When does dancing heritage become harmful?

Performing heritage is often an empowering form of an expression. For some, it can mean getting in touch with their lineage, be that familial, educational, artistic, or cultural. In my experience, as the American-born daughter of a Filipina immigrant mom and an American dad, learning the traditional Filipino dance "tinikling" helped me develop my own blended cultural identity on my own terms. But what happens when performing heritage becomes harmful on a greater sociological scale? Artists have different philosophies when it comes to casting for culturally-specific roles and ethically preserving classical works. The result is a fraught intercultural communication and the need to reconsider who is impacted the most by the messages in classical stories.

5 months after Misty's post, in the midst of a global COVID pandemic, George Floyd, a Black American man, was murdered by a White police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. The US has an ongoing and deeply rooted issue with race, inequality, and violence. As a politically, economically, and socially influential nation, American news often impacts and spreads to other Western nations, for better or for worse. Comments, like those above, demonstrate this dynamic and the resentment some non-Americans feel towards "American problems" impacting their own culture.

While I believe that American issues should not always be impacting other countries or policing other cultures, racism and blackface are not uniquely American issues. The Transatlantic Slave Trade lasted for over 300 years and shouldered the development of the Western world. In today's globalized society, with the internet connecting cultures and sharing information faster than ever before, cultural sensitivity is essential. While it is important to maintain individual heritages and identity, when one's artistic heritage involves the appropriation and caricature of another, some argue that it is unethical to continue performing harmful roles and stories. 

I further learned about the use of caricature in dance from another perspective on a dance research trip in Accra, Ghana. After two weeks of traveling, learning traditional Ghanaian dances in Kumasi, and witnessing the slave castles in Cape Coast, we arrived in the capital city to train with Ghana Dance Ensemble at the University of Ghana. Under the instruction of Dr. Aristides Nene Narh Hargoe and his fellow artists, we learned several dances, including Kpanlogo, a dance of Ga society that grew in popularity in the 1960s following Ghana's independence from the United Kingdom in 1957. The dance resurged as a rejection of colonial rule. 

Our teachers explained the symbolism behind movements throughout the dance, like one movement which mimicked tying fishing rope. However, towards the end of the dance, there was a slower, more dramatic section that stood out from the repetitive, fast-paced sections prior. The video below showcases this moment.

 What do you interpret in this movement? 

When we first learned this movement, I was concentrating on remembering the sequence and embodying the fluidity of the legs and intensity of the gaze from our teachers. It felt brazen and commanding, and I tried not to shy away from the power of the movement. Soon, I found out where this brazen attitude came from: this section was a caricature of the British Empire, Ghana's former colonizers. We were mimicking making a cup of tea, a synecdoche for British people. As someone who now lives in London and drinks several cups of tea a day, this is a fascinating case of flipping the script and using dance caricature as a form of resistance. I was conflicted at the time: as an Asian-American woman, what does it mean for me to be dancing a caricature of British imperialism?

Caricature is not inherently bad. Phil distinguishes caricature as a 2D sketch of an identity, while character is a nuanced, "in on the joke" representation. Caricature can perpetuate power imbalances, such as when Western powers use people of color as jokes or the boost up White characters. Ghanaians in the 1960s used caricature to distance themselves from a foreign empire that exploited them for centuries, reclaiming their power and identity through dance. For me, it was a lesson in embodied knowledge. Our Ghanaian teachers taught us their history through movement, and I felt the power that those movements held. 

In an interview with Royrona Mitra, Akram Khan distinguishes the intersection between dance and heritage: “Dance heritage is inheriting a body of information through training while dancing heritage is knowledge” (Mitra, 2017).  The role of the performer is to inherit and share knowledge, both embodied and contextual, and to expand their intercultural understanding. Considering one's positionality and the relation of identity to roles makes performing even more complex and nuanced, which results in performances richer in depth and understanding.