Educators choreograph different approach to dance

By Carol Egan
Special to The Advertiser

When international music and dance specialists gathered at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa this year, three extraordinary women were in the crowd.

From left, anthropologist Katerina Teaiwa, ethnomusicologist and emeritus professor Barbara Barnard Smith, and dance ethnologist Judy Van Zile are all researchers in dance. Carol Egan

Living treasure

Smith, in her mid-80s, has been named a Living Treasure by the University of Hawai'i. Her pioneering efforts to encourage the study of Asian and Pacific music and dance paved the way for future generations. U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Akaka, a student at UH during Smith's tenure, calls her "one of the pioneers of music education in Hawai'i" and "a dedicated task-master."

A graduate of Pomona (Calif.) College and the Eastman School of Music in New York, Smith was a concert pianist and on the piano faculty at Eastman when she left her teaching position to try other things. In 1949, she arrived in Hawai'i for a job in the UH music department, teaching piano and music theory. Most of her students were of Asian-Pacific ancestry.

Although it seems hard to imagine now, Smith says UH offered courses in Western music only. "I decided we should be teaching some Hawaiian and Asian music," she said.

Ethnomusicology, the study of music of the world's cultures, was unknown. Smith began studying the koto, a stringed instrument, and other forms of music, including Hawaiian chant and Japanese bon dance drumming, becoming the first female and first Caucasian performer of that art, according to Smith.

"I quickly realized how closely dance and music were related, so I insisted that we should also offer some dance courses," she said. "But then I had to find the right people to teach them."

In the late '50s, Smith began team-teaching "Pacific and Asian Music and Education," the first of such courses offered, with Dorothy K. Gillet, who had come to UH from Kamehameha Schools. Gillet taught the Hawaiian and Pacific Islands cultures, Smith the Asian. Guest artists from all Asian and Pacific cultures would be brought in for lectures and demonstrations.

Gradually, UH began adding courses in many Asian forms and Hawaiian chant, as well as other forms of non-Western dance.

In 1956, Smith traveled to Asia on a Rockefeller grant. Building on that research, she created a program in multicultural music education. Her itinerary included Malaysia, the Philippines, Korea, Hong Kong, India and Japan, where she furthered her studies with a koto master. Wherever she went, she asked the musicians for readings and recordings to share with her students.

Her work has taken her all over the world. William Feltz, coordinator of arts activities at the East-West Center and a former student, notes, "Her students have gone on to become experts in many cultures."

Although she officially retired from teaching in 1982, Smith still attends conferences, serves on thesis committees, leads seminars, and serves as a volunteer.

Pioneering work

Van Zile, who teaches dance ethnology and a specialized form of transcribing dance called Labanotation, is convinced that she wouldn't be a professor at UH if it weren't for Smith, who helped Van Zile hone conference papers with sharp editorial comments.

She also has taught and consulted in Korea, Malaysia, China and Taiwan.

Van Zile's path led from a Chicago childhood filled with dance to Indiana University, where she majored in theater and speech therapy and a master's degree from the University of Colorado. She had pretty much dismissed dance as a career until a course in Japanese theater at Colorado made her realize there was something more. A second "aha" experience came when she attended a class in Indian dance at Colorado. Fascinated, she traveled to California to study with a renowned female Indian dancer, Balasaraswati.

After teaching in the theater department at Long Beach State University, she used a Fulbright grant to study Indian dance in Madras in 1969 and 1970, with Balasaraswati's encouragement.

Van Zile earned a master's in dance at UCLA and studied Labanotation, which gave her a chance to record movement more accurately than with a stick-figure system. "I loved the analytical nature of notation," she said. "I had once contemplated being a math major."

Immediately after graduating as UCLA's first dance ethnology major, Van Zile was offered a part-time position in the UH Music Department teaching "Dance in World Cultures" and Labanotation. Over the years her courses migrated to the dance program.

Michael Pili Pang, a MFA student in the UH dance program and a kumu hula, said, "She's a tough lady, but she fine tunes you and teaches you how to look at dance from many aspects"

Van Zile said: "You can't just study dance. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. You have to also understand the people, their way of life, history, and beliefs."

Dances changed

Nothing could be closer to the truth for the youngest of these women, 29-year old Teaiwa, an assistant professor of Pacific Island Studies at UH. Originally from Fiji, she learned details of her family's past while doing research for her master's degree, earned from UH in 1998.

Teaiwa discovered that her father, then 5, along with all other residents of Banaba, an island in the Republic of Kiribati, were forcibly evacuated when Britain, Australia and New Zealand decided to mine the island for phosphate. Although the British purchased an island in Fiji for them, the people felt displaced and in 1970 sued the British government.

The evacuees had retained much of their Kiribati culture, but their dances changed after the displacement. Instead of traditional clapping and big box drum, accompaniment now included guitars, drum sets and cymbals. The dance became a way of saying "we are different" from other I-Kiribati peoples.

Teaiwa focused on dance as a way to get to history and knowledge. "It was sort of like a puzzle," she said. "I started looking for ways their survival was expressed, and I found the answer in the dance. Banaba dancing is really fast and powerful, and a real expression of people learning to survive."

Last fall she taught a graduate course titled "The Body and Pacific Studies." "We began to investigate people's movements in all sorts of situations to see how much information we could get."

One of Teaiwa's students, Carla J. Hostetter, said: "The way academic communities have constructed the position of the researcher/ student has always kept the physical body completely separate from intellectual pursuits. This course and Professor Teaiwa herself flipped that construction upside down and revealed to me that to consider any some subject, intellectual or analytically, you must necessarily think about physical bodies, as they are the site of all intellect."

Teaiwa is putting together an international conference for Pacific Studies scholars in New Zealand in November. A major focus will be on dance, with performances scheduled nightly, an idea which grew out of an incident at a past conference. After performing with another dancer, she explained, "We really got slammed for having performed a Samoan dance, although we weren't Samoan. After that I began to think dance was a very politically charged arena. I started thinking we really needed to talk about dance."

Encouraged by Smith, she joined the International Council on Traditional Music, and is working with Van Zile on several projects, including bringing a New Zealand dance company and choreographer to UH.