1. The study of my living culture

Keywords: Transformation and healing, Ancestral spirit, Epiphany, Ritual, Duende, Initiation, Identity, Cross-cultural dance, Art therapy, Site specific dance, Rapport, Lived experience

Paradigm: Feminist autoethnography, 

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).