Travel and Translation in the Dance Writings of Beryl de Zoete

Around the time Marcia Siegel's dance writing career began, an important predecessor's ended with the death in 1962 of Beryl de Zoete, critic and ethnologist. Of Dutch descent, de Zoete was born in London in 1879 into a family of brokers whose name still figures prominently on the British stock exchange. Traveling independently, using her gifts for meeting people and learning languages, she wrote three unprecedented ethnographies, beginning with the book she produced with Walter Spies, Dance and Drama in Bali (1938), and followed by The Other Mind: A Study of Dance in South India (1953) and Dance and Magic Drama in Ceylon (1957). From the late 1920s through the mid-1950s, de Zoete also published many articles on her encounters with European dance and music, and her reviews of performances and books appeared regularly in newspapers, most notably in the influential weekly New Statesman and Nation. After she died, her friend Arthur Waley completed her planned collection of short pieces, The Thunder and the Freshness (1963), titled after poet John Keats's description of a waterfall. This image evoked, for her, the sound of dance drumming before dawn.In this talk, I sketch de Zoete's life and begin to think about how she worked as a writer. As part of my doctoral research, I investigated her connections with Dalcroze Eurhythmies, which teaches music through movement and improvisation. I also draw on previous work by Margaret Dale, who remembers de Zoete's visits to Sadler's Wells Ballet rehearsals in the 1940s and later consulted her about presenting Sinhalese dance on BBC television.