It's time to stop lying about European history. What really happened to indigenous Europe? — Dance knows.
A four-part series on how Europe lost its body and what dance remembers
What was taken from you?
If something was, your body already knows.
Europe didn’t just colonize the world. It colonized its own body. Dance is the evidence.
This is an open letter to the dance community — especially to dance academics — and an invitation to everyone, dancer or not, to ask a single, unsettling question…
For thousands of years Western Eurasia—a large, highly diverse region of cultures and ethnicities—has been intimately part of a Mediterranean/African world. A lot of people jump to “New World,” Atlantic World discourses, but these can end up centering Europe and a fictional geographic center of whiteness even more, cutting off its people historically from the rest of the world. This dangerously isolates people who belong to the rest of the world as much as we have been coerced to belong to them.
We know from modern psychology the dangers of isolation and how loneliness can fuel hate and colonization, and this is my primary motivation in posting this. Dance belongs to everyone, and if you’re a Westerner—especially white or white-passing—there is a very good chance you had yours stolen from you.
In this open letter to the dance community I’m asking us to confront how deeply our histories, bodies, and fields were shaped by that theft. I’m also demanding better academic research into our history, which is and has always been embodied. I don’t want to hear about how “we can’t know how people in the past were feeling” when we have woodcuts and pictures of people in chains and being butchered. You may not know how they felt, but epigenetics suggests that their descendants do.
I love Europe. In the twenty years I’ve been coming here, many years I’ve spent living here and a decade spent studying here, I am grateful for the privilege I have as an US American citizen to be allowed through the border. My life has been transformed by the dance floors, minds, homes and hearts that have opened to me here. My life has been saved by refuge offered here from dear Irish friends as I had to flee the United States due to threats to my life from ongoing litigation in high courts, criticism of my fascist government and my identity.
I am grateful to my Indigenous, Palestinian and allied friends for opening my eyes America’s ongoing colonization, and to the colonization of my own people, the Roma and the Sinti.1
It is from this life-saving gratitude that I offer this invitation to question what has been taken away and in turn, what the body remembers and can never be taken away. My membership with dancers and artists in North County Clare2 greatly informs my de-colonial dance training, and informs this piece substantially. My kumpanija formed over the last eight years, which includes my mother, Roma and Sinti elders and Critical Romani Studies academics and online activists, helped me come home to myself and my traditions, and what it means to be part of a decentralized society of “gypsies”.
Standing near this 5,000-year-old limestone portal tomb, a fellow American said to me, “This isn’t a grave — this is a magical portal.” In that moment, I knew that dance, spirituality, and history cannot be separated from the body or the land beneath it. What could be more magical than the fact that human beings have been anchoring love, grief, and community in time and place for millennia?
What I want to call out, as directly as I can, is that we cannot understand European history without asking what was done to European bodies and what European bodies were no longer allowed to do.
No other field tells the story of Europe’s internal colonization more clearly than dance.
Every other discipline can escape into abstraction: text, numbers, theory, categories—ultimately control. Dance cannot. Dance forces us to stay with the human being in motion.
First of all, I have no problem with anyone studying ballet or the dances of white people. Ballets Russes remains one of my greatest inspirations when I do dance theater, and the hard work of ballet dancers is extraordinary.
But I do have a problem with calling that the dance — with insisting that all real dance comes from ballet.
I remember when someone confronted me and said I must have studied ballet because of how I danced. I took a single quarter-semester at University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. That was it. But in their mind—and in the mind of my partner at the time—it was impossible to dance with integrity without ballet. Everything else was a joke.
This is not an aesthetic position.
It is a colonial one.
This is how you can tell whether someone understands that European bodies were colonized: by how they tell the story of dance history.
Is dance, for them, just ballet and all of its courtliness and empire?
Or is dance the study of who we are, how we move, how we express, how we live in our bodies?
Within dance studies, this difference is everything.
The first story reproduces the empire.
The second begins to unravel it.
Here is another clue:
Who do white Americans turn to for healing, belonging, and spiritual grounding?
Not ballet. Many don’t even turn to dances nationalized in the 19th and 20th centuries.
For centuries, white Americans have turned to African-American, Indigenous American, Asian, Latin American and Romani dances and embodied knowledge for belonging, healing, spiritual support, courting, mating, and more. Because something was taken. Their own ancestral embodied knowledge — the stuff that lives in rhythm, gravity, breath, repetition, communal timing — was stripped from them.
If something is missing, the body goes looking for it.
Or support my work by ordering my independently published dissertation,
Feeling Impact: A Timedancer’s Study of Irish Step Dance
I love archival, time-period-specific research. But I have been in too many meetings where white dance historians insist that everyone else is “doing the archives wrong.” One American scholar who works primarily out of France rolled her eyes at the mere mention of diversity.
They hold some imagined center:
“We are the true keepers of high-quality historical research.”
But this is a delusion.
The primary sources they rely on do not make any sense.
They look at dance manuals and a handful of well-trodden sources, just in more depth — and believe they have captured “dance history.”
Meanwhile the bodies, the folk forms, the communal improvisations, the rhythms of working people, the ecstatic dances, the migrations, the survivals, the refusals — are nowhere to be found in their story of Europe. Even worse, it does nothing to support the traditions and people in Western Eurasia who are actually preserving and re-discovering these practices. (I will get to dance nationalism in later parts.)
And that erasure is not an accident.
It reflects a deeper erasure of Indigenous Europe and of Europe’s relationships with Africa, the Mediterranean, and Central Asia. It ignores the many people from somewhere else who are part of its history and the racial diversity that has always been part of Western Eurasia’s dance. It ignores that we all came from Africa.
As long as we keep saying that dance studies is just tutus and turnouts, we will lose whatever small foothold we have in the wider academic world. We will lose funding. We will lose power. And within our disembodied colonial system, we will lose the last traces of knowledge native to every single person on this planet: how to live in a body.
Within the dance world, anti-ballet sentiment is not new. Modern and contemporary choreographers have been addressing these issues for a century. Their bodies know something is wrong. They make new futures because they had no choice.
But narratives matter.
And we must begin telling truer ones.
In somatic dance spaces, tremendous strides are being made to dance from the body. But even there, intellectualism sometimes overrides humanity. We tend to dance “the inhuman”: technique, energy, line, clinical anatomy.
We hesitate to dance what is undeniably human:
heartbreak, lust, displacement, longing, anger, connection, transformation.
Pina Bausch never hesitated.
She and her decentralized dance company remain a reminder that the body is always telling the truth.
I am not saying I have all the answers. I am not saying I’m going to get it all right. I am saying we must ask better questions. I discovered something was deeply wrong in western dance history during my master’s degree, long before I fully understood myself as Romani. It was the researcher in me who noticed the gaps and the dancer in me whose body refused the lie. Just because someone said ballet is the origin does not make it true. Just because the archive is silent does not mean the body is.
In the next part of this series, I turn to the machinery itself: the manuals, the archives, the academic habits, the nationalist projects, and the colonial frameworks that built this lie in the first place.
I am not Sinti, but friends and elders are. Regardless, I always seek to recognize them in my work.
We are the North Clare Dance Creamery.