Beth Dean and dance in the Pacific region

CHOREOGRAPHER and dance researcher Beth Dean died on 5 February 2012 in the Sydney area, at the age of 93. Few people interested in the dance of the Pacific will not have encountered her work.
Dean also has an important connection to research on Papua New Guinea dance.
Born in Denver, USA, in 1918, Dean studied ballet early on and moved to Paris at the age of ten to study more intently. Although she returned to Denver to complete high school, she would later also continue her studies in Europe.
After returning to the US, she married Sydney-born singer Victor Carell (1916-2001) in 1944, and three years later they moved to Australia, where they appeared in a number of musicals, such as Annie Get Your Gun, toured Australia and New Zealand, and eventually settled in Sydney.
For eight months in 1953, they conducted field research on Aboriginal dance in Arnhem Land and Central Australia.
This work resulted in Dean’s choreography for the ballet Corroboree (1954)-probably the first Australian work based on fieldwork concerning Australian Aboriginal dance. In the lead role, Dean performed before the Queen during her visit to Australia.
In 1955 Dean and Carell began their involvement with Papua New Guinea.
Impressed by the work they had done in Australia, Franciscan missionaries approached them about making a film about their mission work in the Aitape and Lumi areas.
They accepted this challenge, but were also determined to learn something about dance in the region.
During their visit, they began a long friendship with a man from Malol village named Brere Awol, who would later become a Member of the House of Assembly and Member of Parliament, 1968-77.
Awol would also visit Dean and Carell in Australia and was the subject of one of their films.
After their filming on the Sandaun coast was complete, Dean and Carell flew to Mount Hagen so they could do more research on dance.
There they made the first known sound recordings of music and the film of the courting traditions known in Tok Pisin as tanim het.
These materials provide important comparative information about traditions during the last half century.
While Dean and Carell made recordings of traditional music and sang and danced to show their own traditions, photographs also show Beth Dean recording the speeches of Ninji, a well-known Hagen bikman, as well as Dean demonstrating her ballet pirouettes to an admiring audience.
Amongst the numerous films they made, one specifically focussed on the dances they witnessed in Papua New Guinea.
They also wrote a book about their experiences here called Softly, Wild Drums.
Dean and Carell revisited Papua New Guinea in 1965 and at other times thereafter.
They also travelled to other parts of Sandaun, such as Telefomin, Green River, and Vanimo.
In Imonda they interviewed and recorded the first Papua New Guinean patrol officer named Phillip Bouraga, who would become Secretary to Parliament, Police Commissioner, and an MP for the National Capital District, 1982-87.
Dean and Carell continued to collaborate for the rest of their lives.
Dean’s ballet, Kukaitcha, was performed by the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico as part of the production Ballet of the Five Continents at the 1968 Cultural Olympics in Mexico City.
However, their association with the Pacific had definitely not ended.
In 1970, Dean and Carell helped establish the Cook Islands National Arts Theatre and brought them to Australia for performances.
Two years later, they directed the staging of the first South Pacific Festival of Arts in Suva, Fiji, an event now called the Festival of Pacific Arts.
In 1973 they directed performances for the opening of Sydney’s Opera House, and Dean later appeared as the focus of the TV programme This Is Your Life.
They co-authored an autobiography called Twin Journey in 1983, which provides many details of their lives and accomplishments, including their visits to Papua New Guinea.
By herself or in collaboration with Victor Carell or others, Dean wrote a number of books and articles about dance in the Pacific region, such as South Pacific: Pacific Islands Art and Dance (1972), Three Dances of Oceania (1976), and South Pacific Dance (1978).
This was done at a time when few people considered such traditions even worthy of the name “dance”; she and Carell were also true trailblazers in organising what has become the Festival of Pacific Arts.
The research materials Dean and Carell have collected are preserved in various archives in Australia.
The Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies is presently collaborating with some of these institutions to bring back copies of these invaluable materials so that they might be available to researchers here as well.
While other people are now studying dance traditions of the Pacific, all should be familiar with the pioneering work of Beth Dean and Victor Carell.