Murphy, Jacqueline Shea, The People Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
In The People Have Never Stopped Dancing, Jacqueline Shea Murphy explores the role Native American dance practices and ideologies played in the development of modern dance and choreography. Shea Murphy argues for a complex understanding of dance and representations of dance as legitimate historical documents and tools for gaining entry to and addressing Native American social, cultural, and political histories. Shea Murphy illustrates how Native American dance offers different representations of time, corporeality, (stage) performance, dance representation, causation, and ancestral relations in contrast to European epistemes. In this way, Shea Murphy argues that modern dance partly constituted itself against the Native American dancing body, and over its imagined disappearance and ideologies. Presenting a non-neutral, particular, and political understanding of dance, Shea Murphy links this ongoing process of “cultural exchange” and the varied shifts of dominant group ideology about Native dances to a continued active process of justifying colonialism and indigenous land loss in the name of European ownership. In so doing, Shea Murphy convincingly connects Althusserian revisions of ideology, that which “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” while highlighting the (in)visibility of Native Dance as recuperative methods for Native American “theories” and “documents” as they have and continue to face acts of control and containment from state and cultural agents and apparatuses.
After a general overview of the text and conversation, Shea Murphy organizes her text into three disparate parts, “Restrictions, Regulations, Resiliences”, “Twentieth-Century Modern Dance”, and “Indigenous Choreographers Today”. Shea Murphy draws her data from a wide variety of sources, hegemonic to counter-hegemonic, governmental to popular, written to embodied signification, and anti-dance policies of the 19th century to contemporary participant-observation and interviews. Methodologically, Shea Murphy’s work is guided by two tenets: 1) to expand the narrow understanding of sources and archives that undergirds what she identifies as a colonizer’s arrogant process of “Playing Indian” (from DeLoria) and knowing the Other through representation (Shea Murphy self-identifies as non-Native American) 2) to take Native Dance as a valid source of knowledge and history in its own terms, without comparison to works otherwise canonized in Dance Studies. Although Shea Murphy states her valuing of artist intention, her interpretation of these documents seems to uncover many unintended significations and linkages to the political and spiritual historicity of oppression and racial struggle.
For example, Shea Murphy demonstrates that in culturally relative terms, Native Dance can be seen as different religious, social, recreational, story-telling and remembering practices embodied in personal and communal acts. By unearthing the rich archive of federal antidance policies dating back to 1882 and commentary dating years before this legislation, Shea Murphy shows how dance served to define Indianness in efforts of both containing threats to European, Christian ideologies about ‘proper’ documents, recording, spiritual, embodiment and economic practices. Over time, dominant rhetoric in legislation about Indian dance’s role shifted to accommodate contextual changes such that the purpose of authorizing and protecting white interests was perpetuated. In this sense, Native Dancing bodies was often (un)intentionally negotiated, defiant, underground, and/or rescripted to fit the needs of the agentive dancers and their communities.
Another important contribution Shea Murphy makes rests in framing Native Dance as a non-secular, non-Christian approach and worldview, not necessarily tied to the modern historical chronological mode of remembering the past. Such views account for Native Dance’s ability to create space or agency for Gods, spirits, and nonhuman forces. This rewrites previously privileged notions of agency (political) as dealt with in canonical race and ethnic studies texts. Additionally, Shea Murphy convincingly ties the increasing codification and management of Indianness, the efforts to denounce “fake” Indians and stage “real” “authentic” Indians, and contemporaneous movement theories to explore Delsartian and Native dancer’s notions of corporeality. Delsarte’s Christian-based theory sees individual bodily movement as the source of meaning, an expression of an emotional interiority/abstract, universal truth. The much criticized Delsartian attempt to codify a system of universal expression represented a shift from earlier Christian thought that claimed that the body could not effect change outside of itself, but also required isolation from communal action and turned away from story-telling as a main focus of bodily performance. By figuring movement as the “direct agent” of a soul, and dividing an individual’s inner “truth” of a soul from the act of interior expression externally, Delsartian notions set up the difficulty in audience’s interpretation of Native Dance as an act of communication to anything beyond the interior (i.e. kinship, spirits, nature) and the subsequent denouncement of such religiosity and “authenticity” claims of Native Dance and Indianness through institutions and popular culture (i.e. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West). The linkage in body theories genealogy between Delsarte, Native Dance, and Modern Dance forms the crucial nexus for Shea Murphy’s interventions on the many ways Native Dance was thought, embodied, and written into history.
Shea Murphy’s complex understanding of historic Native American dance choreographies and histories can inform the ways I think about Filipino dancing bodies in the U.S. Shea Murphy’s insights on different notions of time and space as represented in Native American dance and history (land loss/space available to dance) can open my definitions on contexts within which Filipinos dance. Also, Shea Murphy’s aversion of ethnographic pitfalls, paired historical and contemporary dance subject writing, and practical, particularist, political, non-neutral way of understanding dance as document/theory/tranformational/ancestral are useful models for my own investigations. Her notions of coembodiment (non-linear descent) and non-portrayal in dancing genealogy and performance provide disparate frameworks of dance from previous notions of propertied, owned, claimed, “acted” performance. Shea Murphy’s interpretation of Deloria’s argument on “Playing Indian” can be linked to Filipino studies scholar Alan Isaacs’ work on the boy scout narrative in Filipino American history and literature. Shea Murphy’s juxtaposition of early Christian and later Delsartian body ideologies versus Native Dance notions seem to parallel indigenous Filipino notions of ontology (loob/labas, an inner/outer dialectic) and power relations (utang na loob). Whereas Shea Murphy’s insight on Native Dance as historical and embodied document and personal transformational process, ancestral communication, and such all persuasively open up different comprehensions of the forces and powers of dance and different forms of agency for Native dancing bodies (historical, spiritual, political), the qualified power relations within Native Dance and how these Native power relations are theorized through such acts and documents seem like space that Shea Murphy’s analysis has room to grow. Additionally, because Shea Murphy’s investigation launches from questions of visibility (of ideological influence, of “absented” Indians, of Native American Dance in Modern Dance history) but importantly and repeatedly underscores the act of embodiment as a source of meaning, I wonder if the processes of racial formation for Native American dancers (and audiences of their representations) could be further complicated such that the performance of race is disrupted/buttressed/unaffected by the Native American concepts of time, spatiality, body, and movement. Perhaps it is because Shea Murphy’s text offers so many possibilities for imagining now-popular “worldviews” differently, it could influence a paradigmatic shift in the ways dance scholars think, write, and embody dance.
i got Max/MSP 5 installed and the first thing i did was to revisit an old project.my 'dynamic metronome' was something i started years ago in puredata when i got sick of having to stop playing to adjust my metronome's speed, so i wrote one that'd change automatically. i bounced it into an older version of max a while ago to play some interface games with it (i really like their javascript stuff), but i hit a wall when i tried to make it a standalone.
