Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The following journal was kept by the Actor and Dramaturg Paul Babiak during
rehearsals for this production. His discussion of the preconceptions he brought
to the rehearsalsthat it would be a re-creation of a hypothetical original
performance from documentary evidence, rather than a re-interpretation or
translation of those documentsprovides a case study of attitudes explored
elsewhere by Handmade Performance. See, for example, articles on the Last
Judgement and Doctor Faustus websites, as well as the article Witness to Juba
reprinted in the Juba Project site. --SJ
At the beginning of a rehearsal process, any show might be every show. Before
anything has been imagined there is no limit to what a companys collective imagination
might produce. At least thats how I feel. That is why the inception of a rehearsal
process always excites me with the prospect of at last probing the depths of silence. That
is why, while youre working on it, the show means everything. It is only afterwards that
there comes the sense that it was just a show. Its a realization not dissimilar from
waking up from a wonderful dream to find that it was only, after all, just a dream. But
every time I become involved in a production, the same nave expectation returns.
This time, the production in question is Channelling Jubas Dance, to be
presented at the Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT) at the Drama Centre, University of
Toronto, March 4 7, 2004. I am to attend rehearsals and report on the process. I know
nothing about the project, except that its to be a collective creation. (Ive never been in a
collective creation, although Ive read about them. I have the impression theyre nasty,
arty exercises, where you have to pretend to be a tree, or Capitalism, or something, and
the audience has to pretend it understands.) I know even less about the company. I know
its dramaturg, Stephen Johnson of the Drama Centre. Otherwise my expectations are
unlimited. All I know is, whatever happens, Im going to learn something.
. . . neither Homer nor Catnach would do Juba justice Juba must be seen, Juba
must be heard. Jubas self is Jubas parallel.
We must confess that we were never more struck with any performance, and, were
we to attempt a description, we should have to surrender in despair.
But what of Juba, Bozs Juba? To say that he dances as man or nigger never
danced before, that he shakes his leg with the spirit of ten Jim Crows, and postures
as never did Keller or Madame Wharton dream of, is nothing . . .
Many of the descriptions the reviews contain are highly rhythmic, employing
bursts of short phrases in succession, which accumulate, and gradually lengthen out into
long periods. For example:
In his pas, cuts, shuffles, double-shuffles, pirouhettes, in every motion of his limbs
or body, he keeps the most exact time, and executes some of the most astonishing
effects that ever were witnessed in the dancing phenomenon . . .
Surely he cannot be flesh and blood, but some more subtle substance, or how could
he turn, and twine, and twist, and twirl, and hop, and jump, and kick, and throw his
feet almost with a velocity that makes one think they are playing hide-and-seek
with a flash of lightning!
Stephen has removed these quotations from their specific contexts, and organized them,
without citations, into sections under subject headings according to the qualities of Jubas
dance to which they testify: authenticity, analogy/imitation and reference to other
choreographies, precision, wild abandon, and so on. Where a quotation is appropriate to
more than one category, he has reproduced it.
He jumps, he capers, he crosses his legs, he stamps his heels; he dances on his
knees, on his ankles, he ties his limbs into double knots, and untwists them as
one might a skein of silk; and all these marvels are done in strict time and
appropriate rhythm.
Stephen suggests that, rather than everybody taking the pages onstage with them, he read
it out and they can work to his reading. Jen offers an alternative:
Id like to do it chorally, she says. One fast, one medium, one slow you
know?
They break the phrase into three parts, and take a few minutes to memorize them.
Then they go off by themselves and each creates a choreography illustrating her part of
the phrase in her own movement style. They come back together to assemble a section in
which each breaks her passage down further and teaches it, with its choreography, to the
other two: then they all perform the complete choreography in different tempi. Its a
good deal less spontaneous than the other section, but it works.
The strategy in developing the piece will be to build up this central phrase and
then subdivide it by solos. We plan to rehearse these on Saturday. In the meantime,
some alternative means of mining the text for further movement ideas are talked over. A
recurrent pattern of words in Jubas reviews that is suggestive for interpretation in
movement is the series of antitheses (quick/slow, high art/folk art, happy/ furious) which
suggest contrasting moods, which in turn suggest various forms of dance. These can be
mirrored in a series of Circles of Contradiction in each of which two dancers at a time
will manifest contrasting energies. In a couple of the reviews there are evocative
references to classical dance with an implicit comparision of Juba to the Wilis fairy
nymphs -- of Giselle. This suggests there might be a moment at which Elizabeth may
don her pointe shoes and execute a pas de boure across the back of the stage as Jennifer
performs a modern phrase up front. Theres the possibility for another contrast between
Elizabeths pointe work and Kathleens tap. Finally, one of the reviews consists of a
series of parallel ejaculations, each beginning Such . . . ! Such . . . ! Its climactic
structure suggests that it might somehow be useful as a climax, or as a final cadence for
the piece.
We make a note to develop these notions further at the next full group rehearsal
on Sunday. Saturdays rehearsal at the Glen Morris Studio will focus instead on the
solos. Stephen exhorts the group to think about their solos before coming in.
Before going home we review He jumps, he capers, and Stephen times it. It
lasts two and a half minutes.
Did anybody notice how long that opening was? asks Elizabeth.
Jen did. Its about twenty-five seconds.
How long is the whole piece supposed to be? I ask.
Stephen shrugs. Fifteen minutes, he replies. Give or take.
The dancers look at each other. Opening night for the Festival is March 4.
Aah, says Stephen. We got plenty of time.
You could scan this passage like a poem, distinguishing 3 sections (original to
marvelous, ankles and calves to caput all dance and it is a sort of wild to
universal delectation), its stresses and upbeats, and its expanding structure:
/-
i) original,
-
novel,
/-- / -
peculiar, (or peculiar)
-- -
curious, (or curious)
-
wonder-exciting,
--
marvelous
- / --
ii) ankles and calves,
-- / --
knees and thighs,
- / --
elbows and wrists,
-- / - / - /- /-
nay, even his eyes and the lobes of his ears,
/ - / - - / --
and the wool on his caput all dance;
/ -- /- / -
iii) it is a sort of wild saltatorial revel,
/ - / -- / -- / -- / - - /
at which every member of the human frame exerts itself for the
- /- /-
universal delectation.
As each section progresses the quantity of its feet and number of syllables
(particularly weak beats) increases; the length of the line increases within each section;
and the length of each succeeding section exceeds that of the section before. This
expanding structure obviously belongs to the prosody of panegyric in general. But in
traditional rhetoric its wedded with a content. Here there is hardly any content; all the
passage tells us is that Juba had approximately the same physical equipment as the rest of
us: the rhythm is apparently being communicated for its own sake.
I notice that as Kathleen taps away she frequently repeats a similar pattern: a few
taps heel-to-toe in a triple-rhythm, expanding into more taps in a more rapid duple-
rhythm, which finally breaks into a long phrase which seems to break free of metrics
altogether:
/- /-/-/-
-/-/--/-
-----------------
Were Jubas reviewers setting down from memory, by means of the only notation they
knew, the rhythms his feet struck out on the stage? Stephen has a favorite quotation that
suggests that the effect of Jubas dancing depended as much on its auditory as on its
visual appeal:
Mr. Pell would take it as a great favour if the Audience will keep as quite [sic] as
possible during Master Jubas Dances; by doing so, they will hear the exact time he
keeps with his extraordinary steps.
I wonder if I ought to raise the point, but I decide its not really my place. Stephen is the
dramaturg around here, not me. Anyway, Kathleen is the only one to whose dancing
style the idea is appropriate; and shes already using it. On scrutiny, I find the idea
crashes against the brick wall of its own historicity what am I doing after all but
exploiting a commonality between prosody and dance as an excuse for projecting modern
dance conventions onto my notion of a performance buried in the past? The idea is
subtly reconstructionist in fact Im surprised by the subtlety with which my unfulfilled
longing for a blackface banjo orchestra, with bones and tambourine replete, has
insinuated itself into my speculations. Nowadays, such a performance couldnt be
received as other than abominably racist. I dont want people to think Im abominably
racist. I just like tap dancing. And banjoes. I can live without burnt cork.
Almost as if he knew what I was thinking, Stephen comes over, sits down beside
me, and we talk about the reasons for not using Kathleens hambone routine. The point is
not recreation.
You can go, he (Juba) did this, this and this based on your knowledge of what
tap dancers do today. But Juba did other things as well: he did imitations of people; he
did a drag role as Miss Lucy Long, he parodied people. Pells entire orchestra used to
use their musical instruments to replicate the sound of a train.
This is a really romantic image, says Stephen. But I can see him, walking
down the street, and hearing all the sounds; the sound of trains which were new at that
time; of the telegraph, which was new and wanting to recreate them in his
performances.
Juba, like Stephen Foster, may never even have seen a plantation. (Stephen
Foster never saw a plantation? I never knew that.) The odds are that he grew up in Five
Points in New York where Dickens saw him where he learned to be a professional
entertainer, and picked up an idiom that would sell. But Stephens idea seems to be that
that idiom turned out to be more than just a cash cow. It apparently became a very subtle
mode of expression. Thats the whole working assumption of Channelling Jubas
Dance: like Falstaff, who was so witty that he made others witty, Juba was so expressive
that the reverberations he set off in his contemporaries can stimulate new performances
today.
Jen, in the meantime, is looking for ideas to fill out the group section. Stephen
goes over to sit with her and they discuss the options. The Circles of Contradiction can
be developed out into full-blown dance duels, contrasting the styles of each pair of
dancers these can grow out of transitions from the collective numbers based on simple
antitheses that evoke paradoxes within what the reviews lead us to imagine about Jubas
style for example, the sense of communion of a performer with his audience
(integration) as opposed to the solitude of a black American performing for houses of
white Britons (isolation).
Kathleens tap shoes, we notice, make a tremendous racket on the plywood stage
of the Glen Morris which is similar to that of the Robert Gill, where FOOT will take
place. After some discussion, Kathleen takes her shoes off, and demonstrates that she
can produce the same rhythms, just as clearly articulated, but less noisily, in hard-soled
running shoes. Evidently, if we wish to use the tap shoes for her solo, well have to find
an opportunity for her to change into them beforehand, and out again afterwards. The
solos, it is decided, should be largely improvised, in keeping with the impression of
spontaneity which Jubas reviewers convey.
The rehearsal ends without anything definite being set. After sharing some coffee
cake courtesy of Stephens wife, we go home.
At home, working on the report for my CBC placement, I fortuitously stumble
across Stephens essay The Witness to Juba in 1848 in a book I picked up for that: The
Performance Text, edited by Domenico Pietropaolo. It gives a full account of the
scholarship Stephen has already done on Jubas dance, and explains the ideas behind the
dramaturgical method hes employing on the show. Im particularly interested in the fifth
of his observations on Provisional Historiographies:
. . . some historians, in the (vain) effort to get to the subject-event attempt
reconstructions of the performance from the documents. One class of
Shakespearean scholar does this, and it is a particularly strong practice among
dance historians . . .
Crushed again.
I have been researching this, along with a dancer, with respect to Juba, and
offer, as one last provisional historio-graphy, the sight of one contemporary
body imitating (reading) graphic images that are themselves imitations
(readings) of another body dancing (Fgiures 1-8).
. . . Does the imitation help? I cannot answer that. But as imitation with
difference, it may be a kind of useful parody. At the very least, imitation with
the difference of modern dress may draw analogies with contemporary
dance styles. Such similarities may be serendipitous, the result of the limits
and tendencies of the human body in motion. However, they may also
manifest the legacy of an oral-performative tradition the main tenet of
which is imitation with difference.
It reads almost like a manifesto for the work were doing on the show.
I imagine the laughter of a young black man, growing up in a bad neighbourhood in the
U.S. before the Civil War, emancipated by the rhythms of popular songs, finding a voice
for his rage and his exultation in the stamping of his boots, becoming celebrated by
crowds of white men whose praise was the sincerest expression of their contempt,
prospering by the public performance of his independence and his defiance. Perhaps that
is what that expanding structure expresses: a souls mad dash towards freedom.
Bibliography
Publications:
The Production Notebooks, Mark Bly ed., (New York: Theatre Communications Group,
1996
Channelling Jubas Dance: unpublished dramaturgical materials, assembled by Stephen
Johnson, University of Toronto
Stephen Johnson, The Witness to Juba in 1848, in The Performance Text, ed.
Domenico Pietropaolo (Toronto: Legas, 1999)