Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion Tresa Randall Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion. By Susan Manning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. pp. 296. $34.95 cloth. Susan Manning offers a meticulously researched theoretical examination of race, sexuality, gender, spectatorship, and reception in American theatre dance. Manning calls upon critical race theory and queer theory to interrogate the relationships between two distinct, if overlapping, forms of American dance in the mid-twentieth century: modern dance and Negro dance (Manning uses the anachronistic term for what was later called black dance and African American dance). As she argues, Negro dance and modern dance were mutually constitutive categories, forged through interdependent representations of blackness and whiteness. Modern dance occupied a space of white cultural privilege, in which the unmarked white body could speak universally, while the black bodies of Negro dancers remained marked as different. Throughout the book, Manning is clear about her revisionist intent. With postmodern challenges to stable representations of race, gender, and sexuality in mind, she looks back to the 1930s through the 1960s, and questions how spectators from various social locations constructed meaning of danced representations. Theorizing spectatorship as a series of sociohistorical encounters, she proposes that "cross-viewing"—when spectators from various social locations observe each other observing performance—creates the potential for social change. Manning's study consolidates previous studies of gender, sexuality, and race in dance. The field of dance studies has seen an explosion of work on early twentieth-century dance over the last two decades by authors such as Ramsay Burt, Julia Foulkes, Thomas DeFrantz, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Linda Tomko, and Mark Franko, who have replaced celebratory biographies of major figures with examinations of the social, historical, and political contexts of dance practices. In her 1993 study of Mary Wigman, Ecstasy and the Demon, Manning looked at gender and nationalism; here, she turns her attention to race and sexuality. Informing her analysis are primary sources such as reviews, photographs, audience surveys, video and film documentation, choreographic notes, oral histories, and a comprehensive survey of relevant periodicals. Describing almost twenty choreographic works and dance events, she weaves together biographical information on choreographers with information about patronage, venue, critical reception, and spectatorship. The book is organized into an introduction and four chapters, which proceed both chronologically and thematically. Chapters one and two describe the modern dance and leftist dance networks of the 1930s as they related to Negro dance, with emphasis on issues of representation, reception, and patronage. In these chapters Manning introduces the central contrast between "metaphorical minstrelsy" and "black self-representation" that informs much of her argument. "Metaphorical minstrelsy" is Manning's term for the way white modern dancers such as Helen Tamiris and Ted Shawn created danced representations of African American subjects. For example, Tamiris's Negro Spirituals (1928) presented abstractions of concepts such as slavery [End Page 771] and oppression in order to express solidarity with African Americans, while Shawn's Negro Spirituals (1933) used the music to represent emotionalism and religiosity. Edna Guy also staged dances to spirituals and used other black source material in "The First Negro Dance Recital in America" in 1931; pointing out the contrast with white modern dancers, though, Manning calls this "black self-representation" (30), for Guy framed her dances within the context of African American history and culture. As Manning demonstrates in later chapters, black self-representation as a convention gained currency among spectators and critics after 1940 with the work of Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, and later Alvin Ailey. In the 1930s, however, it was an emerging theatrical convention in dance that was not broadly legible; Guy and her contemporaries in Negro dance struggled to maintain patronage and to attract the attention of either the dance press or the African American press. Chapter three is central to Manning's reperiodization of both modern dance and Negro dance, for she demonstrates that after 1940, "the culturally marked body became the province of Negro dance, as modern dance deployed the newly privileged unmarked body" (118). The 1940s witnessed new credibility for the performance of diaspora among Negro dancers alongside redefinitions of whiteness with the rise of "mythic abstraction" as the...