Deciphering the Dance

Ryan Koons ’10 opens a musical window into American Indian culture.

by Matt Getty

July 1, 2009

Ryan Koons '10 discusses his project with Blake Wilson and Susan Rose.

A dozen men stand beside a fire, their bare backs bleeding slowly from long, thin scratches etched by a garfish jawbone. Later, women, who already marched around the flames with long green, red and violet ribbons flowing from their hair, join the men. Backed by the round thrum of a water drum mixed with a rattling gourd shaker, they shuffle around the circle bent at the waist, dragging wooden clubs and occasionally whirling together like a single wounded animal.

As Ryan Koons ’10 watches this daylong scene through the lens of his video camera, he asks himself one question—“What does it mean?”

This is the Pine Arbor Tribal Town’s annual Harvest Busk, which also includes a Feather Dance and culminates with community members spilling baskets of vegetables onto the fire. Though the ceremony has been performed annually in northern Florida for thousands of years, the question on Koons’ mind may never have been as important as it is now. Led by one of the few families of Apalachicola Creek American Indians that trace their involvement in the busk to precolonial times, the gathering opens a valuable window into American Indian culture and history.

“This is as rich a tradition as any of the thousand-year-old European traditions, and nobody knows about it,” says Koons. With the community’s key tradition bearer now in his 70s, the tribe granted Koons this rare access in part to help keep the tradition alive. “If the community doesn’t do something and if academics don’t do something, frankly, the tradition will die. And this is too important to just allow it to die.”

To help the busk survive, the music major launched an independent study this spring, which will grow next year into his senior thesis—a multimedia ethnomusicological and ethnochoreographic analysis of two of the community’s winter ceremonies.

Having traveled to Florida to record the dizzying ritual and interview tribe members during winter break, Koons worked this semester with Justin Marquis ’93, Web and multimedia specialist and adjunct instructor for community studies, to edit his footage into a documentary detailing the chronology of the Harvest Busk. Next year, Koons will work with his thesis advisor Blake Wilson, professor of music, to analyze the event as an ethnomusicological artifact.

“The idea is that music is a window into a culture,” explains Koons, a Westminster, Md., native who performs with his parents in a traditional Nordic and Celtic ensemble. “If you know how to look for it, and if your data is comprehensive enough, you can take madrigals from the 1500s and 1600s and figure out what the political system was like. In Creek culture, this ceremony is described as a microcosm of life. … The dance and the music provide a view into their worldview.”

Capturing that view, however, takes much more than pressing “record” on a camera. Beyond overcoming such technical challenges as how to shoot at night when all of your subjects are backlit by fire, Koons must bridge a gaping cultural divide. 

“The biggest challenge for him is capturing a nonwestern worldview,” says Marquis. “The people he’s talking to are telling him that their worldview is cyclical, and you can’t understand one dance without knowing the entire history of all the dances. So to just study an individual dance in their worldview is meaningless, but for Ryan it is meaningful.”

This is a common ethnographic hurdle, says Assistant Professor of Music Amy Wlodarski, who has helped Koons understand that even if he can’t gain a true insider’s perspective, he can still produce a useful study. Much of that lesson came through the Comparative Black Liberation Movements Mosaic, in which Wlodarski encouraged Koons to participate last year. As part of a multidisciplinary team of faculty and students examining the anti-apartheid and civil-rights movements, Koons traveled to South Africa last summer to capture oral histories of the people and the music behind the four-decade movement to end apartheid.

“That was really throwing him into the field,” says Wlodarski, one of three faculty members who participated in the Community Studies Center (CSC) project. “It was a completely new culture, his first time on a plane, his first passport—all those broadening global experiences we want for our students. And he grew so wonderfully from it that it allowed him to go to the Pine Arbor community and really understand the role of the ethnographer. … He hadn’t just learned about the field’s theoretical challenges; he’d experienced them.”

Following the Mosaic and encouraged by Susan Rose ’77, director of the CSC and professor of sociology, Koons applied for and won a CSC grant to help fund his fieldwork with the Pine Arbor community. “Ryan just has a wonderful sense of awe and excitement as well as the humility and confidence to ask really good questions,” says Rose.

Armed with the grant, his Mosaic experience and that sensibility, Koons has begun to answer that overarching question that vexed him as he recorded the Harvest Busk. The scratches, he says, represent a spiritual and physical cleansing. The shuffling and whirling Buffalo Dance honors buffalo and other animals that provide food. The Feather Dance, in which the men take on both masculine and feminine qualities … Koons pauses, his eyebrows sinking together with concern. “I don’t quite understand that yet,” he says, “but I’ve still got a long way to go.”

View an audio slideshow with Ryan Koons ’10’s commentary on his photos of the Harvest Busk.