Reawakening a Creative Spirit

In the really bad old days, you’d probably get your ideas--wildly inaccurate ones--about American Indian culture from Hollywood films. In the not-so-bad days, you could get a realistic view if you were willing to travel to powwows and reservations.

That all changed in 1987 with the creation of the American Indian Dance Theatre.

The ensemble was founded by New York producer Barbara Schwei and director Hanay Geiogamah (a member of the Kiowa Delaware tribe from Oklahoma and a professor at UCLA’s Film, Theater and Television School and in its American Indian Studies program).

Their intent was to bring into the theater the authentic Indian music and dance you could find only outdoors, and their success went beyond their wildest dreams.

“I wondered why every country except the United States had its own national dance companies representing the diverse segments of their cultures,” Schwei said at the time. “Native Americans should have the opportunity to show off their heritage and culture to their fellow Americans and to the rest of the world.”

The troupe will dance Friday and Sunday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

“It’s hard not to sound political,” Geiogamah said in a recent phone interview from his home in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles.

“Indian culture was in a deep freeze for so long--the languages, the religions, the dances. There was almost no Indian dance at all until the 1950s. It had been restricted by the government.”

The government was particularly concerned about performances of the Ghost Dance, which was regarded as a hidden call for an Indian insurrection. A Ghost Dance religion had arisen after the 1890 battle--some call it a massacre--between U.S. troops and the Indian nations at Wounded Knee, S.D. The religion promised that the land and the decimated buffalo herds would be restored to the Sioux and that the white man would be swept away.

“At the time when I grew up, there were hardly any powwows,” Geiogamah said. “We’ve almost had to restart this from the ground up. True, we did know the dances. They have survived. But the culture had barely survived.

“That reality brought with it an accompanying sense of very strong protectiveness. We managed to salvage what we did. That put us in a very, very protective attitude.”

The protective attitude had an impact on their mission of remaining traditional but also making sure that Indian dance culture continued to be a living, developing art form.

“We could do our beautiful traditional dances forever,” Geiogamah said. “But that’s not what the Dance Theatre was formed to do. From the beginning, it was always to look for the possibilities and opportunities to take it to another step.

“We had to move carefully and conservatively and not be reckless or too frivolous in a direction of new creativity. That’s how our culture works. It takes time to do this.”

Indeed, criticism came from without as well as from within.

“It also came from well-intentioned, non-Indian critics,” the director said. “‘You don’t want to violate your own sacredness,’ they said. It was somewhat confusing. When you realize that you have this cloak of restraint that hangs over your whole effort, it just scares you. Then how are we going to do something new?

“But the impulse for creating dance doesn’t stop to say, ‘What about your elders?’ You have to take a chance, especially for the younger generations. We’ve done that.”

One way was to begin a collaboration three years ago with modern-dance choreographer Laura Dean at a residency at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Mass.

“If we’re going to step outside our traditional performance style, my instincts said that the possibility would be through modern dance rather than ballet, jazz or tap,” Geiogamah said. “She helped us to focus on an adaptable stepping-off point in our vocabulary. If we took this from our rhythm and our steps and tried it in a sort of a modern context, the combination could work and still preserve an Indian feel to it.”

So in addition to the traditional, virtuosic war and mimetic animal dances and the competition dances, in which dancers challenge one another with their most intricate footwork and brilliant costumes, the troupe will bring several new dances and suites.

They have updated the Eagle Dance by using music by Robbie Robertson, of Mohawk heritage, a member of the critically acclaimed rock group the Band. They have also created two entirely new numbers--New Dance and Modern Fancy Dance--to some of Robertson’s music.

“The Eagle Dance still sounds very, very spiritual, but it’s definitely contemporary,” Geiogamah said.

The cultures represented are from across the U.S. and Canada: Assiniboine (Saskatchewan), Comanche and Creek (Oklahoma), Cherokee (North Carolina), Menomini-Potawatomi (Wisconsin), Navajo (New Mexico), Southern Ute (Colorado), Cree (Alberta and Montana), Sioux (the Dakotas and Saskatchewan) Nez Perce (Idaho), Ojibwa and Tsau T’ini/Blackfoot (Alberta) and Zuni (New Mexico).

“We’re unique in that we don’t have a central studio base for our home,” Geiogamah said. “We exist in the national Indian community, which is spread out all over the country. So the rehearsal ethos we’ve developed, when we have enough bookings to constitute a tour, then we plan. We begin to rehearse somewhere near the beginning of that tour.

“We have people coming off the powwow trail, off the ceremonial elders trail, from communities, from cities, from all over. That works. It’s helped us to communicate with hundreds of thousands of non-Indians around the country and around the world that come with a respectful attitude. They want to see this experience. They don’t want to see stereotypes. They don’t want to see exotica.”

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The American Indian Dance Theatre will perform Friday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. $26 to $32. (949) 854-4646.