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.