FACULTY SPOTLIGHT: Excerpts from an Interview with Dr. Amy K. Stillman

Photo Credit: Doug Coombe

“The practice of teaching, of actually having to get out of my chair and move my body along with the students, use my body to show them what to do, and then use my body to realize how things flow from one thing into another, all that really brought everything together for me in a way that wouldn’t have happened if I had if I had kept the performance and teaching and the academic writing separated.”

Excerpts from an Interview with Dr. Amy K. Stillman
and Angela Schöpke-Gonzalez as interviewer
October 30, 2020

Photo Credit: Doug Coombe

Angela Schöpke-Gonzalez: What are you working on now?

Amy K Stillman: Oh boy, yes. I am working on a project that has turned out to be a career long project. It’s a critical edition of Hawaiian repertoire. In musicology, the convention is that an edition is supposed to be an expert assessment of the sources and selection of the most authoritative state of a work. What I’m doing in this [critical edition] instead is bringing together multiple sources for each of the songs that are in this volume to show, number one, there is an incredibly deep archive of sources for Hawaiian music that belies many claims about oral tradition. But, the primary focus [or my work] is tracking the history of hula as a performance genre that integrates poetry, music and dance, that emerged around the 1870s and bringing it down into the present. That is the key project and I hope after I finished the critical edition I actually do get to go back to because there’s a lot to be written about.

Angela Schöpke-Gonzalez: Are there particular moments that you remember shaping or influencing your path?

Amy K Stillman: I was born in ’56. Hawaii was made a state in ‘59 so I was born in the territory without full citizenship rights until statehood. What that meant for my education was that I went through a public-school system at the height of community buy-in to assimilation. So, a good part of my educational experience was in the context of settler colonialism. I was in high school when this [Hawaiian] revitalization kicked into high gear and I trotted off to hula classes with everybody else and thought, wow, this is so cool.

When I arrived at the University of Hawaii, all of the courses that had anything to do with Hawaiian history or Hawaiian anthropology were being taught by credentialed academics–in other words, not Hawaiian and not from Hawaii. In these classes we were assigned to read and learn about the ancient Hawaiian culture as it existed before the missionaries. In other words, we had to learn about a culture that had disappeared. The trouble is, we didn’t live like that. We had faculty professors telling us that we were not authentic, and what’s authentic is what was documented in these readings that we were reading and discussing. It got personal when it got to Hawaiian music. I grew up with Hawaiian music, not because I embraced it but because my parents did. So, Hawaiian music was my soundtrack. But at the University of Hawaii, my professors said that the stuff on the radio was all hybrid stuff, degraded stuff that’s not even Hawaiian. And I’m thinking, how can they say that’s not Hawaiian when I know that’s what my parents grew up with? I know that’s what I grew up on. Who’s going to tell me I’m not authentic? And it was that moment… I remember sitting in an anthropology class thinking, no, I don’t think so. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to go get me a PhD degree so I can stand face-to-face, shoulder-to-shoulder, look these people in the eye and say, “We are authentic”. And that’s what I’ve done.

That’s also when I realized that there are so many gifted musicians and hula instructors and choreographers out there who are doing fabulous work, and my niche was with the research, especially with the historical material. So, I made a conscious decision that I would focus on the research and publishing with my academic hat on even though I was completely trained as a dancer. Then in 2006, I started teaching hula [here at U of M]. I put together a one semester creative expression course for LS&A, and then a group of people successfully convinced me to open a series of, I call them masterclasses. It’s been since then that I’ve really kind of evened out this imbalance from all research, to coming to terms with the idea that people who have knowledge actually have a responsibility to share the knowledge, and not to keep it all within but to share it. The practice of teaching, of actually having to get out of my chair and move my body along with the students, use my body to show them what to do, and then use my body to realize how things flow from one thing into another, all that really brought everything together for me in a way that wouldn’t have happened if I had if I had kept the performance and teaching and the academic writing separated.

Angela Schöpke-Gonzalez: Which discipline or disciplines feel(s) like your intellectual and artistic homes?

Amy K Stillman: Early in my career I was trying to stay abreast of musicology, ethnomusicology, dance studies, folklore, and anthropology. Then performance studies came on the scene and then before I knew it I had all these different communities I was trying to keep up with. Since then I’ve wandered into ethnic studies, which has been a real intellectual home in a way that musicology had never been even though my primary training was in musicology. And maybe in the last five years or so I finally made that last step into Native American and Indigenous Studies, and that’s where I’m finding the most affinity intellectually. But it’s after having traveled through all of these different fields and having periods of intense relationship and then periods of relationships cooling off.

Angela Schöpke-Gonzalez: You mentioned performance studies – how would you define performance studies? And following, how does that relate to the home that you find yourself in now. Is performance studies still a useful category for you?

Amy K Stillman: At the moment, I’m seeing it as a less useful category than I have in the past. I think of performance studies as an eclectic enterprise that does not confine itself to disciplinary divisions, which is a good thing. It’s a space where I see putting things together like theater, dance, and sound design in a way that 10 or 20 years ago would have lived in different locations – the study of as well as the practice of. Where I haven’t quite reconciled with performance studies is that in the early 2000s, much of what was being done under the performance studies label was a kind of untethered and undisciplined way of essentially saying “I came, I saw, I theorized”. People were starting to critique performances without necessarily being historically informed about why the things that we’re seeing on stage were the way they were. That’s my big problem with performance studies, is that it has favored presentist approaches that could benefit from closer reading of how different dimensions of performance have been treated disciplinarily, and over time. So, at the moment, my heart declares that Indigenous Studies is where my attention is focused. But even then, Indigenous Studies is focused on present day struggles, especially around sovereignty, and my whole interest in performativity and embodiment is not central on the Indigenous Studies radar. But then, I’m taking advantage of seniority to declare that what my interest is in Indigenous epistemology and how it plays out in Hawaiian performance: how it tells us how we got to where we are, and how it can show us how we can imagine where we are going. And there’s that creative piece, it’s not just a matter of accounting and documenting but also pushing the envelope. Where do we go forward?

Angela M. Schöpke Gonzalez is a dance theater artist, writer, curator, educator, and data analyst currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Michigan School of Information. Angela’s work draws inspiration from deep investigations of history, civic engagement, policy perspectives, and emotional narrative, and is committed to making spaces for people to engage in dialogue about cultural identity questions.​