Dance Discourses: Keywords In Dance Research (review)

The formation of what Randy Martin has called "critical dance studies" (1998) has gained increased momentum over the past decade. Martin's notion of critical dance studies clarified how dance scholarship was being reshaped by the explicit inclusion of critical theory in its methodologies and epistemologies.¹ One of the major consequences for dance studies in embracing critical theory was the identification of dancing and choreographic practices as being also theory. Understanding dance as theory is not equivalent to seeing dance as the sole provider of the theoretical tools it needs for its own analysis (this would be intolerably solipsistic). Rather, it means that dance becomes a privileged practice ready to provide analytical tools for theorizing other areas of social performances: politics, culture, formations of disciplines and their bodies (docile or resistant). Dance is a mode of theorization that theory itself would need in order to address the social and political problematic brought by issues close to dance such as mobilization, embodiment, subjectivities, participation, representation, desire, discipline, control, etc.

Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research is a continuation and expansion of these propositions regarding dance as theory. Editors Susanne Franco and Marina Nordera write in their Introduction to this excellent collection how their aim is to probe "the way in which dancing itself has been questioned in the production of knowledge and has become both a 'subject' and a 'tool' of reflection" (8). Gathering original contributions by prominent dance scholars from Europe and the U.S.,

Dance Discourses offers an important addition to current debates within dance and performance studies, while fulfilling the editors' desire to "encourage the discussion of theories and methods through comparison and dialogue, by throwing into play the various perspectives, approaches, and guidelines applicable to research in general and the individual studies in particular" (1). A major challenge for anthologies is to articulate and sustain a coherent theoretical and critical line. Franco and Nordera found a solution to such a challenge in structural precision. Dance Discourses is divided into three sections, each defined by one "keyword": "Politics," "Feminine/ Masculine," "Identities." Sections are composed of a short introduction written by a guest contributor. Mark Franko introduces the section/keyword "Politics," Linda Tomko introduces "Feminine/Masculine," and Andrée Grau "Identities." Each introduction is followed by three essays (or "Case Studies"), and a closing chapter ("Perspectives"), responding to the three "Case Studies." This pattern produces much more than one would expect by simply looking at the book's table of contents. By keeping each section so clearly divided, and all sections repeating the same structure, the anthology invites meta-critical readings across the essays. This is already knowledge in motion.

Finding and proposing "keywords for research," especially when these are reduced to only three, is always a risky exercise, open to accusations of arbitrariness. In their Introduction, Franco and Nordera clarify how their keywords were chosen "on the basis of the frequency with which they appear in recent studies both inside and outside of the discipline, on the basis of the quantity and quality of the studies that have been conducted in each of the fields of inquiry they suggest and circumscribe, and, last but not least, on the basis of their relevance to our research" (3-4). Rather than movement, kinetics, corporeality, rehearsal, repetition, training, choreography, or improvisation as keywords for dance research, the chosen three reveal the privileged interlocutor to this anthology: what the editors call critical theory. It should be noted, however, that critical theory remains mostly undefined throughout the book, and never clearly linked to the Frankfurt school or to Marxism, except in Mark Franko's essay.

In "Politics," all the essays (by Laure Guilbert, Susan Manning, and Yvonne Hardt; response by Susanne Franco) address German Ausdruckstanz. In "Feminine/Masculine" (essays by Susan Leigh Foster, Nathalie Lecomte, and Inge Baxman; response...