The early explorers treated in this three-part article represent a wide range of expertise, from painting to linguistics, dance to cartography. The 15 explorers evoked here—Giuseppe Tucci, Sven Hedin, Alexandra David-Neel, Ted Shawn, Tyra Kleen, G. I. Gurdjieff, Beryl de Zoete, Arthur Waley, Rolf De Mare, Claire Holt, Ernest Fenollosa, Rene de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Michael Aris, Lam Anagarika Govinda, and Nicholas Roerich—can be easily referenced in my previous article “Messengers of Mind, Cultural Explorers and the Encounter with Buddhism, Part One: A Gallery of Explorers,” which can also serve as a kind of glossary.
Among these, regarding dance, they fall into two groups: those who misrepresented it as ghoulish and pagan, and those who saw that dance was embodied consciousness: a gateway to knowledge, ritual, and meditative function, and a basis for cultural continuity. The early explorers included botanists, surveyors, military commanders, soldiers, doctors, and missionaries. There is much to learn from those who got it wrong. The best early descriptions of Buddhist cham dance come from L. A. Waddell, who condemned it entirely as “wanton mummery.” There is a British engraving of Hemis Monastery cham, in which nearly every aspect of the dance is incorrect. I gave it to the Hemis Monastery Museum, where it now hangs.
It is a bit of a thrill, therefore, to encounter an early explorer who not only got it right, but asked provocative questions about the nature of dance as depicted in ritual Buddhist paintings. Giuseppe Tucci saw the dance as essential to understanding Tantric Buddhist art and the deities and characters depicted. Not only does he point out that a class of dakinis dance with wrathful deities, but he goes to lengths to describe and define the rarified nature of the creatures who are dancing. It explains, in part, the role of dance in meditation techniques to know exactly who the dancing beings are in a meditation; and when, in the process of meditating, they appear.
Cartographer and explorer Sven Hedin was also a skillful painter and draftsman. In high contrast to the fantastical demons of the British etching, above, Hedin produced excellent renderings of the costume and movements of cham dance, genuine documentations of choreography, mudra, and mask
Ted Shawn documented, on film and in photographs, Tibetan Buddhist cham dances in Darjeeling in 1926. In his book Gods Who Dance—which accompanied his two years of documentations in 1925 and 1926, providing an unprecedented baseline of ancient Asian dance—Shawn wrote insightfully about dance in Buddhism: “It is an ironic fact that there is more actual dance connected with Buddhism itself than almost any other religion . . . Buddhism did not destroy or supplant the religion of the people previous to its coming, but it adjusted itself and fitted in with the gods that were already worshipped. Perhaps this explains it? For in Burma, Ceylon, and Tibet, three of the countries for which Buddhism is the official religion of the country and where it is most powerful, I have seen dancing in connection with Buddhist temples and Buddhist religious festivals. This then means that the primitive people of Tibet, of Burma, and of Ceylon, had gods who danced, and that Buddhism slowly absorbed both the gods and the dancing, rejecting neither the one nor the other.”
Shawn’s influence on early modern dancers was tremendous, counting Martha Graham, Charles Wiedman and Doris Humphrey as his students.
Nicholas Roerich, the celebrated painter and researcher of initiate dance traditions, also influenced Western dance in the early 20th century. Drawing on his years of explorations in Asia and Siberia, Roerich created the scenario, sets, and costumes for Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) composed by Igor Stravinsky and choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky. Sacre is considered one of the most important creations in 20th century dance and music, utterly transforming the notions of what dance and music could do.
These two early explorers, Shawn and Roerich, inspired by their researches into Asian sacred dances, through their direct influence helped to cultivate and raise up Matha Graham and Vaslav Nijinsky, two of the most significant pioneers of 20th century dance invention. The art of dance has its own transmissions, not comparably initiate, but fundamentally driven by an understanding derived from ancient dances: that dance is an enactment and embodiment of spiritual and emotional realities, not merely a representation or performance of it. These are profound insights into the nature of dance itself.
Writer Beryl de Zoete, working in India and Indonesia, and anthropologist Claire Holt, who worked in Java and Bali and the Indonesian islands, recognized dance as a form of knowing, and a means of transmitting spiritual and cosmological truths. De Zoete saw that gesture, rhythm, and spatial structures mirrored metaphysical systems. She understood the dances as living ritual texts, “the body as scripture.” Holt, more concretely, argued that dance was an historical archive in motion, capable of preserving mythic narrative, political ideologies, and religious worldviews, long after texts and historical figures were gone.
Tyra Kleen’s astonishing art nouveau illustrations documenting the mudra, or ritual hand movements, of priests in Bali and Java, were inspired in part by her observation that the continuity of sustained importance of dance within Balinese society was itself a form of resistance against colonizing powers. Her remarkably exact and accurate documentations of mudra were exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, recognized for their scientific value as well as their almost subversive arch style.
Lam Govinda writes about tantric ritual and visualization, addressing the double techniques of inner meditation and outer bodily form: that the inner mudra and outer movement create an essential alignment of subtle and gross energies. Gurdjieff, who established his own set of dances for his followers, based their construction on ancient sacred dance prototypes that he studied in Central Asia and the Middle East. He was not trying to portray metaphysical ideas, rather seeking to invoke and embody inner transformation through precise movement and breath control. He taught that gesture, posture, and rhythm could reshape consciousness. The dances are still performed today, and although they can appear unusual and counterintuitive, their continued use as a form of mental cultivation is noteworthy. He taught: “What you cannot discover in your own body, you will not discover in any place in the world.”
In a remarkable example of modern sacred dance traditions grafting, transplanting, and transmitting through one another, the leader of the Gurdjieff Community of Conway, Massachusetts, Paul Anderson, handed over the site and the followers of Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way there, to Dzogchen teacher Namkhai Norbu, who consequently established his own Vajra dances on the same spot, with the Gurdjieff students becoming Vajrayana Buddhist students under Namkhai Norbu. There are still dancers alive today whose spiritual practice includes both the movements of Gurdjieff dances, as well as the Vajra dances of Namkhai Norbu.
These insights into dance by early explorers are connected in the awareness that Asia’s ancient sacred dances, including Buddhist dances, are ontological: they deal with the essence of being itself and how it emerges. Dance does something to the self and to the world; things are produced and transformed by it. Dance is an agent of mental cultivation and spiritual liberation. Dance changes the experience of inner reality. Where early explorers encountered these realizations and characteristics of sacred dance, we now have dancers and dance researchers enriched by these concepts who find a new recognition today in the practices of embodied, authentic, and somatic movement. In fact, it is often dancers focusing on authentic movement in contemporary practice who most relate and connect with the consciousness-altering dances of Buddhism and their embodied explorations of inner reality.
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Related features from BDG
Messengers of Mind, Cultural Explorers and the Encounter with Buddhism, Part One: A Gallery of Explorers
Messengers of Mind, Part Two: Liminal Lives
