Don’t Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture by Catherine Gunther Kodat

Abstract

DON'T ACT, JUST DANCE: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture. By Catherine Gunther Kodat. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2015.Coinciding with 1990 Goodwill Games, Seattle and Tacoma, Washington hosted Goodwill Arts Festival. This international presentation was planned as Soviet Union's policies of glasnost and perestroika melted Cold War hostilities between United States and Soviet Union. The festival included Seattle Opera's production of Sergei Prokofiev's War and Peace (1942), Seattle Symphony and Seattle Chorale's staging of Prokofiev's score for Sergei Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky (1938), and Bolshoi Ballet's performances of Yuri Grigorovich's choreography for Prokofiev's Ivan Terrible (1975). This was opening stop of Bolshoi's American tour, announcing Gosconcert's interest in cultural diplomacy played out on a literal public stage.Heightened ideological stakes of such performances motivates Catherine Gunther Kodat's Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture. Kodat sets out create a fuller accounting (11) of a Cold War canon, including modern dance and ballet alongside studies of visual arts, literature, and film. Her study identifies how United States, Soviet Union, and China created nationally distinct modernist dance vocabularies while choreographers, composers, and librettists interrogated compromised social and political liberties at home and abroad. She reinterprets principal interests that often dominate studies of art of this period: institutionalized limits placed on modernist aesthetic innovation and growth of government promotion of arts nationally and internationally.Kodat's title comes from George Balanchine's directive Don't act, just dance, liberating dancer from emotive role-playing. Kodat takes up Balanchine's dual imperative explore modernist dance's non-narrative formal properties, in which dance signifies as dance and bodies as bodies rather than exclusively mimetic storytelling. The subtitle comes from Jacques Ranciere's formulation of art's metapolitics: its capacity reveal falseness of surface politics and identify truth located elsewhere. Kodat's metapolitics of interpretation (66) exposes the forms and effects of a certain cool, quintessentially modernist aesthetic distance (13) as constituting an overlooked cultural practice. Informed by sources in art history, literary history, dance history, performance studies, cultural studies, aesthetic theory, feminist theory, and queer theory, Kodat argues, to speak with body is perforce speak of sexed, raced, gendered and/or aging body; of its abilities and its limitations; its mutability and its facticity; its social position and its accompanying political power or lack thereof (64). Her analysis moves beyond anxieties of Western and Communist influences and attends intra-national hostilities (e.g. conservative reactions federally-funded dance) bristling with misogyny and homophobia. Modernist dance performs a pursuit of freedom: bodies propelled forward at historical moments in which marginalized populations asserted themselves.Kodat's study is divided into two major sections. The first serves as a review of literature, with Serge Guilbaut's How New York Stole Idea of Modern Art (1983) and Lawrence H. …