Get your dance back
There are extraordinary people among us.
My class last week was a magical combination of extraordinary ones, including a woman who got her PhD when she was 82. She’s now 86. Every time she opened her mouth, a story emerged that enraptured and informed us, those around her. Alice, we all want to be you, vital and learning and teaching and playing at 86. We have much to learn from the Alices of the world.
And tonight I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by another extraordinary human, renowned photographer Miguel Gandert who also teaches at this Institute, my home for the past three weeks.
Miguel studies ritual, ritualized form: "Ritual performance is something people do not because they have to, but because they need to," he explained to us."I need to photograph to understand the world," he said, as he shared images with us. I was struck by not only their beauty, but by his relationship to them. If photograph is context, we were all imbued with meaning at the end.
His talk, "Images of Ritual: Reading History and Intercultural Relationships in Photography," took us into worlds we do not often see, worlds of process and dance and performance, worlds in some way paralleled by the previous evening’s presentation on Hip-Hop as an intercultural form. "I’ve been doing this dance my whole life," one dancer had said when asked. They owned a form and beat and rhythm that I fear we do not.
The photo of the young woman above is from a series that Miguel did to capture the spirit of Comanche culture, a culture he honored as Nuevomexicano villagers reenact the terms of their own survival and cultural origins. Indo-Hispano music, dance, and celebrations have been handed down for generations in northern New Mexico.
Despite this lengthy heritage, there is slight mention of these traditions in the historical and anthropological record. In the Anglo-American imagination, miscegenation is equated with contamination. When Edward S. Curtis, passed through New Mexico staging his portraits of the American Indian, he bypassed these mestizo communities. So Miguel Gandert stepped in, creating portraits like this one that are made in the tradition of Curtis, staging photographs that Curtis might have made of them.
From there to Bolivia’s Feast Days. In many cases, Miguel was the only observer, or one of a few. Did the dance stop because there were no witnesses? No, the dance wasn’t dependent on an audience; it had to be performed, not because of acclaim, but because of need.
I was deeply humbled by not only the beauty of his images, but also by the depth of his passion and insight, and by his own humbleness in the face of such forces. One of the feast day performances in Brazil draws only 3,000 watchers, but has over 18,000 performers. In the U.S., I fear that a stringent cost-benefit analysis would close that show soon after opening.
We lose ourselves and our mythology in the urge toward efficiency and neatness. Where these dances acknowledge the dark side of their history, our dark histories are "spun" into soundbites. Where these dances must be danced, we look at return on investment before opening a show. We have lost our mythologies, our rituals, our needs. They have been replaced with ROI, Paris Hilton, and media spin.
We are so unconnected to our rituals, to sacred spaces, to the dances that give us shared meaning. These arts serve a vital identity function. We need to get our dance back in order to get our selves back.
Thanks, Miguel.
