Methods: Experimental, Emergent and Transgressive forms, writing as inquiry, reflexive account, personal narrative, autobiographical, memoir, poetry, photography
Theory: Crystalline, Sankofa
"One is not born but rather becomes a woman. A woman defines herself through the way she lives her embodied situation in the world" (Moi, 2001:14).
The study of my living culture
Feminist reflexive autoethnography provided me with a framework for trying to understand the complexities about the world I live in (Ellis, 2004). Reflecting on my writing as a method of inquiry (Reinharz, 1997; Bochner, Ellis and Tillman-Healy, 1997; Denzin, 1997; Richardson, 2000; Gergen and Gergen, 2000; Ellis, 2004; Lather, 2008, Barbour, 2011), has led me to critically examine my relationship with identity, dance and culture much more than when I lived it. The attraction to the study of traditional African culture offered me the opportunity to learn about the awesome power of creation as a “feminine principle,” a connection to earth as Mother, cycles of nature, cycles of the body and through dance ritual celebrating the “mysteries of life” by honouring the female body as the portal of the “Divine” (Lerner, 2002). Having survived childhood trauma, this became a meaningful framework to live my life. I have always found a refuge within the dance and nature.
Embracing African with Contemporary dance genres into my choreographic community dance practice within a professional and educational context, has given rise to ‘a rite of passage’ that also served as an ‘awakening’ and empowerment of my own identity as a woman living and dancing between cultures. Writing autobiographically and reflecting on my story through poetry and photography, I have been able to track the past thirty years describing a selected series of public dance performances as case studies.
In this Masters thesis, "A Write of Passage," about myself dancing as a white woman in black culture, I discuss my film, Children of the Blue Light (Dreessens, 2007), and how as an “outsider” (Vissicaro, 2004), I developed and constructed a new contemporary dance work from the inspiration of an Indigenous traditional context on African sacred ground with Ghanaian and Australian performers. The choreographic process served as a rite of passage not only for emancipation and reconciliation between cultures but also as a powerful tool to reclaim my own honour as woman. This “lived experience” (Klienman, 1991),became meaningful in the face of my lived trauma and the creative choreographic process was a “microcosm” (Vissicaro, 2004), in which I found my identity as a woman through African culture.
Ethnography is a perspective or as Stuart Sigman (1998 in Ellis, 2004:6) writes, “a framework for thinking about the world.” Carolyn Ellis describes this perspective as being reflective of “a way of viewing the world – holistically and naturalistically – and a way of being in the world as an involved participant.” Ethnography means writing about or describing people and culture (Rose, 1990; Rawlins, 1998). In my case, auto- ethnography frames an emergent method of inquiry (Smith and Watson, 1996; Denzin and Lincoln 2000; Wallis, 2003), into my reflexive account (Foltz and Griffin, 1996; Lather, 2008) of dancing between cultures. The term refers to both the “process” of doing a qualitative research study and also to the written “product” (Ellis, 2004). My response data takes a transgressive form (St. Pierre, 1997), in the production of a series of poetic photo stories. Within this context, I weave my narrative, embedding and grounding theory. According to Ellis, it is a social science under the domain of sociology that requires “careful, focused, detailed analysis of some particular episode, some particular pattern, issuing, say, in a new understanding of loss or emotional experience ultimately applicable to people in other times and places” (Ellis, 2004:26). My episode was ‘silenced’ childhood trauma; my pattern was a creatively disguised sense of worthlessness seen anew in another country and through the distant eye of a time past when black women were enslaved, bought and sold (Yeboah, 2007). They were held underground in a sandstone castle and raped by power and control. Now a museum painted white, the ‘fortress’ was then, in 1555, imposed upon a magnificent rock overlooking the beautiful, ‘blue’ Atlantic Ocean of the Cape Coast (Anquandah, 1999).
Slide 1: Program notes for Children of the Blue Light
Photo: Jacqui Dreessens
My son, pictured above, is standing on the Rock that the Cape Coast Castle was built upon. His arms are extending and reaching upwards whilst his feet, connected to the Rock, anchor his torso. As his mother, I believe he is a child that is capable of channelling the ‘Blue Light of transformation’ to help bring healing into this world between nations through his gift of music and the arts that has been passed onto him from his Ancestors. He is a child of mixed race with a heritage of Ghanaian and Dutch culture, living as a second generation “Afro-Aussie” (The Flemington Theatre Group, 2010), on the Surf Coast of Australia. Immanuel is my inspiration for this musical documentary because as a mother, I wanted him to experience the powerful learning that takes place when cultures fuse their art forms. He is talented and knowledgeable in traditional Ghanaian music but lives and is educated in Australia. His traditional Ghanaian music and cultural development has essentially occurred through myself whilst teaching and performing in professional contexts in early childhood, primary, secondary educational and community settings, festivals, travel. He has grown up in my community based performance group, Wild Moves, in which he is currently a master drummer. By taking him to Ghana, I wanted to provide my son with an opportunity to create music and perform with Ghanaian artists from his African cultural ‘roots.’
The program notes of Children of the Blue Light (slide 1), was performed in the slave dungeons of Cape Coast, Ghana, West Africa with Australian and Ghanaian musicians and dancers. This “community ritual” (Halprin, 1995), proposed bringing in transcultural voices as healing through music and dance (Dreessens, 2007). It is a cross-cultural musical documentary celebrating the emancipation and reconciliation between cultures and between past and present times with respect to and in honour of traditional local culture, Ancestors and as well as, the Rock that the fortress was built upon. This “site specific space” (World Dance Alliance Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 2008), became the inspiration for a contemporary dance ritual reflecting the stories of the Australian and Ghanaian performers as well as the “Living Memory” (Yeboah, 2007), contained within the walls of the fortress. The two-hour performance was later edited into a one-hour film (Agoro Fie Productions, 2007). It was created in honour of ‘all’ mixed race children and is a testimony to the strength and endurance of the human spirit. However, I never realised this site specific space would be a powerful place where I would experience a transformative journey into understanding my own development of feminine identity.
“We need to discuss writing therapeutically, vulnerably, evocatively and ethically” (Ellis, 2004:2).
The result of my autobiographical approach to this feminist study in dance making (Halprin, 1995; Rainer, 2006), is a poetical photo story of my performance experience engaging in this Living Memory, whilst also standing in the professional role as producer, director, choreographer and dancer in this public performance during the Pan African Festival, 2007. Norman Denzin (1987), describes this “self” as a “process” rather than as an “entity” because this process, “unifies the stream of thoughts and experiences the person has about himself or herself, around a single pole or point of reference” (Denzin, in Warhol and Michie, 1996:346).More recently, at the Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines Conference in New Zealand (2010), Denzin, in his keynote address, describes this as a moment of “epiphany.” In my performance of Children of the Blue Light, I shift through many streams of thoughts about myself that all unify into a meaningful performance moment of epiphany in the Female dungeon (slide 1: program notes).
Although, initially experienced through movement and music, I have now transferred this performing arts creative process into a written and emergent ethnographic form. It is a personal narrative (Barbour, 2011; Spry, 2006; Gergen and Gergen, 2000, Bochner, 2000). The epiphany of my lived experience in the performance moment of ‘time’ and ‘space,’ has resulted as a narrative in five separate photo stories. This epiphany lasts for approximately five seconds in reality and shapes my whole life into meaning up until that moment (Wallis, 2007). Slide 2, Epiphany, is a “representation” (Gergen and Gergen, 2002), of my feelings of ‘fear’ of oppression and the ‘desire’ for liberation. It is my motivation at that moment in time, where, as I go into the deep dark recesses of the female slave dungeon, I begin to simultaneously descend into the deep dark recesses of my unconsciousness and unlock a part of my heart that I chose to close as a child, for my own emotional safety and survival (Bass and Davis, 1988). This is what is known as “the irruption of transgressive data” or as Elizabeth St. Pierre describes as, a “methodology in the fold” (1997:175). A representation of my Epiphany is displayed in slide 2. It is the ‘bridge’ to the response data that sits in the fold of my descent into the two realities of darkness whilst simultaneously performing in public.
“Art is born from struggle and touches an anonymous centre. Art is inexplicable and has a dream power that radiates from the night mind. It unleashes something ancient, dark and mysterious into the world. It conducts a fresh light” (Hirsch, 2002:36)
Slide 2: Epiphany
I experienced this “fresh light” as being “transformative” (Halprin, 1995). I believe that children hold this power that I will name as the Blue Light, to help us see something “new” in ourselves (Lather, 2008). The Blue Light is where the response data ‘sits.’ Not just in one fold but in many layers. In this time and space, whilst in performance, I question my motives for dancing, singing and playing music in a slave dungeon that has now become a museum. My twelve-year-old son is the composer for this salacious space and leading a professional ensemble of traditional Ghanaian musicians. Immanuel intuitively plays his traditional balafon beautifully. I feel it bringing a focus of intimacy between the performers and the audience as the dancers gather around him in a sacred circle. Together, with sound and movement this sacred salacious space erupts with contained joy and transformation.
Slide 3: Sacred salacious space
Whilst in performance role, many aspects of my female identity are challenged. Not just as the dancer painted blue, portraying an enslaved woman or as a director of a Ghanaian film crew and choreographer of two cross-cultural dance companies collaborating on a project about emancipation but also as a white mother of a child of mixed race with trusted Ghanaian and Australian artists. My relationship to these people as friends has been developing since 2002 and has deepened as a result of this dance making process. They believe in and support my choreographic ideas and approaches because they have journeyed with me on many collaborative cross-cultural projects. People, who love, trust and respect me as ‘Mother Africa.’ This methodology of rapport (St. Pierre, 1997), I consider to be a vital connection as ‘one family’ between my community dance ensemble, Wild Moves Australia and Asanti Dance Theatre, Ghana.
Slide 4: One Family
Since 2002, I have been travelling to Ghana to study traditional culture, music and dance with many performance companies namely, Agoro Theatre Company, Asanti dance theatre and African Footprints International in Cape Coast and Kukyekukyeku performance group in Mosomagor Kakum National Park, Tamale Youth Home group in Northern Ghana, Wala in Nungua, Accra and Addadam cultural enemble with Koo Nimo in Kumasi. I consider Ghana to be my second home. However, a much more deeper and intimate “process” is also being experienced within my own sense of ‘self’ and as a ‘woman.’ I feel the epiphany to be more like a result of an initiation, an awakening, where my eyes are ‘seeing’ or sensing and feeling something new in the world for the first time. Where all my past experiences in my life as an innocent little girl, angry teenager, vulnerable young woman, single mother and divorced wife collide into all sense and meaning. I felt completely in my body, in my physical self, in a strong and powerful sense of being in what I would like to describe as: a clarity of groundedness and connection to earth and sky. I felt huge and expansive. I felt “ecstatic” (Roth, 1997). This later manifested in my Wild Moves slogan, Rooted to the Earth and Connected to the Universe, find your Wild Moves (Dreessens, 2008).
As I recount this lived experience (Klienman, 1991), I decide to symbolise this emotive response (Rainer, 2006) to these performance moments whilst experiencing an epiphany, by creating a series of distorted images from the photographs that were taken by my camera during the performance ritual of Children of the Blue Light. Along with the written Program notes in slide 1, I begin to firstly recall my memory of the event (Smith and Watson, 1996), by interpreting and describing the choreographed movement vocabulary (Pugh-McCutchen, 2006), into poetic form. Shifting from a musical and movement text to a written literacy helped me to deconstruct my intimate act of improvisation (Cheney, 2000), at that moment of epiphany. This aesthetic and critical response mirrors the expression of my own emotive movement vocabulary that was improvised during that moment in time and space (Rainer, 2006). It seems to shift my kinaesthetic and aesthetic awareness into another ‘space’ or ‘domain’ or ‘reality’ that mirrors my original choreographic intention. It reveals what I intuitively created. This interpretive practice (Bochner and Ellis, 2000; Tierney, 2000; Beverley, 2000) motivates me to want to write in a reflexive manner (Spry, 2006; Barbour, 2011). I can see the result mirrored at me, through the photographs and poetry that reveals my intimate response to a past secret that has fuelled my present state of being whilst enacting an enslaved woman. This sets a future up into a self-discovery process that will ultimately, hopefully, lead me into having a ‘voice.’ As a Write of Passage, this voice will need to be examined by the scholarly academic ‘world.’ As an initiate, I am daunted by this prospect and yet here I am. If I am to write therapeutically, vulnerably, evocatively and ethically, how much do I disclose about who I am, as I will not remain that ‘self?’ Already I have transformed and shifted through many layers of Blue Light.
“The story of our lives becomes our lives” (Rich, 1978:34).
Often I don’t know why I am creating something or I have no idea how I am doing it. I am just in the moment sensing and feeling and reacting to some ‘driving force’ or motivation that guides me along a process. Maybe this is what the Ahunta people of Ghana refer to as “The Kundum” or ‘secret’ that is passed on to us through our Ancestors (see program notes, slide 2). For African people, this ‘gift’ is literally in our ‘blood’ and in the molecular structure of our DNA (Ansah, 1999). This is how the “Griots” or “culture keepers” pass their talent and tacit knowledge onto the next generation (Tiérou, 1992). Essentially, I am not of an African heritage. I also don’t have any ancestors with a talent in choreography, music or theatre. Or maybe as Europeans, my Dutch heritage was too busy surviving the World Wars and then ‘uprooting’ and migrating to Australia. Maybe there was not enough opportunity economically to engage in the arts? But I certainly know my son is born with movement and rhythm and I provide him with every opportunity to develop it. I don’t live in a country plagued by war and there is freedom of speech and a lot of writing about it. This sometimes makes me feel that there is more importance placed on the written language and less so on the expressive and highly emotive language of movement. I can say so much more telling my story through my body moving in space (Buck 2002). However, writing as a process of self-discovery comes from the original source of my lived experience in the dance. They are both valid forms of communication and taught in Australian schools (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 2005). I have had this privileged education, along with my son.
My Write of Passage then, also becomes an initiation into the academic world of scholars. A domain I have shied away from for many years, even though I am an experienced lecturer in Dance Education. As I recall, I am too busy dancing, teaching, creating community projects to sit down and write ‘about’ them in an academic language. But I always enjoyed documenting my practice on video, in scrapbooks, photo albums, journal and diary writing, mostly because I wanted to remember the experience of that personal learning. Fortunately, I had a secondary school Dance educator who put me in good stead for studying dance at university. Journals then became excellent teaching resources and records of my learning experiences and revealed the evolving development of my identity as an artist. However, with the recent developments in online technology and social communication networks, it is easy to ‘share’ my work online in the form of blogspots and it is also interesting to read other people’s experiences of their journeys through dance (www.wildmovesevents.blogspot.com). I see that I am not that different to other artists and I certainly am not alone in what I do. Photo journals and electronic media have helped everyone to become an author ( ).
However, now that I have found a frame of reference in feminist reflexive autoethnography, I feel that all my complex multiplicities (Richardson, 1997)have an opportunity to become authenticated by being voiced. I first expressed this process through dance, music and theatre in a community ritual to celebrate Emancipation Day in Cape Coast, Ghana. Secondly, I then, edited the film footage at Agoro Fie Productions with Evangel Arko-Mensah into a documentary form suitable for Ghanaian audiences, but still keeping my Australian audience in mind. Then, I also interpreted this film media into poetry within a photo story made for DVD (Dreessens, 2007). Since 2007, my film and photo story has been broadcasted on Coastal TV in Ghana on numerous occasions, with a twenty-minute live interview by Agoro Fie Productions chat show host, in 2010.
Now, thirdly, I further selected and distorted the photographs and began to uncover a story that illuminates my feminine identity. This poetical narrative was then interpreted from the distortion of the photographs into a reflexive account that holds all my voices together. Finally, I critically analysed this narrative to validate if it is a method of inquiry that is reflexive and transgressive.
I am placing myself in a vulnerable positioning by taking an emotional and professional risk of sharing the darkest and most painful secret of my life “to expose,” as Tillmann-Healy has expressed, “some of the lived” and “felt consequences of these stories” in order “to open dialogues aimed at writing new and better ones” (1996:76). Other authors have employed the autobiographical voice as a means of “speaking out or talking back to fill a silent void and claim a self” (Neuman 1996:191).
“Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who struggle side by side, a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and growth possible. It is that act of speech of ‘talking back,’ that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of moving from object to subject – the liberated voice” (hooks 1989:9).
I find it interesting that I have identified with bell hooks as a feminist writer who also happens to be ‘black.’ Children of the Blue Light is an act of defiance that heals. It is about the oppressed, the colonized and the exploited. This site-specific space where the performance ritual took place is sacred (Nana, 2007). It was once silenced to the hegemonic powers controlling the fortress (Anquandah, 1999). I was an eight-year old girl who was silenced, then preyed upon as a twelve-year old teenager. As a twenty-eight year old woman, I was also silenced and held captive by power and control. To create a film about emancipation with ‘blue’ cross-cultural performers, the community ritual remains the object of expression for myself as director - who is not a native Ghanaian but an outsider from Dutch descent and a first generation Australian. Now, in this sacred ‘performance’ space, I want to place myself as the subject of expression as the ‘dancer’ who experienced the voice of liberation from oppression whilst dancing in my own constructed performance in an ”Other” culture. In order to do this, I must validate my voice through another initiation, in a write of passage. I would like to invite you into my standpoint from the perspective of your own.
It is encouraging and validating to read alternative ethnographers like Mary Gergen and Kenneth Gergen (Bochner and Ellis, 2002:18), when they state that there is “little reason that ethnographic representation should not become as rich in its forms of expression as the arts, with painting, music, dance, poetry, multimedia and performance. And with each alternative we are opened to different avenues of relationship.” In writing for my reader, as in you, I am also creating my own Write of Passage and therefore, coming into a new awareness of ‘self.’
“As the domain of expression is enriched, so is the capacity to realise new worlds – expanding them on the possibility of relationship” (Bochner and Ellis, 2002:23)
My ‘new world’ was opened up for me during the epiphany that I experienced whilst dancing in the female slave dungeon in Ghana while my son was playing his balafon. Feminist theory explains this to be a “click” experience, where this “vulnerability has the potential for unexpected consequences” (Foltz and Griffin, 1996:302). This click in the fold is an emerging method of inquiry that provides transgressive response data, coming from my lived experience. I found this fold to be magical! In this “first order perspective” (Adler and Adler 1987:60), I began “to penetrate beyond a rational moment” into an “irrational, emotional, and deep understanding” of the rich and colourful layers in the “fold” of the world I “lived” in. Dancing between cultures opened me up to many layers or dimensions of space and time that all sat in what I described as the Blue Light.
Upon examining the arrangement of the words, I discover that I have shaped the selected prose into an outline contour of a voluptuous woman with breasts, a waist and rounded hips, albeit two dimensional. Upon this discovery, I am compelled to go back through the original photographs and program notes to examine what other possible images could reflect this notion of a feminine principle or identity, or an entity, or indeed my female sense of self?
Using these distorted photographs as a stimulus for my narrative in poetic form (Austin, 1996), I begin to critically identify or recognise Akosua Tweba, in many forms. She is the ancestral name given to me at my traditional Ghanaian naming ceremony in 2003 by my former mother in law, who is the grand daughter of this great woman. I can recognise her many female forms, similar to the ancient figurines devoted to the Great Earth Mother who is described as the interconnection between every living thing” (Starhawk, 1988). In Ghana ‘She’ is a goddess named, Mawu and is considered to be the female side of God (Lerner, 2002). Often depicted as the Moon, she represents all the ‘mysteries of life’ (Lerner, 2002). Like a wave breaking, I remembered that there is a ‘moon’ on the traditional African blue cloth worn in the performance. My past memory whirls me back to the local Kotokraba market in Cape Coast. This cloth seemed to dance on the shelf before my eyes, as it’s repetitive patterns leapt out towards me in a split second, before the Ghanaian woman selling the cloth, caught my desire for the white circular motif set in a vivid blue colour. As I begin to recall all the unifying artistic elements of the aesthetics that frame Children of the Blue Light, I begin to distinguish the rich reservoir within the mese-on-scene as a source to search for a feminine principle.
I want to put myself at the centre of my research by examining how my choreographic process has empowered me as a woman, whose sexuality was stolen from me as a little girl. My passion towards traditional African dance presented a very powerful image of the feminine. Yet I chose to juxtapose this notion by performing the role of a captured enslaved woman whose power was taken away from her. Upon this discovery, I am compelled to go back through the original film, photographs and program notes, to examine what other possible images could reflect this notion of a feminine identity for the purpose of reclaiming (Bass & Davis, 1988) my sense of womanhood. I will critically examine my intimate sense of self as a woman and how I constructed my narrative in response to the autobiographical photo stories that were composed in response to my intimate act of improvisation that erupted as an epiphany whilst in the re-enactment of an enslaved African woman and as a dancer painted blue, who made a film in Ghana, who is also a white Australian mother, of a mixed race talented musician, who is a young twelve year old boy living with me on the Surf Coast of Victoria, Australia.
Writing this extended sentence reveals to me that I live in an intricately woven and complex web of interrelated multiple realities. No wonder I am held captive and fascinated by spiders weaving their webs in moonlight. They are really just a reflection of my life in the ‘process.’ I recall in 1981, as part of my Higher School Certificate in Dance, creating and performing a dance about my fear of spiders. The whole stage was a myriad of elastics. Except the intention of my choreography was that I was the predator of a vulnerable much smaller creature that was trapped. As a beginning choreographer, unbeknown to myself at the time, I was in fact safely performing my fear from being silenced by a protective authority figure. I felt powerful dancing in black ‘pointe’ shoes, symbolizing the many creative ways of dancing in the air as a spider, making my own decision on when to pounce! However, I did not see as I do now, that I was revealing my childhood trauma of being ‘trapped’ and ‘silenced’ into oppression. Post-modern ethnographers remind us that “writing ethnography is cultural construction, not cultural reporting” and it is “always a construction of the self as well as of the other” (Stacey 1991:115). Since “all knowledge is socially constructed,” as a researcher, I then become the “instrument of data collection and interpretation” and play a central role in creating this knowledge (Foltz and Griffin, 1996:302). I am the subject matter and my ‘matter’ is subjective. A supportive family environment, unbeknown to my situation, along with a privileged education with opportunity for expressive and independent thinking through the arts, opened the door to my silenced childhood trauma and led me to creatively weave a web of choreographic expression through the dance. My body became the vehicle to voice my silence. This validated my physical body.
I consider my Masters thesis to be a write of passage and to be an initiation, where my ‘self’ reacted to the ‘situation’ of epiphany and sacred space. I became the “vehicle of meaning” (Gunn, 1982:23). This epiphany gave me a ‘presence’ in what Gunn describes as, “the juncture between the known and the unknown.” I like to describe this mysterious ‘place’ as the Blue Light. It seems to me that it is not dissimilar to how I have witnessed fetish priestesses in Ghana when they become vehicles of meaning for their community when they channel their ancestral spirits through their body while in the intimate act of improvisation. Pico Iyer (1998) spent much of his life moving between diverse cultural locations much like myself. In his autobiography of travelling in contemporary Asia, he accords that often “places to some extent remake us,” and “recast us in their own images, and the selves they awaken may tell us as much about them as about ourselves” (1998:26). When I digest this statement, I cannot help but feel that Akosua Tweba as my ‘Ancestor by name’ is making her presence be known to me. After all, I participated in the naming ceremony that was a ritual to celebrate my Ghanaian connection to ‘place.’ Somehow she entered my being, or has she been there all along? Either way, it makes me propose many questions about my identity. What I do know is that this ‘situation’ provided a ‘presence’ where I was able to create “an interior dialectic of place and self” (Gunn, 1982:23). I have integrated Akosua Tweba into my being. She is part of my inner landscape that keeps me rooted to the earth and connected to the universe. She is my Ghanaian ancestor who makes sure that decisions I make about contemporary Africa are from a place of integrity and respect, that is, “Sankofa.” According to Adolph Agbo (1999:1), Sankofa is a symbol of “positive reversion and revival” that means go back, “Sanko” and take, “Fa.” It signifies the importance of “returning in time to bring to the present useful past cultural values, which are needed today.” Agbo purports that “progress is based on the right use of the positive contributions of the past. It teaches that there is wisdom in learning from the past because it helps in constructing your future.” I resonated so much so, with this symbol, that before I began manifesting Children of the Blue Light in 2007, I had this sensuous symbol tattooed ‘behind’ on the ‘base’ of my spine.
Slide 6: Sankofa Adinkra symbol of positive reversion
To me, it represents pure love in a constant state of change in search for a balance that consistently expands outwards and inwards simultaneously. It represents my respect for a universe of peace and harmony. I feel ‘in’ love with this notion. It provides me with a calm affect, when and at the same time it dances in front of me. It has, like Pico Iyer accords, “recast” me in it’s “own image” and “awakened” much about myself as well as the respect of traditional Ghanaian culture. Today, after all the Colonial powers of the past, this ancient Adinkra symbol prevails along with the cultural richness of Ghana.
“It teaches people to cherish and value their culture and avoid its adulteration” (Agbo, 1999:1)
I thoroughly feel motivated now to write about my desires and fears now that I can recognise “how an autobiographical impulse” can shift the “observer’s gaze inward toward a self as a site for interpreting cultural experience” (Lather, 2008:369).Surely my skin colour does not stop me from this examination but rather places me in a new perspective to “look at myself from anew” (Lather, 2008:369).Is this a privileged voice? Yes, I believe so because I have the luxury of ‘choosing’ to go overseas albeit on a journey of self-discovery! This is a story of a white woman who reclaimed and empowered her female identity by dancing in black culture in the ‘Mother’ Africa. I feel, see and value the guiding strength of such awesome iconic images. I am not so sure how many African women have the ‘privileged voice’ to firstly, travel abroad, let alone feel empowered by images of our Western Classical Ballet? Why would they when they already have them at their foundational roots? However, that is not my question to be considered here other than I feel privileged that my migrant educated parents “slaved” their “guts out” (to use my father’s terminology), to give me a good education that validated my talent of dance and supported me to develop my skills as an artist and arts educator.
“As a form of institutional and scientific investigation, ethnographic reports privileged the “neutral” voice of the writer over the authority of the subjective and personal experience. Yet, elements of fascination, adventure, romance, and desire leak through, suggesting how ethnographic discourse functions as location for addressing issues of identity, place and uncertainty in modern life (Pratt, 1986:32).
Issues with my own ‘modern’ life have motivated me to turn inward to study my own world by stepping out into another culture that opened me up to a new world or dimension that I call the Blue Light. However, it cannot exist without a dark and light side as it is a constant shift between the two hues continuously transforming and cycling in search of equilibrium, balance and harmony. One way of finding these bridges is by crossing the boundaries using music and dance. I believe this form of expression brings a possibility of healing to the planet after the colonization into a Post-modern world. In making the film Children of the Blue Light, the process helped to bring the division of all my multiple selves closer together. Writing autobiographically allowed me to turn ‘inward’ to study my own world by travelling to an “other” world more mysterious than my own. By doing so I can imagine myself as part of their world and therefore, they occupy a place in my story also.
“…ethnography is a genre of writing that relies on that mysterious other who exits “out there.” And this tension only becomes confounded when we acknowledged how much “out there” looks a lot like “in here” (Neuman, 1996:182).
Travelling to Africa helped me search for my identity. Giving birth to a child of mixed race motivated me to travel to Ghana. I found a voice in this country to carry particular “concrete dimensions of my individual experience that may offer a point of orientation” (Neuman, 1996:183). The situated place where it erupted was outside my own culture but I had to come back home ‘inside’ my own culture to understand it and then further within my ‘inner landscape’ that has only come ‘out’ through this method of inquiry using the response data from my aesthetic critique of my photo stories and poetry. I invite you, the reader, to use the interchangeable metaphors of Dark, Blue and Light to explain the changes that took place within my self-discovery process.
“ Autoethnography is an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural. Back and forth autoethnogaphers gaze, first through an ethnographic wide-angle lens, focusing outwards on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then, they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations” (Bochner and Ellis, 2000:739)
By shifting backwards and forwards and cycling in, around, and through a metaphoric sense of dark, blue and light as represented in slide 2 Epiphany, I am drawn towards autoethnography as a method of inquiry as it has provided a framework to make some meaning out of my hidden dark secret.
“Out of the unconscious the conscious world is born.” (Lerner and McKinney, 2002:80)
Having lived with childhood trauma, music and dance has always been my harbour of survival. Rhythmic motion to dynamic music seemed to balance my disassociated mind and body as it kept me hungering for more release of ecstatic energy within the physical realms of my body. I felt strong in these moments. As a teenager, I hated the image of my own body but I learned to respect ‘the’body as a powerful instrument of expression. Through the devoted study of physical skills with a dedicated dance teacher, and a dance technique within the Western Classical Ballet, I fine-tuned a bodily kinesthetic awareness. I also learnt how ‘a’dancer’s body might safely channel my ‘unknown’ and unpredictable explosive anger and creatively redirect my suppressed volatile emotions. Dancing is where I could escape to feel calm and present to the moment. This is demonstrated in my Higher School Certificate in 1981, Dance at Sunrise at the Ford Theatre, Geelong Performing Arts Centre.
Graduating in Dance Education at university gave me the opportunity to acknowledge my kinesthetic intelligence (Gardiner, 1985). The recognition from my culture gave me the opportunity to be professionally employed using my artistic skill and knowledge as a choreographer and to create numerous school musical productions as well as designing dance curricula in schools that had never experienced the empowering nature of dance as an expressive art form. My experience as a teacher affirmed my confidence as a communicator with young people and developed my ability as a determined advocate of Dance in schools. I could ‘see’ that my teaching impacted upon my secondary school students’ development of artistic knowledge and skills as well as their self-esteem and confidence. I enjoyed observing my students’ learning progression and felt like I was contributing to their personal development as young women as well as dancers who were independent thinkers. And yet in my personal life I was attracting extremely violent and abusive relationships.
The formation of my community dance company, Wild Moves provided me with the opportunity to explore these complex social issues for example, The Nicene Hymn for the Fringe Festival in 1993. As a choreographer, I could safely explore and ‘look at’ my fear by carefully controlling and aesthetically arranging organised patterns of movement in response to a stimulus or idea for dance making; in this case violence on women. I was able to plan structured improvisations that facilitated spontaneous movement exploration of this theme from my dancers. Their movement response revealed and reflected back to me what I could safely ‘look at’ from a distance. I could get my dancers to express my feelings whilst exploring their own. I could artistically make decisions with sensitivity towards my dancers’ movement response because I ‘saw’ my own fragile self-image and the need to survive it or cope with it in my busy life by ‘masking’ it in the artistic realm. I could get ‘dancers’ to perfectly execute my emotions into structured thematic choreographic form. I was able to safely speak my feelings through the dance.
“Dancing is rhythmic movement that ‘speaks’ of joy and sorrow, of love and hate, of hope and fear. It can describe the world inside me and the world around me. It can be as gentle as the rocking of a cradle or as violent as an explosion” (Borten, 1993:1).
Choreographic arrangement allowed me to catch a glimpse of my ‘bigger picture’ whilst remaining detached and removed from my emotions. My body didn’t have to have ownership over the expressed feelings I was asking of my dancers in a collaborative choreographic process. This was very evident in my 1994 choreographic work, Lust, Love & Lament for The Caulfield Arts Complex. But have I ever given myself enough time in my life to stop and recognise, acknowledge and reflect upon this ‘picture’ of my personal self and who, what, when, why or how I create the dance work that I passionately pursue? It’s much more employable as well as enjoyable to keep on creating, teaching, producing and collaborating between intercultural and cross-cultural groups such as 2002, Deaf Olympics Opening Ceremony at the MelbourneOlympic Park. The affects are immediate and the social change can consistently ripple through the culture like the eighteenth year of the Return of the Sacred Kingfisher Festival at CERES Environment Park; a festival that I initiated celebrating a little bird returning to its original stamping ground as a result of cleaning up and regenerating the Merri Creek in Brunswick, Victoria. Up until now, life has been more meaningful by helping others rather than focusing on how the dance has helped to shape my identity, respect and value of my body.
However, I would now like to journey into this macro-perspective (Vissicarro, 2004) to unpack how I have explored these personal and social issues through the ‘safety’ of my art form or choreographic practice. Not only through performance, , so as my community can see a reflection of themselves as a people living in a shared space for example, as in A celebration of Australia’s Federation at Gasworks Arts Park with Indonesian, Chinese, Greek and African Communities for the Australian Dance Council in 2001. But to also ‘unpack’ and begin to ‘recognise’ or ‘look at’ how my creative exploration has served as a cushion for my anger and brought meaning into my life.
I lived a busy life submerged in creative projects of teaching and performing that essentially guide others to a sense of self worth, self efficacy and positive self image whilst attracting destructive relationships to myself (Bass & Davis, 1997.) Making dances and teaching African and Contemporary or Creative dance to young children, adolescents and adults as a community arts practitioner began the learning journey to heal myself. Creating new contemporary dance works for young people, migrants and community groups from the inspiration of African dance not only provided a frame of reference for a thematic approach in cross-cultural dance that fostered reconciliation and emancipation but also facilitated a positive self image for the groups involved and guided me to reclaim and honour my own sense of self worth as a human being This was evident in Children of the Blue Light performed and filmed in the Cape Coast Castle, Ghana, West Africa (Dreessens, 2007).
I would like to track how I have lived my life through the expressive intentions of my choreographic works and critically examine how I was able to redirect my powerful emotions safely through the movement patterns and design of the dance work that were expressed through my dancers. How did my hidden self find a voice through the inspiration of the African culture and transform into a new contemporary dance work? How did I dance my way to an understanding of self through my choreography? How might I have used my art form as a method to survive my childhood trauma and cope with my adult lived experience?
I hope to provide a model not for how readers in the same situation ought to be or do but to give them the benefit of experiencing how I had acted and felt in these extreme situations and was then able to safely explore my personal and social issues through an artistic medium or choreographic process. I want to provide a story to which readers could compare their own experiences. So my goal is to practice an artful, poetic and empathic social science that is written rather than danced, in which readers can keep in their minds and feel in their bodies the “complexities of concrete moments of lived experience” (Ellis, 2004:26).
In today’s climate of cultural diversity within our Australian multicultural society, many migrants arrive on our doorstep escaping political instability and trauma in their mother country and bring their personal stories to the classroom. I explored these issues in Kingfisher Sanctuary for Return of the Sacred Kingfisher Festival, CERES Environment Park in 2002. My research could also serve as a model for therapeutic artistic movement exploration of these social issues that could be implemented in a community dance project; or problem-solving activities through movement using inquiry based learning that implement social issues as a stimulus for dance making in the classroom and across the curriculum (Dreessens, 2009). My research could provide a model for cross-cultural choreographic methods that can interweave the stories of diverse cultural backgrounds within the one community. By presenting my research, I would hope that this model would also serve as an example of the need for dance education in the school and the community through which the lived experience can become meaningful in the face of trauma and how the creative choreographic process is a microcosm in which I found my identity as a woman being able to connect with other people and a sense of shared community space that is safe to live in.
Slide 7: Children of the Blue
How might the choreographic process serve as a rite of passage for reclaiming one’s honour and identity as woman? Suppression is the process of deliberately trying to stop thinking about certain thoughts (Bass & Davis 1988). Re-enacting an enslaved woman tapped me into my own suppressed thoughts of when I was held ‘captive’ as a little girl, then, as a ‘volatile teenager,’ as a ‘beaten girlfriend,’ as an ‘abandoned mother’ and a ‘betrayed wife’ - except with no chains - only with power and control over my own decision-making. In this sense, I have learnt, over my lifetime, not to give my power away and develop a voice to talk back. It comes at no surprise to me that I embraced feminist ethnography as a framework to contextualize my storytelling into a meaningful maze of rich complexity. Creating and producing a film about emancipation from slavery helped me to safely explore my own trauma, while helping others understand the power of dance, as a healing art form and spiritual practice and in so doing helped me, to release a past that is no longer needed to be stored in my body. It is a lived experience that can be shared with others.
Transformational dance is a state of being often explored in movement therapy. Anna Halprin in her book, Five decades of Transformational Dance, asserts that life and art processes are inextricably linked and that the dance possesses a “magical power, a power to heal and transform.” The close attention to the “self in the act of dancing” may lead to “personal transformation and revelation.” Furthermore, art processes may be community processes, ways of making and sustaining community. This conviction has lead Halprin to create large scale events and rituals involving thousands of participants around the world (Dempster, 1997:122).
“The encounter with ethnographic others is a therapeutic quest for meaning, a search for identity that can be considered a form of healing in the broadest sense … it includes the process of ethnographic writing as well (Danforth, 1989:300).
I am sure, as I already have, that as a researcher, I have changed as a result of my research process as a form of self-discovery.
“Many feminist researchers report being profoundly changed by what they learn about themselves. Changes may involve completely reconceptualising a phenomenon and completely revising one’s view.” Reinharz (1992:194)
A story of a white woman dancing in black culture has been expanded into five separate narrative stories. Each story has been a review of the last and then generated into yet another self-discovered story, only to open the door to another way of viewing the world living between cultures. Thorne goes even further and argues that, “….there is a deep logic to this way of writing, that these personal experiences were neither confessional, minor preliminaries, nor mere ‘how it was done’ appendages to the main study, but were closely tired to and even generative in the study and its substantive findings” (Thorne in Krieger 1991:250). This appears to be the case in my photo story.
Slide 8: Akosua Tweba
Slide 9: Positive Reversion
Slide 10: Realisation
The Epiphany in slide 2 takes place in Story 1, when Illumination in dark places becomes a Realisation (slide 10) in Story 2. Here, in Shifting between the Blue, marks the recognition of multiple identities in multiple realities, simultaneously experienced (slide, 8 and 9). The Positive Reversion has manifested through my Akosua Tweba identity. I recognize this significant shift in my being when my son’s beautiful musical composition in Story 3, Children of the Blue Light is delivereded.I feel the healing power of the music holding the dance in the space with the application of time initiated by my son and echoed by Asanti dance theatre. It leaves me feeling ecstatic. All my past and present experiences fall into significant meaning and purpose. The beauty of this moment in sound and movement in relationship with performers and audience within a contained yet expansive space from a time past into the present, makes me feel connected to everyone and everything.
Slide 10: Circle of Strength
This strength felt in Story 4, supports me to acknowledge my sorrows as part of the learning in my life by Dancing within the Dark and the Light, as I let go of time from the past. Finally in Story 5, I am able to release everything in a moment of erupted ecstasy held by the frenzied drumming that grounds me in a calm free flow of peace and playfulness by Dancing with the Blue Light.
Slide 11: In flow with Rhythm
It is in this last story, wherea shift in my perception of my feminine
identity is in a continuous state of change. The more I continue to write this
paper, the more my identity is revealed.
Slide 12: Dancing with my multiple selves
I need to feel my own power, hear my own voice and frame my own story within a method of inquiry where I am both the subject matter and the subject. This autobiographical voice associated with feminist reflexive ethnography, (Behar and Gordon, 1995; Behar, 1996; Krieger, 1991, 1996; Richardson, 1997) advocates starting research from, “one’s own experience or by using personal knowledge to help them in the research process” (Ellis and Bochner, 2000:741). Stories one, through to five, are where I incorporate my standpoints explaining my personal connection to the ethnographic memoir telling my personal story of what went on in the backstage of the making of my film Children of the Blue Light. Bringing in transcultural voices as healing through music and dance. I am the researcher, collecting the evidence, from the moment of my epiphany and drawing the inferences from my ecstatic state held in the sound and movement of a site-specific space and consequently reaching the conclusions about my feminine identity. I am the one who is held directly accountable to my testimony of personal narrative in the first-person voice. I am the main character and the one who is deciding upon the story of “dialogue, dramatic tension, or plotline, for that matter” (Ellis and Bochner, 2000:734).
“In reflexive ethnography, the researcher’s personal experience becomes important primarily in how it illuminates the culture under study” (Ellis and Bochner, 2000:740).
I feel empowered using this method of inquiry into the search for my feminine identity simply because I sing, dance, play music and live between Australia and Africa. Feminist reflexive autoethnography helps me to study my culture between these two worlds. According to Laurel Richardson (1994), the personal narrative within my experimental text, can be validated by employing a “reseeing” and “retelling” sociology (1997:167). This method needs to demonstrate “how transgression looks and feels.” Richardson’s central imaginary is a crystalline structure which is a prism that “reflects” and “refracts” depending on what angle or perspective you are looking at, from, through. The light can be both “waves” and “particles.”
“Crystals grow, change, alter, but are not amorphous. Crystals are prisms that reflect externalities and refract within themselves, creating different colours, patterns, arrays, casting off in different directions. What we see depends upon our angle of repose” (Richardson 1997 in Lincoln and Guba, 2000:181).
Similar to my metaphors of shifting between the layers of the Blue Light of transformation, I resonate with Richardson’s “light theory.” She purports that crystallization, without loosing structure, deconstructs the traditional idea of ‘validity.’ In my metaphor of the Blue Light where you can shift back and forth and through layers of multidimensions with multiple selves, I can begin to feel that there is “no single truth.” Crystallisation or Blue Light therefore can provide me with a deepened, complex, “thoroughly partial understanding” of the power of transformation. The more I know, the more I don’t know.
“Paradoxically, we know more and doubt what we know” (Richardson 1997:92)
The properties of the crystal as a metaphor helps me as researcher to see what Lincoln and Guba describe as “the interweaving of processes in research: discovery, seeing, telling, storying, re-presentation” (2000:182). The ‘shifting’ between the Blue Light as ametaphor goes one step further as a “wave” or “particle.” It also guides me to proposition my ‘voice’ and in so doing, brings myself into a transformative state of healing. Ghana’s Sankofa of positive reversion entered my being as I entered her country, led by my ancestral spirit of Esi Tweba. I see my capacity for a healing state of being, as the colour blue (front cover). My ‘capacity’ is my Dark Goddess who brings a new light of transformation. She is my Other that makes me look at myself from anew. A new perspective to look at from ‘within’ a ‘crystalline structure’ that is the solid matter of my body that has now become a temple of the Divine and a portal to the Divine. I have direct access to Kundum, to this transformative power via our ancestors brought through the energy waves of the Blue Light transported on the sound of music and energy particles of the dance. This unfolding self-discovery process is in a constant dynamic state of change.
I have attempted to modulate my academic authorial voice now so that my ethnographic journey of self-discovery can be heard. In the following pages I invite you as the reader to come along with me on my write of passage as I reveal my stories of self-transformation through the immersion within a Feminist Communitarian Model (Denzin, 1997; Reinharz, 1993). I invite you to share my experience of shifting between the erupting transgressive folds of the Blue Light that reveals my identity as woman.
