Antitheatricality, Ibsen, and Black Women's Bodies

Abstract

Late in Bodies in Dissent, Daphne A. Brooks' extraordinarily dense exploration of transatlantic black popular performance from 1850 to 1910, Brooks describes black actor/dancer Aida Overton Walker's historic performance of Salome (the first black performer of the role) as resistant to the historical evolution of dance towards disembodiment, citing dance historian Susan Leigh Foster's description of the dancers becoming nobodies (338). Walker, according to Brooks, resisted being subsumed into pure form, claiming agency for the black female body. Not once in her quixotic, compelling, and archivally magisterial study does Brooks reference modernism as such, and yet this book is paradoxically central to the project of this special issue of South Central Review on the subject of Staging Modernism. The book never mentions antitheatricality and only briefly explores the issue of theatricality as such. And yet Bodies in Dissent articulates brilliantly against the other two books in this review package Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner 's Against Theatre and Toril Moi's Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism where those issues are foregrounded. And the story of Overton Walker's Salome is representative of a project that articulates popular, black (women's) embodied agency against the exoticizing, antitheatrical, and formalist agenda of the modernists, for whom theatricality in general, and the (black, female) body in particular, were problems. Ackerman and Puchner 's book began its life as a special issue of the journal Modern Drama. Focusing on a narrower time period, the book picks up where Jonas Barish left off in his classic 1981 volume The Antitheatrical Prejudice, exploring various aspects of the apparently oxymoronic field of modern theatre. Setting out to indicate how modernist theatre responds to, represents and critiques the forces unleashed by rapid industrialization and the capitalist mode of production (1), the