In the Shadow of Hollywood Orientalism: Authentic East-Indian Dancing

Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement, Spring 2003 by Williams, Drid

Preliminaries

Combine a theory of the dance that reduces it to raw movement and "style" (Cohen 1967) with a Hollywood choreographer who avidly studied East Indian dance forms, but had no desire to "be" an Indian dancer (Jack Cole), and you possess two essential ingredients of a recipe that resulted in "Broadway Jazz:"1 a movement bricolage consisting of East Indian and other "Oriental" dance movements recostumed and set to jazz music. Cole insisted on "the validity of ethnic dances as vital entertainment" (Loney 1984: 74), and his "interest in learning ethnic dance steps was insatiable at this time, [but] he realized that authentic reconstructions would be too arty for patrons who had come to have a martini or enjoy a supper [in cabarets, nightclubs, etc.]" (Loney 1984: 71).

Agnes de Mille called Jack Cole "the first important choreographer in the commercial sphere," saying that "He set the Broadway jazz style" (de Mille, cited in Loney 1984: 13-14). He was praised by the gossip columnist, Dorothy Kilgallen for taking the art out of dance and giving it a "hotfoot." (Loney 1984: 99). The noted dance critic, John Martin, "considered Cole's art gaunt, nervous, and flagellant, yet with an opulent, sensuous beauty. For Martin, Cole was a depersonalized being, an intense kinetic entity, rather than an individual" (Loney 1984: 99).

Although known by several names, i.e. "nautch dance," "Oriental dance," and "Hindu routines" Cole wanted his type of jazz dance to be called "Broadway Commercial," or something like that: "To me it's rife with sentimentality, it's self-indulgent, but one thing else it is-it's commercial. It fits in with-the stuff-on television and such kindred 'artistic' endeavors. Maybe it helps orient a dancer to the harsh realities of hoofing for a buck" (Loney 1984: 121). But how do theories of the dance enter the picture?

Jerome Delameter (1981: 4-5), quotes Selma Jean Cohen, where she "discusses the kind of communication dance most easily expresses:"

The medium of dance is human movement. It deals with people, not with facts or ideas. And it deals with people in motion-not exhausted. We can think very well while sitting still. We can express the distance of the moon from the earth by gesturing with our fingers, but the matter is better explained in words. We might act out a marriage ceremony to identify the mother-in-law, but it is easier said than done. And what would the poor dancers do with Kant? Neither factual relations nor ideas are promising choreographic material. The area of dance is not that of concepts, which are grasped by the mind by way of words, but of percepts, which are grasped by the eye by way of movement (See Cohen, in Beardsley and Schneller 1967: 272-3).

With regard to concepts and the dance, one would go a long way to find a clearer expression of Descartes' mind-body split than is found in Cohen's Prolegomenon, because her definition of 'dance' (and, by extension, dancers, dancing and dances) declares that dancers retain their bodies and the movements they make, but somehow in the process, they lose their minds (See Farnell 1995: 8). They engage in a "dance area" that excludes concepts, but retains percepts (sense data). These constitute the world of the "poor dancer," who would not know what to do with Immanuel Kant, or, presumably, other philosophers.

Cohen's theory of the dance was widely prevalent for thirty years preceding its publication, and in some circles it still is. There are many, of course, who would reduce dancing to mindless movement, sans language and culture, since this is all that the dance has to offer, along with "individual stylizations"-or so the mythology goes. Moreover, if one thinks of dancing exclusively as technique or steps, then problems of ownership, meaning and authenticity are successfully by-passed. I say this because I am convinced that it is in Cohen's theory that we find a clear expression of Jack Cole's ideas about dancing. In his own words,

I never wanted to be-people are always confusing why you are teaching them; they think you want to teach them to be an Indian dancer-but I was trying to expose them to a different attitude, to give them the excitement and the discovery of the thousand ways there are to move that are peculiar and different, totally different, that would never enter your head here. It opens up a new vocabulary of movement, different ways to approach the problem, rather than a balletic way. (Jack Cole, from an interview with Jerome Delameter 1981: 193)

Unlike his contemporaries (i.e. Martha Graham, Doris Humphery and Charles Weidman), Cole didn't choose to pursue serious modern dance, which was "the less-traveled path, and certainly far less well-remunerated than the work of star dancers in musicals and revues. Cole decided not to take the less-used road" (Loney 1984: 121). Nevertheless, he was a clear inheritor of Denishawn's teaching, as Adrienne McLean points out:

Perhaps the best known and most influential dance school founded in Los Angeles was Denishawn, which opened in 1915. Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn were, through the audiences they attracted and the students they trained (e.g. Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, as well as Cole) the vanguard of what would eventually become American modern dance. Married in 1914, Shawn and St. Denis became famous for the "oriental" dances they created and performed, dances with titles like Incense, The Cobras, Nautch, Yogi, Radha-to list but one of Ruth St. Denis's early programs. Shawn and St. Denis often mixed works from one or another of their oriental "suites"-Ancient Greek, Japanese, east Indian, Persian, Siamese, Chinese, and Egyptian, for example-so that, in the same evening, an audience of the 1920s might see Sappho, Japanese Spear Dance, The Beloved and the Sufi, Kwan Yin, The Abduction of Sita, and Isis and Osiris. Through the early 1930s, Denishawn supplied dancers and dance pieces for numerous Hollywood movies. (McClean 1997: 134)