Recovering the Phoenix: Dance, Education, Society & the Politics of Race By Brenda Dixon Gottschild

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Editor's note: The following paper was delivered by Brenda Dixon Gottschild as the keynote address for the conference Black Britons and Dance,At De Monfort University, Leicester, UK, a one day event to open up and explore possibilities for initiating dialogues among Black British dance practitioners and people teaching in Higher Education, focusing in particular on new ideas about dance history, pedagogy and cultural policy.

The conference was held on Saturday 9 June 2007 organized by Ramsey Burt, Professor of Dance History, Faculty of Humanities, De Monfort University.

Tongue Smell Color (photo detail) from a performance created and performed by Hellmut Gottschild and Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Photo © by Beatriz Schiller, 2002.

In this year 2007, the 200^th anniversary of Britain's abolition of the slave trade, I pour this libation and dedicate this presentation to the memory of our African ancestors who were its victims–and they were your ancestors, as well as mine!

For starters, and to put us on the same page as dance devotees, I want you to hear this-- "A Dancer's Credo," by the late, great Pearl Primus:

My career has been a quest...a search for roots. The journey has taken me deep into the cultures of many people in many countries of the world.

Dance has been my vehicle. Dance has been my language, my strength. In the dance I have confided my most secret thoughts and shared the inner music of all mankind. I have danced across mountains and deserts, ancient rivers, and oceans, and slipped through the boundaries of time and space.

Dance has been my freedom and my world. It has enabled me to go around, scale, bore through, batter down, or ignore visible and invisible social and economic walls.

Dance is my medicine. It is the scream which eases for a while the terrible frustration common to all human beings who, because of race, creed, or color, are "invisible."

Dance is the fist with which I fight the sickening ignorance of prejudice. It is the veiled contempt I feel for those who patronize with false smiles, handouts, empty promises, insincere compliments. Instead of growing twisted like a gnarled tree inside myself, I am able to dance out my anger and my tears.

Dance has been my teacher, ever patiently revealing to me the dignity, beauty, and strength in the cultural heritage of my people, as a vital part of the great heritage of all mankind.

I dance not to entertain but to help people better understand each other. Because through dance I have experienced the wordless joy of freedom, I seek it more fully now for my people and for all people everywhere. [Note 1]

Primus touches on some of the issues that bar the embracing of Afro-British dance and dancers in the British academic and historical mainstream, leading us to contemplate how we get ourselves into such a position of denial that a whole piece of history is undocumented, and people who come from a certain ethnic lineage are left out of the mix.

So, to begin, let me state the obvious: I'm no expert on the Afro-British dance experience, and it's not the topic I'll address today–at least, not directly. Instead, I aim to discuss the roots, roadblocks, resolutions, and results of my work in researching the Africanist [Note 2] presence in American performance and, based on parallels in the two cultures, to make recommendations for Afro-British research. I ask you to engage a "willing suspension of disbelief"–to trust me, and come with me on this journey of interrogation as I add another layer of information from an entirely different source. Here I don my "anti-racist cultural worker" cap to quote from an intriguing article that ran in The Guardian a few years ago. Titled "Where Belief is Born," [Note 3] it's about the work of a new field of research, "'social neuroscience', ... which draws together psychologists, neuroscientists and anthropologists all studying the neural basis for the social interaction between humans." The goal is to see how beliefs are formed, how they affect us, and how these beliefs can be manipulated. They're finding neurological models to explain how our brains categorize others and unconsciously view people and things as good or bad, not on the basis of fact but due to received wisdom–fear and prejudice, that is–"from the prevailing culture." (p.4)