Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (review)

Isadora Duncan said: "Before I go on stage, I must place a motor in my soul" (1927:75). Duncan, although acknowledged as the mother of an organicist conception of modern dance, called "the central spring of all movement," somewhat suspiciously, "the crater of motor power" (1927:168; emphasis added). Felicia Mc Carren does not take such rhetoric for granted. With Dancing Machines she has written a "counter-history" of early 20th-century dance from the overlooked perspective of the mechanical, and of mechanical reproduction. How does the dancing body, whose dominant credo under modernism was organic movement and natural impulse, contribute paradoxically to a poetics of the body as machine? This book not only deconstructs the vocabulary of mechanism embedded in early modernist dance rhetoric and its stage practices, but charts the ambivalent relationship of early 20th-century theatrical dancing to 1920s machine culture.

As in her earlier Dance Pathologies (1998), McCarren analyzes the pathologization of dance in Western culture, and the ways dance acts to depathologize itself. In Dance Pathologies, the Perrot/Coralli Giselle and the technologically enhanced solos of Loïe Fuller respond to the hysterical body of medical discourse and its policing; in Dancing Machines, choreography and performance are in dialogue with the equally traumatic discourses of machine culture, social engineering, and colonialism. As in the earlier book, the context is predominantly French. I read Dancing Machines very much as a continuation of the project begun in Dance Pathologies. Here, McCarren extends the notion of pathology in modernity beyond medical discourse to issues surrounding the body's expenditure of effort, its potentially endless productivity as energy converted into work, and its ambivalent relationships to machine-age ideology. The idea of the dancing machine in the 1920s can be manifest in speed as well as in style, and McCarren shows how the Japanese dancer Michio Ito and the African American dancer Josephine Baker were received within this context: "The idea of a mechanized dancer's driving energy took shape in modernism as abstraction or fragmentation, but it can also be connected to questions of sex, color, and dancing styles in the history of dancing bodies" (32). The idea of the dancing machine is linked to issues of primitivization.

In examining the origin of analogies between dance and the human motor, McCarren stresses contemporary interest in time and motion studies initiated by Marey's chronophotographs, but soon translated into a modernist choreographic precept. The isolation of movement in its "pure" path and perfected performance implies the visual dissection of human motion and, ultimately, the visualization of the form of movement itself, which suggests a certain gestural essentialism. Here, the notions of productivity and expression merge in a way that deserves further analysis. It is not always clear to me how the production of meaning or maximal expressivity necessarily reference labor. But, the other aspect of Mc Carren's concerns takes her toward what Siegfried Kracauer dubbed "the mass ornament" inspired by the assembly line and exemplified in machine dances and the chorus line. As Siegfried Giedion has shown in Mechanization Takes Command: "the concept of Movement [. . .] underlies all mechanization," whereas the assembly line is "almost the synonym of full mechanization" (1969:5, 77). McCarren maps these two technological moments in the encounter between movement and mechanization—"the essential gesture" and "group coordination"—onto the relation of dance to cinema, and she is most effective in this direction. What photography gives to dance, cinema seems to take away. The motion picture camera both preserves and undercuts dance's liveness. Cinema expands and reaestheticizes the dancing body. This point could have been underlined by discussing silent cinema stars such as Lyda Borelli and Ida Rubenstein, whose dancing figured prominently in their filmed performances. But, it is also true that cinema is the medium in which the body's movements are ultimately stored for posterity, that is, reproduced. The concept of mechanization and its consequences for...