Vol. 3, No. 2: Fall/Winter 2007
Taking History an Extra Step
by Elizabeth Rosdeitcher
African American Dance Company performers turn their bodies into a medium for expressing emotions, spiritual states, and social and historical conditions.
In the African American Dance Company, dancers don’t just learn history, they embody it. In a piece called “El Camino del Cimarron” (“Road of the Maroon”), performed in their 2007 spring concert, dancers enacted the plight of the cimarrones, or maroons, slaves who escaped from their colonial slaveholders to form their own communities or join those of indigenous cultures. From the earliest days of New World slavery—in Belize, Guyana, Cuba, Jamaica, and many other countries throughout the Americas and the Caribbean—the maroons learned how to survive and begin new lives.
Dancers Deara Ball and Nancy Walter explain how company director Iris Rosa enabled them to imagine this history with their bodies.
“She got us to visualize what it was like to escape, the fear you would experience going through the jungle at night, through the trees,” says Ball, an English and journalism major who has been in the company since her freshman year. “She got us to imagine who you would leave behind and what you would leave behind. She put us in the mind-set of the people who were escaping,” says Walter, a senior elementary education major who has been in the company for three years and has taken dance since she was four.
“You are using your body to show, ‘This is how they may have run, this is how it may have felt to be in that situation.’ You are actively reliving it and performing it, non-verbally presenting it,” says Rosa, professor of dance in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies.
The piece, also choreographed by Rosa, shows the dancers laboring as slaves, then plotting their way across the bare stage, through various imagined physical and psychological obstacles. Their movements and expressions convey fear, hope, anticipation, and stealth, until the triumph and release of their successful escape. At that point they remain on the lookout, never losing the caution and watchfulness with which they began. Ball and Walter serve as the leaders, guiding the group to their destination. The piece is accompanied at one point by two percussionists, which, says Rosa, “adds an element of force and power.” At another point, the music includes a song about leaving one place for another by the Cuban group Buena Vista Social Club.
As is typical of Rosa’s work, “El Camino” incorporates different dance styles—African, Cuban, contemporary modern. In other pieces she draws on jazz. Here, she explains, she also drew on each dancer’s body and movement styles, made up her own movements, and included the dancers’ own improvisations. She worked with the drummers to create a rhythm that was not identifiable as a particular style, so it would evoke something new, like the new life the fugitives are beginning. Like the dance, maroonage, as Ball explains, was a strong force in the mixing of cultures—a merging of African, European colonial, and native American cultures.
What you don’t see on stage is the process that goes into the shaping of that performance: the weekly discussions between Rosa and the dancers, the readings, lectures, and the daily work on technique and memorization.
For the piece on maroonage, she explains, the students “learn about the real life situations and scenarios, and the work slaves were doing. Students learned, for example, about the labor the slaves performed in Belize, chopping down trees. They learned about the escapes, where the maroons went, how they survived, and about the spiritual meaning this escape had.”
The next step is “to enact it, to use your body to express it. We ask, ‘How do you use your body to show desperation, to show that you want to escape, or that you’re plotting? How do you show what it would be like in the mountains? Those natural body movements become part of the choreography.” The dancers, suggests Rosa, gain “another type of information. And for some, it is very emotional.”
To do this successfully, of course, is no small matter. Rosa, as a performing artist in an academic department, often finds herself trying to educate both students and colleagues alike about the discipline of dance, what it means to “turn your body into your instrument.”
“Training,” says Rosa, “is about cultivating technique and adopting a certain protocol. It’s about knowing how to present yourself, your delivery in a public performance, the way you act, the way you wear your makeup, having your costume perfectly ironed and correct, and every hair in place; it’s about having no nail polish on your toes or one little inkling of jewelry.”
“It’s not just about going out there and dancing,” she muses, “like that TV show, ‘So You Think You Can Dance.’ It’s about delivering pieces that have an emotional quality and provoke thought in the audience.”
“You get there and you learn so much,” says Ball, “about being committed to the process and to dance. It is really special in that way.”
The African American Dance Company is a two-credit course offered through the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies and the African American Arts Institute. One of its objectives is to deal with the experiences of African diasporic culture.
This gives the dancers a broad perspective, suggests Ball. “We talk a lot about civil rights and the experience of African American people, about the diaspora in Latin America and other places. We talk about the histories of people in the company. You also have to be able to articulate your ideas and positions.”
In addition to working on several of Rosa’s compositions, the class develops their own collaborative projects. As a class students choose a theme. Then Rosa divides them into small groups of three or four. Each group decides on a sub-theme around which their composition evolves. They present an early version of their pieces as works in progress in a fall performance, and the final version in the annual spring concert.This year, the theme for the class was “United Souls . . . Human Revolution.”
In Walter’s group the sub-theme was “famine” and their piece, she explains, “portrayed how women come together to work through things in response to natural disaster.” Their movements reflected togetherness and separation, dependency and independence, breaking apart and coming together.
In Ball’s group piece, “I give, you take; we exchange,” the dancers played off each other’s movements. One person did a dance move and another picked up on it, until it seemed to evolve into an elaborate conversation in which each learns from the other and then adds something new.
The process of developing these pieces, says Walter, “is really like writing a paper. You discuss as you go and keep reworking the ideas.”
The African American Dance Company was founded in 1974, the same year as the African American Arts Institute. Its director Herman Hudson, who conceived and created the institute to preserve, promote, and celebrate African American artistic traditions through research and performance, hired Rosa as the ensemble’s director. She has been there ever since.
Born in Puerto Rico, Rosa came to northern Indiana when she was three years old. “As we were growing up,” she explains, “we lived in a Latino neighborhood in the East Chicago harbor. Dance has always been part of the Latino/Hispanic cultural tradition, and so I grew up with the music and dance that was a part of the everyday culture and which has a lot of African influences.”
Her first formal training was in contemporary modern dance and her choreography is still rooted in that genre, which, she explains, is “a broad spectrum of dance styles. So choreographers like José Limón, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, each developed their own style and drew on the experiences in their own world and their own cultures.”
Rosa, too, has developed her own style. She has studied the traditional dance forms from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. With her group in Indianapolis, Sancocho Music and Dance Collage, she presents the traditional forms to young audiences.
As a choreographer, she then “takes these motifs to create new pieces.” She has also “done a lot more work in jazz, branching out little by little to what I do now as far as fusing different dance forms together.”
“You have to have something that keeps driving your creativity,” she observes. And for Rosa the diaspora is a constant source of inspiration. Her recent trip to the Dominican Republic to teach a course called “Dominican identity in the age of globalization,” was itself a source of new material—“a barrage of sights and sounds, what they do, how they eat, how they dance, the whole culture. This,” she says, “is all useful material that I can take and process and merge and fuse into what I like to do.”
For Ball, “As a dancer, it’s very exciting. You never know what to expect.” Or as Walter says, “Dance-wise, this class has changed my life. It’s changed the way I teach dance, do it, look at it.” But it has also, she adds, “opened my eyes to different issues, points of view, and struggles.”
Since the movement of bodies and the fusion of cultures are among the prominent features of the African diaspora—whether you trace that history to Cuba, Belize, or Indiana—what better way to represent it than through this form of dance?
But if the diaspora typically dehumanized those bodies, and sought to cancel out their individuality and will, it seems that Rosa inverts this process, turning the body into the medium of expression for a whole host of thoughts and emotions, psychological and spiritual states, social and historical conditions.
Elizabeth Rosdeitcher is a freelance writer in Bloomington.
