The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives by Selby Wynn Schwartz Harry Hoke The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives. By Selby Wynn Schwartz. University of Michigan Press, 2019. Cloth $80.00, Paper $34.95. 300 pages. 22 illustrations. Selby Wynn Schwartz's The Bodies of Others takes an expansive view of drag dance on the concert stage, weaving together dance studies, gender theory, and historiography to ask how four decades of drag dancers performed as other selves. Schwartz mobilizes dance studies to show how longstanding theories of gender acts and choreographies, such as those of Susan Leigh Foster and Judith Butler, work in praxis, extending scholarship from performance and nightlife studies to the concert stage. Schwartz shows how gesture, costume, and other external transformations build a critical internal practice of inviting another into one's body, transforming ossified concert dance techniques in exciting, gender-busting ways. The result of this transformation, she argues, is a performance that goes beyond mimicry, parody, or inspiration to create a novel synthesis of the self/other. Schwartz analyzes not only individual dances, but also the ways that drag performances have afterlives in restagings, company members, and future artists. Thus, Schwartz's central claim is that drag dance builds a living, queer archive in which dancers invite others into their bodies, then inspire this practice in future artists, creating threads of memory [End Page 166] and re-enlivening the ghosts of past performers in a different cultural context. The introduction draws on theories of drag and gender performance like Marlon Bailey's notion of "working the body" and Trajal Harrell's "fictional archiving" to sketch drag dance as a process of revivifying past performances. Each of the subsequent five chapters begins with one central performance (most are from the 1980s), and then traces its afterlives across the next four decades. Schwartz explores how drag dances shift with changing notions of gay rights and queer politics, and asks what narratives are inscribed on and by gender-bending performances as they echo cross-temporally. While the five chapters end without a conclusion, Schwartz emphasizes that the choreographic lineages she explores continue to manipulate gestural codes today, rendering them visible alongside the ghosts of dancers past. Across the chapters, Schwartz brings theories of gendered acts out of the quotidian and into the stylized world of concert dance. Chapter 1 focuses on Mark Morris's 1989 performance of Dido and Aeneas to argue that Morris's gestural vocabulary in dual roles of the Queen and the Sorceress builds rigid choreographic gender constraints with no room for improvisation. Such inscription places the Queen on an inescapable narrative toward death. Schwartz argues that as the performance is restaged with new performers, the signs become more malleable and collective, opening the door to a more utopian vision of queer politics. In later productions, the ensemble takes precedent over the solo, and both female/male solo dancers create new combinations of female masculinity and male femininity to break such fatalistic narratives. Chapter 2 centers Richard Move's performances ofMartha @, in which he danced in drag as Martha Graham. Rather than replicating Graham's choreography, which changed as her body aged, Schwartz argues that Move created the internal space to channel Graham in his vastly taller, differently proportioned body. Schwartz goes on to introduce Move's company member Catherine Cabeen, who originally danced deeply gendered feminine roles for Martha Graham before performing both masculine and feminine movements to channel the experience for Move. Schwartz uses dance studies to bring gestural repertoires into moments of staged choreography, arguing that this kind of living archive preserves Graham's legacy as a dancer more deeply than straight dance lineages, which preserve the gendered choreography at the expense of Graham's ephemeral essence. Schwartz continues to show how dance brings theories of the body into praxis in chapter 3, which takes the work of Japanese Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno as its starting point. Schwartz argues that in channeling Spanish dancer La Argentina in Admiring La Argentina (1977), Ohno uses the process of drag to invite the dancer into his body. Through drag, Ohno looks to transcend boundaries of time and...