Dance

Although virtually all cultures have dance as part of their heritage, the concept of folk dance, as it has been commonly understood in the United States until recently, developed in Europe during the seventeenth century. Folk dance in Europe was customarily associated with so-called “peasant” or “folk” communities, created and choreographed collectively and anonymously, and passed on informally from generation to generation. Some English and European folk dances, as well as certain children’s games, are thought to have had their origin in ancient rites, religious ceremonies, and life-cycle rituals. Maypole dances, for example, celebrate the return of spring and incorporate symbols of fertility.

The belief that folk dance is an authentic representation of an ancient heritage and the cultural identity of a folk or a nation has inspired scholars, politicians, and others to seek out typical and representative dances. For much of the twentieth century, in Western Europe and the United States, folk dancing was popular as a way to promote regional and national identity. After World War II, in the new socialist states of Eastern Europe, professional groups formed under state sponsorship to develop stylized productions of folk dance for stage presentation.

There have been attempts in the United States to identify a particular dance form as the true American folk dance. Folklorists, however, stress the inappropriateness of singling out one form of cultural expression as quintessentially American or preeminent. In our multicultural society, folk dance embraces, among others, the Anglo-American square dance, Native American fancy dance, Spanish fandango, Latin salsa, Irish jig, Bohemian polka, Scottish highland fling, African American hip-hop, and English Morris dance.

The American Folklife Center’s Neptune Plaza Concert series, which began in 1977, and was reconstituted as “Homegrown: The Music of America” in 2002, has featured a diverse range of music and dance traditions from this country and around the world, and many of these are documented in video, photographs, and audio recordings in the Center’s collections. The Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project, the Chicago Ethnic Arts Project, and the Maine Acadian Folklife Project documented dance traditions ranging from square dancing to polka parties.

Folklife Center collections also contain materials on the music and dance from cultural groups around the world, including Alaskan Tlingits, Jamaican Maroons, and Moroccan Berbers. Of particular note is the Discoteca Publica Municipal de São Paulo Collection, a group of sound recordings, film footage, and photographs made in 1938 that represents one of the first ethnographic compilations of music, dance, and ritual from Brazil.

In December 1986, Margaret Fahnestock Lewis, of Great Mills, Maryland, presented the American Folklife Center with a collection that includes 143 sixteen-inch disc recordings of music and dance from Bali, Fiji, Java, the Kangean Islands, Madura, the Marquesas Islands, New Caledonia, Samoa, and Tahiti. These recordings were made by Mrs. Lewis’s late husband, Sheridan Fahnestock, and his brother, Bruce, on two expeditions in 1940 and 1941, the first aboard the ship Director II. The collection includes documentation of Legong dancers performing to a gamelan ensemble in Bali. Accompanying the discs are five reels of color film and numerous letters, magazine articles, and newspapers clippings documenting the progress of the expeditions.

In 1949 Gheorghe Popescu-Judetz became director and choreographer of the Romanian government-sponsored Ciocîrlia Ensemble, and for the next twenty-two years (until his death in 1972) he worked on the compilation of a catalog and ethnographic description of all Romanian dances and variants. The research resulted in a collection of several thousand notated folk dance variants, more than 3,200 tape-recorded melodies, and approximately 4,000 notated dance melodies. The collection also includes musical arrangements, choreographic diagrams, photographs, and show programs documenting the activities of the Ciocîrlia and Perinitza Ensembles. Gheorghe’s wife Eugenia Popescu-Judetz donated the collection to the American Folklife Center in 1990 and 1995.

Dance presents special problems for documentation, even when a video camera is available. Some researchers have developed systems of dance notation, and examples of these are available in the archive. In addition, the archive holds journals and other publications that are devoted to dance and the cultural activities surrounding dance organizations.