Rosalie Jones: guiding light of Daystar - Native American choreographer

Dance Magazine, August, 1998 by Gordon L. Magill

Rosalie Jones, founder, director, and choreographer of Daystar: Contemporary Dance-Drama of Indian America, is backstage awaiting a performance of Sacred Woman, Sacred Earth, her evening-long cycle of modem Native American dance-dramas. Tall and slender, her long silver hair pulled to one side revealing a beaded earring, Jones, or "Daystar," as she is known professionally, resembles one of the elegant Native American women painted by her contemporary, Navajo artist R. C. Gorman. In Sacred Woman, Sacred Earth, she takes the part of White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman, a character drawn from Lakota Sioux legend. Wearing a white fringed buckskin Plains dress and moccasins, carrying a sacred pipe bundle of beaded, fringed buckskin, she looks otherworldly indeed. The theme of the piece is the Native American view of the feminine principle as revealed through stories from various native cultures: Iroquois, Eastern Cherokee, Blackfeet, and Lakota, as well as intertribal.

The first dance of the evening, "Wolf," is a masked dance of transformation. "The wolf is one of my favorite animals in the natural world," Jones says. "I would like this dance to pay respect to the wolf as an animal. The wolf has been pushed to the brink of extinction due to our misconceptions of it as a bad creature. The Native American views the wolf as a good creature, given to man as a companion to teach us about community. It's said that what happens to the wolf happens to the Indian people."

The curtain opens on a stage empty but for a huge, shadowy spiderweb in the background. Flutes play hauntingly and drums throb as first one, then another male dancer, both wearing wolf heads and long, fringed buckskin skirts, move onstage with taut, pulsating steps. The dancers pantomime the wolf's stalking, watchful movements; the lead dancer grows more menacing, chasing away the others; then a metamorphosis begins as the wolf sheds its skin, inch by inch. A mask of an old man's deeply lined face is revealed. Part animal, part human, he dances a catharsis of transformation in a frenzy of joy and fear with lithe, muscular movements. We are not sure what he becomes--a young man or a young wolf, a male or a female. He has become a shaman, a magician of change.

Afterward, Jones, her head cocked to the right in a characteristically sidelong, quizzical posture, reflects on the meaning "Wolf" holds for her. The words come in a measured, articulate stream, punctuated with emphatic pauses: "`Wolf' is what I've been working twenty-five years to achieve. It has a shamanistic feel to it because it's pure transformation, from beginning to end. It brings together everything I've learned about modern dance, mime, mask, characterization, dramatization of story line. It's based on the traditional Plains straight dance, in which the men pantomime both stalking the animal and being the animal. If it were strictly traditional, the music would stop; the dance would end. But when it's choreographed, you compress time down to its essence, which is what both mime and poetry do.

"I think that `Wolf' points the way toward a certain style of dance," she continues, "the fusion of Native American traditional forms and modern dance. It might be possible that there is no such thing, but I like to think of it as a possibility. I don't know if you would call it style, or genre, or what. The vocabulary just isn't there yet. But that vision of it is out there, someplace. At least that's what has driven my career, my creative life."

It has been a long, often difficult, journey for Jones, from her first attempt at choreography in 1966 through her winning of a 1995-97 National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer's Fellowship to this moment of insight as she stands in the forefront of her chosen field, modern Native American dance. Her creativity in this new form has been prodigious: nine solo dances (another in progress); twelve ensemble dance-dramas based on Native American oral tradition; six modern dance works; and choreography for eight plays, including a Native American interpretation of Oedipus Rex.

Over the years, she has performed her works throughout the United States, from Native American reservations to the Kennedy Center, from summer festivals in the Midwest to theater festivals in Bulgaria and Turkey. Richard West, director of the National Museum of the American Indian, has said, "Rosalie Jones is the preeminent Native American dance artist today." Another contemporary and colleague, Hanay Geiogamah, founder of the American Indian Dance Theatre, has written, "If there is any artist among Indian people who truly merits the label avant-garde in its most positive expression, it is Jones. Her Daystar performing arts company has produced some of the most experimental, bracing, and compelling Native-themed dance works imaginable."

Modern Native American dance is a comparatively small world, still in its adolescence, that has been nurtured by Jones and, among others, Juan Valenzuela, of Aztec-Yaqui parentage, and Rene Highway, a Canadian Cree. Their joint vision is of a dance form that synthesizes traditional tribal and modern dance, ballet, and jazz. Jones, who founded Daystar in 1980, was the first to begin working in modern Native American dance.