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)
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Slide 5: The Blue Rite |
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