DANCE : Conference for Critics Offers Some Surprises

Far from being a pack of mean-spirited Grinches, dance critics are even willing to give up their Labor Day weekend holiday to attend a national conference on--what else?--dance criticism.

Almost 200 members of the Dance Critics Assn. attended a four-day conference this weekend at Cal State Los Angeles. The conference was called “Looking Out: Critical Imperatives in World Dance” and was tied into the international focus of the Los Angeles Festival, which runs through Sept. 16.

There resulted more questions than answers and a surprising amount of heat and disagreement. Critics just can’t help criticizing each other, I guess.

Because many of us grew up on the movies, we were all drawn to a film-video presentation entitled “Hollywood Images of World Dance” by Allegra Fuller Snyder, UCLA professor of dance ethnology. The films proved intriguing. No, make that horrifying.

The program shows excerpts from Hollywood movies of 1939-85 and covers five geographical and ethnic areas: Africa, America (Indian), Pacific Islands, Asia and South America.

Most of these movies use world dance indiscriminately as local color, exoticism or special effect. Hardly any attempt to present the dances of those regions correctly, honestly and with respect. Instead, stereotypes abound.

In a series of Tarzan and “King Solomon’s Mines” movies, for instance, we see the “natives” performing “savage” dances--always before they are about to sacrifice a heroic blond couple in some particularly gruesome way. (Of course, the captives aresaved in the nick of time.)

Over time, we see the costumes in these movies get skimpier and skimpier, but the sense of dangerous evil, wild hopping and jumping, grunting and drooling remains constant.

Except . . . one astonishing exception.

In the MGM 1950 remake of “King Solomon’s Mines,” we see an actual Watusi dance that would be performed before a king. A lithe, male dancer manipulates two long spears with incredibly fluid arm movements, while he and a group of men behind him execute dazzling, high-stepping moves. For a change, we watch with admiration and serious interest.

Snyder said that because of political developments in Watusi homelands in Burundi and Rwanda, this particular dance can no longer be seen there. So Hollywood has served a documentary function. Amazing.

But elsewhere, we see such phony, though sometimes delectable, examples as Betty Grable doing a tap-dance hula in the 1939 film “Honolulu” for MGM (at least she calls it a “homage” to the real thing in the movie) or a mishmash of Southeast Asian, Chinese and Japanese dance styles in a fantasy sequence from MGM’s 1955 “Kismet.” Don’t they all look the same, the producers seem to be saying, and if not, who cares?

OK, so if you want the real--not the reel--thing, where do you turn? Is it all that easy to find? Admittedly, during the L.A. Festival, you have lots of opportunities. But still, major problems must be considered, as discussed in a panel entitled “Translating the World: Presenting World Dance on the Proscenium Stage,” moderated by Times dance writer Lewis Segal.

Here, we learn that much of what we term “world dance” takes place in different venues and often lasts considerably longer than we are used to.

Javanese court dances, for instance, take place over two days and two nights, minimum. They can be performed by up to 400 dancers and 200 musicians. Audiences number 30,000 to 36,000 people, and they come and go--eat and even sleep--during performances in a way we would not consider socially acceptable.

What happens when such dances are brought to the L.A. Festival? What is lost in shortening them and placing them in the context of a proscenium theater?

No clear answers emerged during the panel, composed of representatives from the visiting Royal Court Yogyakarta Java, the American Indian Dance Theater and the Aman International Folk Ensemble. The panelists agreed that these--and other dances (even European folk dances)--must be shortened and edited. They said the point is to retain what is important and to eliminate what is redundant.

They agreed that editing can be good or terrible; it depends on the sensibility of the artist. But how the artists do that right, what decisions they make, no one ventured.

So, to the question of to what degree is what we see on the stage reliable, the artists say, essentially: “Trust us.”

But when does a difference in degree become a difference in kind? Who decides what is important and what is redundant? How do they know? If anything truly is redundant, why is it there in the first place?

No one has a clear answer.

But critics themselves went under scrutiny in a session entitled “Watching American Critics Watch World Dance: A Metacritical Analysis,” led by June Vail, director of dance at Bowdoin College in Maine, and Ronald Smith, associate dean of the Graduate School at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Vail uses a computer program that analyzes texts of various reviews, she said, to “identify the habits American critics have.”

It turned out to be a sobering session.

After finding four major categories that critics seem to favor--visual impact, qualities of performers, historical context and aesthetic traditions and conventions--she concluded that the “conventions of journalism invite cheating by encouraging writers to sound as if they are infallible.”

Gee, anyone on the receiving end of letters to the editor knows that isn’t true.

Fortunately, dancer and critic Gus Solomons Jr. spread some much-appreciated balm on wounds by urging writers always to “look for the things in the work you can relate to, or love. That may seduce you to love more.”

Sounds to one critic’s ears like good, practical advice.