Becoming Beautiful: Ballroom Dance in the American Heartland by Joanna Bosse

Abstract

Reviewed by: Becoming Beautiful: Ballroom Dance in the American Heartland by Joanna Bosse Juliet McMains Joanna Bosse, Becoming Beautiful: Ballroom Dance in the American Heartland. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 200 pp. $95.00. Many people view ballroom dancing as an anachronism, lifted from a time when performance of one’s class position and gender role were more tightly prescribed, when the consequences of a misstep in waltz could ruin your chances at a desirable love match or a lackluster foxtrot could jeopardize your social standing. Despite attempts to market ballroom dancing to a younger, hipper demographic through, for example, the use of modern pop music, the appeal of ballroom dancing is still largely based on nostalgia. It is perhaps not surprising that Joanna Bosse’s ethnography of the Regent Ballroom in Savoy, Illinois is somewhat anachronistic as anthropological scholarship. On the one hand, her choice of a white, middle-class, suburban, midwestern American community and her attention to issues of race, class and gender reflect values of a twenty-first century ethnographer attempting to redress critiques of old-school ethnography. However, Bosse treats the Regent Ballroom as an isolated community, without examining how it relates to national networks of ballroom dance studios or the history of social dance practices. The resulting catalog of the inner workings of this singular dance studio and its clientele is firmly rooted in the values of old-school ethnography, harkening nostalgically back to a time when it was believed that an encyclopedic description of a community was not only possible, but a desirable goal of ethnography. Even the data, primarily collected between 1996–2002, seem like a curious relic from a prior era. The challenge of any ethnographer is to write about a specific community in enough detail to reveal its complexity while simultaneously illuminating issues of broader relevance. On the former charge, Bosse succeeds in constructing a vivid portrait of the experiences of the predominantly white, middle-class students at the Regent Ballroom. She represents her informants with deep respect, warmth, and generosity. The text is thick with rich quotes and descriptions chronicling their process of “becoming beautiful” [End Page 47] through the practice and performance of ballroom dance. Bosse argues that Regent clients undergo a transformation in their “self-imaginary,” which she defines as “the way we understand our own identity and potential” (9). “I enter the dance a klutz, and by the end I’m beautiful,” (6) is the sentiment Bosse ascribes to Regent clients. In other words, ballroom dancing offers practitioners a means of transforming their self-image in the present and also of projecting it into the future. Bosse suggests that the process of becoming beautiful encompasses not only aesthetics but also greater access to “feelings of connectedness, desirability, and affection” (7). Bosse argues that one of the key means through which ballroom dance practitioners achieve such transformation is by entering into a state of flow, described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as complete presence and absorption in an activity. Bosse argues that it is the rigid structures of ballroom dance—its dichotomous gender roles and limited improvisational choices—that enable dancers to enter into a state of flow. Her proposal is provocative, even if it runs counter to the experiences of many dancers. In my own case, for example, I find flow easier to access when dancing more improvisational partner dances such as tango or dances with more fluid gender roles such as contact improvisation than in ballroom dancing. Given the counter-intuitive nature of the author’s proposal—that tightly pre-scribed gender roles and pre-determined steps are that which can unlock a sense of play and freedom—comparison to other dance styles and populations of dancers could have strengthened her argument. This omission points to a broader constraint of the book—the author’s limited knowledge of dance beyond her own experience as an amateur dancer at the Regent Ballroom. When describing competition ballroom dance, for example, she frequently relies on generalities and stereotypes. Statements such as the claim that for female standard ballroom competitors “hair is generally dyed to platinum blonde if possible” (101) will likely limit Bosse’s credibility with competition dancers. When...