Calvin Luther Martin Formerly a professor of history at Rutgers University, now writer. Author of The Way of the Human Being, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade, winner of the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award for the year's best book in American History, In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Time, and the edited volume The American Indian and the Problem of History. My wife and I watched it [the video, "The Great Dance."] one evening. I am afraid my life has been not quite the same since. Was it that the film re-set my course a couple of degrees in a new direction? Re-set, now, truer to the mark? Or did it give me greater thrust, urgency, and confidence? I'm not certain. But it did something, that's certain. It did it to my wife, too. Sure, I was susceptible. Perhaps I have been waiting to see this film for years. All my life maybe. Even from before I was born, I imagine. It stirred an old memory, an old thing in me. In the reptilian brain: the oldest mind of all. There it awoke something. To say I am beholden to you is to say very little. You have done a service to humanity. To the Spirit of the Earth. The aborigines around the world know that the life and consciousness of the earth have diminished in power. The Spirit speaks in a whisper only, in fragmented phrases. Aborigines detect its dying in the fragmented song of birds and furtive ways of the nonhuman people. It is the Great Fear and Great Forgetting that is silencing the Spirit. Humans share this consciousness, this energy, this memory and mind. And when mankind separates itself from the Spirit's energy and memory and consciousness, the wholeself dies. This is disastrous. "The Great Dance" breathes life. It awakens Voice. I know that in my soul, for it did it to mine. This is not a film on ethnography; it is an ontology in its own right.
	Louis G. Herman Professor of Political Science/ Social Science and Humanities, Hawaii, USA "Congratulations! It is quite brilliant - really succeeds in conveying a Bushman-Shamanic aesthetic. The script, story line and the body language of the hunters are all haunting. 'Tracking is like Dancing. It makes your body happy . . . you are talking with God when you are doing these things'. What a precise and poetic equation expressing how Shamanic states of consciousness can help tune our life (a hunting and gathering economy and any economy) to the larger cosmic order. The opening scenes hook the viewer: the liquid shot of the melon; Mantis in the foreground, hunters in the distance - A fantastic image to spin some trickster reversals off, which you suggest filmically by the unexpected switches in POV. I love the way the story repeats on several levels - a spiral uncovering deeper and deeper layers of the hunter's relation to the world of animals and by extension the whole community of life. We have never been more in need of recovering that relationship. The climax is riveting. I found myself holding my breath. The final scene neatly recapitulates the meaning of the whole film - taking a glowing ember from where we have last been, throwing it into the dark to lead us on. I can really see the love and attention that went into every scene all the while with a vision of the whole in mind. Undoubtedly one of the most original, beautiful and powerful documentaries I've ever seen. It is clear to me why you want to think outside the box of the traditional documentary. San culture, apart from its intrinsic beauty, has some potentially life saving lessons for industrial society: "those lazy people who don't know hunting who want to share our meat. We are not happy because you must know the ways of the animal before you eat it". A deep ethic lies there. Indoor people and their governments are not only oblivious of the need to learn from a hunting and gathering culture but we contravene basic human rights in denying the hunters' access to the land and animals they need to live it; resources we stole from them in the first place. It is all too much. One cannot see the movie, understand this and not want to do something to help." Megan Biesele Author; Coordinator, Kalahari Peoples Fund; and President School of Expressive Culture, Austin, Texas, USA "I believe THE GREAT DANCE is destined to become both an anthropological and a popular classic. From my own ethnographic work in San folklore and religion, I became convinced that despite the greatly changed lifestyles of many San today, a hunting-gathering ethos often remains an accessible part of their cultural repertoire. There is nothing mystical, and certainly nothing inherently racial, about this persistence of a set of cultural tools. As !Unn/obe Morethlwa said to me in Botswana in the 1970s, to learn a skill and practice it as learned--even if that skill is the purposeful alteration of consciousness-- is not a San thing, it's a HUMAN thing. THE GREAT DANCE demonstrates this humanness aptly and dramatically. Today, we are looking to understand the limits of humanness so as to understand our human oneness. The strengths of different cultures are to be celebrated; however, looked at logically, they do not obscure the universal cultural processes by which individual men and women create, sustain, and change them. Both academics and the public yearn to grasp somehow that ultimate stretch of the human mind and spirit whose fullest expression we increasingly see in the longlived cultures which preceded us. The only thing especially "San" about the hunting, tracking, spiritual, and social abilities portrayed in THE GREAT DANCE is the unbroken connection with many previous generations of skills teaching and local knowledge. This news is, and should be, exciting to us in a profound way: it enfranchises us all, potentially, within the "primal" category we thought was reserved to remote, relict populations of hunter-gatherers and their ancestors. As Haida hunters of North America have said, "the world is as sharp as a knife". That sharpness, if we hone our societies and educate our children well, is available to all. The San in THE GREAT DANCE show us the way with the very simplicity of their approach. There is no egregious "ego" as we know it, no bravado, just matter-of-factness. They are going about the business of being people who live by (and for!) hunting in dry sub-Saharan Africa. They know how to do it, and they do it as they always do, despite the dimension of being filmed. The persistence hunt demands every ounce of humanness that can be wrung out of a person: clearly the drain that self-consciousness would put on this endeavor would destine it to failure. But matter-of-factness does not in the San case interfere with what our culture regards as the mystical or paranormal. It is clear that !Nqate and the others are familiar on an everyday basis with the permutations of useful altered states--and not just in the healing dance context. They lead us to an understanding of the power of identification with the animal they are hunting. They AND the film do this by exhausting and draining us as we feel in our bones the arduous running down of an antelope whose life-business is to run. Like the San, for whom collective understanding and creativity are all-important, the makers of THE GREAT DANCE worked collectively, drawing on the strengths of all concerned. The rapidly changing perspectives made possible by their brilliant, athletic camera work have allowed a most powerful alchemy of identity to succeed. The film is breathtaking, and it is the best visual demonstration I know to date of the following human equation: HUNTING AT ITS BEST = ART AT ITS BEST = SPIRITUAL TRANSCENDENCE." Prof. Keyan Tomaselli Director and Professor, Graduate Program in Cultural and Media Studies University of Natal, Durban, South Africa Excerpts from Prof. Tomaselli's first draft for his address at the National Khoisan Consultative Conference 2001: "Khoisan Diversity in National Unity", entitled 'The Khoisan on Film: Recovering Agency' "I want to make the point that the fourth stage of the San and Khoisan campaign for taking control of their identity is the establishment of this very Khoisan Legacy Project and National Committee, which has organised this Oudtshoorn conference. My argument is that the best means to empower this control will be in alliance with filmmakers, academics and development workers. Not just any of them, but especially those who understand the practice and power of participatory or joint research and image making. The Great Dance is a good example of this kind of production - not only were the San NGO's consulted, but the film maker worked within contracts negotiated with them; the narrative was developed with the San `actors'; the film is returned to the San in the form of screenings (and royalties) and hopefully also by means of reception analysis to come. The San have the access required to popularise these struggles on the international TV and cinema stages." "THE GREAT DANCE suggests that "tracking is dancing". Dancing has religious significance. Belinda Kruiper in August 2000, said she was at "peace with this filmmaker" in "the way the film and the movement and the energy, catching the truth and the essence of what happened between man and beast" was portrayed. "[I]n getting a message across ... he [the filmmaker/hunter] speaks to the animal and becomes the animal in the beating of the heart". Of her hunter husband Belinda observed "Vetkat could feel that by watching it. So he got that message to the hunter, the feeling of the hunter"." Paula del Giudice Chair of the Board of the National Wildlife Federation, USA "The Great Dance is spectacular! It is a visual feast! Not only is it an artistic vision, but it also depicts the San people accurately and completely honestly. No Hollywood hype, no Euro-centric values sandwiching them. Just the people, who they are, how they believe. The rain dance and the sequence following it just mesmerized me. WOW! Thank you for sharing this with me. I hope it finds a spot in many peoples' hearts and helps to make their understanding of the human spirit more widespread." Jeffrey Sehume Graduate Program in Cultural and Media Studies University of Natal, Durban South Africa "In all, Great Dance is an important media statement on the heroism of a community of San-Bushmen. It makes significant inroads in developing a more conscious balance of life of San- Bushmen in present society with all the pressures of social and cultural integration, bearing in mind the attended political pressures on the lives and cultures of these first people of the fourth world. Apart from emphasizing some of the issues of land dislocation, gender relations, social organization, other aspects in the documentary lend an air to this progressive importance of Great Dance. From a technical point of view, Great Dance uses the camera as an actor in the narrative. The manipulation of images and sound augurs well in driving and accentuating the great hunt. The effect of globalization is one other theme that manifests itself in the documentary. Globalization has affected the once uncorrupted ways of life of this San community. This is reflected in the fashion of their dress, Western clothes and combined indigenous entertainment with radios. It indicates that the makers of the documentary were concerned with presenting as 'realistic' as possible a portrayal of contemporary San society." Jenny Huggett Marine biologist, Marine & Coastal Management, Cape Town, South Africa "The Great Dance" is an overwhelmingly beautiful movie - words escape us… Thank you so much for the privilege of a sneak preview."

 

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