Works Cited
Brill, Deirdre. 2007. “La Escuela Cubana:
Dance Education and Performance in
Revolutionary Cuba.” PhD diss., University
of Pennsylvania.
Burdsall, Lorna. 2001. More Than Just a
Footnote: Dancing from Connecticut to
Revolutionary Cuba. Montmagny, Québec:
AGMV Marquis.
Daniel, Yvonne. 1995. Rumba: Dance and Social
Change in Contemporary Cuba. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press.
De la Fuente, Alejandro. 2001. A Nation for All:
Race, Inequality, and Politics in TwentiethCentury Cuba. Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press.
Dopico Black, Georgina. 1989. “The Limits of
Expression:
Intellectual
Freedom
in
Postrevolutionary Cuba.” Cuban Studies 19:
107–42.
Fernandes, Sujatha. 2006. Cuba Represent!
Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of
New Revolutionary Cultures. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Frederik, Laurie. 2012. Trumpets in the
Mountains: Theater and the Politics of
National Culture in Cuba. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Gleijeses, Piero. 2002. Conflicting Missions:
Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press.
Guerra, Lillian. 2012. Visions of Power in Cuba:
Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959–
1971. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press.
Guillermoprieto, Alma. 2004. Dancing with
Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution.
Translated by Esther Allen. New York:
Vintage Books.
Hagedorn, Katherine. 2001. Divine Utterances:
The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution
Press.
John, Suki. 2007. “La tecnica cubana: A
Revolution in Dance.” PhD diss., University
of Connecticut.
Lumsden, Ian. 1996. Machos, Maricones, and
Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality. Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press.
Miller, Nicola. 2008. “A Revolutionary
Modernity: the Cultural Policy of the Cuban
156
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Revolution.” Journal of Latin American
Studies 40(4): 675–96.
Moore, Robin D. 2006. Music and Revolution:
Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Mousouris, Melinda. 2002. “The Dance World
of Ramiro Guerra.” In Caribbean Dance
from Abakuá to Zouk: How Movement
Shapes Identity, edited by Susanna Sloat, 56–
72. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida
Press.
Roca, Octavio. 2010. Cuban Ballet. Layton, UT:
Gibbs Smith.
Sawyer, Mark Q. 2006. Racial Politics in
Post-Revolutionary Cuba. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Terry, Walter. 1981. Alicia and Her Ballet
Nacional de Cuba. New York: Anchor Press/
Doubleday.
Tomé, Lester. 2011. “The Cuban Ballet: Its
Rationale, Aesthetics and Artistic Identity as
Formulated by Alicia Alonso.” PhD diss.,
Temple University.
Viddal, Grete. 2012. “Vodú Chic: Haitian
Religion and the Folkloric Imaginary in
Socialist Cuba.” New West Indian Guide 86
(3–4): 205–36.
Dance on Its Own Terms: Histories
and Methodologies
edited by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot. 2013.
Oxford University Press. 464 pp., 77 illustrations,
notes, index. $99 hardcover, $39.95 paper.
doi:10.1017/S0149767713000193
For a couple of decades now, dance scholars
have been blessed with a seemingly endless
identity crisis. That is, the explosion of dance
scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s, and the
felicitous proliferation of methodologies this
engendered, has led many dance scholars to
pursue specific research interests and broad disciplinary queries in tandem. Getting a grip on
just what the field is up to has been a shared
project, and edited collections have played a
pronounced role, particularly for undergraduates, in laying out the state of the field. The origins of dance studies (particularly its debts to
anthropology and literary studies), and its rise
alongside related critical discourses (particularly
cultural and performance studies), made for a
motley origin and a constantly pluralizing
maturation.
In the 1990s, a series of important collections helped to define the ever-malleable,
usually interdisciplinary parameters of dance
studies. Collections in the first decade of the
2000s often focused on subdisciplines or
specialized lines of inquiry. One of these,
Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research,
took up the question of methodology head-on,
considering the ways in which dance is not
only subject to, but productive of, critical theory. Its introduction diagnosed two responses
among scholars to the heady theorizations of
the ’90s—one that embraced interdisciplinarity,
and another that “emphasized the need to find
methods and instruments of analysis within
dance itself” (Franco and Nordera 2007, 8).
An important new volume of historical and
critical essays, Dance on Its Own Terms: Histories
and Methodologies, edited by Melanie Bales and
Karen Eliot, enters the disciplinary scrum
knowingly. At a few points, its Introduction
frames the collection as a response to the project
taken up by Dance Discourses, and plants itself
firmly in the dance-centered camp. The editors
are unambiguous as to why a dance-centric criticism is merited: “In their eagerness to adopt
theoretical language from other disciplines,
dance scholars have lost fluency in their own
language” (4). I suspect that a host of dance
scholars would assent to that view, but would
greet a concurrent claim more warily. The editors worry that “the body is theorized as a site
for the study of race, class, and gender, but
many dance students are inadequately equipped
to observe and write about bodies in movement,” and likewise that “monolithic assumptions impose themselves on our attention
where nuance and sophisticated criticism is
needed instead” (4). It is a trend, they claim,
that too often leads toward “foregone conclusions.” One faint implication here is that political emphases were imported to dance studies
by theoretical models external to dance; a stronger implication is that interdisciplinary
emphases obscure rather than illuminate the
nuances specific to dance.
Partly anticipating such objections, the editors specify that “the political nature of dance is,
we think, inarguable,” but that the “wealth and
ambiguity of dance’s history” can best emerge
by “examining dances within their own
contextual frames” (6–7). In discussing their
historiographic impulses, the editors present
the project as a progressive one that seeks to
include a wider variety of historical actors, and
many of the essays keep to that objective. The
collection takes an approach that is at once historicist and formalist, reaching toward contingencies particular to dance (for example,
prioritizing primary sources like dance notation), and likewise harnessing analytic frameworks particular to dance (for example, Laban
Movement Analysis). It would be reductive to
suggest that the editors see no place for theory,
no value in cross-disciplinary work; rather, they
have embraced a dance-outward approach as
one means for advancing the field. Whether
this dance-centrism is a necessary corrective or
a questionable revanchism (or both) will and
ought to be the subject of further debate.
Lurking behind this debate is a broad question: has dance studies as a field come far
enough along to dance on its own two feet?
The collection will elicit different responses to
that question from its different readers, since
it illustrates both the advantages and the pitfalls
of its declared approach. It is telling that some
of the collection’s strongest essays manage to
meld dance-specific rigor with a sustained
engagement of other disciplines.
The volume is thoughtfully grouped into
three parts, each with a different emphasis: the
first on performance and reconstruction, the
second on pedagogy and the choreographic process, and the third on systems of notation.
While these groupings hold together fairly
well, plenty of the essays also fulfill the editors’
hope of speaking to each other from across the
collection. Few of those connections are explicit:
the focus on dance seems to have left many contributors hesitant to theorize broadly, and the
introductions to each of the book’s three parts
treat their contents with a light hand. In other
words, not only dance in general, but each
essay individually, exists on its own terms. It is
to the editors’ credit that they still crosspollinate so productively. It is also perhaps
partly the product of a separate dynamic: most
of the volume’s contributors are connected in
some way to The Ohio State University.
The essays touch on a range of issues, many
of which deal with the process of reconstruction
and the status of the dance text. Karen Eliot’s
excellent essay is an apt opening to the volume,
DRJ 45/3 • DECEMBER 2013
157
as it considers how specific historical pressures
(here, those coalescing in Great Britain during
the Second World War) form historically specific
ideas of the ballet canon, in this case those cultivated under the aegis of two notably different
company directors. Ninette de Valois, viewing
tradition as an open system, presented restagings
that sought to “revivify the past in contemporary
terms” (27). Mona Inglesby hewed more closely
to a conservative idea of the traditional, and saw
the project of preserving the classics as, among
other things, “a rampart against the tides of
war” (30). These attitudes are traced in part by
studying their differing relationships to the
régisseur émigré Nicholas Sergeyev.
Of immense help in framing this and
related discussions is the term “culture of reconstruction” (67), introduced by Deborah Friedes
Galili in her contribution. In Galili’s account,
this term “comprises the attitudes and
approaches toward reconstructive practices,” as
determined by historically and nationally
specific values, predominant theories of reconstructive practice, and the institutions facilitating a reconstruction. Galili considers the way
in which the present contemporary dance
scene in Israel privileges not supposedly faithful
reproduction, but “recycling” (a choreographer’s remixing and reframing of their own
past work) as a reconstructive mode.
Many of the cultures of reconstruction discussed across the volume resemble something
like Galili’s recycling model, or at least show the
ways in which cultures of reconstruction are
always subject to local pressures and serendipities. Several of the essays demystify the very
idea of reconstruction, elucidating the nuances
of time and place that prioritize one choreographic quality over another, or infuse wholly
contemporary idioms under the guise of authenticity. One welcome move in the collection is the
extension of this revisionist attitude toward
the pedagogy of the danse d’école, pointing to
the ways in which the personalities and proclivities of teachers and mentors do not so much
transmit as transform the traditions of ballet
training. Carrie Gaiser Casey, noting the role of
homosocial relationships in Anna Pavlova’s company, seeks to “complicate our understanding
of feminist ballet history” by demonstrating that
the dissemination of the ballet tradition is a far
from passive affair (207). Jessica Zeller, in her
study of the noted teacher Rochelle Zide-Booth,
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explores the eclectic syncretism that can operate
on both an individual and a national scale.
Reconstructing past dances, and practicing a
pedagogy, emerge as equally inflected practices;
further work on how these phenomena intersect
promises great rewards.
Several essays make clear that the how of
reconstruction is a politically and conceptually
fraught process. Ann Dils’s essay takes up one
instance of such politics, the reconfiguration
of racial caricatures in her own 2009 recreation
of the 1920 Jean Cocteau/Darius Milhaud farce
Le Boeuf sur le Toit. Dils suggests that reconstructions might also “rehearse” the audience,
“imbedding information into the performance
that prompts acts of historical imagination and
critical reflection” (44). This reminder—that
historical dance texts include not only what
happens onstage, but intended affective
responses—calls to mind a distinction that
Mark Franko made in 1989, that “whereas
reconstruction at its weakest tries to recreate a
reality without a predetermined effect, reinvention aims at creating precisely the same effect”
(Franko 1989, 58). Franko’s observations, and
Dils’s reflections, indicate that in the absence
of staging details, attention swings quickly
toward what might be reproduced in the audience—a process no less mediated, and at least
as complicated. Catherine Turocy’s contribution is the only essay that takes a
boots-on-the-ground approach to a related
dilemma, by providing exercises for practitioners who want to recreate not necessarily
the spectacular effect, but the performer’s affect,
when dancing historical works.1 All of this
points toward a predicament that haunts
Dance on Its Own Terms: in “extending our
scholarly empathy” toward a dance’s original
political context, our own politics inevitably
come along for the ride (7). The editors, and
some of their contributors, pay attention to
this dynamic; left unresolved is just how far
off the politically clarifying force of recent
(and interdisciplinary) theory can be held.
Two of the collection’s strongest essays, if
dance-centric, keep an eye on developments in
other fields. Harmony Bench looks at the participatory culture of YouTube, and how it allows
“viral choreographies” to travel from body to
body. Here, she considers Beyoncé’s music
video, “Single Ladies,” and how a multiplicity
of online parodies facilitates the de- and
re-stabilization of various masculinities.
Throughout, Bench pays close attention to the
negotiative role of specific movements, and the
discussion is greatly aided by her engagement
of affect theory and queer theory. Victoria
Watts’s essay, productively employing the
insights of Visual Culture Studies, surveys notations systems from several periods. She suggests
that since notations emerge “from the needs
and ethos of their unique times and particular
cultures” (367), they “not only document
bodies in motion, but also form a visible trace
of how movement is seen” (372). Her analysis
ranges from the broad stakes of accounting for
such scopic regimes, on down to the minutiae
of one case study, George Balanchine’s
Serenade. (Melanie Bales also discusses this ballet; this is one of several points where scholars
cover similar terrain to advantageous effect.)
Watts’s essay, and also the volume’s section
on notation as a whole, counterbalance the
many inquiries into cultures of reconstruction,
suggesting that we might benefit from a complementary term, perhaps “cultures of documentation,” as a reminder that whether dealing with
a notation, music score, film, photo, or verbal
description, each medium and method of documentation is influenced by a host of historical
contingencies. This brings up a tricky question:
what different methodologies do these different
forms of record necessitate? Lillian Lawler’s frequent warning, across her scholarly career,
against reading too much dance into too inconclusive an image, was an admonition of enduring importance.2 Some essays discuss their
records attentively, questioning when an image
might be staged, or when a sequence seems
re-choreographed for film. At plenty of points,
Lawler’s skeptical approach to sources might
have come in handy, especially when synthesizing a variety of record-types, suggesting that we
must continue to explore how primary source
methodologies should shift when juggling multiple media. The challenge of using primary
sources is one area where interdisciplinary
work would seem to offer valuable opportunities for dance studies. (To toss out two
examples: what might the methodologies
of microhistory, or of the “new” New
Bibliography, contribute to the use of dance
records? Those two fields are by now a few decades old, but their focus on documentary
traces and questions of scale aligns well with
the present concerns of dance studies. The
still-evolving digital turn in the humanities,
whatever the direction of its turn, offers a very
different, more broadly attuned sense of how
we might use field-specific records.)
The essays illustrate one enduring challenge
specific to dance scholars. Textual descriptions
of dance, especially lengthy ones, sometimes
do a double disservice: not only can they sap
the life out of the dance described, but they
also have a way of injecting strange lethargies
into the progression of a critical argument. It
takes a strong and selective prose stylist to pull
them off; some of the critics anthologized here
manage this quite well, and some do not.
Attending to dance on its own terms, and keeping the focus on movement analysis rather than
movement description, might in the future
mean turning to interactive media with increasing resolve.
Further discussion of dance on its own
terms will also involve extending the insights
of this collection to a wider pool of topics.
The editors are careful to state that while it is
their “intention to value the richness and
vibrancy of the dance field,” they “make no
claims to address all of it” (3). The collection’s
focus, somewhat narrower than this suggests,
is decidedly on Western concert dance, largely
on ballet, and centers firmly on the late nineteenth century and onward. As a result, we
receive a nuanced picture of 20th-century ballet.
It will be rewarding to see what other dancecentered methodologies emerge through the
examination of a more culturally and temporally broad set of dance forms.
It would be unfair to fault the collection, in
sticking to its stated aim of distancing interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks, for failing to
account for any given recent critical trend. It
does however mean that when prominent ideas
in adjacent fields go unaddressed, some of the
volume’s arguments will be ripe for fruitful
engagement. For example, in some of the essays,
the attitude toward the dance-text that predominates stresses its ephemeral and transitory qualities (positions we might connect to those of
Marcia B. Siegel and Peggy Phelan)—an ephemerality that is arrested in systems of notation
and films to varying degrees. Recent trends in
performance studies have proposed different
ontologies, partly through theorizing archives
and reenactments, for example in the work of
DRJ 45/3 • DECEMBER 2013
159
Philip Auslander, Rebecca Schneider, and Diana
Taylor (Auslander 2008; Scheider 2011; Taylor
2003). These discussions of records and reconstructions would at many points accord productively with the claims of this collection, and at
other times problematize them. On another
front, since the nation-state is a prominent entity
in the anthology, the emphases of transnational
studies (for example, on diasporic cultural production and on cross-border patterns of
exchange) provide a rich body of insight to complement and counter this collection’s tendency to
focus on national categories.
It is inevitable that some scholars who favor
interdisciplinary work will see the absence of
these and other discussions as an omission; hopefully, they will also see it as an opportunity. By
turning the field’s gaze inward with this collection, the editors have facilitated some muchneeded temperature-taking. They have intervened
in a sticky debate, producing results that should be
both contested and respected. The scholars collected in Dance on Its Own Terms, by supplying
at times provocative answers to enduring questions, have ensured that we will continue to debate
not just the vagaries of dance’s many histories, but
the vagaries of its many historians.
Seth Stewart Williams
Columbia University
Notes
1. I should mention that Catherine Turocy
was, for some time, my boss. Having loved working with her, I no doubt lack for objectivity.
2. Lawler discusses the problem of pictorial
records as source material throughout The
Dance in Ancient Greece (1964), a theme that
also crops up in many of her earlier articles.
She weighed in on such questions to humorous
effect in a letter to The Classical Journal (1965,
267).
Works Cited
Auslander, Philip. 2008. Liveness: Performance in
a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge.
Franco, Susanne, and Marina Nordera, eds.
2007. Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance
Research. New York: Routledge.
160
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Franko,
Mark.
1989.
“Repeatability,
Reconstruction and Beyond.” Theater
Journal 41(1): 56–74.
Lawler, Lillian. 1964. The Dance in Ancient Greece.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
——. 1965. “Are They Dancing?” The Classical
Journal 60(6): 267.
Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains:
Art and War in Times of Theatrical
Reenactment. New York: Routledge.
Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the
Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dance and Politics
edited by Alexandra Kolb. 2011. Bern, Switzerland:
Peter Lang AG, 348 pp., photographs, 1 table, notes,
index. $87.95 paper.
doi:10.1017/S0149767713000156
It is common for many dance artists and scholars to move within nations and between
countries as part of their professions. With
this multitude of lived, global trajectories
comes the awareness of site-specific, issuespecific, and audience-specific views on dance,
work with dance, and reception of dance. One
such intriguing aspect concerns different articulations of dancing the political, and of defining,
debating, and comparing its forms, affects, and
effects. What were the political factors behind
the arrests and killings of Indonesian classical
dancers between 1965 and 1966 (Larasati
2013)? How can these historical events be
related to the desires of today’s European choreographers to create political dances without
explicit political content or identity politics
(Hammergren 2012)? Why was dance made a
tool of foreign policy and exported across the
world during the Cold War by both the Soviet
Union and the United States, and why does
this not happen today (Franko 2007, 17)?
Why has the field of Dance Studies taken so
long to recognize the established tradition of
investigations of the interrelations of migration
and dance (Scolieri 2008, v)?
With questions like these in mind, it is
timely to see the publication of an anthology
on dance and politics that seeks to explore “the
implications of dance in the explicitly political
realm” (xiii). As editor Alexandra Kolb herself
states, the definition of the expression “an