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AHRB Research Centre for Cross-Cultural Music
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Is an academic/actor/choreographer and filmmaker, and has won several major awards for his works. He graduated in acting from Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London; then studied ballet and contemporary dance at the Ballet Rambert School and learnt filmmaking at Twickenham Film Studios.
In 2002 he studied from an MPhil at Brunel University in London and has almost completed his DPhil at the University of Sussex, which is entitled, ' How black slaves in London added extra content to European dances such as the quadrille as part of their fight for emancipation' and he expects to be examined this autumn. So far the majority of his time has been spent on making films on an extraordinarily small budget and studying for his DPhil at the University of Sussex. In 2006 he was appointed to the full-time post of Senior Lecturer in Dance at the University of Lincoln.
BLACK SOLIDARITY DANCE FILM
( SURREY UNIVERSITY FELLOWSHIP 2006/7)
A 7min Silent Dance Film installation
By
Rodreguez King-Dorset
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This debut feature film, written, choreographed and Pictured: Naomi James and Rodreguez King-Dorset 2006 |
The Continuity of Traditional West African dance in London , via the Caribbean . How *black Slaves in London added extra content to European dances such as the Minuet as part of their fight for Emancipation.
*Since it is widely acknowledged by historians such as David Barry Gasper that the vast majority of the slaves that came to London in 1730-1850 were from West Africa via the Caribbean, for the purpose of this work, 'black' dance means culturally black, as well as biologically black; a dance culture and identity that is rooted in West Africa; unless otherwise stated, the term 'black' must be recognised in this context.
**Talking of 'blacks' as a group may also be too much of a generalisation. They were made up of many groups. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this film, there are general points that apply across the board to a wide variety of different groups. There are refutable exceptions, but these are refutations to a general pattern that has persisted across cultural West Africa for most of recorded history, although the term " West Africa " covers a large, diverse and far from homogenous area.
*** I am firmly of the opinion that film, as a visual medium remains a mainstream 'activity' whereas 'digital video' and/or 'multi-media.' are merely offshoots from the mainstream. The filmmaker has acquired a range of techniques and abilities much greater and much more effective than other techniques. That is why it is still important to use the full resources of filmmaking for this project. It is proposed that the film should be silent because silent films i.e. early films in the beginning of the film industry evoke a set of period associations which will be particularly appropriate to the atmosphere this project is intending to create.
The survival of West African cultural traditions in the New World has been a subject of academic controversy since the pioneering work of Melville Herskovits in 1937. Yet even in this controversy, the dance culture of blacks in London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been neglected. What has been overlooked is that when blacks arrived in London from the Caribbean, they brought with them aspects of their West African dance culture, which had survived their transportation to the Caribbean . These dances can provide important evidence for the controversy.
This research project will be based on West African dance themes. It will set out to make a film attempting to establish what elements of West African dance were incorporated into the Minuet when West Africans in London danced it at the end of the eighteenth century. It is necessary to do a filmed dance reconstruction since it is the film medium that can best show the minute differences of actual body movement styles and aesthetic rhythmic patterns of traditional West African original dances that found their way to London via the Caribbean . I will illustrate and analyse this aspect of African cultural tradition in the visual evidence of the dance film reconstructions.
We know that there were opportunities in the minuet for individual dancers to extemporise and there is obviously a range of dance movements they might have used in doing so. Evidence is fortunately available in prints showing these improvisations and the research will try and establish what range of options a West African had when given such opportunities.
It will be necessary to establish what West African dance survived in the Caribbean in the first half of the nineteenth century. This is not as difficult as it sounds, because many of those West African dances have survived in the Caribbean to the present day. It is only recently however that attempts have been made to compare what has survived in the Caribbean, with what dances are still current in West Africa . The rich dance culture of West Africa has persisted almost unchanged in spite of colonialisation, and seems to have proved equally strong in surviving the horrors of slavery and transportation to the Caribbean . What this research will attempt to do will be to show elements of West African dances that blacks arriving in London from the Caribbean brought with them. These elements need to be clearly linked to those that still exist in West Africa . Once this has been established it will be possible to make reasonable predictions as to what range of dance movements were likely to have been used when black dancers were called on to improvise in the minuet.
There is plenty of evidence in press advertisements of the time, that from early in the eighteenth century the black community in London was holding 'black hops' or 'black balls' which white people were not allowed to attend. ( The London Chronicle , 17 February 1764). This short film will hope to show the various ways in which dance was used at 'West African balls' as a means of meeting black people's problems of identity in London up until the moment of Emancipation. The film itself will show the following:
• Archival footage of Traditional West African dance. (15 sec). Film of the Umwese people from Yoruba in Nigeria . (Held by private collector) With the use of freeze frame and subtitles, the essential elements of West African dance will be analysed visually. Essentially the aim will be to point up as simply as possible the major differences between West African and European dance, and since the installation will be viewed by a number of European eyes, it is necessary to step outside the usual set of expectations about dance and try and see dance in its West African context.
• A typical current folk dance from Antigua . It is important that I use a performer and a dancer that I know. I have grown up with Antiguan folk dance and I am particularly well suited to analyse it. The point of showing this solo is to make clear that the West African elements already analysed clearly survived in the Caribbean through oral tradition.
• A reconstruction of the European minuet danced in London in 1772. (40 sec) See Kellom Tomlinson, The Art of Dancing Explained by Reading and Figures ( London , 1735), Vol. I, pp. 6-17.
• A reconstruction of the European minuet as black dancers might have used it as a means of both satirising Europeans and asserting their own sense of identity and independence. Including analysis and subtitles. (Mockery and satirising). (40 sec) See Federal Writers' Project, Slave Narratives. A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves (Washington, D.C. 1936-38), Vol. XVI Part II, p.249.
• To look at and attempt to analyse what evidence there would be in the black minuet of the vestigial influences of West African dance continuity. This will include freeze frames and arrowed computer graphics to prove the various points raised in the dances. (40 sec). Use will be made of pictorial evidence available in Prints and etchings. (See Primary Sources on the following page).
• A "subtitling" commentary will provide a historical background and a textual analysis of the dances involved.
(Computer graphics, freeze framing, dissolving and replays will add to the overall 7 min estimated running length of the film).
It is hoped that a filmed dance reconstruction will help redress the balance and give black dance in London during this period the importance it deserves.
The Victoria & Albert Museum have agreed to showcase it as part of the their 2007 commemoration events marking the 1807 Act of Parliament that made it illegal to trade in black people as slaves.
Discussing dance in academic terms has its own particular problems. Dance is a form of movement by humans that expresses their response in movement to music. It needs to be seen and either experienced in practice or kinaesthetically appreciated by the visual observer who is supposedly imaginatively experiencing the dance as a physical exertion, even though not actually moving.
In this film neither music notation nor dance notation has been used, but hopefully the film extracts have been the means by which those aspects of dance difficult to pin down in words, have been illustrated. There have also been the drawings and paintings used, but these represent a moment frozen in time, whereas dance is essentially movement. The camera frame itself presents another problem. This imposes a square or rectangular surround to what is viewed. Unfortunately a dancer in making the moves required by the dance tends to move out of the frame and the visual effect of the dance depends on being able to view the whole body of the dancer. If the camera operator appreciates this and moves the camera further away from the dancer so that the whole body can be seen whatever movement it makes, then unfortunately the dancer has a tendency to look too small within the frame, more like a performing flea than a real human being. This is generally the reason why tribal dances and dance designed for the theatre stage, seldom seem to work properly when viewed on film.
With the new visual medium of the camera, if dance is to be effective, it generally has to be designed to suit the needs of the camera frame. Many dances not designed for the camera lose some of their impact when filmed simply because the intentions of the dance makers and the dancers themselves are poorly conveyed in the new medium. The viewer must therefore appreciate that much of the original force is diminished in the new medium, but they are being shown to illustrate the points being made in this film, and dance being a visual art, the film extracts are still much more academically valid than any notation or any prose writing could make them.
Antigua :
The diaries of the missionaries of the Moravian {Muswell Hill, London ) and Methodist societies provide invaluable information on West African continuity in Antigua . The Moravians were the first to evangelise the slaves in Antigua , in 1756, and therefore encountered many of these traditions. The search of these sources was very time consuming. There is only one major drawback. The explanation of certain West African traditions could have been more detailed. Quite often the missionaries made vague references to West African traditions without attempting any elucidation.
London :
News journals that comprise the Burnley collection, (1700-1850) provided valuable information about one aspect of London 's African dance heritage. The many white commentators admitted to having problems with the presence of blacks in London, especially with the 'black only' clubs, where the black Londoners danced and clung together to form strong community links in the tradition of their forebears, as has been shown. Probably they were blinkered by their own image of the black man and his dance and felt compelled to exercise their own insecurities about the dancing body and so projected them onto the black. Whatever the reason, there seem to have been reservations in their reporting of the West African dance tradition. The series of prints that include Isaac Cruikshank (1792) and G.S Tregears (c1834).
© Copyright: Rodreguez King-Dorset 2006
