Rethinking Dance History: A Reader, ed. Alexandra Carter

Abstract

metaphoric potential, but of the amount of ink consumed. Paragraphs, pages and, in a few cases, entire chapters are devoted to dancers’ life stories, careers, identities, connections, and colleagues, the schools or companies they founded, the venues at which they performed, their audiences and environments: in other words, the book charts who is dancing, when, where, and for whom. Chapter 11, by Larraine Nicholas, is a case in point. Although titled “British Modern Dance in the 1940s and 1950s,” the chapter tends to concentrate instead on the careers, geographical movements, performance ventures, and pedagogic activities of its chosen historical subjects (the three emigre dancers Kurt Jooss, Sigurd Leeder, and Rudolf von Laban). Chapter 9, “Katherine Dunham’s Floating Island of Negritude,” is structured similarly, though here with the performer-focus acknowledged in author Ramsay Burt’s title. Burt offers an account of Dunham’s dance training, career, and dance aesthetics, as well as noting the ideological and social contexts within which she worked. The most intriguing of the dancer studies, though, goes beyond the normative prescription. While centered upon the careers of three historical subjects, chapter 8, by Linda J. Tomko, is not entirely biographical. As her title implies, Tomko considers a professional interaction: between “Practitioners and Patrons of New Dance in Progressive-era America.” The argument has at its basis the issue of gender: in particular, the women’s rights movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recounting U.S. separate spheres ideology, Tomko outlines how the dancers in question—the trio of Fuller, St. Denis, and Duncan mentioned earlier—engaged with female, reform-oriented audiences. Women’s study groups, culture clubs, and societies, she maintains, comprised a core component of the patronage network that supported the dancers, both financially and socially. As well as noting these backstage dealings, though, Tomko considers a more subliminal aspect to the professional engagement. She writes: “In the early twentiethcentury United States, a cluster of women movement practitioners took the opportunity to press for and to fashion dance practices that contested and confirmed current cultural issues” (p. 82). According to Tomko, then, the dancers engaged in topical debate through gestural expression. Dance itself was a vehicle of sociopolitical comment, a medium through which Fuller, St. Denis, and Duncan might reflect on women’s public-sphere activity. This is a seductive hypothesis, appealing not only to those notions, mentioned earlier, of dance as a socially embodied practice, but to broader critical currents— to feminism, feminist theory, and other “identitarian” themes that seem to encourage a dialogic, interdisciplinary critique. What is more, Tomko’s envisaging of dancers as participants in the cultural scene—as “creators and arbiters possessing cultural authority” (p. 90)—lines up neatly with present interdisciplinary tastes for the “performative”: in the present context, for the notion of dancers as owners, constructors, and communicators (rather than passive recipients) of cultural KBI22(1).book Page 160 Thursday, February 8, 2007 9:40 AM