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DANCE THEOLOGY
Lalrinawmi Ralte
I have discovered a thread running through Mizo society and religious life in Mizoram which women had a very important part to play. This happened within a patriarchal structure. I discovered that women were once considered the upholders of culture and of religious life. It is painful also to discover how women's power has been distorted. It is therefore important to acknowledge the fact that women have survived in their painful situations.
Dance is a restoration of the culture of the Mizo people, which has been lost for a century. It focuses particularly upon women. In rediscovering ourselves our experience becomes authentic and we can begin to liberate ourselves from the patriarchal structures. In dance we reclaim our power as women, we show the falseness of the claim that we have no religion, because dance is a deeply spiritual experience. In dance we celebrate the most wonderful thing which woman experience as we use our body as a demonstration of the meaning in our lives.
In dance theology we reclaim the neglected and forgotten women’s power, as our source of empowerment. Dance is a cultural expression of power for women. Discovering that sources of empowerment is the reconstruction of theology. It is a theology of hope for all the people because every person can relate to the experience of Mizoness. It is a theology of transformation because we reappreciate our roots and establish that root as a sources of developing our theology of hope. Dance is not only a survival of our culture but points to a new way of experiencing Christianity. Reclaiming our roots help us to honor women who are subordinated by the structures of an oppressive church.
Dance makes a connection between traditional social and religious life with the Christian life. Dance integrates drums, songs and tunes. In dance, we are truly Christian and truly Mizo at the same time. Dancing is a bodily experience which expresses a spiritual reality. It therefore, integrates women’s physical and spiritual self. Dance also integrates our cultural life and Christianity.
Each occasion gave a great sense of belonging and integrity to the people as a community. Dance broke the barriers between rich and poor, men and women, chief and the community. Dance demonstrated their feelings of integration in the community. So, dance was traditionally redeeming for the Mizo people.
Drum, dance, and song
One of the significant things about dance was its association with drums, and songs. Each dance had a different drum with different rhythms. The indigenous drums had different sizes, sounds, styles, and speeds. The songs often sung with the dance and drum were composed with typical Mizo tunes. So the drum, dance and song were intertwined with other, making the occasion successful. Song, drum, and dance made up a powerful union because they share their common roots in the life of the people. Together, songs, drums and dance express our deep spirituality.
The introduction of the drum in the revival movement was the first manifestation of indigenization within the Christian community. The traditional musical gifts were a result of the encounter with Christianity, in the form of ecstatic revivals, at the deepest levels of the culture. It was this aspect of Mizo culture that contributed to the continuance of revivalism among the Christians. The indigenization of Christianity did not come easily.
I am moved to mention the Mizoram Presbyterian Church's celebration of the Centenary. The centenary was celebrated in January 11-16, 1994. For that celebration, one of the celebrations was biting the biggest drum in Asia. The drum hollowed out from a tree trunk, using two cow hides, one on each ends. It is slightly oval in shape, the outside diametre of the longer axis is 7'8" and the shorter 6'10" (228 cm. and 210 cm.) with average rim thickness of 4". Its weight is about 1000 kilograms and 700 years old.
Revival and Dance
The Mizoram Presbyterian Church has experienced major revivals a number of times. The most popular ones were in the years 1906, 1913, 1918, 1930, 1935, 1948, 1984, 1988 and and ‘Bethel Revival’ in 1990. There were many other minor revivals which occurred in smaller circles whether local or pastorate (several churches under one pastor). Since the first revival in 1906, there have been two popular revival responses. One is dance, and the other is an evangelical calling of people to repentance and discipleship. Each of these revival types focused on a different message.
The nature of revival dance is spontaneous. Dancers have freedom to express their spiritual experience in any way meaningful for them. Revival dance has no established form, no predictablility. Each individual person dances in his/her own free-form manner. Some dancers either move forward in a circle, or backwards and sideways.
Dance seems to be more popular and attractive to some than the sermon during the revival movement. It seems to contradict the pattern of the Presbyterian Church tradition where the sermon is the core of the worship. But in revival, the sermon takes a secondary place and dance has higher status in worship. Therefore, the song leaders are sensitive to what songs may be sung in order to keep the revival going.
We have seen that dance is intrinsically linked with revival in Mizo Christianity. Is it because the sermon is not Good News? Is the reason that the dancers are more emotional and have no interest in intellectual reflection of the message? Do dancers find dancing liberating and satisfying to their spiritual need?
Women and Dance
In 1906 Pi Hlunziki was the first person to receive a revival experience. Her response was weeping and dancing at Mission Veng Church. Immediately after other people began to dance as one of many different experiences of revival. Ever since the people in the Mizoram Presbyterian church have continued to dance because they find it meaningful and positive.
It is important to mention that women felt a great sense of belonging to the revival and this manifested itself in dancing. It is also interesting to observe that many more women dance than men. Rev. C. Lianzuala believes that in his church about 85% of the dancers are women.
As has already been discussed, women were surrounded by restrictions regulating baptism, conversion, and preaching, from which they were excluded. Their spiritual experience did not count, and they were not given a chance to share their spiritual insights. Women are disempowered by their secondary status in the church. Women suffer emotionally, psychologically, and mentally because of their inferior status in their new religion of Christianity. It is possible that women are more attracted to dance as a way to enjoy equal opportunity in the church.
In dance women are able to express their feelings, emotions, intuitions and esctasy as a way of sharing their spiritual experience. I believe women dance to liberate themselves from their oppressive image and spiritual bondage. Dance inspires women in new ways of human creation and is experienced as God's creation. To some extent women break through the restrictive practices of the church in dance.
Dance is embodiment
Revival dance is physical. Feeling is expressed through body movement, body gesture and body language. Some women dance with bare feet as a sign of humility before God. Dance communicates an emotional and esctatic experience. Dance is the physical communication of spiritual experiences. Dance acknowledges the body as sacred, to be respected. Dance is very creative because it is one of the primary sources through which we truly articulate the thoughts and images that are part of us. My mother shares her experience of dance and she says, “Dance is the language of the my body and is a tools to express the spiritual experience given by God.”
Resistance to Dance
The Welsh Presbyterian Church Missionaries introduced a style of Christianity which has little symbolic, rhythmic design. The Protestant Christianity it represents is a purely mental, philosophical religion with no physical movements for the worshipper. Therefore, church leaders find it difficult to accept the emotional, ecstatic expression of Mizo spirituality, and spiritual experience from than theirs.
The other resistance to revival dance is that it reminds the cultural life before Christianity. Christianity, of course, strongly rejected the cultural life as it was said to be connected with paganism.
Missionary Response
From the first revival in 1906, the resistance to dance has been very powerful, partly because dancing reinforced the cultural-social and religious life. Since the coming of Christianity, Mizo cultural (symbolic) dances are no longer practiced in the social life. The missionaries said that anything related to Mizo life was connected with animism. Our religious practice was called pagan. So, to avoid paganism and animism, they rejected every life style no matter what or how it was portrayed, and no matter what the occasion for its practice and its meaning might be. This is ethnocentricism, that is, cultural imperialism. Ethnocentrism is the missionaries' imposition of their culture agenda upon Mizo Christianity without regard for the people's life. The missionaries did not understand the social and religious life, therefore, they rejected what they did not understand.
Thus the missionary response to the revival dance was negative or mixed. In revival, we sing our own songs and compose our own tunes. Songs with their tunes are the music for dance. It could be possible that the missionaries might have felt excluded from the Mizo tunes which were styles they were not familiar with. At the beginning of Christianity, the English tune translated into Mizo was commonly sung in the church. Our tunes were rejected because they especially related to different occasions, for example, romance, social life, harvesting and other forms of celebration. The missionaries banned the drum, the basis for dance. By banning the drum they were banning dancing.
Mizo Christian Response
Brig. Ngurliana of the Salvation Army of Mizoram, believes that the resistance to the drum and dance was not limited to the missionaries, but was present among the Mizo themselves. The first few church leaders preferred Western songs and the fear was, “If the Mizo sang our own songs which may be related to love songs, sentimental song and drinking song, we may not be able to protect ourselves from going back to Mizo life.”
Pu Muka, one of the first church secretaries of the Mizoram Presbyterian Church confirmed that, “The missionary encouraged the Mizo to sing their own song with our own tune, but we were in trouble as to which tune to use since we have diverse tunes.” Pu Muka did not necessarily blame the first church leaders for refusing to use songs and drums in the church because at that time the message they were given was that life was pagan, dreadful and fearful. Pu Muka concluded that, “It is true the first church leaders tried their best to stay away from the traditional life as far as possible.”
Only lately, sometime in 1980, the drum was reintroduced again by the youth and every member in the church welcomed it. Since then we continue to use drum in Mission Veng Church and we love it because we cannot dance without drum.
Reflections
It is very important to reflect the celebration of Christianity in Mizoram held in January 11-16, 1994. We had the biggest drum in the world. Why do we want to have the biggest drum. Why do we reintroduce the missionary's rejected Mizo lifestyle. In spite of that the church members are very excited and enthusiastic about having a drum for the celebration.
The idea of having the drum is very symbolic in various ways. It shows our resistance to being called pagan and animist with its negative connotations. This title was given to us by the British officers and white missionaries. The pain of being called pagan and animist dies hard in the mind of the people. So, now finally we can reject these words and we can welcome Christianity as a part of ourselves. In reclaiming the drum as part of our culture we can also reclaim the dance. Now as we no longer accept the negative images of our culture given by the missionaries, the way is paved for us to accept the more positive images in traditional religion.
We need no longer be suspicious of the dancers but instead we can see dance as part of what we are, and who we are. Our dance gives us a chance to remember our cultural and religious roots. Dance empowers us to rediscover our lost essential Mizoness and to be authentic Mizo and Christians at the same time. Our dance helps us to appreciate our way of worshipping in our own spirituality.
To rediscover who we are as Mizo and as a Christians is healing. It is our hope to bring about a reawakening of religion by means of dancing. Dance is one of the uniting power for the churches. Dance Theology helps to integrate Christianity and Mizo culture and in so doing healing the disintegration of culture brought by Christianity. Dance Theology is really a new way of looking at our theology through the lens of our religious roots.
In dance, I discover a source of empowerment for women. That experience comes from dance. In dance, women's spirituality is fulfilled. In dance women are healed from their confusion and find power. A shy woman will dance to share her joy and experience in public. An invisible woman will be seen as her role of dancing will be appreciated. Dance Theology also integrates women's bodily experience with her spiritual experience. It is a recognition of the long neglected importance of women's experience and power.
[Source – In God’s Image, Vol. 19/4 2000]
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