Dancing with Memory

The ideas that particular groups, nations and societies choose to remember or forget can reveal a great deal about their vision of themselves, their past, present and future. Evidence of these cultural memories, or cultural blind spots, can be found not just in texts, objects or monuments created for that purpose, but in traces of the practices people have chosen to repeat, transmit and record, or to modify, transform and discontinue. In particular, popular cultural practices offer an insight into what those at all levels of society found important or exciting enough to pass on, and irrelevant or shocking enough to abandon. Popular film and popular music have recently been studied from this perspective, but this is the first large-scale research project to consider the capacity of popular dance to embody and communicate cultural memories.

The project focuses on the cancan as a prime example of a dance form laden with cultural memory and amnesia. The familiar stereotype of a line of women kicking in unison conceals a nearly two-hundred-year history of dramatic change from early improvisations by working-class male dancers, to contemporary film and street art. Dancers, choreographers, writers and artists have reshaped the cancan in response to contexts such as the French and Haitian Revolutions, the Revolution of 1830, the rise of first wave feminism, the emergence of post-impressionist and modernist art, mass culture in the inter-war years, and Franco-American tensions in the early Cold War, leaving residues of cultural memory in the dance's movement, form and meanings. Some of these memories remain highly visible in contemporary versions of the cancan, whereas others have been forgotten, underplayed or repressed, such as its early male performers, influences from Spanish and Afro-Haitian dance forms, and repeated imagery of the black cancan dancer. Contemporary representations of the cancan in European street art draw on these manifest and latent memories to comment on issues such as the French veiling controversy, and American military interventions justified in the name of 'liberty'. Performances and representations of the cancan, therefore, invoke, filter and reshape the past, aligning it towards particular visions of the present and future. The project will uncover this culturally and historically significant process that has previously been overlooked by scholars.

The first stage of the project will involve archival research in London and Paris. Important primary sources written in French will then be translated into English by the project's Research Assistant. These sources will be interpreted by the Principal Investigator, Dr Clare Parfitt-Brown, and will form the basis for a book publication titled Revealed Flesh, Forgotten Histories: the cancan, popular dance and cultural memory. The book will make translations of many little-known French sources and early illustrations of the cancan accessible to scholars and the public for the first time, and will be the first academic book focused on this dance form. The process of developing connections between the cancan, cultural memory, and other popular dance forms will also be made public through a series of seminars hosted by the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, University of London. Each seminar will bring research on a particular popular dance form/context into dialogue with research in cultural memory, and will be accompanied by live performances and film screenings. In these ways, the project intends to explore and vividly demonstrate to scholars, policy-makers, and the public, the capacity of popular dance to bring the past to bear on the issues, concerns and anxieties of the present by embodying cultural memories.

The project resonates with current European (and global) political and societal concerns surrounding cultural memory, cultural heritage, and the value of the arts. Therefore, the project has particular potential for impact in the artistic and cultural sectors, and at the interface between scholarly and public debate.

Firstly, the project seeks to promote Anglo-French cultural understanding, benefiting both the UK and France, and their cultural relations over the long term. The book will unpick stereotypes about French identity and culture, using familiar (and less familiar) examples from French and French-focused popular culture (such as Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings and Baz Luhrmann's film Moulin Rouge!). It will also translate French sources into English and interpret them, removing barriers to British public (and academic) understanding of French and European cultural histories. These effects will be multiplied and accelerated by disseminating the research and promoting the book via the blog.

A more distinct group of beneficiaries are contemporary performers of the popular dance forms that will be the focus for the Dancing with Memory seminars. Performances integrated into the seminars will offer these practitioners knowledge exchange opportunities with popular dance researchers, feeding immediately into their creative practice and professional development. The project will also promote public interest in the dance forms, not just as cultural heritage, but as evolving practices, thereby potentially increasing performance opportunities for these performers.

Further beneficiaries of the research are British and European arts and cultural policy makers and the arts and cultural sectors they serve. The research will explore how cultural memories embodied in popular dance, art, literature and film have influenced, for example, French national identity, attitudes to French immigration, French relations with Europe, America and the Middle East, and the debate about veiling in public spaces. This reassessment of the impact of the arts on cultural memory has the potential to influence French and European policies on cultural heritage (such as engagement with UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage List), the funding of arts institutions, media coverage of the arts, and arts tourism in the long term. In a climate of cuts to funding for the arts and cultural industries, the project's exploration of the long-term cultural impact of popular dance could be utilised by institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (whose Curator of Dance is on the project's steering group) to articulate its value to national and European agendas concerning cultural memory, identity, and heritage.

There are several academic beneficiaries of the research whose impact could be felt beyond academia. The RA will gain experience of contributing to a publicly funded research project, including assisting with the seminars, and will be mentored by the PI to develop future career trajectories that build on the project work. The postgraduate and early-career researchers who will be invited to attend the Dancing with Memory seminars will learn about public engagement activities surrounding research projects, and networking across disciplinary boundaries. The project will, therefore, develop researchers whose skills extend beyond the conducting of research itself into collaborative, knowledge exchange and public engagement activities.

Finally, the research will benefit the emerging discipline of popular dance history by developing a methodology which connects it to wider political and cultural debates surrounding national identity, immigration and intangible cultural heritage. The project, therefore, develops the capacity of the discipline to have impacts beyond academia, and carves out a political and cultural public role for popular dance historians, while enhancing public understanding of popular dance research.