Should dance competitions add a new category - vernacular dance - to strip away judging centered around White aesthetics?
First of all, thank you Black Dance Teachers Association for including me in this discussion and asking my thoughts. It’s such a complicated question, mainly because what we get into right away is this issue of nomenclature - what do we call things. Years ago, I watched “contemporary” become a catch-all phrase to include anything that fall outside of the realm of ballet, hip hop, jazz or any indigenous or culturally specific forms (i.e., hula, West African, etc.). What it did, effectively, is diminish all of the techniques that have been studied, trained in and articulated through regularly performed masterpieces in the canon of repertory dance in America.
Said another way, nobody cares that what the 12-year-old in the convention competition is doing in her solo at the moment is a bad contraction followed by a bad spiral, both of which are specified in Graham technique, can be learned and are not respected.
And if none of the other judges on the panel—nor the choreographer of that solo, nor the teacher rehearsing the dancer in it—is qualified to judge the technical merit of a contraction or spiral, it makes no sense to comment on it as a judge. This neck of the dance woods has decided that bad or otherwise, what the dancer is doing is “contemporary” and thus legit.
Similarly, “vernacular” as a term defines the dialect or way ordinary people speak in a specific area or region. If we use this logic, we have to make a lot of assumptions about what ordinary people we’re talking about. In this case, is it black people in America? Is it hip hop practitioners?
If so, has anybody canvassed this community to find out what they agree are the values of hip hop that should be present in work to call it such? Are they in agreement on this so that we can decide the standards and judge merit based on some kind of template? Obviously this has gone on in ballet in spades, as there are five internationally recognized schools of ballet that we can use as reference points for the values we need to see when this same 12-year-old I’m judging gets on a pointe shoe (and she likely will) an hour after this contemporary solo. (Don’t get me started on the racial disparities here - it’s a whole other blog.)
Because people are not having this conversation on this level with any serious, beyond-the-dollar import about dance inside of most places where kids are judged doing it, I worry that we could potentially be more exclusive than inclusive. Hula, Irish Step and West African dance would all be considered vernacular dance by these standards. Isn’t there then a responsibility to make sure that these forms can be appropriately judged by someone with the information/authority to judge it?
I get that I’m not being completely fair here; the area of dance we’re dealing with, the convention/competition circuit, is built with machinery that doesn’t have space to gatekeep nuances. This is actually my bigger problem: it should. We’re doing kids across the country a disservice if we’re teaching them culturally specific movement while offering no reference points, no research and no deeper investment in the values thereof sourced through accredited gurus. It doesn’t matter that only 10% of them will dance beyond high school. If we put them in little league, they’re gonna learn all about that baseball. We won’t let them travel dribbling a basketball just because they’re kids. Why should there be less integrity in dance?
This is the place to start. It’s less about adding a category, more about managing and respecting the ones we have. Then perhaps it will be easier to clarify what is necessary to prevent black forms - especially hip hop - from being regularly disrespected and poorly appropriated all across the country.