Serenity Wise and Dr. Elena Benthaus

Transcript of The Role of Popular and Social Dance with Serenity Wise and Dr. Elena Benthaus

00:00:03.000 –>  00:00:19.000

Elena: Hello everyone. This little conversation is titled, The Role of Popular and Social Dance and Higher Education in Australasia, post symposium editorial chat between me, Dr. Elena Benthaus and

00:00:19.000 –> 00:00:22.000 

Serenity: Serenity Wise.

00:00:22.000 –> 00:02:34.000

Elena: We are here to talk a little bit about the Chat’s special issue and how we proposed it, how we envisioned it and the particular symposium it kind of came out of. So the idea about the symposium on the role of popular dance in higher education institutions in Australasia, started taking shape as part of the hashtag Pop Dance Profs campaign initiated by the Pop Moves affiliated Dance Studies Association working group for Popular, Social, and Vernacular Dance.¹ In the lead up to DSA’s 2022 annual conference. In this campaign, the working group advocated for popular dance ‘being knowledge’ in order to address the ways that higher education institutions have not valued all forms of dance equally. 

To contribute to the discussion from a regionalized or localized perspective, the Tiny PoP Moves Salon Australasia team which I’m heading, which is like a little salon where we get popular dance scholars from across Australasia together every couple of months to talk about issues with our research or give people the opportunity to present some of their research and have like a community feedback focus discussion afterwards.

We ran a special topic salon at the end of 2022 where we focused on the role that popular dance plays in higher education institutions in the region down here. Given how does dispersed popular dance scholar practitioners are, for example, how those working regularly in academia in Australasia are often asked to fit into different departments that are not necessarily dance oriented or how popular dance scholar practitioners are often asked to cover a week or two on the topic as casually contracted work, so as guest lecturers, giving guest workshops, giving guest tutorials and how this positions popular, social, and vernacular dance in the broader curriculum across a variety of disciplines. I think this was the first session, Serenity, that you attended. And then we started chatting about organizing a localized, regional symposium to address some of these questions and observations, right?

00:02:34.000 –> 00:04:37.000

Serenity: Yeah, I thought, you know, I am a PhD candidate and I had just started teaching at University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau in the Dance Studies Department, which is the same department where I’m doing my PhD and I was about one or two semesters into exactly what you described Elena. I was guest lecturing with my specialization in community dance which in my particular sub area of community dance² I’m essentially popular and social dance and I was thinking, well, let me just reach out to other scholars in the area, saw this fantastic meeting and immediately noticed that many of the needs and ideas and concerns that people in the meeting were expressing were what I was already getting a hint of, which was popular and social dance in higher education is almost ghettoized. It’s sort of put in the margins, treated like an extra, just a little flavor. To keep things interesting as opposed to a subject, a dance subject like any other dance subject that has history and and diversity and technique and so much to teach us about culture. And it was, it was immediate that I noticed the connections that I was already sort of getting a sense of really seemed to be much broader than just my individual experience that this was really a relevant issue to popular and social dance education in our Australasian region. And I thought, well, hey, I probably have a little bit less to do than all of these fellow overworked scholars who have been in the game for a while. So why don’t we see if we can put a little bit of my available time and labor to use. And if Elena has a little available time and labor we can put this symposium together to start some conversations, at least beginning with New Zealand and Australia in the region.

00:04:37.000 –> 00:07:09.000

00:04:37.000 –> 00:07:09.000

Elena: Yeah, so that was actually quite, like I was a little bit overworked, but I felt this was important and I really wanted to do it and, so we did it and we came up with a range of questions for the CFP that people could address in the proposals for the symposium. And some of the questions were, so just generally, what is the role of popular, social, and vernacular dance in dance departments? How much are they included? In what ways do they show up in the curriculum? What forms of knowledge do popular, social, and vernacular dance scholars/ practitioners bring to the institution as a whole, not just the dance department? What are the benefits of including popular, social, and vernacular dance more firmly in the curriculum in dance departments, but also in departments that are not dance oriented or dance departments per se. So what conditions actually need to be created to more firmly situate. Popular, social, and vernacular dance knowledges into the curriculum and into departments, dance, or otherwise. What are the barriers to make popular, social, vernacular dance knowledges more firmly part of the curriculum? How do popular, social, vernacular dance scholar/practitioners navigate institutions’ misconceptions about their practices that often arise in these in these kinds of institutional environments, and also precarity because if you’re hired to do this as a, you know, one week, one guest lecture, or if you’re lucky, you get a whole, course out of it that you do for like 12 weeks but only on a casual or sessional contract. How do we, how do we, and they navigate precarity? And also That’s a question we wanted to ask, but we didn’t actually get to address properly in this symposium based on the contributions that we got, what are the interactions and collaborations that people have experienced or witnessed between dancers, dance groups, dance researchers, dance institutions in Australasia in the broader Asia Pacific region.

We got that within Australasia, but we didn’t get the broader Asia Pacific region per se yet. But also, all of these questions… All of these questions still stand. So, so even with the symposium that we ran, these questions are still very firmly there and haven’t been completely addressed and just have also kind of raised more questions in the process and I think we had some a range of takeaways from the symposium itself, that still kind of leave those questions open.

00:07:09.000 –> 00:08:14.000

Serenity: Yeah, you know, probably unsurprisingly these questions like you mentioned, Elena surfaced so many more questions and also realities about sort of systemic flaws that make it very difficult to do justice to popular and social dance. And I really enjoyed the conversations that came out of those questions in the symposium.³

When we started there were presentations that explored many different iterations of popular and social dance in Australasia and, what, not only what the value was of these of these projects, of these efforts that popular social dancers are doing inside and outside of the academy. But their dreams for the future and what equity might start to look like for popular and social dance in the academic system.

And I think once we started to get through the presentations and then come together in sort of a live conversation. During the symposium at the end of the symposium as you remember.

00:08:14.000 –> 00:08:17.000

Elena: Hmm.

00:08:17.000 –> 00:10:13.000

Serenity: And ideas were popping off and percolating. We started to. Navigate and formulate like what are the main things we would like? What are the main… I think of it as a list of demands. It’s not necessarily a list of demands. It’s not not a list of demands. It’s a list of needs. It’s a list of the more, the most imminent, identifiable ways that we can start to address this structural inequity and really bring in the benefits of popular social dance and do right by popular and social dance in higher education.

We narrowed it down to about 4 symposium takeaways that many of the participants weighed in on and those were one, a degree track dedicated to popular and social dance.

We’ve seen some iterations of something or other kind of like this, but really just a clear identified degree track, acknowledging this as a field all unto itself that does deserve a depth of study and development.

Number 2, curricula that centers people of varying physical mental abilities. Number 3, popular and social dance compulsory courses that are situated within university general education offerings. So taking that social element, taking the benefits of what popular and social dance can teach us about society and about the life, the social lives of human beings. And taking that not just in the dance department, but taking it outside so that students of other degree programs have the benefit of learning from this art form, these art forms. And what they have to teach us about human life.

00:10:13.000 –> 00:10:14.000

Elena: Hmm.

00:10:14.000 –> 00:11:15.000

Serenity: And number 4, a greater development of curricula that teaches dance students to be educators. And when we’re looking at that particularly through a popular social dance lens, that’s really teaching our, our dance study students to be a facilitators, listeners and teachers of people. Not just dance students because if we’re talking about popular and social dance we’re talking about people in communities that may not even think of themselves as dancers, but they’re dancing, they’re creating culture, they’re creating dance.

And there’s a very clear desire amongst popular and social dancers, at least the ones in our symposium that there’s a value in educating our dance students to be educators of people, of people that dance through popular and social dance, not just to be good dance teachers to dance students who aspire to be what they see as professional dancers.

00:11:15.000 –> 00:13:12.000

Elena: Yeah, I think that was also like one of the big things that kind of came out of it that kind of resonates with Danielle Robinson and Eloisa Domenici’s article from 2010 “From Inclusion to Integration: Intercultural Dialogue and Contemporary University Dance Education.”

Like one of the kind of key points that they make and I’m quoting them now is “for us ‘integration’ refers to much more than the simple inclusion of a new dance technique class here and there. Rather, it refers to the interweaving of different dance forms, at all levels of the dance curriculum – including technique, composition, pedagogy, and history.”⁴

And it includes also community building I feel like outside of technique, composition, pedagogy, and history community building as a particular aspect of pedagogy in a particular aspect of history is something that we really kind of talked about also in relation to that there needs to be a greater connection between academic curricula and dance practitioners in the community and not just between like modern and contemporary dance companies and the academic institution, right? Because there are plenty of connections in Melbourne where I am. So the Victorian College of Performing Arts has various links to, you know, contemporary dance practitioners in Melbourne. But It has a little less connections or a little less, you know, representation, representation is a word I don’t like, but it has like a, like a lesser connection between like community dance groups or community dance practices. I think they’re trying to build that. I’m not situated in the VCA myself. I’m in cultural studies, so I’m not sure, but I always see more connection to to contemporary dance companies and choreographers than I see to community dance schools.

00:13:12.000 –> 00:13:46.000

Serenity: That’s right. And it, you know, the reality that we see of popular and social dance, community-based dance groups sort of being at the margins of those academic connections like you mentioned the academy tending to have if they’re gonna have any connections out there in the lived community oftentimes it’s modern and contemporary companies and then secondarily maybe a connection to you know a popular and social dance group here and there. I think what we’re really witnessing there and we cannot ignore is the white supremacy of it all.

00:13:46.000 –> 00:13:47.000

Elena: Hmm. Hmm.

00:13:47.000 –> 00:14:26.000

Serenity: Yeah, I think. Our contributors speak a little bit to that. When we are talking about the needs of popular and social dance, we cannot ignore the fact that we are oftentimes talking about some of the ignored, marginalized, and the ignored needs of dances that come from people of color. Dances that originate and thrive through communities of color. And that this inequity is probably not a coincidence.

00:14:27.000 –> 00:16:17.000

Elena: Not really. I think that’s kind of the thing. If our dream, right? Or our imaginary future for popular, social, vernacular dance includes having dedicated streams of popular, social, and vernacular dance in the curriculum, firmly embedded, that sit equally beside contemporary dance and ballet techniques, which are the predominant forms which are taught in the institutions that I have been seeing and have been a part of in one way or another, we need to build the environment for them to actually… Thrive, right? So you need to have an environment that makes it possible for kind of students who come in from those marginalized communities, who will practice a lot of popular social, and vernacular dance to thrive, right? To not just be there because they’re included now, but to make a livable and a breathable environment for them and have dedicated staff members who make it possible that there is this type of environment that gives breathing room for this and also a little bit more flexibility I often find, because it can be very inflexible as an environment in terms of people’s needs, right!? Varying physical and mental abilities of students, also community kind of engagements that they might have that might make it a bit more difficult to kind of be there in the same, in the particular ways that curricula and classes are organized around particular timetables, attendance hurdles, things like that. That sometimes make it more difficult. And obviously, you know, it’s expensive.

00:16:17.000 –> 00:17:11.000

Serenity: Yeah, I mean speaking of those challenges. I think that’s actually, this is a fantastic point also just in general about the challenges of this and it’s a good thing for us in this editorial conversation to kind of restate, and I say restate, because clearly we’re not the only ones who’ve said it. Even Robinson and Domenici in their article mentioned this is tough work. It is. We recognize that it is not an easy task to say simply, oh, well, we’ll just have all of the dances of the world in our degree program. You can major in every dance, from everybody’s culture and you’re gonna know it like that. Like that is not what, you know… No one’s under any delusions that that is an easy task to navigate or that that is even necessarily the goal.

00:17:11.000 –> 00:17:12.000

Elena: Yeah.

00:17:12.000 –> 00:18:31.000

Serenity: But, one of… Actually this challenge of, okay, well then how do we appropriately create a dance curriculum that acknowledges the most relevant dance forms to teach and the ways to teach them? How do we appropriately assess and then place popular and social dance in degree programs both in dance programs as well as in the general university learning curriculum? And I think part of the frustration as academics, as people in these fields, but also part of what’s so blatant about it is, we know that we can’t do everything. But there’s certain things that are just very clearly achievable and useful when we talk about degree programs that are designed to be relevant to the world today.

What is more relevant than popular and social dance if you’re looking at styles of dance? If you’re talking, if you want to make an economic argument and you’re talking about what is going to equip our young dance students to be marketable and to be able to work and build their livelihoods and be able to do their art for the rest of their lives because we live in a capitalism and they need to make a living.

00:18:31.000 –> 00:18:32.000

Elena: Hmm.

00:18:32.000 –> 00:19:42.000

Serenity: Popular and social dance is a very, comparatively, a very lucrative field. It’s popular. And social. So, this is where some of the frustration I think comes from us, as people in the field is, we really shouldn’t have to work very hard and at times we have had to work very hard. But we really shouldn’t have to, to make the case that there is a very clear and present value and a very true relevance to centering popular and social dance.

So what’s the hangup? And a lot of it, you know, as our contributors talk about is tradition. It’s just… It’s just finding a way forward in a system that… That moves very slowly. And can be hesitant sometimes, but, I think that there’s no mistake to be made that popular and social dance is very relevant to both many of the aspirations we have for the field as well as the aspirations that the academy has for its students.

00:19:42.000 –> 00:20:58.000

Elena: Definitely. And it’s kind of like, and again, I’m not saying that the institutions I have been connected to that I mentioned are not aiming to do that, right? So there is a bit of a push to do it.

And… But it’s been difficult, I think, generally, because tradition is bigger than just the dance departments’ tradition of having a conservatory style dance education that is now broadening up and changing its outlook. It’s also part of the way that the university was built on stolen land here, right? The land of the Wurundjeri people of the Eastern Kulin Nations, specifically in Melbourne, and how the university is also, was built by rich white men for rich white men initially. Like that’s kind of one of the things that is… that is… So, tradition is just bigger than ballet tradition. Or contemporary dance tradition.

00:20:59.000 –> 00:21:14.000

Serenity: Yeah. And also kind of like, Whose tradition? There’s nothing wrong with tradition. First of all, you know, as we both know, there’s nothing wrong with tradition, but this is an area where tradition and particularly a certain group’s tradition is obstructing even what the academy says it wants.

00:21:14.000 –> 00:22:19.000

Elena: Hmm…And it also really includes talking about a certain type of elitism in this instance. Is that, that what is actually the connection between the institution and the regular dance schools that exist in the city. There are quite a good number of dance schools in Melbourne. I’m not sure in how far all of them have an actual connection to like, to the university. Or how much the university is interested in thinking about this. But they have to, because technically some of the students who are coming into the program, they have been trained in dance schools, right? What, but what is the actual connection between the university and those dance schools on the ground, who are doing the work of educating the dancers that will then be students in the academy. And I know that there is a lot of, kind of also question mark around what kind of dance forms they are trained in and a little bit of a, of a, I don’t know, misconception about how some of this works.

00:22:19.000 –> 00:22:24.000

Serenity: Hmm.

00:22:24.000 –> 00:22:31.000

Elena: There needs to be a better conversation between that.

00:22:31.000 –> 00:23:25.000

Serenity: So our contributors spoke quite a lot to that connection between the community and the academy, particularly Jacqueline and Kate-Elisah’s piece where we, I mean, they’re fantastic. They are actually working in the community doing community dance classes and have something to say about what they’re experiencing when it comes to the impacts of higher education and its training of young dance teachers and how the two, like how the community and the academy can coordinate efforts better to prepare young dancers to sort of be the future teachers and leaders of dance in our broader Australasian region.

00:23:25.000 –> 00:24:49.000

Elena: And they’re both like not academics. So they’re both actually working in the industry and… So, Jacqueline is a big advocate for women in the workforce and small business. Like, small business owners, specifically geared towards women in business, right? And a lot of dance studio owners in Melbourne are women and it can’t be underestimated to think about the gendered aspect of how this works here, right? And then Kate-Elisah, who is connected with Jacqueline and they did this research project together.

So, Kate-Elisah is a dance teacher and a dancer and a studio owner here in Melbourne and they did this kind of research… They collected the research with other dance studio owners during COVID and how it impacted small businesses and they came into the symposium feeling a bit apprehensive about being in an academic setting, but what they did like, having these conversations about how they don’t really feel connected, right, to the university even though, who they like, who they educate might go to university to become a dancer and as a dance teacher so these connections are really important for this particular conversation. And this is their contribution.

00:24:49.000 –> 00:25:19.000

Serenity: Yeah, when we think about the holistic learning of the young dancer of the individual, they are walking through both the doors of Kate-Elisah’s studio and the university and we think about everything that they’re learning throughout their experiences wouldn’t it be a really valuable thing to coordinate and at least be… have both types of institutions to be aware of how they’re educating the same mind, the same dancer.

00:25:19.000 –> 00:26:06.000

Elena: Hmm. And then Jeanette is kind of looking really more closely at what she calls the shism in Australian dance studies around culturally specific dance genres in a post-migration context… Really thinking through the current situation in the curriculum and looking at historical and current strategies and then really starting to think about a future.

And I think there is a bridge to be built between both of those contributions that will make up the other part of the Chats outside of our editorial conversation. But in terms of like thinking about who was able to contribute that is also like going back to some of the kind of structural limitations.

00:26:07.000 –> 00:28:07.000

Serenity: Yeah, even to this very chat who was able to contribute, you know, it’s worth mentioning in this chat right here in this editorial that, well, our symposium did have a diversity of contributors who were able to make the time at least for 2 days to come together and dream and discuss and and and connect with fellow academics. Many of the contributors who were people of color were not able to extend even further free labor in the form of this chat. We didn’t do demographic information. We didn’t take demographic information, so I can’t speak to the racial and ethnic backgrounds or otherwise cultural backgrounds of our contributors, but what I can speak to is, at least on the level of white passing privilege, you know, out of all of us, I’m the only person who was able to contribute to this chat and then was able to provide that additional free labor, that doesn’t pass as white.

And that’s not just a truth in this Chats in that where we are already talking about the need for not just diversity, but like doing justice to the knowledge that people of color, that Indigenous people, that marginalized people bring through dance programs, particularly popular and social dance programs.

That’s not just true here. That’s true systemically. There’s a reason why that happened and it’s not because all the symposium goers that happen to be people of color just had better things to do today. It’s because of, there are real, societal pressures. And so many of the things that we’re discussing still impact us even in the form of this chat and impact us in our industries and impact us in our artistic practices and our very lived beings.

00:28:08.000 –> 00:29:28.000

Elena: And also who gets to do a dance degree in this context. And I mean, this is kind of the final note for the editorial, because of the time limit. But, there’s more to say. But it’s like who actually gets to do a dance degree because tuition fees are… A lot. So who gets to be in the room is always a consideration. And this is what I say, what I was saying about building, building a better environment. Like making space and the question will always be how do we make that space in an institutional context, where education is not free, where education is considered something to pay for, where you have to become a consumer of education, where it’s goal-oriented in a way that you get the most out of your money. And where education is just seen as a commodity and not something that will have a broader impact and something really valuable to contribute. To dance communities on the ground as well, or more broadly on the ground. There’s always like this disconnect of who gets to do this. Who gets to be able to do this. And tuition fees get more expensive at the moment too.

So that’s, you know, a whole other thing to think about. Which we don’t have time for. Which is like a bit sad.

00:29:28.000 –> 00:29:46.000

Serenity: Oh, but we’re starting it. We’re starting this conversation and we hope that you enjoy this editorial, and that you enjoy the following contributions from this Chats and that this is a conversation that rolls on and rolls on and gets bigger and grows and has more contributors.

00:29:28.000 –> 00:29:46.000

Elena: I second that.

About the Authors

Serenity Wise is a PhD candidate in Dance Studies at University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau. Her background spans dance, visual art, and sometimes, the intersections between them. As a dance scholar/practitioner, Serenity’s research explores dancing communities, social sustainability, and policy. In the visual arts she works as a curator/educator centred around object-based learning. Serenity holds a Master of Community Dance degree from University of Auckland, and a Master of Art History degree from University of London (SOAS).

Dr Elena Benthaus is a (former) dancer and now popular screendance scholar, who graduated with a PhD in Dance Studies from the University of Melbourne in 2016. Elena’s research on dance on the popular screen sits in between the disciplines and theoretical lineages of screendance studies, screen studies, cultural studies, popular music cultures, and fandom/spectatorship studies. Her scholarship can be found in The International Journal of Screendance and The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition. She also currently serves as the Chair of the emerging PoP Moves Australia/Australasia network (check out: https://popmoves.com/). Needless to say, dance is always on her mind. Follow her on Insta (@tiny_office_dances) for some tiny office dances and some disco kitchen stories.

References

1.  In this Chats Editorial, we understand popular, social, and vernacular dance along the lines of Julie Malnig’s conceptualisation in the introduction for the edited collection Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake. With regards to social dances she notes that “in social dancing, a sense of community often derives less from preexisting groups brought together by shared social and cultural interests than from a community created as a result of the dancing (pp. 4-5) and are as such symbolic and expressive of a range of social and cultural values, both in relation to individual identity and group identity when it comes to questions of class, race, and sexuality, particular to their time, place, and historical contexts. Vernacular dances in this context are seen as dances that have developed as part of the everyday culture of a particular community, learned informally and outside of dance studios or dance institutions. Popular dance styles then can also be identified as a specific process in which local, vernacular, and social dance styles become popularized in the public sphere and moved outside of their local contexts, and as result of this process of popularization become global dance phenomena. Or as Mary Fogarty notes in her article, “On Popular Dance Aesthetics: Why Backup Dancers Matter to Hip Hop Dance Histories,” “Note that the “popular” here is often set against both art and subcultural discourses; the “popular” is also a descriptor commonly used to identify the commercial labour of dancers who work in professional settings within various entertainment and cultural industries…” (117) However, we want to acknowledge that these ways of understanding popular, social, and vernacular dances are not about pinning down a one-fits-all definition. Rather, we see these understandings as overlapping and in constant flux. ↩︎
2.  In this conversation the use of the term community dance refers to dance practices that prioritise the experiences and wellbeing of the participants and the broader communities that the practitioners belong to. As discussed by Amans (2017), Nilsson (2020), and Wise et al (2020), community dance is primarily a term used within dance research and academia to discuss dance practices that follow a set of processes, characteristics, and principles that can be present across a range of dance genres, geographic locations, demography of participants or leaders, movement technique, or professional vs non-professional contexts. What guides an understanding of community dance practices and community dance groups is its informal and formal processes emphasising inclusion, access, equity, and its priority of people first and product second. Community dance as a concept has a great deal of overlap with popular, social, and vernacular dance as these processes are often located within popular, social and vernacular dancing communities. However, it is relevant to acknowledge that not all popular/social/vernacular communities of dancing people are primarily focused on the aforementioned definitive qualities of community dance (for example, there exist popular dance groups that prioritise commercial production of the dance and secondarily may prioritise the experience or enjoyment of the participants). Conversely, not all community dance practices engage in popular, social, and vernacular dance (for example, a group of leisure dancers that practice a genre of dance not conventionally seen as popular/social/vernacular).  ↩︎
3.  For more details, see Symposium Webpage → https://popmoves.com/events/popular-dance-in-higher-education/ and the Instagram link to the CfP announcement → https://www.instagram.com/p/CqPRme8JvCZ/?igsh=MXB4Y3hldnd6c2l4bQ== and the program announcement → https://www.instagram.com/p/CzYCnlSJYat/?igsh=MW05YjllZmh4NG1wbw==  ↩︎
4. Robinson, Danielle and Eloisa Domenici. “From Inclusion to Integration: Intercultural Dialogue and Contemporary University Dance Education.” Research in Dance Education, 11:3, 2010, 2014. ↩︎