Steering away from the 'quick fix' modality of movement therapy, the objective of Freedance, Inc. from its inception was to provide the local refugee population of Phoenix, Arizona, with opportunities and tools to form dance communities. By offering an ethical and physical place for individuals to preserve the thread of their indigenous traditions, Freedance, Inc. focuses on the root cause of pain in the refugee condition, that is the glaring absence of the community from which individuals were torn and where their traditions were embedded.
Refugees, especially survivors of torture, carry with them untenable loss. Freedance, Inc. addresses and supports them in that task by enabling a type of dance community that is different from the traditional dance culture, but one that can grow into a suitable surrogate in a new context. It is apparent that each of the dance communities, whose formation we have facilitated, energizes the larger refugee community within which it functions. This confirms our hypothesis that dance communities not only sustain the whole, but also help participants make sense of the situation and cope to some extent at least with their changing roles and concepts of identity.
Where it began
A few years ago, as professional dancers and musicians, we were asked to perform a concert of African music for the Unaccompanied Minors Foster Group, a division of Catholic Social Services' (CSS) Refugee Resettlement Program. The majority of these orphaned refugee children attending our concert with their foster parents were between six and fifteen years old and originally from different countries in Africa. Our multicultural group was composed of both African and non-African members.
From the start of the concert, we were struck by the irony that we were performing for a group whose cultural approach to music and dance was audience participation. Our show was homegrown material to them but presented with the accepted divide between audience and performer designed for an American public. As the event unfolded, we were compelled to invite the crowd to join us on the floor. Eventually the boldest children and some parents came forth, while others stood by. Witnessing the myriad of mixed emotions showing in these eyes that had seen so much was for us akin to pain. The concert was memorable, if by some standards raucous (1) and the seed was planted for the formation of a non-profit entity that would help refugees build dance communities. We materialized this idea a few years later by incorporating Freedance, Inc. in August 2002.
We chose the name 'Freedance' to suggest that dance should not be bound by socio-political constraints and to encourage freedom of dance and cultural expression by all. Although our work is geared to the development of dance communities among refugees from around the world, we focused the primary phase of our project on African populations. In part, we realised that our 50 years of combined experience working and studying with Africans from diverse areas significantly informed our understanding and approach to interacting with refugees. Also, our academic backgrounds pertaining to dance and anthropology reminded us that dance culture as a dynamic knowledge system encourages group solidarity and the building of community.
This recognition fuels a major assumption motivating our work in Freedance, Inc. which suggests that promoting dance culture powerfully reduces retraumatisation factors associated with refugee resettlement (Vissicaro & Godfrey, 2003). We envision this type of healing strategy quite differently than other types of movement therapy protocol. Those protocols impose standardized methods, mostly influenced by Western European values, and assessed by professionals using universally acknowledged criteria. This is called the 'etic' approach. Instead of employing techniques created outside a particular cultural knowledge system, we take the 'emic' position by looking inside the cultural system to find indigenous tools for healing that people already have.
Exploring the emic perspective also parallels the way some anthropologists seek and understand views of those they are studying in their ethnographic fieldwork. Emphasis on emic knowledge counteracts hegemonic forces that attempt to hierarchically differentiate and control the refugee acculturation process. With these realisations, Freedance, Inc. is taking shape as a critical research project to empower oppressed voices by providing a forum for dance communities to root and evolve.
Through our contacts within various resettlement agencies, we began our volunteer effort simultaneously with clients of the International Rescue Center (IRC) and of the CSS Phoenix Arizona Survivors of Torture (PAST) program. We started interacting with a large group of Sudanese young men and conducting a series of gatherings with African women and children from the countries of Liberia, Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Togo, as well as Sudan. We already knew that identity in these populations is more communal and collective than individual. We discovered that migrating to this country further blurs the lines of personal identity for many refugees. In spite of security concerns in the U.S, once these refugees are granted entrance into the country, little attention is ever paid to the history of their plight or even their actual identity. No mental health triage is conducted upon arrival to identify survivors of torture from other refugees (2). Without original birth certificates, authorities rely on estimates and often, vague recollections for documentation. In some cases, even the name of individuals is not necessarily their own (3).
Our studies of African knowledge systems supported the idea that dance and music are integral parts of life, providing tools for socio-cultural identification. We understood that for the refugees, dance and music are not only intrinsic to the formation of stronger community bonds, but have the power to heal. Communal organisation is central to African worldviews and the core around which all other aspects of life revolve. These ideas provided the foundation for Freedance, Inc., in its assumption that making dance communities bridges the gap of anonymity and isolation resulting from refugees' forced migration, particularly for people from African countries.
Sudanese war orphans
The first dance community with which we worked as sponsors of refugee groups was a group of Sudanese youths from the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. At the time of our first encounters, most of these young men had been in the U.S. for about 18 months, when the support of sponsoring agencies was about to end, and they would lose the larger community's safety net, adding to the series of losses that characterized their lives.
Under the pressures of civil war, these young men had been forced to leave their village in groups between the ages of four and seven. They were either orphaned or escaped child soldiers who had been kidnapped from their homes. All had spent most of the last decade in the bush wandering between opposing factions and unwelcoming countries, which is why they are referred to as the 'Lost Boys' It was estimated that some 40,000 male children were forced into a 1,000 mile journey through the wilderness and only one out of three survived. Their treks spanned three countries, with brief periods in or around refugee camps before being expelled back into the bush in hoards of parentless kids. Every one of them had lived through horrific experiences, from surviving disease, starvation and wild animal attacks to war atrocities at the hand of soldiers, including rape, kidnapping, maiming and other cruelties. The absence of parents fostered tremendous dependency on collective identification with the group, whose membership was continually diminishing.
Over 3,800 boys and young men resettled in the U.S. with little more than the clothes they wore and a bundle of papers giving them the right to work. As Mary Pipher states in her book, The Middle of Everywhere, most of what they knew about the world was not useful in this new country (Pipher, 2002). At least 300 were sent to Arizona, making it the largest 'Lost Boys' community in the nation. Through death, disease and forced migration, and due to sheer numbers and the luck of the draw, most were separated from any group with which they had bonded in the past.
As previously mentioned, we began our journey with them when the waning of corporate sponsorship was already having detrimental effect on many individuals still struggling to make meaning of this fast-paced world of work, technology, excesses, temptations and isolation that they could not have imagined 18 months previously, and in which they were thrown for ever. Drifting into depression and extreme isolation was making the act of getting out of bed or out the door a near insurmountable task. For us, the formation of this dance community felt akin to a rescue mission.
We worked with Phoenix-based Lost Boys for a period extending a little over a year. We took a fledgling group loosely formed around two-dozen occasional members through several stages that resulted in the formation of an active traditional dance and music-performing group. Eventually, under the tutelage of dedicated volunteers from the City of Phoenix, the synergy generated by this dance community contributed to the creation of a federally (4) funded Lost Boys cultural centre, with full and part-time staff, and a budget of $200,000 a year.
The experience was as transformative for them as it was for us. By year's end, this dance community consisted of approximately 80 members belonging to two separate ethnic groups, Nuers and Dinkas, who are still fighting a civil war in Sudan. They neither spoke the same language nor shared knowledge systems or dance cultures. The animosity resulting from decades of ongoing conflict was constantly exacerbated by current events 'back home' At every rehearsal and performance, we addressed a divided crowd seated or standing in two distinct areas, and any communication outside those settings involved a number of phone calls to guarantee that all members concerned were alerted. As we taught leadership and presentation skills and organized weekly rehearsals, we noticed the situation improving over time. We made political history on a minute scale by gradually merging the two groups into one dance community.
We began by helping them pick a name that reflected that goal. They became the 'Sudanese Voices United' with elected leaders for each of group. We gave the Nuers and Dinkas equal rehearsal time for their traditional dance repertoire. Upon their request, we brought instruments, sewed costumes, turned dowels into makeshift spears, made ankle bracelet rattles from recycled cans and broken glass, and plucked feathers off ostriches.
There were weekly progressions and recessions within the community. For example, the first rehearsals were attended each group alternatively, as if they were trying to avoid being in each other's presence. Then, at subsequent meetings, members of both groups were present until we were finally able to hold complete rehearsals for upcoming events. Another instance that demonstrated dance community bonding between the Dinka and Nuer components of the group involved the wearing of printed t-shirts during performances. Three sets of shirts were printed initially: one simply stated 'Sudanese Voices United, Traditional Music and Dance' and the other two specified the tribal names of each group, 'Sudanese Voices United, Dinka Traditional Music and Dance' and 'Sudanese Voices United, Nuer Traditional Music and Dance'. At their first performance, the respective members wore their 'Dinka' and 'Nuer' shirts, and the generic batch of shirts was left untouched. By the second performance, the non-specific shirts were the preferred choice. At that moment we observed how dance community serves as a bridging device, and, in this case, is located squarely at the intersection of the two sub-groups within the larger Sudanese community.
Survivors of Hutu/Tutsi genocide
Simultaneous to our work with the Sudanese Voiced United were meetings with women in the CSS Phoenix Arizona Survivors of Torture (PAST) program. From our first interaction in May 2002 to the present, four distinct communities emerged, each defined by a specific dance culture or shared knowledge system. One group of women was from the Sudan (5), mostly from the northern Islamic part of the country. Another group included Hutu and Tutsi people from Rwanda and Burundi. The other two were from Somalia and Togo respectively. We organized our meetings in order for each group to have a discrete amount of time to practice dances, songs, and music, which we helped them document. This structure continued for several months. At the end of that period, the Hutu/Tutsi group emerged as the most committed to becoming a performing dance community. The objective of performing was to increase awareness of their dance culture for educational purposes through concerts, workshops, and classes.
This group, which continues to rehearse and has presentations scheduled for 2004, involves 25 Burundian and Rwandan refugees. All came to Phoenix escaping on-going genocides in East Central Africa mainly between ethnic Hutus and Tutsis. This conflict emanates from a long-standing pursuit of power in which German and then Belgian colonialists used ethnicity as a divisive platform. "In their attacks on African nationalism, they (the colonialists) encouraged ethnic loyalties as a means of fragmenting an emerging African opposition to colonial rule (Isabirye & Mahmoundi, 2000, p. 66)."
Unlike the Dinka and Nuer lost boys, these refugees express strong preference not to be classified as members of one or the other ethnic group. Historically intermarried, speaking the same Kirundi language, and practicing similar religious beliefs, they also share dance culture, which disseminates social values and ideals from generation to generation. Dance culture functions to bring the East Central African refugee group together, thus creating balance among its members whose personal lives, roles within the families, social constructs, and understanding of the world have been ripped apart. Through intergenerational transmission of information, dance culture emphasises the importance of family, considered the cornerstone of traditional knowledge in Africa (Francis, 2000). For this reason, these refugees chose the name, Gahuza Imiryango, which means 'putting families together'. It was interesting for us to notice that our prompting of both the Dinka and Nuer as well as Hutu and Tutsi refugees to select a group name encouraged feelings of solidarity and distinction. This set them apart as entities distinct from other refugees, assembling with a specific purpose and experiencing a unique history of being together. By investigating social theoretical principles, we later made the discovery that group self-awareness was one determining characteristic of communities.
The term 'community' actually comes from gemeinschaft, a concept developed by Ferdinand Tönnies in the late 19th and early 20th century. Gemeinschaft reveals an organic or essential human will that exudes a consciousness of group belonging (Tönnies, 1925). In communities, membership is self-propelled without remuneration through money or reward for work or services. Further, communal social organizations, such as Sudanese Voices United and Gahuza Imiryango, restore order with the condition of mutual dependence on the group as a whole, not its individual parts. The collective strength of this group is requisite since without sufficient participation by its core membership, dance rehearsals and performances are cancelled.
Other factors influencing participation are health, work schedules, and celebrations, such as birthdays and religious confirmations. Lately however, it is the escalation of conflicts back home in Africa that most greatly impacts the dynamics of this refugee community. For example, when the news of a family death reaches a member of the group, an unspoken moratorium brings all dance activity to halt. Public performance is taboo while mourning, which traditionally lasts one month. Interestingly, children have permission to perform, and we rely on them for scheduled performances in which the adults cannot participate; this leads us to another set of assumptions that we are examining: the role of the younger generation. Quicker to adapt and faster learners, young refugees in general are thrown into positions of responsibility beyond their years and cultural norms. We are finding that these children are more prone to forget traditional values and instead choose to construct new knowledge through interactions with different people, media, and other environmental aspects in their adopted homeland. Generally, however, the transmission of dance culture for people of all age groups serves as a coping mechanism to help refugees through stressful situations but also to fulfill responsibilities within their community. This idea is supported by interviews explaining how they teach and perform dances while living in the refugee camps of Goma, Benaco, and Kabuga located in East Central Africa. Those activities not only preserve and affirm their collective identity relative to other refugee groups in the camps, but also to transmit that body of knowledge and the values it promotes to their young people.
Challenges in making refugee dance communities
While Americans fight wars in their country and abroad against foreign and domestic terrorism to defend the way of life in the so-called free world, 'freedom' for this population of survivors hinges at a more existential level of staying alive and together. Because boundaries of their safety thresholds are non-existent or barely reconstituted, interacting with refugee groups in making dance communities poses different sets of challenges than dealing with other types of dance companies. The issue of trust is critical, yet hard to maintain with people whose lives (and sometimes bodies) were broken at the hands of others.
Can they trust us to be who we say we are? Can we trust them to be where we have committed the group to be? As a non-profit entity, the benevolence of Freedance, Inc. is readily accepted, which enables us to suggest and facilitate steps toward growth and development for the group that may otherwise be misconstrued or met with outright fear. For all refugees, and survivors of torture in particular, the risk of exploitation is omnipresent, as it has been in one form or another since the beginning of their plight, and as it is still in their daily life in the U.S. By the same token, individuals' resolve to meet functional elements such as time commitments, future planning, and resource allocation can waver and be at unpredictable times totally unreliable. If we did not mold our expectations to the needs of the members of our communities, we, as co-founders of Freedance, Inc., would have been tempted on numerous occasions to drop the project altogether.
New avenues are taking shape on the horizon of Freedance, Inc. Catholic Social Services recently informed us of the pending arrival of another large group of refugees from Africa, in this case Bantus, a previously enslaved population living in Somalia whose separate enclaves identify themselves according to the dances they perform. The first families to arrive are being placed in apartments within the same complex as other Somali refugees who once were members of the dominant ethnic class.
This leaves us to wonder how this living situation will impact on our work of enabling dance communities between these two groups. It is our hope that, as it did with the Sudanese Voices United and Gahuza Imiryango, the traditions separating ethnic Bantus and Somalis will become the thread that ultimately ties them together as a collective dance community.
You can contact Pegge Vissicaro pegge@asu.edu or Danielle Godfrey daniellegodfrey@earthlink.net for more information about Freedance, Inc.
References
(1) In its unwavering diligence, the staff of the Unaccompanied Minors program leans toward total assimilation to the American way of life for their clients and our efforts to reintroduce these youths to the root of their knowledge system meet the sponsors' reluctance time and again.
(2) Mental health care is provided through self-referral only, which exasperates cultural taboos of most non-Western peoples.
(3) Switches often occur at United Nations High Commission for Refugees offices in refugee camps when for any reason individuals are not present at the time a list of names is called up for passage into the U.S. Answering to a different name is a small price to pay for what they view as ultimate freedom.
(4) Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement
(5) At the time of this writing, Sudanese refugees constitute the largest number of African refugees in Phoenix.