La Renaissance Indigéne commissioned by the Heard Museum, dancer/choreographer: Rulan Tangen; costumes and paint designs: Virgil Ortiz; hair: Edgar Soto and Tressa diGiorgio, 2004. Photo by Larry Price (Navajo).

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It is observed with alarm that the holding of dances by the Indians on their reserves is on the increase. … I…direct you to use your utmost endeavours to dissuade the Indians from excessive indulgence in the practice of dancing. You should suppress any dances which cause waste of time, interfere with the occupations of the Indians, unsettle them for serious work, injure their health or encourage them in sloth and idleness.

The Canadian official who wrote that letter wasn’t alone in his opinion of Indian dances. At the beginning of the 20th century in Canada and the United States, government officials intent on controlling and assimilating Indian peoples made every effort to put an end to traditional Indian dances, recognizing that they were essential to the collective psychology, cultural heritage and spiritual practices of the tribes.

Yet all their efforts to stop Indians from dancing were for naught. As Maria Tallchief, the famous 20th-century American prima ballerina, wrote in her autobiography, “The Osage and many other Indian nations kept their culture alive by holding ceremonies in remote corners of the reservation. [My sister] Marjorie and I were thrilled when, together with Grandma Tall Chief, Daddy drove us to the location.” Tallchief became a dance pioneer of a different stripe—as the first American Indian to find success as a ballerina, as choreographer George Balanchine’s muse, and as a great teacher and founder of the Chicago City Ballet. But she wrote of the powwow, “The rhythm of those songs has stayed with me.”

Today Native American dance traditions are thriving—in powwow, social dances and private ceremonial practices—throughout the United States and Canada. More surprising is the vibrant and growing movement in contemporary Native dance—dance that combines elements of Western ballet and modern dance with influences of global Indigenous peoples and is often created by collectives of dancers, musicians and other artists. Canada, with its superior arts funding, leads the United States in support of the 30-year-old movement. Sometimes narrative, sometimes abstract, this new dance form often explores stories and themes common to many Indigenous peoples. For this article, Native Peoples talked with six high-profile dancers and choreographers who are changing stereotypes about “Indian dance.”

DAYSTAR/ROSALIE JONES
Daystar/Rosalie Jones (Pembina Chippewa) grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, studied ballet, and was planning to be a pianist when she discovered modern dance. “I was so excited by the physicality of it and the creativity,” she recalls. “You could delve into yourself and your own ideas, and create art and performance.”

Jones became involved in teaching and choreography as a young woman. While working on her master’s degree in dance at the University of Utah, she was hired in 1966 to produce a dramatic “spectacle” featuring students from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe to be performed in Washington, D.C. An ensemble of 30 dancers was joined by 200 traditional dancers in performing Sipapu: A Drama of Authentic Dance and Chants of Indian America, based on the coyote trickster stories of the Southwest. Jones’ subsequent work at IAIA represented the beginning of Indigenous theater and dance training for young Native Americans in the United States.

Prayer of the First Dancer, Dancer/choreographer: Daystar/Rosalie Jones, Location: UC-Irvine, 1997. Photo by Philip Channing.

Jones continued her own studies at the Juilliard School in New York, where Mexican-born dancer and choreographer José Limón became a mentor and friend. Later she taught at the Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota. There she established her narrative choreographic style, often using a storyteller character and dancers. She traveled to schools across the country, teaching and performing a one-woman production called Daystar: An American Indian Woman Dances, in which she became Napi, the Blackfeet trickster.

In 1980 she began Daystar: Contemporary Dance-Drama of Indian America. Jones envisioned it as an all-Native dance company focused on modern dance. “I think it really was the first dance company conceived that way,” she says. Today it is the oldest Native modern dance company.

For her company, Jones created numerous productions, including The Corn Mother (Eastern Cherokee), Sacred Woman, Sacred Earth (Lakota) and Wolf: A Transformation (Anishinaabe). Her most recent production is No Home But the Heart, a 12-scene ensemble work about three generations of women in her family; Jones portrays the daughter and narrator.

Now 63, Jones continues to perform and choreograph, and is helping to develop a Native performing arts curriculum at Trent University in Ontario. She is based in Rochester, New York, but hopes one day to return to live in Montana.
Last year, at a conference on Native dance held at the University of California Riverside, Jones realized her dreams had come true: Here were younger dancers and choreographers just as dedicated as she is to contemporary Native dance, and to telling the stories of Native people. “Finally,” she says, “there is a movement! It’s really happening.”
www.daystardance.com

RAOUL TRUJILLO
Raoul Trujillo (Apache/Ute/French Canadian/Latino) was a professional skier when he was tapped to perform in a production of Equus in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1977. “I was playing one of the horses, and it was totally movement based,” he says. “I just really had this feeling about being a dancer. I had never studied, never did anything like that.”
Trujillo subsequently earned a scholarship at Toronto Dance Theatre and then studied dance, lighting and sound design at Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab in New York. From 1981 to 1987, he was a soloist and master teacher for Nikolais Dance Theatre, touring worldwide.

In the mid-1980s, Trujillo and Alejandro Ronceria (see below) began collaborating. The pair envisioned choreography and movement based on Indigenous dance, including powwow. “When you talk about Aboriginal contemporary dance, it’s kind of a misnomer,” Trujillo explains. “We’re using song, dance steps and music that’s always been available to us; we’re just using it as modern people to tell new stories.”

In 1987 he became co-director and choreographer for the newly created American Indian Dance Theater for two years. The company, which turns traditional Native dance into theatrical productions, still tours. The first major solo piece Trujillo choreographed and danced, The Shaman’s Journey, proved so popular that PBS made it into a documentary. Later, he would narrate the 10-part history series Dancing for PBS.

Trujillo turned in part to acting for film and television in the late 1980s, appearing in films including Black Robe, Highlander III and Shadow of the Wolf, and on TV in the series Destiny Ridge. He has made guest appearances on many television shows. This fall, he will appear in director Terrence Malick’s film The New World, about Captain John Smith’s “settling” of America and encounter with Pocahontas, and played Lakota chief Red Cloud in the TNT summer miniseries Into the West.

Trujillo, 49, now balances dancing and choreography with his acting career. Since 1995, with Ronceria, he has been involved as a master teacher in the unique Aboriginal Dance Training and Performance Program at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada. The program brings together Indigenous people from around the world. He continues to work independently as a choreographer and dancer, keeping his home base in the remote mountain village of Ojito in northern New Mexico.

“Embracing this world tribalism is what’s exciting to me now,” Trujillo says. “The politics of the time—a time like this of repression, almost a fascism—always leads to great art. I think what’s coming forward now is we’re reaching to all corners of the globe and bringing music and sound and sensitivities to honor Earth and harmony and balance. That’s the cutting edge in all dance.”
www.raoultrujilloinfo.com

ALEJANDRO RONCERIA
Born in Bogotá, Colombia, Alejandro Ronceria (Suesca/ Sogamoso) trained in ballet in Colombia and later studied and danced in New York and the Soviet Union. He danced with the Karen Jamieson Dance Company in Vancouver, British Columbia, before moving to Toronto, where he collaborated with Rene Highway and Raoul Trujillo.

New Song New Dance, Choreographer: Rene Hawey, Dancers: Rene Highway, Raoul Trujillo and Alejandro Ronceria Toronto 1987. Photo by Cylla Von Tiedemann.

Ronceria co-founded the Aboriginal Dance Training and Performance Program at Banff in 1996, and articulates a philosophy of contemporary Aboriginal or Native dance perhaps better than anyone else.

“We have an incredible past in the Aboriginal peoples’ history, and so many commonalities among the histories, pre-colonial and post-colonial,” he says. “We are not homogenous, but we are common.” Through his research into dance in New Zealand, Asia, and South and North America, Ronceria has found similarities in music and movement narratives, such as the butterfly dance.

“We don’t interpret music on the upbeat [as does Western music]; we interpret it on the downbeat. And how we dance in it, it’s a completely different game.” That’s evident at any powwow or traditional dance, he says. “The beat is down, your heels are going into the ground, you pound it; we want to be as close as possible to the earth.” Another similarity is the use of live music and dancers who are also singers and actors. “They’re as integral as the music. There is no dance without the music, and vice versa.”

Based in Toronto, Ronceria continues to work independently as a choreographer and teacher all over Canada, the United States and South America. Now 46, he still dances, but less often than in the past. A company he co-founded with Penny Couchie, Earth in Motion: World Indigenous Dance, will perform his piece Agua in Mexico City this year. In the Arctic, he is collaborating with an Inuit artist, Sylvia Cloutier, and the Qaggig Theater Company on another dance piece they will workshop and then perform. Ronceria has also been working on dance films since 1996.

Earth in Motion offers a summer program in Toronto for choreographers. They work on new dances each is creating, and by the end, premiere the works-in-progress. Students also learn logistics of choreographing and producing works. Ronceria becomes a mentor to many of them, who call him for advice on their journeys. “We are opening the doors for all these young people,” he says. “I’m really proud because their work is being so well received.”

SANDRA LARONDE
Growing up with three brothers, Sandra Laronde (Teme Augama Anishnaabi) played volleyball, basketball and hockey, and was a runner. “I got into dance through sports,” she explains. “People always said, ‘You move like a dancer.’” Laronde grew up in the tiny village of Temagami, population 500, some 450 miles northeast of Toronto. She started taking dance classes in Toronto in 1985, but it was a residency in Mexico City with Zapotec dancer Georgina Martinez that most inspired her to pursue dance.

Dancing Americas, 2003: Sandra Laronde (front), Andrea Zavala (back left), and Carlos Rivera (back right.) Photo by David Hou.

Laronde danced with many different companies before creating her own, Red Sky, in 2000. The company has had startling success, performing original works such as Dancing Americas in the Canada Dance Festival at the National Arts Centre (the Canadian equivalent of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.) and Caribou Song at the Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto—both to sold-out audiences. Dancing Americas was named Best of 2003 in dance by the Toronto Globe & Mail and the Toronto Sun. She has also choreographed a dance for children called Raven Stole the Sun. She has been commissioned by the Canada Dance Festival and is collaborating on a piece called Shimmer with choreographers from Canada and New Zealand. Shimmer will debut at the festival in 2006. She also is working as co-choreographer with Oregon Public Broadcasting and Painted Sky to develop For the Generations, a Native American music special. Laronde dances in all the works, which are ensemble pieces. The now “thirty-something” artist notes, “It’s very exciting and also very scary.”

Her inspiration comes from deep within, sometimes from dreams. Dancing Americas was prompted by a visit to a butterfly sanctuary in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, where millions of monarch butterflies migrate annually. “I thought, How many generations of butterflies have come and gone, and done this migration?” she says. “The fact that they know where to go—it’s encoded in their DNA someplace. What a beautiful metaphor for Indigenous people.”

Like many Native dancers, Laronde subscribes to the belief in “body memory” or “bone memory,” meaning that, perhaps in DNA, people carry abstract memories of events and concepts from times prior to their lives. A dancer can tap into “body memory” in a nonintellectual way that an actor or writer can’t, Laronde says.

Laronde’s aim is to meld tradition with today, and blend all forms of artistic expression to create “dance that has a voice, theater that has a body,” she says. “People say Red Sky is so cutting edge; I say, no, we’re continuing a legacy. This is what our people have done for thousands of years.”
www.redskyperformance.com

SANTEE SMITH
Santee Smith (Mohawk) began studying ballet at age three, and trained in residency at the National Ballet School of Canada in Toronto from age 11 until 17, dancing six hours a day, six days a week. By then, she wasn’t sure she wanted to pursue ballet as a career, and instead went to McMaster University, where she earned bachelor’s degrees in kinesiology and psychology. She missed performance, and in 1996 started choreographing on her own; then she was hired to choreograph The Gift, a film by Gary Farmer about the role of corn in Native cultures.

She had accidentally returned to dance full-time, and began creating her own dances based on Iroquois stories. Her first major work was Kaha:wi, in which she used traditional Mohawk women’s shuffle and stomp dances as the foundation and added modern and balletic influences for upper-body movement. She also incorporated narrative.

The piece premiered in 2004 with a cast of 10 in 16 different scenes, expressing the stories of three generations of women. Kaha:wi was the first Native work performed in 2004 at the new Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

Smith recently finished touring Here on Earth, a 25-minute piece that will be performed as a full-scale production Oct. 6–8, 2005 at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre in Toronto. She finds and commissions musicians to create original music for her dances, and for Kaha:wi she composed three of the songs and sang them.

Smith, who is 34, lives and works with her six-year-old daughter (named Kaha:wi after Smith’s grandmother, which means “she carries”) on the Six Nations Reserve, where about 17,000 people live. “I still really like living within my own community, and I hope to work on a new piece based on the Iroquois creation story,” she says.

Smith counts among her chief mentors Raoul Trujillo and Alejandro Ronceria (as do Laronde, and Rulan Tangen, below). “I also look to people who were groundbreakers in contemporary dance who went back to discovering their own roots, including José Limón and Alvin Ailey.” Though she expects to form a company this year, she will continue to work with Ronceria and other independent choreographers and dancers. “Collaboration is a really great thing to do because you’re able to co-create with somebody,” she says.
www.santeesmithdance.com

RULAN TANGEN
Rulan Tangen (Metis) has been dancing since childhood, first studying Russian ballet technique with Elena Piernik in San Francisco and earning a scholarship to the Marin Ballet School in northern California. After graduating from high school at age 14, she moved to New York, where she studied on scholarship with David Howard and performed with numerous ballet companies. She later shifted into modern and other dance forms, performing with the Peridance Ensemble and Michael Mao Dance Company in New York and on European tours.

She has since danced with Redwood Empire Ballet, Karen Jamieson Company, Daystar: Contemporary Dance-Drama of Indian America, One Soul, Moving People and One Railroad Circus. She has worked as a choreographer and director with several companies, including the Banff dance program. In 2004, she formed her own company, Dancing Earth.

Tangen, now in her 30s, differentiates her work from that of earlier Native dance companies by using movement as a metaphor. Her work focuses less on narrative and more on creating mosaics of ideas and movements. When working with other dancers, she solicits concepts based on their backgrounds and experiences. “My role as a creator is to erase the ego and channel in different viewpoints,” she says. “I’m trying to empower people.”

“It’s more to me than just Native dancers doing contemporary dance. The leader has to reflect the individuals’ ideas. I try to step away from my training and be a pure vessel for kinetic expression of many different tribal points of view. I’m looking myself for a global Indigenous viewpoint.”

Her recent works include a dance commission created for the Heard Museum in 2004 to honor an exhibition by Cochiti Pueblo artist Virgil Ortiz. Based on the tale of the marriage of sun and moon, La Renaissance Indigène incorporated many elements, including hip-hop, modern and “sneak-up” powwow. Ortiz did body painting and costumes for the dancers. Tangen also created a dance she performed on tour with Native flutist Robert Mirabal. Courtship Song integrated a grass-dance sidestep and expansive, balletic movement.

This spring, Tangen traveled to Brazil to the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics to participate in a symposium about performance traditions as a source of knowledge. This fall, with Trujillo, she will be seen in the Malick film The New World, in which she dances and has a speaking part.

One of Tangen’s dreams is to choreograph and perform dances outdoors, in endangered or otherwise significant sites, perhaps like Bandelier National Monument near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she lives. Filming such performances would allow many people to see the dances—and, she hopes, to impress upon them that such sites are living spaces.
www.rulantangen.com

Hollis Walker is a Santa Fe-based writer whose work has appeared in publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Ms. magazine. She has written often about Native American subjects and is a past fellow of the National Arts Journalism Program.

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