In any event, Highland dancing became regimented for a very long time after the Academy commenced. Several specific movements that Mr Sutherland taught me were banned or penalised, one cannot quite ascertain which. This censorship by the uninformed had the same effects on art as censorship always has. A dreariness of performance and the repression of the art itself were the results. 

 

Among the repressed techniques were some of those that we have discussed, for example, the open second aerial position in the pas de bas of the sword dance and elsewhere, high cutting with an open second aerial position, high cutting in the hornpipe, the proper shake in shak-a-foot in the fling, side cutting in Seann Truibhas for a time. One atavistic innovation was the reversion to the very old-fashioned square start to the reels, but worse, was the modification to the technique for swinging in them which turned it into an ugly sight. There were other techniques that were repressed. It was really less a matter of problems with particular movements than it was of the suppression of a particular approach to, and a style of, Highland dancing.

 

Some in the New Zealand Highland dancing community interpret its history in a particular way. The argument is that New Zealand dancing now represents an historic remnant, an outpost of technique that was brought here from Scotland a long time ago. From this beginning it is supposed to have evolved into its current high art form. The dancing must have come from Scotland of course, but the remnant outpost and evolutionary theories of the recent style is a Whig, or self justifying, view of history which would furnish the Academy with some authenticity were it correct.

 

Substantiation of the Whig view requires among other things a listing of the initiating immigrant dancers and their dancing records in Scotland. It then has to show that the Academy style in the 1950s and 1960s was a part of a continuum from them. The transfer theory has also to explain why it is that the style came only to New Zealand and not to Canada, South Africa or Australia.

 

This memoir will show that there are no such antecedents. Furthermore, a sharp break with the past occurred as the Academy asserted itself as the controlling body around 1950. Ian Cameron's single mindedness, the registration process and bureaucratic aspirations were the reasons for the discontinuity with the past.

 

The breach with the past was supported by the registration processes for competitiors, competitions and judges. Judges were selected by an Academy process. They selected winners by Academy criteria, ergo to win, one danced the Academy way and not in the Sutherland style. Judges, winners and the Academy were thus a self-supporting system.

 

Competing at an unregistered meeting could result in a competitor's disqualification. Meetings had to register because no one would compete and no one would judge otherwise. Both the competitors and the meetings therefore had to register in another self-supporting system. Apart from the lack of evidence supporting the Whig argument for a continuum, the registration processes were the necessary mechanism that supported the Academy's break with the past c. 1950.

 

As an example, this stranglehold contributed to the Wellington Competitions Society's removal of Highland dancing from its competitions. These were very big competitions in all types of vocal and instrumental music and dancing for children, that ran for a week in the August school holidays. They were run by prominent people involved in the performing arts. There was no prize money nor medals but certifcates went down to highly commended.

 

There were similar societies in other cities. The Wellington Society had a long history and it was not about to accept restrictions on the appointment of its judges and on its Highland dancing competitors when it was free to appoint judges in all the other arts and in which it allowed any child to perform.

 

Some young ballet dancers would enter the Highland dancing competitions as well. The organisers, unlike at the Highland dancing meetings, did not require registration cards at these competitions. Alexander Grant danced the best hornpipes at these competitions that I am ever likely to see. Grant became a career ballet dancer in the United Kingdom and later in Canada. Ironically he was an advisor to The Scottish Ballet.

 

Ballet teachers of character dancing were outside the Piping and Dancing Association’s net, and their unregistered pupils were competing in Highland dancing events at these large, well-organised, unregulated and unregistered meetings run by the Wellington Competitions Society.

 

There was a record of coldly received intrusion by the Piping and Dancing Association into these long-established societies’ events at the official level. At the other end, the Piping and Dancing Association reminded the dancing fraternity of the risk of competing at unregistered meetings. The mere possibility of disqualification caused we dancers to withdraw from the Wellington Competitions, which stopped its Highland dancing events.

 

The point for this memoir is that the outcome of the Wellington episode illustrates that the registration system was a controlling mechanism and that the Piping and Dancing Association used it as such. This policing mechanism facilitated the changes in dancing that the Academy instituted, as has been shown.

 

In its formative years the Academy of Highland and National Dancing regulated and regimented the art in ways that changed the character of Highland dancing throughout New Zealand. Whatever the nature of dance that previously existed in New Zealand was later extinguished by decree.

 

The power behind the decrees lay in the national registration of judges, dancers and competitions by the New Zealand Piping and Dancing Association, the parent body of the Academy. This was the self-sustaining selective process that determined the transition to the new style.

 

The imposed style was not a style of dancing that recognisably evolved from its forerunner. I was competing around the North Island before the Academy was established and I saw the dancing alter as it assumed control, dance by dance.

 

Dancers became the same, “Like peas in a pod”, we used to say. My Mother offers an illustration of the demise of an earlier style – one which my teacher derided. She learned dancing from Alexander (Sandy) Sutherland in Invercargill, himself a New Zealander, during and after the First War.

 

Her style of dancing, in which she was competitively successful, was quite unlike the style imposed in the 1950s. That is to say that the 1950s nation-wide style of dancing did not evolve from the Otago and Southland style of the earlier period when those provinces had the largest Scots population and the longest Scottish tradition and orientation of any region of New Zealand. Nor did the style of the 1950s develop from an earlier North Island style of dance, as I have mentioned.

 

William Sutherland was dancing in Scotland before 1900. The first regular Highland games in New Zealand had been held less than 40 years before that. He was dancing in New Zealand in the 1920s. No one was better able to compare styles. He never mentioned any general differences between the pre-Academy style of dancing in New Zealand and the Scottish style. His comments were of the sort that poor teaching produces poor dancing everywhere. It is false to assert that there was a pre-Academy style of dancing that was peculiar to New Zealand.

 

The Academy introduced a centralised style that was imposed over a certain amount of dissent, not least from my teacher. It occurred as a part of the movement towards social conformity following World War II that has drawn comment in other aspects of New Zealand social history.

 

The Academy was to run afoul of the Scottish Official Board quite early in the piece. This attracted public comment from the examiner for the British Ballet Organisation:

 

HIGHLAND DANCING SITUATION IN N.Z. “FANTASTIC”

What she described as “a fantastic situation” existed in the attitude towards Highland dancing in New Zealand, the Australian representative of the British Ballet Organisation (Mrs Vera Lacey) said on her arrival in Wellington today. Mrs Lacey said that in her tour of the South Island she had found dancing teachers were confused, because where their pupils were following the technique set down by the Scottish Board of Highland dancing [sic] they were being penalised in competition work.

 

Mrs Lacey said that the board’s technique had been laid down after extensive research into Scottish Highland dancing over the past century. The board had been set up because of differences in technique which existed in different parts of the United Kingdom and, in fact, all over the world.

 

“Before the setting up of the board, Scottish dancing differed even in different States of Australia,” Mrs Lacey said. “The basic steps remain the same but the board’s technique means slight alterations in detail work.”

 

PUPILS PENALISED Mrs Lacey said she had discovered that in New Zealand the pupils of teachers of Scottish national dancing who taught standardised technique were being penalised in competition work despite the fact that the New Zealand organisation was an affiliated member of the Scottish board.

 

“Last year the British Ballet Organisation went to considerable expense to bring an expert in Highland dancing to New Zealand to conduct examinations so that teachers could discuss the board’s technique with her, but all this seems to have been of little use.

 

“It almost appears as if New Zealand wants to carry on its own technique of Highland dancing. If this is so, those who want to follow the standardised technique should not be penalised,” said Mrs Lacey.

 

Mrs Lacey added that the board on which every big dance organisation in Scotland was represented had, at the end of their research, brought out a book on its technique. This book clearly described the technique and gave variations for each step. In Sean Truibhas, for instance, there were 18 steps including variations to choose from.

 

Mrs Lacey said that during her tour of the South Island she had examined about 300 ballet pupils. She would see 200 in Wellington and 400 in Auckland. Evening Post, 15 June 1956, p 11.

 

The Piping and Dancing Association President, Neil McPhee, tried to get the Academy on track about this time. He arranged the purchase of Scottish Official Board films of Mr Sutherland’s pupil James L. MacKenzie which were publicly shown in the Thistle Hall. The three McCanns made up a sizable fraction of the audience because of an Academy boycott of the films. They were shown privately to Mr Sutherland. Neil also supported former Academy dancer Jean MacLennan and arranged for her to explain the faults in Academy technique that she had come to realise from her time in Scotland.

 

The Academy’s reaction to the films and to Jean MacLennan’s message reinforced the implicit directives that New Zealand dancers had already received from it. Both were ignored.

 

By this time, the middle 1950s (and earlier), New Zealand pipers were going to Scotland. The dancers were not to follow them because of the repression of the Scottish style of dancing that the Academy was by then enforcing in New Zealand. The film and the MacLennan episodes are indicators of the Academy’s attitude. There was no hope for a dancer bringing Scottish technique to New Zealand. More generally, the period was one when young New Zealanders started their OE en masse and the Academy’s stance was the reason why Highland dancers, qua dancers, did not join their peers and their pipers. This failure was to have consequences for New Zealand dancing that are revealed by the comparison with its piping.