,
regrouping, then spitting apart again. We spent almost as much time afterwards discussing what it all could mean.
How
the form is developing:
Over the years I've led the Politics of Dancing in various contexts: At workshops at U.S. colleges
and European dance schools, at The Contact Teachers Conference in Berlin in 1988, as a rehearsal tool for other performance
projects. I've heard that others who have done the form with me have gone on to lead it in workshops of their own. I've
continued to develop the form to try to deepen the possible meanings derived from doing it. The first major change was that
I felt that I should no longer be the only one choosing the categories. I'd always felt manipulative and in a sense voyeuristic,
eliciting personal information from the groups. I decided to give the first 5 or so instructions and then invite another
participant to continue for 5, and then they would turn the asking role to someone else. This almost inevitably led to a
sort of round robin group free association of people randomly asking us to divide ourselves. I feel this is much more democratic
and gets to the core of what the concerns of the entire circle are. I've further refined the role of the asker by instructing
that each of us should think of a categorization that would place us in the majority (but not include everyone), one that
would place us in the extreme minority and one that would split the group in equal parts. While this last adjustment took
away some of the free form randomness of letting anyone split the group whenever they felt an impulse to do so, (often in
response to the previous division), it added focus to the choices made by the participants and clarified the reasons for doing
the exercise.
Another change I made from those first rehearsals is that I merged the Politics of Dancing with work
I had begun doing with improvisation with eyes closed. In the eyes closed work I try to get people to stop using vision as
a handicap; that is, relying upon the information one gets from sight to the impediment of the other senses. I had the initial
group form with eyes closed so that the only clues to the identity of the others around us came through touch, smell, temperature,
etc. I then asked that the person making the category phrase the statement always using the words "I" or "My" and that the
statement had to be true for her/him. If the statement, e.g., "I AM AN ONLY CHILD" or "MY EYES ARE BROWN,” was true for a
person they were instructed to stay in the center of the room with the person who spoke; if it was not true they were told
to go to the wall and form a group there. The railroad tracks were now situated in the center of the room so that there could
be no possibility of waffling in the middle. People were instructed not to open their eyes until they had formed an inward
oriented group. When they opened their eyes they were guided to look for the same things as in the earlier incarnation of
the exercise; i.e., similarities, differences, feelings about being grouped with these people. We then continued as before,
always with a discussion afterwards.
Some thoughts about the Politics of Dancing exercise, its usefulness and some
possible pitfalls as a tool for pinpointing identity and prejudice:
In its original form, as a rehearsal tool for a
specific piece with a large cast, it was a good and fast way to get a disparate group of people to work together and deal
with the difficult material of the piece. Some of the more dramatic separations were used in the performance of Adolfo und
Maria. For example, an ensemble dance was interrupted by a loud sound and the "WHITE" performers were separated from the
"NOT WHITE" performers; then the piece continued.
From the start I observed a tendency for some people to situate themselves
somewhere between the railroad tracks and the wall, waffling in the middle, not fully committing themselves to either category.
Early on, I felt I had to address this because for the exercise to be most powerful people needed to commit in the moment
to being "THIS" and "NOT THAT," and to experience being looked at as "the other." As I explained to one student who was
having trouble with one division- when the secret police were knocking on doors during the Third Reich they were not so interested
in the subtle grays of identity. Also by not choosing at the moment of questioning you are possibly denying a component of
your identity and you should examine why it is that you cannot declare this trait to be a part of who you are.
At
its worst, The Politics of Dancing can become a kind of glib party game where people try to get the embarrassing "goods" on
their friends. This seems to happen most often when the participants are all young (late teens, early twenties), and have
known each other in some other more formal context over time. This has happened when I've taught workshops as a guest teacher
within a college dance department and in my improv class at the American Dance Festival. I think I could have avoided this
rowdiness and lack of serious focus by giving a more thoughtful preamble; perhaps explaining Liz Lerman's description of the
piece in D.C. as a source of the work. Putting the exercise in some sort of context seems to be a necessary responsibility
of the workshop leader. This means being clear why you think this particular group of people would benefit from doing it
and not just throwing it in as a kind of interesting workshop activity.
I do believe that this form can deepen one's
sense of identity in several ways. It forces one to publicly declare aspects of the self that are taken for granted or are
not often acknowledged (perhaps even to oneself). Also one gets the experience of being looked at as one of a group of people
who ... "DO NOT WANT TO HAVE CHILDREN," or "HAVE BEEN ARRESTED," or "HAVE PARENTS WHO ARE COLLEGE GRADS." While for myself,
I have had no qualms with being grouped with other "NON-WHITES" or "NON-HETEROSEXUALS," I usually am uneasy being grouped
with "MEN" and I feel exposed being looked at with the group of "PEOPLE WITH DEAD FATHERS." I have found that I usually derive
a certain comfort being in the extreme minority whereas others find this to be unsettling.
The most vexing statement
has been "I BELIEVE THAT I AM IN THE MORE INTELLIGENT HALF OF THIS WORKSHOP." People have left the room or insisted upon
being hit by the train based upon their feelings about that one. In one rehearsal with 8 men, 7 went to the side of "MORE
INTELLIGENT" while only one declared himself to belong in the "NOT MORE INTELLIGENT" half. The statements "I CONSIDER MYSELF
TALL" or "I THINK THAT I AM OVER WEIGHT" often produce two groups that look identical in terms of height and weight. Personal
perceptions can be deceiving.
Anecdotes:
I often relate an experience I had in the early 80's when doing a lecture-dem
at Elders Share the Arts, a seniors' art center in the Bronx. I began teaching the workshop using the voice of a nanny talking
to very young children. I asked in a completely condescending tone, "If you can, could you try to lift your arms above your
head." Of course, this being a senior center with its own performing arts group, filled with vital, creative people who just
happened to be over 65, they all immediately thrust their arms in the air giving me very quizzical looks. The point being
that in my life in the downtown PoMo dance world, I rarely came into direct contact with "older" people and my conception
of "PEOPLE OVER 65" was that they were all virtual cripples who needed to have even very simple things painstakingly explained
to them.
When leading this form at the EDDC in Holland, the workshop of 12 was made of about 6 Germans. When someone
said, "I AM NOT GERMAN" we split accordingly. When we opened our eyes to focus in on our own group one of our "NOT GERMANS"
said to a man standing with us, "Hey, you belong over there." He responded that he didn't because he was Austrian, and a
rather heated discussion broke out.
Once at the discussion after having done Politics of Dancing at a college here,
one student was very upset because her best friend had gone to the "JEWISH" group. Her friend explained that one of her parents
was Jewish so in that moment she felt to be true to her identity she had to go to that side. The friend continued to be agitated
all the while insisting that she felt neutral about Jews and Jewishness. Someone asked if she would feel the same way if
she had just discovered that her best friend was "BORN IN CANADA" or a "METHODIST."
Defining sexuality takes quite
a bit of finessing. In a single workshop "I AM GAY," "I AM HOMOSEXUAL," "I AM QUEER," "I HAVE INTERCOURSE ONLY WITH PEOPLE
OF MY OWN GENDER" and their "opposites" can each produce very different splits in one group. A person who can stand with
"I AM HETEROSEXUAL" may find it impossible to do so with "I HAVE SEX ONLY WITH PEOPLE OF THE OPPOSITE GENDER" or even simply
"I AM STRAIGHT." It seems that the politics of gender and identity and language has produced an infinitely complex dance.
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