DANZ QUARTERLY No 7 April 2007
Book reviews
Two books one new and obfuscating, one old and illuminating. Take your pick.
Reviewed by by Jennifer Shennan
Social Choreography Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement, by Andrew Hewitt. Duke University Press, 2007. NZ$ 43.95.
Intrigued by the title - a study I have long thought was waiting to be written - I bought this book from Bruce McKenzie in Palmerston North, the country’s best informed stockist of dance book titles. Who else discusses such things with you for an hour and more?
Hewitt is Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature at UCLA. It is a welcome trend that sees scholars of different disciplines now incorporating a dimension of dance into discussion of social and critical theory. But for that to enlighten the history of ideas, an author needs to make fairly cogent decisions about the periods and places within which to locate the discourse.
Opening with a quote from Friedrich Schiller, 1793, and moving to Havelock Ellis, 1906, Hewitt uses these quotes, conveniently out of context, to draw a line of development from that tired school of thought that has European history as the only history of the world.
His writing about such a vast sweep of changing times without specific settings or references is so loose, at times obfuscating, as to leave the writer with little sense of perspective on "the relationship of aesthetics to politics", and certainly none whatever of the relationship of dance to anything else. One quote should suffice:
"My central presupposition in this book is that Schiller’s project of what I will call social choreography had been dehistoricized and depoliticized by a prevailing modernist understanding of choreography as an essentially metaphysical phenomenon oriented around questions of transcendental subjectivity rather than social and political intersubjectivity."
My once-read copy of the book is for sale for sixpence.
Dance Writings by Edwin Denby. Edited by William Cornfield and Robert Mackay. University Press of Florida, first published 1986. Now in paperback, US$ 29.95.
This collection of writings by a renowned New York dance critic is one to place alongside his earlier collections Looking at the Dance (1946) and Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets (1965). Interestingly, the editors of this posthumous collection consulted the writer’s archive and compared his first journal with the published versions, and "where they differed, we selected what we considered was the better version”. Any published reviewer knows the experience.
Denby wrote eloquently about dance for decades. He could describe a physical act or body state in such a way as to offer the reader a chance at kinaesthetically experiencing the performance years later, no mean achievement. The four artists he considered exemplary were Alicia Markova, Alexandra Danilova, Martha Graham and George Balanchine, but there are scores of riches and insights beyond these, and a chance to read into them the synchronic sociology of the specific times and places that interest you (read about Asadata Dafora, Katherine Dunham, the Rockettes, Kabuki, and so on).
You don¹t have to agree with Denby’s opinions but you are grateful that you can tell what his opinions are. I disagree with him about the choreography of Kurt Jooss, for example, but who wouldn’t want to read, in 1941, or now.
"Their hands and necks are plain and good. The breastbone is held high and the chest is open. The upper third of the body is excellent. But below it the belly is dull, the buttocks heavy. The small of the back sags in. Where is the shining tautness across the groin, a glory of Western dancing?"
My much-read copy is not for sale.
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Writings also to note:
Check Landfall Nov. 2006 for a major article by Leonard Wilcox, lecturer in cultural studies at University of Canterbury, on themes in the choreography of Douglas Wright’s Black Milk.
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