Folk Dance Unleashes a World of Issues : Presenting traditional works on a concert stage raises questions for critics, artists and producers

Critics and audiences are trusting souls. When looking at dance that comes from the world outside mainstream Euro-American traditions, we usually accept it at face value.

If something called the National Dance Company of China appears at the Music Center, we don’t question its pedigree--until a so-called Mongolian Herdsman’s Dance shows us nomads jeteing across the stage with pointed feet, classical turnout and academic, Soviet-style placement.

Similarly, when Tibetan monks from the Dalai Lama’s own Namgyal Monastery perform at Royce Hall, we watch picturesque fragments of rituals that can last many hours, or even days, and never wonder how such drastic editing might despiritualize what should be a religious experience.

Obviously, dance belonging to different spatial conditions than those of the picture-frame stage must be adapted for our theaters, as must participatory dances and those that last longer than the two-to-three hours that we normally devote to a performance.

Compromise of some sort is virtually inevitable, but much of the time, we grow so absorbed with the exotic idioms on view that we don’t consider how and why they’ve been altered.

But we should, because all too often genuine folk art becomes marginalized in the process, turned into diversionary spectacle. And because it comes to us so fundamentally trivialized, such work feeds some Americans’ already inflated notions of cultural superiority.

We confront or evade these problems week by week in a typical season. Indeed, such attractions as the recent Los Angeles Festival, “Africa Oye!” (at El Camino College), American Indian Dance Theatre (at the Wiltern) and Ballet Folklorico Nacional de Chile (at Pasadena Civic Auditorium this afternoon) have made the last third of 1990 into something like a laboratory for the study of how choreographers and impresarios tailor world dance for American audiences.

“People will absolutely turn off from you if you do something to push them too far in this kind of ethnic performance experience,” said Hanay Geiogamah, artistic director of American Indian Dance Theatre, on a panel in September’s Dance Critics Assn. (DCA) conference at Cal State Los Angeles, the first annual meeting of the organization ever held in Los Angeles.

Giving what he called a “progress report” on his company, Geiogamah spoke of “translating” Indian dance to the stage as “a complex challenge . . . that I had not really perceived.” He described the process in terms of decisions about “editing, grouping, music choice, costume choice, intensity of mood, build, just so many things that I took for granted.”

Because he considers his restaged Indian dances different in function from their tribal originals, Geiogamah believes the shortened theater-versions have their own validity. Yet he recognizes the abuses that can occur: taking folk dance and, in his words, “tabbing it to death, because I really hate the tabbing and the string-’em-along little excerpts. That’s a destructive, suffocating thing to do. . . .”

In addressing the 1989 Dance Critics Assn. conference in San Francisco, Los Angeles Festival director Peter Sellars had attacked “Africa Oye!” as “vilely produced. Eight major groups of artists were slung together in a kind of smorgasbord treatment,” he said.

“Just imagine us sending to Africa a show saying ‘Hello, this is Western Culture.’ And we would send five minutes of ‘Boheme’ and a 15-minute excerpt of ‘Swan Lake’ . . . that’s the ‘American Show,’ and we’ll take that around Africa. I mean, the idea is so demeaning: ‘Now let’s look at Africa through a series of 15-minute excerpts of major artists. . . .’ ”

“Africa Oye!” producer and co-director Mel Howard replied to Sellars’ charges by saying, “We did not excerpt anything: Every piece in the show is complete. There were time constraints but we were very careful and asked the artists for whole pieces that did not deform a larger or longer work.”

On the “smorgasbord” issue, he said that “despite using diverse elements, my goal was to make a piece of theater that felt seamless. It took us two years to find groups that would create the proper chemistry for the evening.”

Why not longer performances by fewer groups? “I don’t think that an audience that would be coming to see this show in huge theaters would want to sit through 45 minutes of most of the groups,” he answered. “When we can’t understand what they’re singing, it could seem repetitive if it went on too long.”

As it happens, Sellars’ own festival resorted to plenty of variety-show programming, both in those juxtapositions of different Native American and Oceanic groups at Sunset Canyon Recreation Center and in the sampler repertory by the Classical Dance Company of Cambodia at the Arboretum.

Although the blame for presenting ethnic vaudeville usually falls on Americans for not taking world dance seriously, sometimes it’s a matter of what the world dance community thinks we can handle.

“The Western attention-span is two hours,” distinguished Court Art of Java choreographer R. Rio Sasminta Mardawa told The Times this summer, speaking as if citing the Koran or Bhagavadgita. Thus even the Javanese company’s evening-long Wayang Wong dance drama “Arjuna Wiwaha” proved heavily abridged for American consumption: more linear or plot-bound at the festival than audiences find it back home in Jogjakarta.

At least festival audiences saw the trimmed Wayang Wong at close range on the Arboretum’s outdoor platform stage. With bleacher seating for 869, this performance space didn’t resemble the elegant dance pavilions at the Sultan’s palace but it proved infinitely preferable to the large proscenium theaters that the company encountered later on its American tour.

Local arts writer Douglas Sadownick saw the complete Court Art of Java repertory in Arcadia and then caught a performance at the 2,100-seat Brooklyn Academy of Music some 10 days later. “It was a totally different experience,” he says. “There was a real distance between performers and audience--as if you were looking at postcards. It was dead on that stage. Everyone around me was sleeping and if I had seen it there for the first time, I wouldn’t have found it interesting at all.”

On the same weekend that the Javanese opened in Arcadia, the DCA conference was convened, directed by the Oakland Tribune’s David Gere and former Herald-Examiner dance critic Elizabeth Zimmer.

The four-day event included everything from an interview with modern-dance and ballet choreographer Mark Morris to film clips compiled by UCLA professor of dance ethnology Allegra Fuller Snyder illustrating how Hollywood has shaped American notions of world dance. Michael Blackwood previewed his film “Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis” and festival artists gave master classes that helped critics better understand unfamiliar idioms.

Among the critics, Alastair Macaulay (the Financial Times, London) spoke about the importance of sensibility in writing about dance, Marcia B. Siegel (the Christian Science Monitor) on describing the experience as clearly as possible without cultural bias, and Joan Acocella (Dance Magazine) on how our American heritage offers a deep personal connection to many different traditions. “I don’t think we can see beauty that we haven’t been taught in some measure to see,” she argued.

Issues of cultural entitlement and colonialism inspired heated debates, with a number of prominent academics (some of whom moonlight as critics) helping clarify historical and sociological patterns.

In his paper on the politics of international cultural exchange, Ricardo D. Trimillos, professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Hawaii, used examples from Guatemala, China and the U.S. to explore a worldwide “co-optation of minority culture by majority society.”

“Troubling is an often encountered majority attitude that minority dances are easy or less profound,” he said. Trimillos also asked hard questions about the confusion between what he called “folklore and fakelore,” and took on the volatile subject of authenticity. Without stating a preference, he distinguished between reproducing a classic form (a hula danced exactly the way it looked at some time in the distant past) and preserving a social function (creating hulas just as relevant to Hawaiians as the ancient ones used to be).

“Who has the right to present and represent a tradition. . . ?” he asked. “Do we impose our standards of dance and dance presentation on others through our media, through our scholars, our exchange teachers and, yes, through our dance critics?”

Although the theme of the DCA conference was “Critical Imperatives in World Dance,” a number of speakers addressed unfinished business in American society: racism and entrenched Euro-American “norms” that define cultural value. None proved more eloquent than Brenda Dixon, associate professor of dance at Temple University, in her detailed audit of the unacknowledged debt that American concert dance owes to African and African-American traditions:

“What sublimation had to be enacted by the guardians of American culture to erase my culture from a society that’s virtually seething with its presence?” she asked.

“The Afrocentric legacy is not a choice, but it’s an imperative that comes to us through the culture . . . like electricity through the wires. We draw from it all the time even though we’re not necessarily aware of the sources. . . .”

Some conference spectators complained about “white-bashing” and fled. Others grew sanctimonious about their enlightenment and hissed speakers who hadn’t yet mastered the approved multicultural terms of endearment.

At one point in his interview with Acocella on the creative influence of his training in flamenco and Balkan dance, Morris reminded the most disruptive attendees that there was more than one way to talk about multiculturalism. “Lighten up!,” he said.

No chance. Right now, the matter of exactly who can--or can’t--be described as “we,” “us” or “the Other” in American dance translates into grants, commissions, media attention and, for better or worse, standards of excellence. The DCA spent four days and $70,000 (the largest conference budget in the organization’s history) studying the subject and, in the end, arrived at only one principle that nearly everyone present might accept:

In the ‘90s, world dance, like charity, begins at home.