A blog written by UoB Placement Student, Freddie Thackray
Music and dance have been used as both a tool for and against cultural hegemony for centuries, due to their possession of power as an internal expression of identity in individuals and an external projection of cultural nuance, and reified communal identities. This duality gives music and dance its importance in fighting racial injustice, and cultural heritage. These two practices are inextricably linked, as “the relationship between music and dance parallels that between speech and gesture” (Jerome Lewis, Language, Music, and The Brain, MIT Press, 2013). Music and dance sustain communal strength, and thus have been used to control populations based on race, class, and gender; a historical dialogue rooted in colonialism. Furthermore, in today’s society, we see music and dance challenging what it means to conserve culture, moving away from physical cultural heritage into an unmuseumification of embodied cultural and lived experience, in a potent form of non-verbal communication.
Image of dancers during a performance - sourced from Unsplashed.
Due to the intangibility largely surrounding artistic ritual, the physical materials of music and dance have often been utilised by oppressors to quell societal strength. Once spiritual and religious hegemony through music is controlled, so becomes society. For example, in the case of the mbira amongst the Shona people of Zimbabwe. In Shona culture the mbira holds the ability to evoke the spirits of ancestors during the funeral ceremonies and rituals that strengthen their connection to God, it is the ancestors that are closest to God. This spiritual appeasement forms the foundation of Shona religious practice, hinged on the mbira. In the 1890s Christian missionaries condoned the playing of the mbira dzaVadzimu as heathen and evil (Jones, 1994: 127), the mbira, and thus its practice and production declined. Furthermore, Western ideas such as four-part conducted harmony, and musical ownership disintegrated improvisation, innovation, and communal spirit. Paradoxically, through the control of musical practice in colonialism, we see its obvious capabilities. Furthermore, the historical, racial suspension of musical practice poses an even greater incentive to fully reclaim music and dance’s efficacy.
For example, Katherine Dunham reclaimed dance as a form of non-verbal artistic and political statement in support of international Black rights. The first performance of her ballet, Southland, in 1951 in Chile, presents a bold and brazen personal representation of American lynchings. Dunham’s academic fusion of research and dance made her work most threatening to the US Government, she created a model for social research to enact social change through the medium of dance and the arts. Her integrated studio in New York became a place people were viewed as people, not based on race, thus a “space was made for dance like hers because of the community Dunham developed as a means of support and socially transformative movement process” (Martin, 2017: 9). Dunham transcended geographic boundaries separating people from their ancestral lands, reclaiming dance’s role in a modern context.
An integral part of the UnMuseum Cultural and Heritage Programme is the performing arts. Reiterations of Dunham’s methodology are presented in which research and embodied experience combine, producing a wholly more robust and dynamic practice than either isolated. For example, Norman Stephenson’s dance (DMAC dance collective, Bristol), incorporate ritualistic dialogue between musician, dancer, and participants that blurs the lines between audience and creator, thus embellishing a dissolving of physical makeup and social distinction, predicated upon race. In a kind of kinaesthetic empathy, the participants of the music and dance events are brought together in a sonic bonding that both strengthens racial identity in the individual and in the community; this provides cultural hegemony and unity in the challenging of systemic oppression.