Bryce R. Shelley and Professor Susanne Davis, Dance

Dance is often overlooked in the United States as a valid medium through which other cultures can be identified, classified, and understood. As dance is not an integral part of life in the United States, many people forget (or never knew) that dance is a cultural element sometimes as integrated into daily life as eating, sleeping, or working. Because of its unique blend of various arts it can be utilized as a potent tool for understanding cultures from different times and places. Cultural dances can help us see a different view of the world through costuming, choice of dance music, occasions for dancing, way of moving, and use of the dance. A trained dance ethnographer can tell a great deal about a culture’s history, political and social structure, occupational opportunities, religion, and family life simply by studying that culture’s dances.

Further, such information can assist tremendously in helping a dancer perform an ethnic number with precision and correct styling. Knowing about a country’s dance and how it relates to culture is as essential to a world dance student as studying the basic culture of Victorian England would be to someone performing an authentic Shakespeare play. BYU’s International Folk Dance Ensemble is world renown. In the last ten years they have performed on stage in over 100 locations in the United States and at festivals in China, France, Quebec, and Belgium. They have performed in small assemblies for ambassadors from all over the world and have performed at the Opening Ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City with a larger audience of 2.1 billion persons—over one-fifth of the world’s population. On a more local level, another folk dance ensemble performs 60+ shows to over 10,000 elementary students each year during May. It is easy to grasp the importance of the International Folk Dancers in increasing the reach of BYU and its sponsoring organization throughout the world. Part of this professionalism is due to the dancers maintaining an accurate representation of the styling which others value so highly in their culture.

The purpose of this project was to further the spread of this knowledge through the writing of four brief papers on dance in four separate cultures. This was to be the beginning of a larger project which would accumulate such papers over the years and create a database of ethnic papers which could be useful to students and other persons interested in learning about dances from different cultures. Portions of this database may be printed for the use of students in world dance classes and teams offered at Brigham Young University. Further, the BYU International Folk Dance program has agreed to post them on their website making them available for anyone to access worldwide.

Through discussion with faculty members it was determined that writing papers on Hungary, Israel, Ukraine, and Ireland would be of the greatest immediate use to BYU’s dance program. This project also doubled as an honors capstone project. The proposal for the ORCA grant was submitted with the idea to use the funds to construct interactive websites that would include dance and video clips of dancers from each of these cultures. There was, however, a development that significantly altered this project.

In an effort unrelated to the original project, I applied for and was accepted as a technician for the International Folk Dance Ensemble’s Performing Arts Company (PAC). In such a capacity, I had the opportunity to travel to two folk dance festivals in Europe, one in Schoten, Belgium and the other in Martigues, France. Because I was serving in the capacity of a technician, I would frequently be able to view the performances from the viewpoint of the audience. Considering this opportunity, it seemed like a wise idea to use the ORCA grant money for a photo and video recording device which would have the capacity to capture video clips and high quality still pictures that could be used along with the information in the papers for an interactive website.

The camera that I purchased, an Olympus 770, was adequate for the task of recording both still photos and video clips of dances at the festivals. Throughout the festivals I collected digital images of costumes, instruments, performers, and still shots of dances as well as many video clips of authentic ethnic dances. The raw data for these video clips amounted to over five gigabytes of information. Even after editing had been performed in which some of the coarser or poorly shot frames were removed there were still nearly three gigabytes of information (more than four full data CDs).

Unfortunately there were no groups from Hungary, Ireland, Ukraine, or Israel at either of the dance festivals I was able to attend. Due to this I was unable to make the interactive websites for the cultures on which I had written papers. However, having some time left before the project was due after returning to the United States, I decided to catalog and organize the several hundred files which I recorded. In this way those who would come after me and add cultural information to the database would have the video clips and photographs that I wish I had had when I was writing the papers. This organization of data used up the time that would have been spent on one of the papers and creating the interactive websites so the original project of four papers was modified to include three papers (those on Hungary, Israel, and Ukraine) and a CD media archive.

Due to space restrictions, I am only able to include one example of the photographs which I took at the European festivals. To the right is a photograph of a native Kamchatka (Northeast Russia) dancer in a woman’s costume. I would like to have demonstrated some of the video clips of actual dances, as they are more impressive and of far greater value to the dance program at BYU than the photographs but the current reporting method precludes the attachments of such files. The video clips will be available for any and all interested parties at the Harold B. Lee Library where they are kept as a part of their honors thesis collection. I am grateful for the funding from ORCA which allowed me to record and preserve cultural dances for future generations and to help present generations understand others’ cultures better through the medium of world dance.