Do not let the slim, modest size of this volume fool you. Its essays, twelve in all, are chock-full of puzzles, paradoxes, contradictions, and questions. As the title indicates, the focus of the anthology is on nature as it relates to dancing. It is a relationship that enjoyed a sustained renaissance during the early twentieth century, both in British dance and also in what might be called its Anglo diaspora, among other places. The hope of the collection, as Rachel Fensham expresses it in the volume's Introduction, is that its contributions will serve to “establish a context” and “provide a framework” for future research focusing more generally on connections between dance and the natural in other times and places (1, 2). Despite valiant efforts on Fensham's part, however, that context and that framework never fully cohere, neither in her Introduction nor in the volume in its entirety. However, given the almost inconceivably complicated character of the conceptual/theoretical task it entails, the attempt alone, such as it is, holds merit.

The core of the book, and what arguably might have been a better focus for its constitution as a whole, is an examination of Greek revivalist dancing that occurred in Britain and parts of its cultural diaspora at this time. Roughly half of the volume's essays are concerned with this topic. Fiona Macintosh sets the stage for it by providing a summary of the British fin de siècle turn to classical Greece, identifying some of the ways in which the freedom attributed to ancient Greek culture took on political significance in the British context—particularly in relation to the women's liberation movement. Macintosh's overview sheds critical light on why it was that representations of ancient Maenadic rituals in particular were singled out as the focal subject matter for Greek revival dance. It also provides a helpful summary of the different venues available for Greek revival dancers during this period in Britain (private salons, public performances, and chorus roles in Greek revival dramas). This clarifies somewhat the differing histories of the major figures defining the movement and their respective legacies.

Alexandra Carter launches the main discussion of Greek revival dancing in two separate contributions. The first focuses on two leaders of the movement, Madge Atkinson and Ruby Ginner, who creatively explored classical Greek naturalism through the combined strategies of developing original movement techniques, employing subject matter drawn from nature, and staging performances that afforded dancers opportunities for personal emotional expression. “Dancing naturally” for these Greek revivalists is characterized by Carter as, “the privileging of the physiological/organic functions of the body and their structural relationships as the foundation for dance” (28). This formulation identifies both what was at the core of the Greek revival process in British dance and also what connected it to the wider array of embodied practices represented in the volume. Carter's second contribution, a collection of extracts selected from an unpublished manuscript Madge Atkinson wrote in collaboration with Mary A. Johnstone, provides a relatively direct point of access to the kind of thinking that sustained the revivalist movement in the British dance context. The excerpts exemplify some of the claims made in Carter's initial essay about the constructed, non-spontaneous character of the dance training and the performances associated with it.

Rachel Fensham's main contribution to the volume (in addition to her Introduction) focuses on the costumes worn by Madge Atkinson's Greek revival dancers. Fensham examines the cut, texture, and color of the silk and cotton dresses, tunics, and sashes used to create the flickering effects of patterned moving color that were a hallmark of Atkinson's choreography. Fensham demonstrates convincingly that costuming was a defining feature of Greek revival dancing, and contributed significantly to its popularity and theatrical success. She also foregrounds the ways in which Atkinson's material creations connected the Greek revival movement to industrial processes shaped by British imperialism.

Karen Vedel's essay on the concept of plastique in Denmark extends the discussion of Greek revivalism beyond the United Kingdom. Plastique, a French term of Greek origin, was used in Denmark to link practices of acting, dancing, and gymnastics to the sculptural aesthetics of ancient Greece. In so doing, the term assigned value to movement techniques that emphasized organic form, freely flowing successive coordination processes, and the genuine expression of individual emotions. Vedel's discussion illuminates how plastique thinking and exercising in Denmark sustained an ideologically based dual process, naturalizing women's bodies as (1) individually expressive (therefore democratic and modern) and also (2) as agents of human reproduction and essentially maternal.

Amanda Card further extends this comparative trajectory, tracing the history of Greek revival dancing in Sydney during the interwar years. Card focuses on the transmission process from Britain to Australia, illustrating the manner in which Australian proponents of the movement shaped it to suit their own local purposes. Card considers class-specific transformations of the style that occurred as lower, working-class instructors appropriated it for a non-elite clientele. She also documents links to fascism made during the 1930s when Australian identifications of “efficiency” and “simplicity” as embodied in classical Greek naturalism were related to those of German, Italian, and Japanese regimes of authoritarian control and fascist social regulation (151).

These several chapters on Greek revival dancing form something of a “book within a book” of Dancing Naturally. In them, the editors’ general aim of redressing gaps in the dance historiography of Greek revivalism—gaps hidden by the shadows cast by Isadora Duncan and Maud Allen—is admirably met. The collection provides a portrait of the growth and evolution of Greek-inspired dance as it spread across several continents and inspired a diverse array of movement practices. Looking closely at the individuals and the smaller details of this movement, the volume sheds light on the popular appeal of Greek-inspired naturalism, which came to mean much to many and with highly varied consequences.

The contributions comprising the rest of the volume serve collectively to illustrate in just how many different directions an interest in “the natural” can move. Michael Huxley and Ramsey Burt provide the most spectacular case in point, attempting to examine, in the space of ten small pages, three different areas of dance-related discourse, all of which “negotiated ideas of the natural” at the beginning of the twentieth century (31). The whirlwind tour leads (rightly) to the conclusion that “the natural was far from a straight-forward concept at the start of the twentieth century” (40). It also manages, however, to reduce the discourse to a single antinomy—one between nature defined as a reactionary call back to antiquity and nature as the subject of modern science. Contributors of other essays sometimes use the idea of nature mainly as a point of departure to address additional topics. Tess Buckland's essay on ballroom dancing of the period, for example, illustrates how the ballroom served as a social microcosm, providing a contested space where modernity and tradition, and elitism and democracy, among other oppositions, could meet and engage. The idea of nature in this context is associated with relatively accessible, newly introduced, and informal kinds of ragtime dancing. Susan Foster's essay comparing U.S.-based men's and women's physical training programs, developed respectively by Allen Sargent and Genevieve Stebbins, takes as its focus the construction of a sexual “division of labour” (122). Here, the idea of nature aligns with modernity, science (anatomical knowledge), and theories of tension-relaxation, dynamism, and muscularity.

Lesley Main and Libby Worth both make thought-provoking contributions that move beyond the focal subject matter of Greek revival dancing while nonetheless relating substantively to it. Lesley Main articulates Doris Humphrey's theory of nature as it is evident in her classic work, Water Study. Main identifies the principle of “succession” as basic to Humphrey's movement philosophy—a principle that evolved out of Humphrey's explorations of breath and gravity and led her to emphasize ever-changing rhythmic continuities (103). Humphrey's naturalism, in this regard, shows striking parallels to that of the Greek revival dancing of Atkinson and Ginner, as well as to the formal aesthetic of plastique that Vedel identifies in the Danish context, and even to the “follow through” style of Greek revival dance identified by Card in Gladys Talma's Sydney-based work. On the other hand, Main argues convincingly that Humphrey's successional theory produces a definition of the natural that both “contradicts the notion of ‘reproduction’” and also enables the choreographer to “engage with the work from the present” (108). These ideas would seem to contrast strongly with associations made to maternalism and antiquity reported for Greek revival dance in other essays.

Libby Worth, who contributes the volume's final essay, takes a surprising and stimulating tack in her assessment of the work of movement educator Mabel Elsworth Todd. Worth rejects naturalism as a relevant orientation in relation to Todd's somatic theory. She notes that choreographers Anna Halprin and Joan Skinner, both of whom were strongly influenced by Todd, also refrained from characterizing their methods of dance training and choreography in naturalist terms as well. Todd's enduring legacy, Worth argues, serves as “a reminder to stay alert to the broad range of interpretations the term ‘natural’ can elicit when used as a descriptor for dance” (155). She resists the investigation of what might be natural in dance and related somatic disciplines on the grounds of its being both irrelevant and reductive for contemporary research purposes.

Worth's final critical words create something of a symmetry with those used by Fensham at the beginning of the volume. At the start of her Introduction, Fensham warns, quoting Raymond Williams, that nature is “perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language” (2). The comment is meant to prepare readers for the myriad definitions and applications that are to follow. Nature is certainly an extraordinarily challenging concept for dance theory to embrace. Yet, of all the arts, dance is arguably the most brilliant and compelling in its illumination of the aesthetic reality of at least human nature, and its concern with human “un-nature” as well. On the whole, the authors contributing to Dancing Naturally effectively pay tribute to this distinctive capacity of dance and to the unique intelligence it brings forth in relation to this intensely problematic yet vitally resonant topic. The fragmentary status of the book as a whole, however, and the brevity of its individual contributions, preclude it from being anything other than an opening salvo in this broader theoretical engagement. Regardless, the volume is still a suggestive introductory text insofar as its focus on the relation of nature to dance is concerned. It is also a useful resource for specialists working on British dance history, on Greek revivalism and neo-classical art forms generally, and on early twentieth-century Eurocentric dance and physical culture.