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Book Review

Choreographing History

Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics

Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics. By Mark Franko. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995; pp. xiv + 240. $29.95 cloth, $12.95 paper.

Choreographing History and Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics sprang from the same sources: a conference at the University of California, Riverside in 1992 and a research group at U.C. Irvine in 1993, both titled "Choreographing History," which discussed, respectively, the project of writing about the body and the construction of dance's history. Although the purposes of the two interdisciplinary works ultimately diverge, Franko's study and many of the essays in Choreographing History share a desire to consider the place of the spectator/historian within the historical narrative, a penchant for an intriguing juxtaposition of subjects, a healthy respect for the place of the body within scholarly discourse, and a postmodern perspecti ve on performance.

Choreographing History answers a perceived neglect of the body in mainstream scholarship, calling for scholarship that "addresses a writing body as well as a body written upon" (12). In her introduction, Susan Leigh Foster explains the title of the anthology: "To choreograph history, then, is first to grant that history is made by bodies, and then to acknowledge that all those bodies, in moving and in documenting their movements, in learning about past movement, continually conspire tog ether and are conspired against" (10). Working to dispel what they perceive as widespread loathing of the body within academia, the authors consistently invoke the work of Foucault, engage in "performative writing," and compare seemingly heterogeneous sub jects in the construction of their arguments.

Between Foster's introduction and Hayden White's closing "Corpologue," the anthology is organized into five sections. In the Þrst section, "Resurrecting Historical Bodies," Stephen Greenblatt, John J. MacAloon, and P. Sterling Stuckey examine t he body situated within three historical milieus: seventeenth-century London and physician John Bulwer's attempts to discover the body's "natural" language; the 1992 Winter Olympic Games in Albertville and globalizing body practice; and the nineteenth-cen tury American South and the conflation of slavery, a dance called the "Ring Shout," and Christianity. The next section, "Bodily Interventions into Academic Disciplines," with essays by Mario Biagioli, Susan McClary, and Randy Martin, looks at the pla ce of the body within science, music, and dance ethnography.

It is within the third section, "Moving Theory Across Bodies of Practice," that some of the most provocative, seemingly disparate juxtapositions of subjects in recent scholarly discourse occur. Thomas W. Laqueur argues convincingly in the section's Þ ;rst essay that credit, novels, and masturbation are textually linked because they all grew out of a common "villain"--fictionality, or the "realm of the imagined" (121). Joseph Roach illustrates three cultural "tactics" for the ways bodies enter int o representation--subtraction, subordination, and substitution; his examples range from eighteenth-century dance notation and movement patterns in Jane Austen's novels to transsexual striptease, headshots, and the Mardi-Gras Indians. Although Miriam Silve rberg's essay, "Advertising Every Body: Images from the Japanese Modern Years," does not engage in the kind of provocative conflation utilized by Laqueur and Roach, Silverberg takes an equally interesting approach to scholarship. In order to demonstr ate how archivists, capitalists, and cartoonists imagined bodies in Japanese modern culture, Silverberg includes six pages of illustrations, offering the reader "the option to read my history of the advertising of 'every Japanese body' both through my int erpretation, moving [End Page 247] back and forth between text and images . . . or solely via my ordering of pictorial images" (130). The result is a rich, multi-layered narrative suggestive of the complexities of its subject.

Although many of the essays in Choreographing History are invested in situating the position of the historian and/or spectator within the narrative, the essays in the fourth section, "Historians as Bodies in Motion," foreground this investment. Sus an A. Manning's excellent essay "Modern Dance in the Third Reich: Six Positions and a Coda" considers how the history of Ausdruckstanz ("dance of expression") in Germany counters the standard histories of Weimar culture. Cynthia J. Novack examines the body as cultural practice within Anna Halprin's EarthDance, a participatory event created by Halprin for the 1992 "Choreographing History" Conference. Lena Hammergren considers the importance of different personas as knowledge-making devices fo r writing a history of Isadora Duncan's performances in Sweden.

The fifth section, "Embodying Theory," contains essays by Sue-Ellen Case, Peggy Phelan, and Sharon Traweek. Finally, the section titled "Corpologue" includes one essay, "Bodies and Their Plots" by Hayden White. Its epigraph, by Michel Foucault, which states simply that "[t]he soul is the prison of the body" (229), is indicative of the frequent nodding toward--but not always agreement with--Foucault in this volume. White's insistence that "the normal body can have no history" without measurement again st the monstrous body (233) is also indicative of the notion, prevalent throughout the essays in Choreographing History, that presence is defined by absence.

Like Choreographing History, Mark Franko's Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics is interdisciplinary in nature. Franko purports to "contribute to a revisionary account of historical modern dance"; instead of "master narratives," he proposes "methodologies for opening the canon to theories of spectatorship" (ix). Most of his chapters situate well-known choreographers within their political and historical contexts, then juxtapose them against lesser-known figures in order to illustrate t he complexities of the social history of modern dance and its spectatorship. For instance, Franko begins his revisionary account of modern dance with a deconstructive reading of the writings of Isadora Duncan through comparison with the work of Valentine de Saint-Point, who Franko sees as the lone female artist within the futurist movement: "If Duncan presented dancing as an idea of woman (the woman of the future), Saint-Point presented woman as a dance of the idea (the futurist woman)" (24).

In the brief second chapter, Franko takes a different tactic than he does elsewhere. Here, he examines the journal New Theatre and the work of critic Edna Ocko in order to "outline the dance theory of a cultural milieu more politically radical than individuals later canonized as the aesthetic radicals" (25). The author incorporates within the chapter the text of a 1993 conversation between himself and Ocko; this text is somewhat intrusive and might have better served the brief chapter if it had bee n included as part of the appendix.

Next, Franko attempts to reconstruct Martha Graham's modernism through the lenses of both right- and left-wing critics of the period, reconsidering the debate over Graham's formalism. As in his analysis of Duncan's work, Franko not only examines Graham's dances, but her writing as well. Chapter 4 is a comparison of Merce Cunningham and Douglas Dunn, focusing on the role of expression within their work. In Chapter 5, Franko begins with the performances of the lesser-known Barbette, an American trapeze arti st and female impersonator and, utilizing gay theory, compares Barbette's work to the work of the more well-known Butoh dancer, Kazuo Ohno.

Throughout the book, Franko struggles with the perceived split between emotion and expressivity. Although his work lacks an overall conclusion, he aptly explicates the complexities both of that split and of the politics of modernism. Dancing Modernism/ Performing Politics includes a number of excellent photographs, as well as an appendix with reprints of articles on American modern dance--all from a theoretical, left-wing perspective--that appeared in New Theatre, New Masses, and the < I>Daily Worker between 1929 and 1937.

In the recently published anthology Performance and Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), which includes essays by three of the authors who also contributed to Choreographing History, editor Elin Diamond claims that postmodern notions of performance "gesture toward an epistemology grounded not on the distinction between truthful models and fictional representations but on different ways of knowing and doing that are constitutively heterogeneous, contingent, and risky" (1). This g esture is well-embodied in the two works reviewed here. Like Performance and Cultural Politics and other works such as Susan A. Manning's Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman and Ann Daly's D one Into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America, Choreographing History [End Page 248] and Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics are important steps in the ineluctable dance by postmodern historians across a bridge that spans the gaps among disciplines, between theory and practice, and between present and past.

Judith Sebesta Nickel
The University of Texas at Austin

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