One of the more interesting presentations last week was from our own panel. A young grad student presented on a Uigur folk dance ritual. He had some nice field video of extended members of a family whom he knew dancing together while local musicians played. Uigurs are Muslim, and here in the US we have this idea that Muslim women are barred from even semi-public participation, but the video showed men and women dancing at the same time, if not always together. The evening ends with dancers spinning to the music in a contest - the one left standing is declared the winner (in this video a youngster and a young man spun for so long that the musicians stopped and declared them both winners). It was a really charming and interesting glimpse of a culture that not many people know about (which was, in fact, the theme of the panel).
The presentation went on to note that China, which controls the Uigur Autonomous Region, has variously enacted prohibitions against the Uigur language as well as folk dance celebrations like this one. Lately, however, they have changed tactics, and have begun allowing very public dance performances with the idea that it would strengthen Uigur "identity" - or, at least, what China would like for the Uigurs to consider their identity. (I hope, if he reads this, the presentor will bear with me here - this is a real capsulization of his presentation). To that end, productions have been staged in large theatres and broadcast on TV. Many, many groups vie with each other using flashy costumes, lighting and stage effects, and putting large numbers of people onstage, doing theatricalized choreography of the actual folk dances. The presentor noticed that the Uigur audiences are happy with the presentations, since it represents some positive acceptance of their customs, however dramatized, and that some elements of flash have begun to show up in local rituals. Meanwhile, some of the hominess of family celebrations, as well as local idiosyncrasies, are being lost.
Though the presentor was trying for some neutrality, he thankfully did not hide the fact that he thought this might mean the end of the local folkdance rituals, and he expressed both distrust of the official acceptance of public performances and some sorrow that elements of flash were showing up locally. I understood his point - China, after all, is very, very big, and has been dominating all of the areas around it, not just, as is fashionably understood, Tibet. But the presentation did get me thinking.
For one thing, folk rituals all over the world have gone the way of the dodo with the avalanche of media. It happened long ago in the US (I remember first noticing in the early 1980's that a mall worker in rural PA looked like an MTV video jock, and suddenly realized that the reason was that, via cable - everyone was able to watch MTV! - A facile example, but you see my point). So we don't notice here anymore how national rituals - like the Superbowl - have taken over for more local events as a means of underscoring our collective identity. So the Chinese are busy doing in their autonomous reagions what we have already done to ourselves.
There was no time at our panel for discussion, unfortunately; no time to discuss things like colonialism, post-colonialism, and that the preservation of indigenous cultures often hinges on depriving people of things like plumbing and electricity that the rest of us already enjoy, and that the advent of these things almost by default means that everyone joins the hive collective.
But what really got me thinking was something different; i.e. how classical dance is formed. Is the destruction of local culture a necessary prelude to national culture? Is the absorption of folk movement into public choreography part of a transformation to a national artisitic expression?
I started thinking about the evolution of ballet. It has been awhile since I read about this, but ballet started as a "gentlemen's entertainment" held in cigar smoke-filled theatres where an exclusively male audience ogled the bare arms, lower legs and half-revealed bosoms of female dancers doing, essentially, folk dances. From those somewhat salacious beginnings we have the artistry and athletcisim (and, yes, the sensuality) of modern ballet, while the folk traditions that helped spawn it have all but died away.
So the Uigur dance transformation from local tradition to a more uniform public one is underway. It may well be the death of the local, but is it also evolving on the road to classical dance?
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