The Double Life of Pagan Dance: Indigenous Rituality, Early Modern Dance, and the Language of US Newspapers

Abstract

What can be made of the fact that American early modern dancers employed the term ‘pagan dance’ to describe their practices, ideologies, and aesthetics when they were surrounded by a public discourse that disparaged Indigenous dance through the very same label? When used to describe Indigenous ritual dances, the term ‘pagan dance’ performed a complete cultural recontextualisation upon whatever Indigenous dance that was its object — transforming each dance into a justification for a US settler-colonial and anti-Indigenous stance. However, when adopted by early modern dancers, the term ‘pagan dance’ could be received by the US public as a revitalisation of ancient spiritualism and a garnering of ‘native’ ritual knowledge. Tracking the term through American newspapers at the turn of the twentieth century, this article investigates the bifurcation of a ‘pagan dance’ vocabulary that
conditioned dance’s social and spiritual reception in the US.