Butting Out: Reading Resistive Choreographies through Works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha (review)

In this ambitious study, Chatterjea critiques and reformulates the categoryof postmodern dance through the work of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha. Deploying performance studies, US minority discourse, postcolonial studies, and subaltern history, Chatterjea nonetheless places her work firmly within dance studies, especially the subfield concerned with the politicsof choreography. Through reference to specific dance examples, Chatterjea highlights the complex political, cultural, and historical underpinnings of avant-garde choreography within the Indian postcolonial and African American contexts.

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar is an African American choreographer who brings together a range of movement languages, which she integrates into dance-based theatrical productions. Chandralekha is a contemporary choreographer, at the forefront of the Indian modern dance movement, who draws from the principles of Indian classical dance, especially bharata natyam, integrating it with movement vocabularies from yoga and the southern Indian martial art kalaripayattu. Chatterjea, herself a contemporary choreographer working with South Asian classical dance vocabularies, became interested in these two artists less through accidents of history and location and more via a specific set of historical, diasporic conditions, which Chatterjea both lays out as a context and interrogates.

Chatterjea rethinks the category of the postmodern and deconstructs its exclusive and hegemonic restriction to the experiments and inquiries of the white West. Interestingly, instead of aligning postmodernism with the distancing devices of pastiche and irony, Chatterjea instead positions the postmodern within the politically radical, highlighting progressive imperatives within the works of these two choreographers. She likewise argues that these kinds of radical postmodern artists critique their own histories and the roots fromwhich their choreography emerges. For her then, Zollar and Chandralekha's approaches are paradigmatic of an alternative, radical postmodern that promises emancipatory politics and solidarity alongside creative experimentation. Chatterjea's concern lies not just with dance as political but with creating politically-mobilised writing. It was refreshing to encounter such a clear commitment to politics and ethics within a scholarly work.

While I found the content of this text to be provocative and full of insights, I found the structure more difficult to grasp. The first five chapters of this book form a set of critiques mobilised against conventional aesthetic categories and histories. The last chapter is divided into nine sections, each of which analyses a particular dance piece and explores how these works articulate radical aesthetics and reflective approaches to history. The theoretical arguments become more solidly grounded in the later section of the book. I might have found the wide range of observations easier to assimilate had the dance analysis sections been integrated into the theoretical critique. That said, however, the text need not be read only in the order in which it is laid out. I could envisage, for instance, assigning excerpts of the dance analysis sections to students alongside entries from the early part of the book.

This book is an important contribution to dance studies, especially as it argues persuasively for the inclusion of dance in feminist theory, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies. It will be of particular interest to scholars concerned with rethinking historical methodologies and categories of aesthetic classification as well as to those involved with postcolonial studies and the politics of performance. It will also be useful for students especially, although not exclusively, at the postgraduate level and for courses in dance history and dance analysis, as well as studies in performance, politics, and identity.