Blog Post #7

I really enjoyed this weeks’ focus. The guided activity and the readings focused on dance. I am not a dancer, however I am enrolled in DANC200 this semester. Before this class, I never realized the importance of dance; I knew dance was entertaining and a form of expression but I didn’t realize the impact it can have on people’s lives. In the beginning of the semester, we had to define dance. I simply defined dance as an art form. However, I soon realized that dance has many aspects to it. We attended a dance event a few weeks ago that focused on preventing abuse to women. The women told a story through their dance and expressed their strength and power. I believe all of this relates to the assignments this week because I was able to understand what the Urban Bush Women (UBW) were trying to express through dance.

            When exploring the website, I focused on the UBW’s core values. I really believe that these core values were represented and expressed in every dance that I watched. The core values include: validating the individual, catalyzing for social change, building trust through process, entering community and co-creating stories, celebrating the movement and culture of the African Diaspora, and recognizing that place matters. The women in the group displayed pride in their heritage and similar to the dance group I witnessed for class, they expressed strength and power.

            I was extremely shocked when I watched “Batty Moves.” Compared to the dances that I had watched prior, this dance was very revealing and somewhat scandalous. The dance involved a lot of movements relating to the hips and butt and the outfits were somewhat revealing. However, after I read, “Memory Walking with Urban Bush’s Batty Moves,” I realized the meaning of the dance. I would not consider the dance to be vulgar because the point of the dance was for the women to embrace their bodies and take pride in them. The dance displayed the women’s strength. The author mentions, “Their costumes hinted at what they intended to do--- kick butts!” I also found it very interesting that each dancer “sang their versions of the song, sharing their African American heritage but also emphasizing their own identities to illustrate both individual and collective identities as women of the African Diaspora.” The author even mentions the significance of the dance and how it reminded her of the childhood games that she experienced in Ghana. When first viewing this dance, one might believe that it is vulgar and inappropriate, however upon further analysis, it genuinely has a lot of meaning. An interviewee said, “African people’s movements have often been described as “lewd and lascivious” by European Americans because we comfortably use pelvic movements in all sorts of dances from the sacred to the flirtatious to the boldly sensual. As African people in the United States, we developed an “in-your-face” approach to our desire to continue our movement traditions of the hips. We developed defiance and resistance to ideas of cultural domination and we carried it in our hips.”

            I also enjoyed reading, “Sexual Politics.” The first sentence really stuck out to me. It read, “Recent feminist scholarship tends to proceed on the assumption that history is really his story—an account of the past written by or about men.” However, modern and post modern dance are the only major art forms in which “the creators, the consolidators, and the second and third generation innovators have almost all been women.” Despite this fact, this might not necessarily be something to celebrate. The author includes, “The fact that it’s difficult to name a major male choreographer who isn’t also homosexual suggests that the art of dance has been, and to a large extent still is, shunned by heterosexual males who regard it as a womanly activity. However, this makes no sense to me. Dancers are considered good due to years of practice, not because of their gender. The author then focuses on the constraints placed on women in the past. Duncan danced without a corset in order to rebel against its meaning. The author mentions, “She rebelled not only against the corset per se, but also against everything it symbolized: the constraints—both physical and psychological—imposed upon women by Victorian Culture.” I believe this aspect of the reading ties in with the UBW. The UBW dance for a purpose. They tell stories when they dance and display their strength and power throughout their dances. Dance is more than what you’re wearing, it’s about the significance and importance of your movements and the stories and emotions that they evoke.