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Reviewed by:
  • Dance, Spectacle and the Body Politick
  • Tom Bishop
Nevile, Jennifer , ed., Dance, Spectacle and the Body Politick, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2008; paperback; pp. 392; 33 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$24.95; ISBN 9780253219855.

This volume of fifteen essays offers a variety of perspectives on the history of late medieval and, especially, Early Modern dance. Most readers are likely find in it both pleasure and frustration, as the contributions seem intended for varying levels of expertise, detail, and generality, and range from overviews of wide swathes of culture and historical time to discussions of particular dance genres, even to detailed analyses of individual pieces. Both specialist and non-specialists will find the volume useful and worth perusal, but may wish to dip into it for the pieces that suit their needs rather than read it continuously through.

Jennifer Nevile, an expert on Renaissance Italian dance at the University of New South Wales, has edited the volume, and herself contributed to it three full essays on her field, along with a substantial introductory chapter and introductions to each of the sections. She has also provided a useful set of [End Page 256] reference tools, including a list of dance treatises and manuscripts, an extensive bibliography and a glossary of dance terms. She has divided the collection into six sections, with her Introduction as Part One, on 'Dance at Court and in the City', 'Dance and the Public Theater', 'Choreographic Structure and Music', 'Dance and the State' and 'Dance, Society, and the Cosmos'. The order of these sections is most likely arbitrary, as no particular development seems evident. Indeed, some amount of overlap is evident across sections, for instance between those in Parts Two and Five, or Parts Four and Six. One might see this mild repetitiveness as lending some cohesion to the volume, yet it also has the effect of drawing the partitions in question; in the courtly and absolutist political cultures of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, for instance, the distinction between 'dance at court' and 'dance and the state' is difficult to draw. Nor does the logic of the volume proceed from general discussion to particular example, since the last section is the most 'cosmic' and wide-ranging, even including an essay by Graham Pont on 'Plato's Philosophy of Dance' that is very general in its discussion and seems to fall quite outside the announced ambit of the collection.

Not all the dance cultures or traditions of Europe, or even Western Europe, are equally represented, nor is the time span indicated by the title. The one essay on medieval dance, Karen Silen's sketch of 'Dance in Late Thirteenth-Century Paris', which ends up suggesting that we know comparatively little about the topic, is balanced by a plurality of essays on later French and Italian dance. Two essays on eighteenth-century theatrical dance represent England; German and Spanish dance barely appears. Though one ought not to fault the collection for not covering even more ground than it already has, the tension between the main focus on the courtly dance leaders of Western Europe, France and Italy, in the period of their heyday, say 1450 to 1700, and the volume's wider ambitions (the Introduction is entitled 'Dance in Europe 1250-1750) leads to some conceptual and organizational problems.

Popular dance traditions, always hardest to recover, are rather thin in the discussion. The omission of traditions of English dance before the early eighteenth century is especially notable, since popular dance was already incorporated into the English public theatre in the late sixteenth century through the 'jig' memorably associated with the career of Will Kemp. Indeed, the existence of Kemp and his peers around 1600 gives the lie to Nevile's claim that it was not 'until the final century of the period dealt with in this volume that dance entered the realm of the public, commercial theatre' (p. [End Page 257] 115). There is good evidence that aristocratic dance was represented on English public stages already in the sixteenth century, and certainly by the time of the dancing masters working alongside Jonson and Jones (mentioned only once), court masque and even antimasque dances were...

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