Recovering the Phoenix, cont. By Brenda Dixon Gottschild

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

So–might we ask, are black Britons kept out of British dance departments because their methodologies are suspect? If so, should that assumption be put under the microscope? –Or, better, under the knife? Is it assumed that people of African lineage are "too close to the material to be objective" when examining elements of their own cultural heritage? (That, by the way, is what I've been accused of by the dance establishment.) If that's the case, then why are so-called whites free to study ballet, baroque, ballroom, or any other dance genre with no restrictions? And is the story–or the historiography–of dance by black Britons invisibilized because it is viewed through a prism that can "read" nothing but white light–white-centered activity–with everything else falling beyond its spectrum?

Jumping off again, take this example, and make what you will of it: Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, founder and artistic director of Urban Bush Women, talked about two levels of bias that she's simply had to live with when I interviewed her for a Dance Magazine article some years ago. In spite of her extensive background in dance and theater studies, both practical and theoretical and at the undergraduate and graduate levels, she explains that "... in the beginning I was viewed as a na?ve artist, as though I were exploring in certain ways because I didn't know any better." [Note 6] She was only doing what her white "downtown dance" counterparts did: she was "getting at the energy of the movement without the feet being pointed or the legs straightened." When whites did this, it was experimental; when she did it, it was assumed it was for lack of technical ability or from ignorance. Zollar also recounts this story about choreographing two dances around the same time–one about the death of her mother, with the female cast of all white women wearing white, to suggest hospital gowns, and the other a rendering of Fanga, a traditional Liberian welcome dance first performed by Pearl Primus. "One of my teachers said, 'Were you trying to say that the white world is dying, and the black world is alive, healthy, and happy?' Zollar was stunned and thought, 'It doesn't matter what I do; they'll always see it in racial terms.'" (p. 24)

Are we, in this room, subject to Zollar's comment? Do we put people of African lineage in a box marked "Race and Other"–regardless of what they do?

Okay, now, for a really "off the wall" topic, but one that has its place in this discussion. As I tell you this true story, keep in mind the Guardian article about how our beliefs are shaped. The Independent, [Note 7] a British publication, ran an expos? in its January 21 1995 Weekend section on the practice of elite American campuses (including Harvard, Yale, Vassar, and Wellesley, Hillary Clinton's alma mater) requiring its incoming students to pose nude for "posture photographs." The practice continued through the late 1960s, having been discontinued at Yale not until 1968. Apparently, students were not even aware of the possibility of refusing or protesting and were informed that the posture photo "...was a routine feature of freshman orientation week." This was definitely not pornography–not as innocent! In truth, these photos "...had nothing to do with posture," but were made for quack, antiquated anthropological purposes that can only be seen as a racist hangover from earlier times. According to George Hersey, a Yale art history professor quoted in the article:

The reigning school of the time, presided over by E.A. Hooton of Harvard and W. H. Sheldon [of Columbia University]... held that a person's body, measured and analysed, could tell much about intelligence, temperament, moral worth and probable future achievement. The inspiration came from the founder of social Darwinism, Francis Galton, who proposed such a photo archive for the British population... . The Nazis compiled similar archives analyzing the photos for racial as well as characterological content (as did Hooten)." (p.25)

Hersey, who later authored a book on the aesthetics of racism, asserts that "from the outset, the purpose of these 'posture photographs' was eugenic... enforced better breeding–getting those Exeter and Harvard men together with their corresponding Wellesley, Vassar and Radcliffe girls." "In other words, physique equals destiny."(p. 25)

Now, what could have driven the leading educators of our finest institutions to adhere to such a dubious and devious pseudo-scientific project? The writer ends the article with words of caution: yes, we all say/think/believe this could never happen again; but, hey, there are the recent "Bell Curve Wars," of the 1990s, with another gaggle of "scientists" attesting to the inherently low IQ of peoples of color in general and people of African lineage in particular. [Note 8] He reminds us that "...skepticism is still valuable in the face of scientific claims of certainty, particularly in the slippery realms of human behavior." (p.26)

I raise this controversy in light of the article on the irrationality of belief and the staying power of stereotypes and in the service of our topic for today's symposium. You know, cultural myths have a strong hold–a stronghold, if you will–on the imagination. As that essay points out, those of us who are convinced that we are washed clean of racism most probably harbor unconscious negative associations. Applying these findings to the field of dance, some of us may be aware–as my husband Hellmut Gottschild so eloquently phrased it–that "Whenever we want to designate someone as 'Other,' the first place we go is to the body." I fear that the belief that white folks' anatomy is different than and superior to all others is a conceit that is alive and kicking in dance circles and in the world at large. Look at the ongoing "chatter" that continues to surround dancers' particulars–feet, buttocks, musculature, and so on. So many of these characteristics are still attributed to race, although, if we are educated and up to date, we know that race is a social construct, not a biological reality. And what about sports? There, the myth is the reverse, but still racially driven–namely, that peoples of African lineage are high achievers not because of hard work and training, but due to innate, inborn prowess; they don't use brain power to achieve ascendance, it just comes naturally. The powerful myth of race endures. It is a culturally exclusive constellation of beliefs based on pseudo-science. Is that myth at all a driving force in keeping Afro-Britons off the historical and intellectual screen of mainstream British culture?

Tell me: are all of us in this room beyond such thoughts? Do we find that some part of us persists in believing the myth of Africanist inferiority, even though another part of us knows it's a lie?