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Reviewed by:
  • The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training
  • Katja Kolcio
The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training by Melanie Bales and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol. 2008. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. 264 pp., notes, works cited, and index. $70.00 cloth; $30.00 paper.

In The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training, editors Melanie Bales and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol focus directly on “the practices . . . that thread through the jumbled collection of experiences that comprise late twentieth- and very early twenty-first century dance training” (ix). They remind us at once of the centrality of training to the art of dance and to its cultural and epistemic potency. Bales and Nettl-Fiol begin with the premise that training practices are not only skill builders—they are sites for the invention, discovery, and development of dance (viii). As such, they are generative sites of art and knowledge production. Of greatest significance, Bales and Nettl-Fiol develop a framework for making sense of the current context of eclectic, self-styled dance training. The framework consists of two contrasting concepts: bricolage and deconstruction. These two concepts carry broad cultural currency [End Page 96] and are commonly invoked in the arts, in academe, and in politics as strategies for addressing these increasingly mediated, layered, and globally minded times. Bales and Nettl-Fiol elaborate the motif, first applied to dance by Elizabeth Dempster (1995), by detailing specific ways that bricolage and deconstruction are practiced in the training of the self-styled dancer. In doing so the authors situate training practices in relation to cultural and personal contexts. Moreover, they treat the cultivation of one’s training practices as an art in which dancers can and do assert political and creative agency. Part ethnography, and part a call for conscious practice, this book is an invaluable resource for our field.

The Body Eclectic enters a trajectory of fairly recent writing that recognizes dance training as politicized terrain and includes authors Donald Blumenfeld-Jones, Martha Eddy, Jill Green, Silvie Fortin, Susan Foster, Sherry Shapiro, and Susan Stinson. Bales and Nettl-Fiol accomplish two notable feats in their investigation. The first is their weaving together of historical, cultural, economic, philosophic, and personal contexts—theoretical musings are grounded in the rich and accessible territory of personal experiences. Bales and Nettl-Fiol call their work ethnographic, and its strength lies in the fact that they do not speak for their “subjects.” Through ample incorporation of interview transcripts, the authors speak with the dancers they describe. There is a solid tradition in the field of dance scholarship of interviews and oral histories. Beginning with Selma Jean Cohen’s The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief (1965), dance scholars have asked our artists to speak from personal experience, to theorize their own conditions, in their own words. The Body Eclectic follows in this tradition by including substantial interviews with a variety of dancers whose stories fall in and out of line with the central themes of the book. The stories inform, specify, and contrast the layered analysis presented by the authors, thereby furthering the themes of bricolage and deconstruction.

The second notable and fertile aspect of this work is that the authors allow space for each reader, and each dancer, to discover and develop personal politics in relation to their own training practices. They do so by highlighting the role of intention in the engagement of movement practice. Bales and Nettl-Fiol’s framework fosters agency, even in economically difficult times. It is a framework for making conceptual sense of motley training regimen (combining, for instance, ballet with yoga and contact improvisation) as a potent means of cultivating one’s artistry as a contemporary dancer. We are not free from the values embedded in the movement we practice; yet we can make informed and generative choices as we choose our practices. This is in direct contrast to the notion, set forth in Susan Foster’s valuable essay “Dancing Bodies” (1997) of the eclectically training dancer as a “hired body” with homogenized ability and aesthetic. The hired body is shaped by economic forces and lacks depth and specific aesthetic vision. Bales and Nettl-Fiol offer a practical strategy...

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