Which is the witch: dance versus order and authority By Nora Amin
In the beginning of the twentieth century, when Isadora Duncan emerged with her wild dances and her free spirit, she was considered an outcast. Isadora Duncan followed her heart and chased behind her imagination in all freedom and authenticity, with her own signature she created what she called the natural and free movement, what would be later considered as a pioneering trend for modern dance. Her life was her dance, and her dance was her life. She choreographed her dances in the same wildness that choreographed her life. She even created a school to teach the arts to the children, she invested in the future and she followed her dream. Women of that sort are dangerous to the status quo, artists of that sort are equally dangerous to the notions of order and authority whether in the sociocultural sphere or the artistic sphere, they challenge the established systems of behavior as much as they challenge the acknowledged systems of creativity, and dance is among them. Our movement in the public sphere is coded, it is contained and tamed, our bodies are shaped by education into a specific and socially accepted behavior. Dance is a form of physical behavior and activity that defies those social and cultural codes of public collective movement, by bringing in personal and creative patterns of physical presence and of expression while communicating esthetically beyond the formal discourse of daily life, dance explores another free physicality to the dancer that shows a body liberated from the public and general codes of movement, it reinvents the body, unless it is the dance embedded in the traditional rituals of that culture or society. The ritual protects the dance, stylizes it and puts it into the general codes of the society, often with a spiritual color that deviates the physicality and the sexuality from their realistic references and impacts, and elevate them, in that context the dance becomes tamed and accepted. Yet, until today, in most cultures, a dancer is considered threatening to the public morality, and in most cases is not admitted into the official social structures of recognition and acceptance. Nevertheless, and paradoxically enough, staged dance has also produced its tradition of codes, borders, taboos, authority and order. It is equally difficult to challenge the dance institution as it is difficult to challenge the socio-cultural institution. The female dancer on stage liberates her body as well as the bodies of the spectators - from the frame of accepted and imposed physicality. She becomes the delegate of this liberation, the model that this dreamt freedom is projected upon. She dissects herself from the public and collective physicality to plant herself in the alternative personal and physical reality that can only be achieved through performance. Hence performance becomes the artistic bridge that connects between the outside reality which is ruled by order and the alternative imagined identities that dwell in the bodies of the spectators and emerge via the body of the performer. 1
If the female dancer is able to re-appropriate her body against the universal tradition of the patriarchal system that makes her a property of the male, that denies her the right to own her body, or defines her sexuality as a commodity to please the male and therefore sets the rules of beauty and femininity, if such rebellious female performers exist in male dominated cultures, then they would be the right catalyst to open the stage for all the repressed bodies, identities and genders. By breaking the authorized gender image and gender behavior rises the possibility to recognize all forms of physicalities and sexualities. Nevertheless the dance of the rebellious can become commodified and exoticized, as a strategy to contain the different, the personal, the untamed and the threatening. The commodification is a usual strategy of wrapping and re-framing the body into an object within a market of transactions. The queer becomes an object for curiosity and shame, while the female dancer transforms through the male gaze into an untamed concubine. The strategy of exoticizing is more based in alienating the body, in instrumentalising the rebellion and the different projecting onto them a notion of otherness that is somehow dehumanizing just as racism dehumanizes by othering the different. From this dehumanization emerge the animalistic images, and the performer may be treated as an animal, a pet may be. This petting - especially of the female performer - seems on the surface as kind and affective, yet it hides behind it the traditional hierarchy of the male supremacy. Exoticising is dehumanising. It puts dance in the sphere of racism, and demands a profound look into our universal history of dance and its connections to racism. It is by transgressing the borders of the institutionalized dance that a dancer is able to confront all those oppressive strategies and revolt. It is impossible to break the codes by following them, just as it is impossible to find one's own physicality, authenticity and liberation while abiding to the official vocabulary and technics of the dance systems. To break the acknowledged dance systems is a step to break the bigger physical systems of behavior, and later infiltrate the values and world views that produced them. The "Hexentanz" of Mary Wigman is a clear model of opposition not only to the official dance but also to the imposed modes of physicality, sexuality and femininity. It is a model that puts the spectator in direct confrontation with the notions of wildness, beauty and power, all in connection to the question of femininity and the image of the female dancer. Wigman removes the objectified beauty of the face by wearing a mask, by that she also removes the female face. We remain with the body, the female body without its female face. We get the chance to re-explore the female physicality when it is faceless. Or rather carrying a solid and stiff face that disrupts our ready made perception of the body. Then comes the choreography which re-shapes the female physicality in a warrior type mode, although - in the choreography - this warrior is sitting on the floor, 2
spreading her legs, and taking positions that shift away from the vertical body into the horizontal mode that opposes the usual dance moves, and opposes the way we are used to perceive dance visually. Wigman connects to the ground, to her roots, and plants her new body and her new dance, she defies the official dance beauty and creates new lines and shapes that break away from what has been deeply rooted in our consciousness of dance. Her wildness in imagination is met by her wildness in performance, she is the choreographer/ dancer, she conceives her dance with her body and through it, and performs it while performing herself, her dance is a performance of the self and of the dance together. It is a socio-cultural statement born in very personal authenticity of her creative and transcending imagination. The movement of her arms and fingers while spreading her legs is carried by an inner power and a performative projection that match her with the image of a witch. One that is not supported by superstition. It is not the dance on its own, nor the effect of the mask, it is mainly the power and energy that carry the performance and shape its delivery. It is this almost madness, this momentary transcendence, that bewitch and win over the prescribed codes of dance and of sociophysical behavior. In that sense dance functions as a form of rebellion against the collective modes of physicality which are imposed via education, physical education being one part of the general socio-cultural education of the citizens that guarantees order for the service of authority, whether social authority or religious authority or state authority. Education is a tool to implement homogeny in order to protect the hegemony of the authority. A witch is that marginalized figure, the outcast like Isadora Duncan, the one who dares. With her daring she challenges authority, she brings out the inner flame of the untamed performer and practices her magic. The magic is the liberation of the inner self and the discovery of the inherent inner power of the self and how it is able to radiate energy, empower and create bonding within a group while reclaiming its identity and the ownership of her body. In Egypt, it is frequent - by tradition - to see the female performer, actress or dancer, as a witch, and a witch is by definition evil. The spectators enjoy the beauty of the female body and its charm in oriental dance while shaming it. The double operation of desiring and shaming is the safeguard of morality against the magic of the witch. Yet the witch is able to give up her magic in order to seek social recognition and approval, hence become an obedient object of the status-quo, unless her witch craft - her dance - is a bridge towards a certain resistance to that statusquo, in that context she can only be a warrior and carry on by confronting the shame, the alienation, the exoticisation and dehumanisation. To break the borders of dance is also to explore new possibilities of movement and of stage physicalities, as well as to understand new connections and modes of communication with the spectators. Choosing to provoke and not to please, choosing to oppose and not to entertain, choosing truth over hypocrisy. 3
A foreign body on stage is already formulated in the collective perception as alien by nature, compared to the fabricated alienation imposed on the native dancer who rebels, its otherness is pre-conceived even prior to the performance, the exoticisation of the dance of the foreigner is easily made even if that performer is performing within the western traditions on a western stage, but what can that foreign body contribute to the native audience's understanding of their own bodies and identities? It is sometimes the mere realization of the impact of othering the foreign performer for the sake of protecting the hierarchy of knowledge and of identities. In this sense even the most revolutionary foreign performer can be enslaved by the perception of the spectators, a perception that creates an othered identity and projects it back onto the stage. The spectator will not feel threatened and will have preserved the native order. If the dance of the foreigner can bring to the surface the realization of all those strategies, then it would have succeeded as a statement against the established order of prejudice and hierarchy. In 1926's "Hexentanz 2", we can see a ritual, yet it is not the established and acknowledged ritual, but rather the individual statement of the self occupying the scene as an alternative ritual and breaking away from the collectively approved ritual. It is the ritual of re-appropriating the stage, and reappropriating body and gender. This dance ritual creates its own aesthetics in movement and in space, it preserves and radiates the authentic physical identity and sensuality and sexuality versus the traditional and objectified. It is a dance ritual that is also about performing gender, Wigman questions our stereotypes of performing gender, adds the elements of the wild, frantic, untamed and disturbing femininity. She also provokes us towards questioning the notions of beauty, and dance itself, what is dance? What defines it and how it is created? How does dance communicate gender and vice versa? If in the common popular cultures, the witch is an evil person, one that has to be hunted down and burned to death, then she - and it is usually a she would seem to me as an equivalent of the devil, of Satan. This demonization of the figure and personality of a magician - and a performer is indeed a magician - shifts it from the image of somebody able to transform reality, make miracles happen, into an enemy that has to be liquidated. The difference between the witch and the good fairy, is that the witch breaks the order while the good fairy preserves it. A miracle that protects the value system -however oppressive - is an angelic miracle, while a miracle - this time by a witch - that transforms that oppressive system into another is sinful, a devilish act, and she would be the demon. We can easily extend this duality, and explore its echoes in the systems of state order and authority, the good fairy is the soldier that attacks the protestors while the witch is the protestor or the revolutionary. By the way, Isadora Duncan created a solo dance in 1923 called "The Revolutionary"! In the same direction, an artist that protects the established system is a good soldier, a good fairy, and one that disrupts the order and provokes for change and transformation is a witch. 4
I sincerely hope we all become witches for the best transformations of our cultures, societies and crafts, for they are the witches who are able to make a revolution, change is their predominant miracle, and in the dance field they are the witches - like Mary Wigman, Isadora Duncan and Valeska Gert to name but a few - who are able to re-create the stage as a space for passion, truth and liberation. Let us enjoy the “Witch dance project� here at the Sophiensaele and let us explore the little miracles of the commissioned dancers and choreographers, the witches of the Sophiensaele.
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