These difficulties with dancing that the Academy and the Piping and Dancing Association are experiencing are an outcome of a particular view of history. A reassessment of that history is being undertaken here and further review of the roles of key individuals in the pantheon is necessary, as has already been done with Ian Cameron and May Thorne-Wilson, to whom the memoir is about to return.
The central individuals will be referred to collectively as "the founders", meaning the inner group of influential people in the Piping and Dancing Association and in the Academy from 1945 to 1955. They are important by reason of a deliberate decision they took, in addition to the activities that they are recognised for. The method will continue to be that of political history, considering the interactions of organisations, the place of pipers and the motive force of an idea.
Though their organisation is now the junior player in its partnership with the Pipe Bands Association and the Academy, presidents of the Piping and Dancing Association from 1945 controlled the successful efforts to entrench the Academy in New Zealand but without winning international acceptance of it. Presidents Cameron, Cruden and Nicholson were administrators whose solutions were in terms of rules and regulations - the semi legalistic reaction. Administrative and legal methods are more effective in preventing activities than they are in making things happen.
Having lost control of the Pipe Bands, the presidents' enduring problem was to maintain the Academy in a subservient role to their Association and the constitutions were written to this end. The tactic of control through ex-officio appointments has worked better at some times than it has at others. Presidents were supported in their manoeuvrings with the dancing Academy over a long time by some pipers.
From about 1950, New Zealand pipers have been laying their foundations on Scots granite. Yet almost to a man around this time the pipers on the committees of the Piping and Dancing Association turned from this practise by supporting the dancing Academy in building its castle in the air. The committed support for the dancing Academy of pipers in the Association meetings was organised by Ian Cameron and it was crucial. The strange thing is that they and everyone else knew Mr Sutherland's dancing credentials. Some of the pipers who promoted the Academy in the Piping and Dancing Association meetings tried to maintain a personal relationship with Mr Sutherland. He used to refer to them as those who "Run with the hares and hunt with the hounds". Scots authority was accepted by these men in piping but not in dancing.
Though not a piper, this group later included Percy Geddes who, with others, was to assume the role of historian in finding the supposed roots of the Academy in Scotland and who became an Academy President in a long-sighted move by the Association in placing him there.
The directed history of the Academy that these people developed, selectively writes out of the record the undeviating and enduring opposition to the Academy dancing style of the only expert dancer in New Zealand, William Sutherland. Their official story asserts the excellence and the knowledge of the local dancers who developed the Academy method of dancing, yet who really had no dancing education other than from their likewise untutored teachers. The received version of that history, written by those effectively unschooled in dancing, tries to break this cycle of ignorance by tracking this teaching to largely inexpert dancers from Scotland.
Here we have the reason for the excision from the record that May Thorne-Wilson was Mr Sutherland's dancing pupil. It would have been a non-sequitur to connect her to his Scottish authority when he was so opposed to the methods that she helped to introduce through the Academy. All the writers of the history could do was to suppress her connection to him, and they did so.
The slanted history acknowledges Mr Sutherland’s record in Scotland in a cursory manner yet he was a major presence, for a long time, in each country. This point is not developed at all in what is called the “history”. His ostracism and its consequences are not a part of the Academy’s preferred story.
Sending Mr Sutherland to Coventry offers a major insight into the Academy founders’ interest in dancing. They are held to be farsighted developers when actually they excluded the man who could have helped them, from both organisations. The few of Mr Sutherland’s ex-pupils who were involved at different times had essentially no influence for much the same reasons. The same is true of Davey Bothwell and Bert Robertson. All of those people were absorbed and neutralised.
The deliberate decision that the founders made from the outset was to exclude Mr Sutherland from the Academy. This ostracism of Mr Sutherland at the very beginning has led to today’s difficulties. There has been a suppression of that critical fact. It is central to the understanding of the politics of, and in understanding the techniques of, and in evaluating the contribution of the founders to, the New Zealand Academy of Highland and National Dancing today.
The founders had decided to redirect the course of New Zealand Highland dancing. The logic of their attitude towards Mr Sutherland was, almost as a necessary progression, extended to an antipathy towards the Scottish Official Board. By the mid 1950s the founders had a difficult situation of their own making on their hands. They were prevented from comprehending or adequately responding to the signals that they were getting from the Board by their predetermined position on an artificial dancing method. A reassessment of the founders’ mindset, their personal objectives and their worldview appears necessary on these issues.
It is very important to realise that Mr Sutherland’s immediate opposition was to the dancing techniques that were being introduced. That opposition always remained and later extended to the Academy itself, as the organisation that enforced them. The so-called roots of the Academy method in Scotland were revealed for local consumption in part as a response to New Zealanders who were influenced by the pressure that the Scottish Official Board was exerting. Another reason behind the development of the false history was the long run necessity for the members of an organisation to see it as legitimate.
Had the Academy truly had direct lines to competitors of repute in Scotland it would have proclaimed them during its beginnings. For example, May Thorne-Wilson’s connection to Mr Sutherland was used in this way until he made it untenable, as we have seen. The Academy made no such other serious claim in its formative period nor indeed at any time before 1960. It was some time after that date that these claims appeared. The immediate issue is why the claimed Scottish origins of Academy dancing took so long to emerge.
The effect of my own dancing enters here as a part of the reason for the long delay in the appearance of the roots in Scotland argument. I was actively dancing all around the North Island, and occasionally in the South, from 1944 until about 1960. There was interest around the boards in the way that I danced. It advertised Mr Sutherland’s rejection of the Academy. The Academy could not lay a claim to a Scottish derivation with Mr Sutherland’s pupil performing before everyone and demonstrating the contrast. The construction of links to Scotland would become possible only as Mr Sutherland passed from the scene. This is why it was so long delayed.
The Academy developed and relied on an erroneous view of the history of Highland dancing in New Zealand, which has had the effect of justifying the implementation of the Academy’s dancing technique. This interpretation was adopted by policy makers in the Piping and Dancing Association and the Academy from about 1970, or in any event after Mr Sutherland’s death. That interpretation (and consequently its subsequent use) can be clearly demonstrated.
This memoir does not dispute the fact of the existence of the lines to dancers in Scotland that the genealogists have disinterred. The error is in the interpretation that has been attached to the genealogy. The flaws in the lines to Scotland theory, each of which is terminal to the argument, are: (1) the assumption that those Scots forebears were successful competitive dancers. If they were not competitively successful in the premier Highland games in Scotland then they have no standing as a source of dancing knowledge; (2) Mr Sutherland had impeccable Scots credentials, known to all, that were not utilised; (3) it does not explain why the style came only to new Zeland - how is it that dancers presumably from different parts of Scotland brought a common method of dance just to New Zealand? (4) the establishment of the Academy marked a sharp break about 1950 in the way that New Zealanders danced. There was no evolution from Scotland.
The idea that the dance that the Academy introduced is in a line developed from Scotland has been shown in this memoir to be false. However, it has taken root in ordinary dancers’ minds, as it was intended that it should. It is something of a creation myth for Academy adherents. It surrounds the founders in a glow of adulation. It is the well-spring of New Zealand dancers’ resentment of the Scottish Official Board’s actions. Other reservations that they have are superficialities, a veneer over that construction.
The creation myth has been reinforced by examination among generations of Academy teachers and dancers who are now the rank and file in the New Zealand resistance to the Scottish Official Board. The purpose and the function of the myth and the fact of the break in style that the Academy introduced c. 1950, would have to be explained to them all in order to de-mythologise New Zealand dancing. It would then be possible for the Academy to alter its stance vis a vis the Board.
That official view of history is now restricting the available options in trying to deal with the Scottish Official Board. To modify this policy would be to deny the history that the Academy and the Association have disseminated to decades of their members, who have received it in good faith. The Association and the Academy are now the prisoners of the history that they wrote. Responsibility for the capture of the two organisations by the rewritten history lies with the policy makers in them both since about 1970.
The generic issue to which this memoir seems always to return is, “Who taught Jane Doe Highland dancing?” As Mr Sutherland used to say in his soft Highland accent, the answer to that rhetorical question usually is, “Peter learned from Paul and Paul learned from Andrew but Andrew never knew it in the first place”. And there is the whole problem of the Academy today.
A dancing life is a short one and the Academy has damaged generations of dancers for nearly 60 years. I really doubt that New Zealand dancing can recover from all of this because the root and branch pruning of a tree has effects that remain as long as it lives.