Dance Community and Cultural Identity

Introduction

            Dance and music often play a role in creating community and affirming identity.  Recent research on dance communities explores the ways in which dance provides not only a space for cultural expression, but also a space for negotiating and transforming identity.  This paper reviews recent literature on dance communities, drawing special attention to four themes:  embodied social identity, cultural consciousness, performing sexuality, and global discourse.  These four themes give insight into the link between cultural identity and dance communities in the world today.  

Dance Community and Cultural Identity

Embodied Social Identity

            In the article “Ethnicity, identity, and music,” ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes (1994) follows writers such as Bourdieu (1977) and De Certeau (1984) to argue that music and dance do not simply reflect culture.  Rather, music and dance are social performance in which meanings are generated.  They provide the means by which the hierarchies of place are negotiated and transformed.  For example, a rural migrant to the city may begin to identify with urban music genres, thereby facilitating a transformation from proletarian to urbanite.

            Stokes (1994) describes how the places constructed through music involve notions of difference and social boundary, which helps to organize hierarchies of a moral and political order.   He examines the ways in which different social identities might be negotiated though music.  Questions around ethnicity often involve discussions regarding authenticity, or the “authentic” traces of identity “in” music.  Music is used by social actors in specific local situations to maintain distinctions between us and them, and terms such as authenticity are often used to justify these boundaries. 

            Music might also be used to propagate a national identity through state control or influence over universities, conservatories, and archives.  For example, during the national reforms in Turkey in 1935, village radio sets played educational programs disseminating “new” Turkish language, history, and folklore, as well as musical genres representing Turkey’s new “European” identity.  Just as musical performance enacts dominant communal values, it can also enact rival principles of social organization (Stokes, 1994).

            In sum, music and dance are invariably communal activities that bring people together in specific alignments.  The way in which people interact through music and dance with these social alignments can provide a powerful affective experience in which social identity is literally “embodied” (Stokes, 1994).                

            In the article “Moving identity: dance in the negotiation of sexuality and ethnicity in Cyprus,” Stavros Stavrou Karayanni (2006) uses Cyprus as a case study for a crossroad where ethnic, sexual, gender, and race politics are complex, interwoven, and endlessly negotiated.  The history of colonization in Cyprus not only scripts national manhood, but also exercises control over every individual’s body.  Karayanni (2006) eloquently describes the embodied nature of identity, especially as it relates to national history:

If our bodies are organic vessels that carry our personal history, our idiosyncrasies, our emotions and frustrations, signs that mark our national, gender and class identity, then when we set that body in motion the entire microcosm of the individual is on display; a microcosm replete with contradictions such as control and resistance, compliance and oppression.  In other words, in dance, the body resonates with its history, thus becoming a site where various meanings manifest themselves and cross paths with each other.  (p. 252)

Thus movement becomes a medium to process body memory, as well as to construct and mobilize social identity.

Cultural Consciousness

            In the article “Dance as a means of cultural identity: A case of the Bukusu Kamabeka dance,” Mellitus Nyongesa Wanyama (2011) addresses the role that music education must play in order to preserve traditional Kenyan music and dance as valuable cultural identity treasures.  The Bukusu Kamabeka dance has a peculiar style that distinguishes it from similar shoulder dances by the Luo, Kamba, Gusii, Kuria, Giriama, and others.  This particular style of dance is therefore part of the cultural identity of the Bukusu people.  Wanyama (2011) explores the unique Bukusu cultural identities associated with the performance of Litunga music and the Kamabeka dance, including instruments, informal music education, communal rituals, timbre of voices, rhythm variations, idiosyncratic dance flares, and folk songs.

            Some of the songs in litunga music tell the story of the mythical-genealogical foundations of the Bukusu community.  Others allude to the historical continuum of events that the community has undergone.  Dancers, or as Wanyama calls them “culture owners,” dance their experiences, struggles, and aspirations.  In doing so, they not only mobilize their cultural identity, but also reshape their philosophy of life and hope as they dance the kamabeka (Wanyama, 2011).

            In the article “Identity Discourses on the Dancefloor,” Bryan Rill (2010) examines the Electronic Dance Music Culture (EDMC) as one of the largest subculture musical movements in history.   The article takes a psychological approach to the trance consciousness that occurs on the dance floor and argues that dancing re-constitutes the bodily self an as interaction rather than a corporeal body. 

            People who participate in raves describe it as a somatic experience, one that silences the inner language of our waking consciousness and moves the dancer into the present moment.  The egocentric “I” is superseded by “We” and thinking is second to feeling.  Rill (2010) uses scientific theories of human consciousness to articulate the phenomenological experience of musical trancing.  Using a radical departure from traditional cognitive theory, in which the world is objectively “out there” and people are a singular, bounded unitary consciousness, Rill (2010) points to neuroscientists who theorize an embodied context of the lived experience (Merleau-Ponty, 1968; Varela and Rosch, 1991; Maturana and Varela, 1987; Edelman, 1992; Freeman, 1997):

The neural networks upon which these interactions are mapped are not “hard-wired.”  The brain continually reconfigures its neural networks based on interaction with the world.  It is quite possible, then, to create new neural pathways as a result of the often-powerful trance experiences occurring on the dance floor.  (p. 148)

As such, dancing at a rave is ripe with transformative potential.  This potential is wrapped up in a collective sensual experience, as every dancer is aware that he or she is part of the collective body.

Performing Sexuality

            In the article “Sexuality and Sexual Identity:  Critical Possibilities for Teaching Dance Appreciation and Dance History,” Ann Dils (2004) asserts that dance history needs to be considered alongside the history of sexuality and that studying dance practice is important in understanding the performance of sexual identities.  Dils (2004) defines sexuality as “our desire for, fantasies about, and realized sexual contact with others” (p. 11).  Sexuality is non-determinate in that it cannot be contained within the heterosexual/homosexual binary and is variable over a lifespan.  Using her classroom experiences as a case study, she discusses ways in which to give students practice describing and thinking about the social messages of movement.  For example, some students may see the dance space as a feminized space, a place to appreciate beauty and be entertained.  As such, when men enter this space, they become feminized, appreciated for their visual appeal rather than their impact or productivity.

            In the article “Belly Dance, Gender Identity, and Social Activism:  Conceptualizing Free and Open Spaces,” Dennis J. Downey and Sandrine Zerbib (2008) investigate the influence of belly dance on participants’ gender identity and involvement in social activism.  The authors argue that leisure activities have an important link to participant identity, and that they can be the source of strong collective identity.

            Belly dance identity includes a basic tension between an “ancient earth woman” identity and a “harem sex symbol” identity.  While the earth woman is associated with matriarchal power and control over women’s own sexuality, the harem sex symbol represents an “Orientalized” symbol of women’s sexuality and availability.  This tension, which simultaneously challenges and reaffirms traditional gender roles, parallels tensions concerning sexuality in third wave feminism (Downey and Zerbib, 2008). 

Downey and Zerbib’s preliminary analysis indicates that length of involvement and level of dance are positively associated with dancers’ body image, and that many participants see belly dance as a means to social change (Downey and Zerbib, 2008).

Stokes (1994) discusses ways in which gender boundaries are performed in music and dance.  He points to Cowan’s recent study of Greek dance (1990), which views dance less as a domain of shared and agreed meaning than one of conflict and control.  While dance is a means of gender socialization, it is also an area where gender categories can be contested.  Social dance brings together unmarried men and women in public space, which is a problem in any society in which social and moral order is in terms of marriage and the confinement of sexuality within the domestic unit (Stokes, 1994).

Global Discourse

                        In the paper “An Insider’s Guide to the Street Dance Subculture in Singapore,” Wong Pao Yi Elke (2011) examines the vibrant subculture of street dance in Singapore, conceptualizing the social space of street dance through processes of construction, consumption, and contestation.  Elke draws attention to the interaction between the local and global street dance communities and studies how these interactions promote greater cultural appreciation:  “The international street dance community has become increasingly interconnected across time and space, resulting in a continuous two-way transmission of cultural production between the local and the global” (p. 8).  Elke argues that street dance subcultures not only transcend geographical borders to establish subculture identities, but also contribute to the flows across the global dancescape.

            In the article “Salsa Dance as Cosmopolitan Formation:  Cooperation, Conflict and Commerce in the Midwest United States,” Joanna Bosse (2013) examines the way in which salsa dance and music have entered a number of global social distribution networks, thereby accumulating meanings beyond its Latin American identity and complicating its associated Latina discourses.  Bosse (2013) presents a case study of a community of amateur salsa dancers in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, arguing that particular social and economic factors have the potential to undermine the genre’s capacity to serve as an expression of Latin American ethnic or racial identity.

            Internationally, salsa has become a music to be danced to rather than a music that is produced.  The popularity of salsa music around the world has led to local salsa dance scenes that are often socially and culturally diverse (Roman-Velazquez, 2002).  In small-town Illinois, Bosse (2013) describes how local salsero elites couched their marginalization of Mexicans in terms of aesthetics or authenticity—the Mexicans did not dance in a Cuban, Puerto Rican, or New York style, which was the style of white, middle-class newcomers, who were the paying customers. 

            “Cosmopolitanism” (Breckenridge, 2002) provides a framework for understanding how a shared set of class-based values joined the local economic and/or educational resident elites—whites, Latin Americans, and other ethnic groups—in opposition to the local working-class Mexicans.  Cosmopolitan formations are often described as “global” in common language.  Because a modernist-capitalist formation dominates much of the globe, commerce influenced the development of the salsa community in small-town Illinois.  Bosse (2013) explains:

So while salsa continued to serve as a signifier of Latino identity and shifting notions of ‘home’, it also became a powerful signifier of a particular type of ‘hip’ cosmopolitanism for a core group of ethnically diverse local elites.  To this latter constituency, fluency in salsa music and dance communicated a fluency in foreign lands and urban centres—a substantial currency for those living in a quiet, rural college town in central Illinois.  (p. 226)

Summary

            Recent literature on dance community and cultural identity explore the ways in which identities are embodied through dance movement.  Social identity is embodied through a powerful affective experience and dancers’ interactions with social alignments (Stokes, 1994).  Dance performance not only reflects culture, but also serves as a medium to negotiate and generate new meaning.  Dance movement processes body memory, and at times collective group memory, such as the national identity in Cyprus (Karayanni, 2006).  Dance may also be used to mobilize cultural identity and preserve unique features of a collective group, as with the Bukusu Kamabeka dance in Kenya (Wanyama, 2011).  Dance has the potential to both reinforce traditional gender roles and challenge them, as gender boundaries are explored and broadened in the performance of dance (Downey and Zerbib, 2008).  As a particular type of music and dance grows in popularity around the world, it becomes subject to global discourses of difference, giving local dance scenes the opportunity to renegotiate meaning in their local contexts (Elke, 2011; Bosse, 2013).  In sum, dance is a valuable area of academic inquiry that requires an interdisciplinary stance.  The links between dance community and cultural identity include its associated concerns with the politics of identity contained within the contested notions of race, class, gender and sexuality.

  

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