Edited collections in dance studies are crucial to the sharing, nurturing, and continued development of the field, principally in the way they bring together multiple perspectives into one text. The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies offers a wide range of informed and critical perspectives from relatively early-career to accomplished scholars representing dance studies today as well as working toward future developments within and beyond the field. Thirty-three chapters are curated with a thematic and case study approach around the phrase “dance and ….” A range of paradigmatic perspectives are organized into seven key frames: training and engagement, somatics, analysis, society and culture, time, scenography, space and place (1). Overall, the book utilizes co-editors’ Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett's expertise principally with and through cultural studies—that is, in how the volume addresses particularities and singularizations. The contributions also address collective concerns of the past, present, and future of dance studies, such as our pedagogical practices and who we are training, choreographic analysis across materialities, contexts, difference(s), and continual critical questioning of our histories.
Below features a more detailed review of a specific selection of chapters. One reason is strategic, aiming to share the depth of critical perspectives found across such a multiplicitous volume but in a way that fits the limited scope of a book review. The other reason for the selection is political. These chapters explicitly work within a recent collective urgency (though not necessarily a “new” problem) to decolonize dance studies and related terms (Banerji and Mitra Reference Banerji and Mitra2020). The authors actively cite the knowledge, methodologies, and perspectives of Black dance scholars (listed in Ahlgren et al. Reference Ahlgren, Borelli, Croft, Kraut, Leopold, Reid and Johnson2020) and cast an “eye toward specificity—specific figures, cultures, histories of Latinx, Asian American, First Nations/Native peoples, and beyond” (Dance Studies Association 2020). The book amplifies, “through the cracks of coloniality,” the work of Black and Global Majority colleagues, which is “foundational to our fields” (Revolution or Nothing 2020). To be clear, the companion does not center on subaltern and diasporic voices alone; rather, the selection of chapters discussed below evidence how the volume addresses concerns toward anti-racism and decolonization, at the same time aiming to magnify these voices in this book review, as an act in itself. In other words, this review is structured around a thematic and case study approach on the subaltern and diasporic, adapting the method that the companion uses with a greater number of paradigms and perspectives.
“The Dancing Body, Power and the Transmission of Collective Memory in Apartheid South Africa,” by Catherine F. Botha, explores “how the dancing body in South Africa was profoundly imprinted upon by apartheid” (22). A tripartite lens is taken to the continuum of dis/empowerment, dis/embodiment, and dis/placement related to apartheid, the dancing body, and memory. Botha brings into sharp relief the dis/empowerment of dancing bodies through the experiences of artists such as Johaar Mosaval, the first Black South African to become senior principal dancer at the Royal Ballet, who was forced to dance behind a line at the back of class because of his race (25). Botha's discussion of disparate treatment after a car accident in which Barry Martin, a Black American dancer on tour in South Africa at the time (1983), and a white dancer were injured, builds layers to the argument of the significant political and material impact of racism in this cultural context. Martin was denied an ambulance and initial hospital admission, reinforcing the stark denial of presence of the dancing body because of race. The dis/placement of the dancing body is explored through the site-specific work of Jay Pather, thus challenging the high art, low art, nonart distinction that is crucial to “stop the legacy of apartheid in subtle forms” (29). The chapter addresses what Ramsay Burt argues for in his contribution on Black British dance archives and the lost histories of Elroy Josephs: namely, that dance scholars need to expand inquiries across “high” and “low,” and recognize the transformative agencies of artists from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean who have contributed to metropolitan Western dance culture (245).
Nadine George-Graves offers a sensorially charged, auto-ethnographically led microhistory in “Black Dance: Brooklyn 2017.” Gesture is crafted through this chapter in response to a state of immobilizing shock and depression after the US presidential election of 2016. George-Graves moves the reader to empathetically feel and reflect with her insight of Black dance in this particular political time and space. Embodied critical reflections are provided through analyses of personal-political performances and events, including (but not limited to) the 2017 New York Women's March, the work of Maria Baumann, and Afro-Caribbean dance classes led by Pat Hall. The Brooklyn political and artistic movements of 2017 inspire “an eclectic phenomenological experience to productively interrogate the machinations of art and politics/society/culture to … add to the grander calculations of the meanings of embodied performance,” which includes how artists and practitioners resist with and through dance, movement, and the body (224). The writing reaches out in its own performative-evocative mode to help the reader experience the layers of embodied resistance it offers, particularly toward a future that must continue to “yield complicated black dance in the context of the current socio-political climate” (234).
Danielle Goldman's chapter, “A Love Song as a Form of Protest,” is a kind of love song in itself, bringing together targeted analysis of American music and dance history via works featured in the exhibition Endless Shout at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2016–2017). Critical elaboration on Pope.L's Cage Unrequited (2013), in which the artist transcribes by hand from John Cage's Silence (1961) against another writing by the musician Julius Eastman (1940–1990), motivates consideration of the politics that undergird privileged sites of postmodern experimentalism in modern dance, such as Judson Dance Theater (251). Discussion of Ishmael Houston-Jones's Untitled Duet (1982) provides stimulating counterpoint to Pope.L's work as well, but is more specific to a critical scrutiny of the history of contact improvisation. The layered and rigorous analysis challenges mainstream postmodern dance history, which is limited particularly in terms of race and bodily norms. As Goldman writes, “Despite legitimate claims about Judson's many democratizing effects, the scene was overwhelmingly white” (252). Goldman provides readers what the selection of works offer the museumgoer—“to reconsider dominant histories of experimental music and postmodern dance and to consider the racial dimensions of privileging chance procedure and indeterminacy over improvisation,”—thus posing more complex questions regarding influence, lineage, and desire (257).
“Longing for the Subaltern: Subaltern Historiography as Choreographic Tactic,” by Cynthia Ling Lee, uses Meena Murugesan's 2013 we used to see this and Lee's own 2016 work, blood run, to explore the translation of subaltern theory into choreographic praxis (396). The chapter addresses choreographic tactics and subaltern techniques for rewriting the past, destabilizing and queering the colonial archive, engaging in imaginative speculation, decentring a single narrative through multiple viewpoints, and improvising repetition to perform an unfinished unruliness (408). Detailed analysis of mobilizing techniques, including Lee's semi-autoethnographic performative critical reflections and imagery, opens up a specific viewpoint on challenging contested narratives of authoritarian Eurocentric colonialist histories. The highly nuanced private and public spheres that these works traverse include Lee's choreographic resistance and rewriting of Taiwanese Han-indigenous relations from a US diasporic and queer positionality. A key critical perspective is articulated, which then can be read alongside the performative works themselves, bringing the depth of theory and practice together and thus moving the field toward broader valuing of the intellectual and political power of choreographic practice(s).
Lester Tomé offers a tour de force analysis related to ballet's new cosmopolitanism to address institutional diversity through a focus on Carlos Acosta's career in relation to the Royal Ballet in “Black Star, Fetishized Other: Carlos Acosta, Ballet's New Cosmopolitanism, and Desire in the Age of Institutional Diversity.” Tomé argues that Acosta's rise to fame, particularly in the UK, signifies his own working of the ideologies of diversity as a principal dancer. The dominant problematic narrative contributing to this celebrity relates to a rather limited rags to riches narrative, which does not challenge the more complex problems of inclusion, particularly within ballet institutions. As Tomé explains, “Ballet's new cosmopolitanism compels subaltern dancers to negotiate the politics of moving from the periphery to the center, where they find themselves both valued and devalued for their race, ethnicity, and nationality: these markers of diversity make such dancers an asset to dance institutions yet expose them to colonialist subjection” (299). It is not as simple as the important task of changing the face of dance, but it requires examining the complex layers within which racism and colonialism manifest. Acosta's “enactment of refinement” is particularly potent where an “embodiment of gentility” is both an instance of docile conformance with British social norms and a mechanism of power deployed by a technically expert body trained to counter coloniality in a contemporary context (302). Tomé also discusses how dance criticism feeds the spectacle of otherness. Examining the systemized practices of discrimination and inclusion in dance institutions involves scrutiny of “the ambiguous ideology of diversity in multicultural settings—an ideology that fosters recognition and representation of the subaltern, but which does not always transcend coloniality” (299).
The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies is a vital resource for students, researchers, practitioners, and academics across disciplines. Diverse approaches are mapped out across the established field, particularly related to our dancing communities, histories, pedagogies, scenographies, choreographic analyses, and politics of labor and economy, while also advancing innovative critical potential within dance studies. Focusing on the selection of chapters above aims to exemplify the volume's depth, specifically on subaltern and diasporic research, practice, and action. I encourage readers to explore the many more insights and arguments to be read, felt, reflected, and engaged with.
