Don’t Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture by Catherine Gunther Kodat (review)

Coinciding with the 1990 Goodwill Games, Seattle and Tacoma, Washington hosted the Goodwill Arts Festival. This international presentation was planned as the Soviet Union’s policies of glasnost and perestroika melted Cold War hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union. The festival included the Seattle Opera’s production of Sergei Prokofiev’s War and Peace (1942), the Seattle Symphony and Seattle Chorale’s staging of Prokofiev’s score for Sergei Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky (1938), and the Bolshoi Ballet’s performances of Yuri Grigorovich’s choreography for Prokofiev’s Ivan the Terrible (1975). This was opening stop of the Bolshoi’s American tour, announcing the Gosconcert’s interest in cultural diplomacy played out on a literal public stage.

Heightened ideological stakes of such performances motivates Catherine Gunther Kodat’s Don’t Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture. Kodat sets out to create a “fuller accounting” (11) of a Cold War canon, including modern dance and ballet alongside studies of visual arts, literature, and film. Her study identifies how the United States, the Soviet Union, and China created nationally distinct modernist dance vocabularies while choreographers, composers, and librettists interrogated compromised social and political liberties at home and abroad. She reinterprets the principal interests that often dominate studies of the art of this period: the institutionalized limits placed on modernist aesthetic innovation and the growth of government promotion of the arts nationally and internationally.

Kodat’s title comes from George Balanchine’s directive “Don’t act, just dance,” liberating the dancer from emotive role-playing. Kodat takes up Balanchine’s dual imperative to explore modernist dance’s non-narrative formal properties, in which dance signifies as dance and bodies as bodies rather than exclusively mimetic storytelling. The subtitle comes from Jacques Ranciere’s formulation of art’s metapolitics: its capacity to reveal the falseness of surface politics and identify truth located elsewhere. Kodat’s “metapolitics of interpretation” (66) exposes “the forms and effects of a certain cool, quintessentially modernist aesthetic distance” (13) as constituting an overlooked cultural practice. Informed by sources in art history, literary history, dance history, performance studies, cultural studies, aesthetic theory, feminist theory, and queer theory, Kodat argues, “to speak with the body is perforce to speak of the sexed, raced, gendered and/or aging body; of its abilities and its limitations; its mutability and its facticity; its social position and its accompanying political power or lack thereof” (64). Her analysis moves beyond anxieties of Western and Communist influences and attends to intra-national hostilities (e.g. conservative reactions to federally-funded dance) bristling with misogyny and homophobia. Modernist dance performs a pursuit of freedom: bodies propelled forward at historical moments in which marginalized populations asserted themselves.

Kodat’s study is divided into two major sections. The first serves as a review of literature, with Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1983) and Lawrence H. Schwartz’s Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (1988) presented as historicist criticism reductively rendering modernist works politically mute. What follows is dense philosophical scaffolding of Theodore Adorno and Ranciere, considering art’s ability to make visible the otherwise invisible, i.e. the political aspect of art, found in the “strategic blur [of] what had been taken to be the clear aesthetic, affective, formal or psychological impact of a movement” (107).

Kodat’s case studies comprise the second section. Her sources range from period criticism to performers’ papers to declassified FBI files. She reads Balanchine’s orientalist fantasy The Figure in the Carpet (1960) and Merce Cunningham’s Event at the Shiraz Arts Festival (1972) against international policies, the latter work’s independence of movement challenging systems of control by asserting a “radically democratic politics of the dance” (114). The most persuasive of Kodat’s case studies, the following chapter traces the transformation of Spartacus from ancient legend to Cold War spectacle to gay...