The Making of Channelling Jubas Dance

A Rehearsal Journal on the Creative Process by Paul Babiak

The following journal was kept by the Actor and Dramaturg Paul Babiak during
rehearsals for this production. His discussion of the preconceptions he brought
to the rehearsalsthat it would be a re-creation of a hypothetical original
performance from documentary evidence, rather than a re-interpretation or
translation of those documentsprovides a case study of attitudes explored
elsewhere by Handmade Performance. See, for example, articles on the Last
Judgement and Doctor Faustus websites, as well as the article Witness to Juba
reprinted in the Juba Project site. --SJ

At the beginning of a rehearsal process, any show might be every show. Before
anything has been imagined there is no limit to what a companys collective imagination
might produce. At least thats how I feel. That is why the inception of a rehearsal
process always excites me with the prospect of at last probing the depths of silence. That
is why, while youre working on it, the show means everything. It is only afterwards that
there comes the sense that it was just a show. Its a realization not dissimilar from
waking up from a wonderful dream to find that it was only, after all, just a dream. But
every time I become involved in a production, the same nave expectation returns.
This time, the production in question is Channelling Jubas Dance, to be
presented at the Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT) at the Drama Centre, University of
Toronto, March 4 7, 2004. I am to attend rehearsals and report on the process. I know
nothing about the project, except that its to be a collective creation. (Ive never been in a
collective creation, although Ive read about them. I have the impression theyre nasty,
arty exercises, where you have to pretend to be a tree, or Capitalism, or something, and
the audience has to pretend it understands.) I know even less about the company. I know
its dramaturg, Stephen Johnson of the Drama Centre. Otherwise my expectations are
unlimited. All I know is, whatever happens, Im going to learn something.

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

 I arrive late -- a little after 6:00 p.m. at the Glen Morris Studio Theatre for the
first rehearsal I am able to attend, of Channelling Jubas Dance. My shoes are soggy
from the snow through which Ive dragged them from the subway. As I mount the stairs
from the theatre foyer to the back of the raised banks of stalls, an indistinct murmur of
female voices comes to my ears. I descend along the centre aisle towards the stage. In
the gap between the foot of the stage and the first bank of seats stands Stephen Johnson,
his graying hair drawn back in a ponytail and his spectacles gleaming genially. Lying on
the floor around him, a trio of young women muse over scattered photocopies, reading to
each other, underlining and highlighting.
Stephen welcomes me and introduces me to the group, Handmade Performance
consisting for this production of dancers Jennifer Johnson, Kathleen Salvador, and
Elizabeth Dawn Snell. They greet me warmly, and soon a little casual conversation has
identified some mutual friends of friends and made us familiar. The group is strikingly
unified it its diversity: the dancers are all highly prepossessing young women in their
early-to-middle twenties, who together evoke a spectrum of physical dynamics. Kathleen
is tall and hispanic-black, her dance vocabulary, as I shall soon find out, predominantly
jazz and tap. Elizabeth, whose movement is essentially and exquisitely classical in mode,
is shorter, the whiteness of her skin contrasting vividly with her vibrant copper-coloured
hair. Jennifer is the shortest of the group, but also the most athletic: she has a darker
and more rugged stage presence which places her visually in between Elizabeth and
Kathleen. The style of movement on which Jennifer predominantly draws (or will for
this project, in any case) is modern, expressionistic, and again, athletic.
They lie on the floor again and resume sorting through their photocopies
apparently a lot of reviews about some entertainer -- now and then reading out brief
snatches of phrase: such toes and such heelings, His pedal execution is a thing to
wonder at. A dancer of some kind, then? He trills, he shakes, he screams, he laughs,
Sounds like an interesting sort of dancer. I pull out my clipboard and start making notes
on a yellow pad: its a conditioned reflex, a strategy for coping with the bizarre.
Self-consciousness forbids my asking whats going on. But while Jennifer,
Kathleen and Elizabeth are in discussion Stephen comes over to me and asks if Ive ever
heard of Juba. I confess I havent. Stephen picks up a black paper folder containing a set
of photocopies and hands it to me: this is the dramaturgy package for Channelling
Jubas Dance. Looking through it, I recognize many of the expressions the trio Ive just
met are reading out to each other.
The package, assembled by Stephen, includes the handbill for an engagement of
Pells Serenaders at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham, on Thursday, 21 December, 1848.
The company of G.W. Pell apparently performed a standard Nigger Minstrel show of a
sort which survived in the United States into the 1920s. There are some contemporary
pictures, including one of Pells Serenaders as a banjo orchestra, seated on chairs in a
semicircle, with Pell in blackface at one end playing the bones. At the other end sits a
character with a tambourine, identified by a subscript as Juba. Inset are portraits of both
Juba and Pell: the former is a broodingly handsome young black man. Other pictures
include a couple of nineteenth-century-style caricatures: a black man, wearing leather
high-boots with pointed toes, usually lifting one knee in terpsichorean frenzy; yet with a
strangely contemplative expression on his face.
As I leaf through the package, Stephen sits beside me and narrates some of what
we know, or think likely, about William Henry Lane, a.k.a. Juba, Londons performing
sensation of the late 1840s. He was apparently an American, probably born in the Five
Points area of New York. He enjoyed several years of celebrity in England as an
interpreter of specialty dances based on the traditions of the Deep South; at one point he
performed as a headliner in the famous park at Vauxhall. Later in his career he was to be
seen in numerous less distinguished venues. Finally, in the early 1850s, he disappeared.
There are some biographical materials in the dramaturgical package two
posthumous reports drawn from recollections preserved by social historian Henry
Mayhew and early theatre historian T. Alliston Brown. Between them these evoke a
story, with an almost fairy-tale structure, of a regular black who, success having gone
to his head, aspired to ride in his own carriage, married a white woman, and died
miserably for his presumption, to have his skeleton put on display at the Surrey Music
Hall, Sheffield. Stephen has gone to a great deal of trouble trying to verify or disprove
these reports, without success either way.
It has been surmised that Jubas dance incorporated elements of Southern
American Festival and Plantation dance (the Birmingham handbill says so) -- these
having possibly derived in turn from African tribal dance; as well as that he was very
likely an early exponent of tap. He must in any case have been a highly versatile
performer: he apparently also did female impersonation in the character of Miss Lucy
Long, as well as singing (Come back Steben and Jenny, put de Kittle on,) and
playing the tambourine. The package includes pianoforte sheet music for some of the
songs listed in the handbill: Jubas songs, as published at least, call for a tenor voice with
an extremely broad range from D above middle C to D two octaves above. Finally
there are a number of excerpts from contemporary reviews. It is these reviews, for the
most part extravagantly laudatory, that will form the basis for Handmade Performances
collective work.
None of the reviews appear to be written by or for technical experts on dance: in
consequence, no precise descriptive record of Jubas dance method is contained in them.
Instead the pieces attempt -- in nineteenth-century journalistic language to evoke the
impressions left on one who has seen and heard Jubas performances in another who has
not. A recurrent motif is that of the incapacity of all possible language adequately to
evoke Jubas dance:
The manner in which he beats time with his feet, and the extraordinary command
which he possesses over them, can only be believed by those who have been
present at his exhibition.

. . . neither Homer nor Catnach would do Juba justice Juba must be seen, Juba
must be heard. Jubas self is Jubas parallel.

We must confess that we were never more struck with any performance, and, were
we to attempt a description, we should have to surrender in despair.

But what of Juba, Bozs Juba? To say that he dances as man or nigger never
danced before, that he shakes his leg with the spirit of ten Jim Crows, and postures
as never did Keller or Madame Wharton dream of, is nothing . . .

Another repeated figure gives the impression of a profusion of minute

apprehensions so complex and succeeding so rapidly they can never be completely
comprehended. This is particularly true of Charles Dickens encomium (from American
Notes) which earned Lane the sobriquet Bozs Juba:
Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut; snapping his fingers, rolling his
eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about
 on his toes and heels like nothing but the mans fingers on the tambourine; dancing
with two legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs all
sorts of legs and no legs what is this to him?

Many of the descriptions the reviews contain are highly rhythmic, employing
bursts of short phrases in succession, which accumulate, and gradually lengthen out into
long periods. For example:

In his pas, cuts, shuffles, double-shuffles, pirouhettes, in every motion of his limbs
or body, he keeps the most exact time, and executes some of the most astonishing
effects that ever were witnessed in the dancing phenomenon . . .

Surely he cannot be flesh and blood, but some more subtle substance, or how could
he turn, and twine, and twist, and twirl, and hop, and jump, and kick, and throw his
feet almost with a velocity that makes one think they are playing hide-and-seek
with a flash of lightning!

Stephen has removed these quotations from their specific contexts, and organized them,
without citations, into sections under subject headings according to the qualities of Jubas
dance to which they testify: authenticity, analogy/imitation and reference to other
choreographies, precision, wild abandon, and so on. Where a quotation is appropriate to
more than one category, he has reproduced it.

I think Im getting the idea: tap-dancing, an 1840s minstrel show COOL! My

minds ear begins to swarm with melodies from Showboat. It only remains to see how
Handmade Performance will go about bringing it off.
After quite a bit of time musing, underlining and highlighting, Stephen persuades
the dancers to select a single passage and put it on its feet. From my own experience as a
performer I recognize the reluctance that exaggerates the time the dancers require to get
up, desultorily stretch, and go onstage. When they finally arrive there, paper in hand,
Elizabeth, Jennifer and Kathleen form a circle, looking inwards towards each other.
Perhaps theyre feeling a trifle shy. I would if I were in their position.
They read to each other from their selections of phrases; the air fills with a collage
of exclamations: exquisite time, he bounds, whirls and astonishes, indescribable
activity of body. The dancers begin to move in a circle, they begin to cross around each
other; the whole group, turning, begins to move across the stage and the language begins
to move towards a sort of climax. Then, first Kathleen, and Elizabeth after her, break out
of the circle, and all three freeze, facing in different directions.
Its good; its very expressive. Its not quite Bojangles Robinson, but it feels like
it could lead to something. The company are encouraged, pleased with themselves.
Their energy picks up and they do the same thing again a couple of times, elaborating,
trying to reproduce the patterns in which the words fell, the way they crescendoed
together, and trying to organize and set the end of the phrase. But now they feel
constricted by the paper in their hands. Stephen recommends they learn the words before
trying the phrase again. But they can consider this phrase at least, as set.
Jennifer and Elizabeth sit down again while Kathleen continues tap-dancing softly
in her running shoes. Some suggestions are made for further figures. Each of the
dancers, for example, will have to have a solo; and the solos obviously have to be
distributed more or less evenly throughout the piece.
Stephen recommends that we concentrate on group work tonight: With the paper
in your hands youre not going to get any effect tonight. What you have to do is go away
and learn the words, and then when you come back another day youll completely nail
it.
Kathleen, still tapping insouciantly, says, Yeah, its like, I have to know my
intention for that step, you know what I mean?
Stephen smiles and nods: Method dancing, thats what I like to see.
At 7:30 we take a break. Over cookies and pop Stephen and the dancers fill me in
on what took place at the first two rehearsals, which I was forced to miss. At the first
meeting, Stephen distributed copies of the dramaturgical package and the reviews were
read out and discussed. Each of the performers began making a selection of the passages
which were most suggestive to her. At their second meeting the group, having re-
examined the package individually, discussed in greater detail what had really impressed
them. They wrote down images and series of words, and began talking over rough ideas
for creating a dance out of the words elicited from these white male Victorian reviewers
by the exertions of this young afro-American man.
Im delighted and intrigued, and instantly get the wrong idea. Of course! We use
the language to inspire us to invent tap dancing! We retrace the descent of jazz from
minstrelsy! Recreationist theatre as a form of social anthropology!
Fortunately, I havent time to express this lunacy before Stephen explains the real
concept of the show to me. The goal of the collective is, as the Brief Statement of
Project on the first page of the dramaturgical package emphasizes (and as I have
overlooked), not to attempt recreating Jubas dance it is to let the language which has
arisen in response to Juba provoke a reciprocal dance response in Jennifer, Elizabeth and
Kathleen. Consequently there will be no music: the movement will arise in direct
response to the words which will be selected from among the excerpts or supplied by
analogy with them to accompany the piece.
No banjos, then? No Showboat medley? I become quiet and concentrate on my
cookie.
This is the second theatrical incarnation of Juba. In an earlier play written by
Stephen, a Historian narrates Jubas story as the documents, personified in two other
actors and introduced in antithetical pairs, squabble over the silent figure of a single
dancer, Jennifer, whose movements instantiate the speakers words. In the play, the
dance is contained within a structure of language, and never breaks free of it; this time
the language will be broken up and function as ancillary to the movement.
After the break, Stephen suggests that one of the combinations they might try is
three different interpretations of the same text. Everybody is feeling comfortable after
their cookies and pop. There is a general disposition in favour of continuing to sit on the
floor. Stephen takes up a sheet on which one of the phrases that been selected out is
highlighted:

He jumps, he capers, he crosses his legs, he stamps his heels; he dances on his
knees, on his ankles, he ties his limbs into double knots, and untwists them as
one might a skein of silk; and all these marvels are done in strict time and
appropriate rhythm.

Stephen suggests that, rather than everybody taking the pages onstage with them, he read
it out and they can work to his reading. Jen offers an alternative:
Id like to do it chorally, she says. One fast, one medium, one slow you
know?
They break the phrase into three parts, and take a few minutes to memorize them.
Then they go off by themselves and each creates a choreography illustrating her part of
the phrase in her own movement style. They come back together to assemble a section in
which each breaks her passage down further and teaches it, with its choreography, to the
other two: then they all perform the complete choreography in different tempi. Its a
good deal less spontaneous than the other section, but it works.
The strategy in developing the piece will be to build up this central phrase and
then subdivide it by solos. We plan to rehearse these on Saturday. In the meantime,
some alternative means of mining the text for further movement ideas are talked over. A
recurrent pattern of words in Jubas reviews that is suggestive for interpretation in
movement is the series of antitheses (quick/slow, high art/folk art, happy/ furious) which
suggest contrasting moods, which in turn suggest various forms of dance. These can be
mirrored in a series of Circles of Contradiction in each of which two dancers at a time
will manifest contrasting energies. In a couple of the reviews there are evocative
references to classical dance with an implicit comparision of Juba to the Wilis fairy
nymphs -- of Giselle. This suggests there might be a moment at which Elizabeth may
don her pointe shoes and execute a pas de boure across the back of the stage as Jennifer
performs a modern phrase up front. Theres the possibility for another contrast between
Elizabeths pointe work and Kathleens tap. Finally, one of the reviews consists of a
series of parallel ejaculations, each beginning Such . . . ! Such . . . ! Its climactic
structure suggests that it might somehow be useful as a climax, or as a final cadence for
the piece.
We make a note to develop these notions further at the next full group rehearsal
on Sunday. Saturdays rehearsal at the Glen Morris Studio will focus instead on the
solos. Stephen exhorts the group to think about their solos before coming in.
Before going home we review He jumps, he capers, and Stephen times it. It
lasts two and a half minutes.
Did anybody notice how long that opening was? asks Elizabeth.
Jen did. Its about twenty-five seconds.
How long is the whole piece supposed to be? I ask.
 Stephen shrugs. Fifteen minutes, he replies. Give or take.
The dancers look at each other. Opening night for the Festival is March 4.
Aah, says Stephen. We got plenty of time.

Saturday, February 21, 2004

Elizabeth has to work and isnt able to be at rehearsal today. Jennifer is lying on
the floor trying to wrench a concept for her solo out of a page of prose. Kathleen has
brought her tap shoes and is clattering across the stage of the Glen Morris working on her
solo. Her virtuosity is really impressive. She taps with a natural ease and gracefulness,
lunging suddenly into jazz moves with almost feral vigour. Relapsing into playfulness,
she experiments briefly with a series of handclaps to her elbows, knees and feet of the
type that Stephen notes used to be called Ham-bone.
Stephen raises the question of whether well use set texts at all for the solos. If
we do, will we use the same text for all of them? Or different ones?
Watching Kathleen experiment with sequences of steps, I imagine various
possible suggestions I might make. One thing that has struck me, reading over the copies
Stephen has given me, is the speech rhythms the various writers have employed. Over
and over again I encounter the same pattern -- lots and lots of little staccato short phrases,
followed by several less rhythmic medium-sized phrases, followed by a long, sailing
legato phrase that arches up to a climax, and then subsides in conclusion. For example:
(Jubas steps) are original, novel, peculiar, curious, wonder-exciting, marvelous;
toes and heels, ankles and calves, knees and thighs, elbows and wrists, nay even his
eyes and the lobes of his ears, and the wool on his caput all dance; it is a sort of
wild saltatorial revel, at which every member of the human frame exerts itself for
the universal delectation.

You could scan this passage like a poem, distinguishing 3 sections (original to
marvelous, ankles and calves to caput all dance and it is a sort of wild to
universal delectation), its stresses and upbeats, and its expanding structure:

/-
i) original,
-
novel,
 /-- / -
peculiar, (or peculiar)
-- -
curious, (or curious)
-
wonder-exciting,
--
marvelous
- / --
ii) ankles and calves,
-- / --
knees and thighs,
- / --
elbows and wrists,
-- / - / - /- /-
nay, even his eyes and the lobes of his ears,
/ - / - - / --
and the wool on his caput all dance;
/ -- /- / -
iii) it is a sort of wild saltatorial revel,
/ - / -- / -- / -- / - - /
at which every member of the human frame exerts itself for the
- /- /-
universal delectation.

As each section progresses the quantity of its feet and number of syllables
(particularly weak beats) increases; the length of the line increases within each section;
and the length of each succeeding section exceeds that of the section before. This
expanding structure obviously belongs to the prosody of panegyric in general. But in
traditional rhetoric its wedded with a content. Here there is hardly any content; all the
passage tells us is that Juba had approximately the same physical equipment as the rest of
us: the rhythm is apparently being communicated for its own sake.
I notice that as Kathleen taps away she frequently repeats a similar pattern: a few
taps heel-to-toe in a triple-rhythm, expanding into more taps in a more rapid duple-
rhythm, which finally breaks into a long phrase which seems to break free of metrics
altogether:
/- /-/-/-
-/-/--/-
-----------------
Were Jubas reviewers setting down from memory, by means of the only notation they
knew, the rhythms his feet struck out on the stage? Stephen has a favorite quotation that
suggests that the effect of Jubas dancing depended as much on its auditory as on its
visual appeal:

Mr. Pell would take it as a great favour if the Audience will keep as quite [sic] as
possible during Master Jubas Dances; by doing so, they will hear the exact time he
keeps with his extraordinary steps.

I wonder if I ought to raise the point, but I decide its not really my place. Stephen is the
dramaturg around here, not me. Anyway, Kathleen is the only one to whose dancing
style the idea is appropriate; and shes already using it. On scrutiny, I find the idea
crashes against the brick wall of its own historicity what am I doing after all but
exploiting a commonality between prosody and dance as an excuse for projecting modern
dance conventions onto my notion of a performance buried in the past? The idea is
subtly reconstructionist in fact Im surprised by the subtlety with which my unfulfilled
longing for a blackface banjo orchestra, with bones and tambourine replete, has
insinuated itself into my speculations. Nowadays, such a performance couldnt be
received as other than abominably racist. I dont want people to think Im abominably
racist. I just like tap dancing. And banjoes. I can live without burnt cork.
Almost as if he knew what I was thinking, Stephen comes over, sits down beside
me, and we talk about the reasons for not using Kathleens hambone routine. The point is
not recreation.
You can go, he (Juba) did this, this and this based on your knowledge of what
tap dancers do today. But Juba did other things as well: he did imitations of people; he
did a drag role as Miss Lucy Long, he parodied people. Pells entire orchestra used to
use their musical instruments to replicate the sound of a train.
This is a really romantic image, says Stephen. But I can see him, walking
down the street, and hearing all the sounds; the sound of trains which were new at that
time; of the telegraph, which was new and wanting to recreate them in his
performances.
Juba, like Stephen Foster, may never even have seen a plantation. (Stephen
Foster never saw a plantation? I never knew that.) The odds are that he grew up in Five
Points in New York where Dickens saw him where he learned to be a professional
entertainer, and picked up an idiom that would sell. But Stephens idea seems to be that
that idiom turned out to be more than just a cash cow. It apparently became a very subtle
mode of expression. Thats the whole working assumption of Channelling Jubas
Dance: like Falstaff, who was so witty that he made others witty, Juba was so expressive
that the reverberations he set off in his contemporaries can stimulate new performances
today.
Jen, in the meantime, is looking for ideas to fill out the group section. Stephen
goes over to sit with her and they discuss the options. The Circles of Contradiction can
be developed out into full-blown dance duels, contrasting the styles of each pair of
dancers these can grow out of transitions from the collective numbers based on simple
antitheses that evoke paradoxes within what the reviews lead us to imagine about Jubas
style for example, the sense of communion of a performer with his audience
(integration) as opposed to the solitude of a black American performing for houses of
white Britons (isolation).
Kathleens tap shoes, we notice, make a tremendous racket on the plywood stage
of the Glen Morris which is similar to that of the Robert Gill, where FOOT will take
place. After some discussion, Kathleen takes her shoes off, and demonstrates that she
can produce the same rhythms, just as clearly articulated, but less noisily, in hard-soled
running shoes. Evidently, if we wish to use the tap shoes for her solo, well have to find
an opportunity for her to change into them beforehand, and out again afterwards. The
solos, it is decided, should be largely improvised, in keeping with the impression of
spontaneity which Jubas reviewers convey.
The rehearsal ends without anything definite being set. After sharing some coffee
cake courtesy of Stephens wife, we go home.
At home, working on the report for my CBC placement, I fortuitously stumble
across Stephens essay The Witness to Juba in 1848 in a book I picked up for that: The
Performance Text, edited by Domenico Pietropaolo. It gives a full account of the
scholarship Stephen has already done on Jubas dance, and explains the ideas behind the
dramaturgical method hes employing on the show. Im particularly interested in the fifth
of his observations on Provisional Historiographies:
. . . some historians, in the (vain) effort to get to the subject-event attempt
reconstructions of the performance from the documents. One class of
Shakespearean scholar does this, and it is a particularly strong practice among
dance historians . . .

Crushed again.

I have been researching this, along with a dancer, with respect to Juba, and
offer, as one last provisional historio-graphy, the sight of one contemporary
body imitating (reading) graphic images that are themselves imitations
(readings) of another body dancing (Fgiures 1-8).

Hey, look, there are pictures of Jen!

. . . I add that this means of getting to the dance is predicated on the

assumption that the images are based on firsthand viewing, and the intention
of accurate recording; this assumption is questionable . . .

I hadnt thought of that.

. . . Does the imitation help? I cannot answer that. But as imitation with
difference, it may be a kind of useful parody. At the very least, imitation with
the difference of modern dress may draw analogies with contemporary
dance styles. Such similarities may be serendipitous, the result of the limits
and tendencies of the human body in motion. However, they may also
manifest the legacy of an oral-performative tradition the main tenet of
which is imitation with difference.

It reads almost like a manifesto for the work were doing on the show.

Sunday, 22 February, 2004

Jen seems to be feeling a lot more confident this evening as we meet at the Robert
Gill Theatre the space the company will actually be performing in. Tonight, she
announces, were going to focus on contradictions and Juba descriptions. Stephen
proposes an additional exercise: each of the dancers will perform a solo while the other
two describe what shes doing, just as Jubas critics described his performances out of
their impressions.
Stephen suggests we start off by reviewing He jumps; he capers. But Jen
objects to jumping right into it: Thats the hardest part, she says. She gets the
company warming up first, working individually on their solos, roughing through the
steps they have worked up on their own in socks and bare feet. Kathleen shows us she
can tap even in gray ski-socks. Elizabeth, always the quietest, throws aside her backpack
and woolly sweater, and begins contemplatively stretching in a few moments she is
pirouhetting around the stage with a gracefulness as dazzling as a Victoria Day sparkler.
Finally Jen gives the word, and all three dancers gather in a circle upstage right
and begin. Stephen tweeks their positioning, they begin their lines, and the circle begins
to move. As they run through the opening, Stephen watches, making suggestions on
placement to ensure that the whole stage is being adequately filled, and trying to
anticipate how they will adjust to the lighting rig in order to reduce the amount of time
that will be required to tech the show.
They move from the opening (Word Improv #1) into He Jumps (Eyewitness
Riff #1). A new wrinkle is added when the dancers run the section with an extra phrase
in which they all repeat the choreography they have taught each other at different speeds.
Stephen is quick to point out that from the conclusion of this phrase the company can
proceed straightaway into a Circle of Contradiction followed by a solo but Jen isnt
ready to be pinned down to an order yet. She wants to experiment with the pairs of
antithetical terms.
While Elizabeth watches them, Jen works with Kathleen for a little while on the
contrast between the sources reports of Jubas technical precision and his wild
abandon. At first the method is simply allegorical: Jen is precise and Kathleen is
abandoned; but this soon bores Jen and exhausts Kathleen. Elizabeth suggests they
alternate. Jen points out that the difficulty is to know when and how they should switch:
she tries dividing the stage into quadrants two abandoned ones and two precise
ones, where the performers will adopt the appropriate manner as they move through them
but this looks funny and is quickly given up. Then Jen tries placing herself side by side
with Kathleen and drawing an imaginary line across the stage between them.
Abandoned, Kathleen exclaims, and performs a wild jete.
 Precision, says Jennifer, and executes a series of restrained robotic motions.
Kathleen steps across the line directly behind Jen and adopts movements like
hers, speaking out her word. Hearing her, Jen steps across the line so she is beside
Kathleen again, repeats the word abandoned, and delivers a series of judo-kicks to the
air. The pattern works there is just the right combination of sameness and otherness
between the two performers and their motions. This routine becomes Compete Two.
Working with the same conceit, Kathleen and Elizabeth see what they can do with
graceful and grotesque, genuine and artificial, classical, and popular, and so
on. None of these work for them. But Jen gets an idea, and sells it to Elizabeth before
trying it out. On the one hand, she explains, Juba was fully integrated into the minstrel
show he was Mr. Tambo to Pells Mr. Bones, and so on -- and yet once he became a
featured performer he must have become alienated from them. He would have come on,
done his specialties, and then gone off again. They work with the contrast between
isolated and integrated, and this time they produce something they enjoy doing, that
Stephen and I enjoy watching. This becomes Compete One.
Now that Im watching these three really talented dancers work with such
intensity, Im gradually forgetting the banjoes and the bones. My own essentially
reactionary tastes in dance are gradually being seduced by this companys flair for
experimentation and particularly by the way theyre using language. The dancers
silence is a convention for which I always entertained an unquestioning respect but Im
questioning it now, watching Handmade Performance work on their solos. As Elizabeth
executes a particularly graceful turn, Jen and Kathleen sit watching her and improvise
descriptions of her, addressed to nobody in particular: Shes coming toward me, red
hair, red dress, the stripes; now shes bending, turning. The language is inadequate to
contain the beauty of Elizabeths gesture, and instead accompanies it, sets it in relief. I
feel how Jubas critics must have been beguiled, as one is always beguiled by a skillful
performer: the way Fred Astaire made you feel it was easy to tap, that all you had to do
was wish hard and you could do it. I feel Jubas reviewers danced along with him across
stages built of words.
Theres plenty of material now; all that needed is an order. They discuss options
for finding moments when Elizabeth can get up en pointe and when Kathleen can put on
her tap shoes. It could happen right at the very beginning, after which the specialty shoes
could come off for the duration of the show. On the other hand, the whole idea might
wait until just before Kathleens solo, almost at the end of the show. In either case its
decided, the verbal reference to the Wilis ought to be used, and somehow associated with
Elizabeth.
At the end of the rehearsal I go home, thinking about a dancers silence, and about
Jubas laugh. What did it mean, that laugh? The reviewers singled it out as one of his
distinguishing marks:
. . . there never was such a laugh as the laugh of Juba-there is in it the concentrated
laugh of fifty comic pantomimes; it has no relation to the chuckle, and least of all to
the famous horse-laugh: not a bit of itit is a laugh distinct, a laugh apart, a laugh
by itselfclear, ringing, echoing, resonant, harmonious, full of rejoicing and
mighty mirth and fervent fun.

I imagine the laughter of a young black man, growing up in a bad neighbourhood in the
U.S. before the Civil War, emancipated by the rhythms of popular songs, finding a voice
for his rage and his exultation in the stamping of his boots, becoming celebrated by
crowds of white men whose praise was the sincerest expression of their contempt,
prospering by the public performance of his independence and his defiance. Perhaps that
is what that expanding structure expresses: a souls mad dash towards freedom.

Monday, February 23, 2004

Its now two days until the Tech rehearsal, and we havent even had a complete
run of our show yet. Stephen, always reluctant to impose structure, arrives with a
printout giving a suggested order for the show. After some discussion, we decide that the
Wilis section will follow Jens solo and introduce Kathleens that means that both
Kathleen and Elizabeth will have to sit at the side of the stage and inconspicuously put
their shoes on during Jens solo. A warm-up follows in which the dancers lie down on
the stage and roll around it while saying their lines.
The company gathers in the upstage right corner and begins. They run the piece
through, almost from beginning to end, without stopping. Wherever a transition is
missing, they improvise. Its rough, but at least its all there now. The show times out to
almost exactly fifteen minutes. The closing of the piece (Word Improv #2) is its opening
in reverse: the dancers, spread out across the stage, come together into a circle, muttering
their gibberish of praise in softening tones: the circle moves towards the up right corner
of the stage and then stop in silence. Everybody feels that the piece has a shape now, and
is, in broad outline, complete. We all feel its good.
We celebrate over my contribution to the evening: a dish of apple/rhubarb
crumble. Stephen makes some suggestions as to what parts of the stage need to be better
covered and offers a few notes. Then he asks me if I have anything to add.
Im still self-conscious about my only-recently-superceded yearning for Captain
Andys Cotton Blossom to feel comfortable making comments. I think Handmade
Performance have much more to tell me than I have to tell them; and after all, the piece
has only just had its first full run. Nevertheless I do feel it still falls a tad bit short on
presentation.
I only have one word to say, I tell them, and I think I should just say it and let
people respond however they think. The word is smile.
Maybe Im still thinking about Jubas laugh. But notwithstanding my
pusillanimous tactfulness, I still manage to create a minor controversy. Jen and Stephen
agree that the group is still performing rather for themselves and each other than for
anybody else.

Wednesday, February 28, 2004

I arrive late for the tech run, with only time to take my seat before the lights go
down. In accordance with Stephens plan there are almost no cues: light come up over a
five-count, just enough to make Jen, Elizabeth and Kathleen clearly visible, and goes
down in approximately the same time. There are no specials, no sound cues: the entire
piece is conducted entirely to the accompaniment of the dancers voices, the thumping of
their bare feet, and the clatter of Kathleens taps.
It astonishes me to see how far the piece has come in two days. The various
sequences proceed confidently from one to the next; they flow according to a logic of
their own. The execution of all the dancers is expressive and evocative in their solos; in
the concerted sections they move in perfect integration with each other. In the progress
from Word Improv #1 through Competes and Solos 1, 2 and 3, climaxing in Kathleens
solo and cadencing into the recapitulatory Eyewitness Riff and Word Improv #2, the
piece tells its oblique story; it is simply a description of a description, but it has a
mythical quality. As the dancers regroup into their circle and move towards the upstage
right corner, in the dimming of the lights I feel the same tugging at my heart that used to
come with the conclusion of Saturday matines at the Willow Theatre: the sense that I
have been over the rainbow, but now have to walk back through the slush and the snow.
Stephens satisfaction is palpable as he gives notes afterwards: half of them are
simply to let the group know how good the show is. Some of its more unusual features
can in fact stand to be emphasized the solos, for example.
You can make more eye contact, says Stephen. Let the solos be like a game of
charades. Are you describing me accurately? Please describe me more accurately.
Stephen encourages Jen, Elizabeth and Kathleen to continue their solos as long as
they like, unless they feel uncomfortable. Elizabeth dismisses this last notion: Im
dancing with a certain text in mind, she says, and the others speaking while Im
dancing, describing me, it tells me its coming across.
I hope theyre going to do another run, but theyre not: the tech people have all
broken for dinner, and Stephen, Jen, Elizabeth and Kathleen are putting on their coats,
scarves and gloves. I feel a sadness. The rehearsal process is over and the show is now a
show, now this show. At the beginning of a rehearsal process, any show might be
Everyshow. But the instant choices are made to include some things, others are
inevitably excluded. Channelling Jubas Dance is a good show, but it cant be every
show anymore. Neither is it any longer our show, only our show, in the sense it was
while we were creating it. Its now at least half in the hands of the audience, for them to
make of what they please.

Bibliography

Publications:

The Production Notebooks, Mark Bly ed., (New York: Theatre Communications Group,
1996
Channelling Jubas Dance: unpublished dramaturgical materials, assembled by Stephen
Johnson, University of Toronto

Stephen Johnson, The Witness to Juba in 1848, in The Performance Text, ed.
Domenico Pietropaolo (Toronto: Legas, 1999)

[Editedslightlyby Stephen Johnson]