Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (review)

Of the major performing arts—opera, theater, music—dance has perhaps the most elusive relation to technology: Once the attendant problems of lighting and amplification are resolved, the audience is confronted, in the last analysis, by a body on a stage. In the broadest sense, this is the proposition that Felicia McCarren seeks to debunk in this challenging study of the place of dance in the larger context of European modernism. It is not the technological apparatus that supports modern dance that is the issue, she proposes, so much as an epic shift of metaphor from the romantic-organic terms of nineteenth-century discourse to the early-twentieth-century representation of the performer either as a "human motor" or as automated "dancing machine."

Typical of most recent humanities scholarship, technology figures in this book in the highly abstracted sense of an emerging "culture of the machine." What concerns McCarren is the response by dancers, choreographers, and the artists, critics, poets, and philosophers who reflect upon them. This response, she finds, takes essentially two forms. The most literal are dancers who, like the figures in Fernand Léger's Ballet mécanique, look like machines or whose movements and gestures reference the surrounding world of the automobile, the airplane, or the mechanized urban metropolis. Second is dancing of the sort, exemplified by the synchronized chorus lines of the Tiller Girls, that works like a machine: with its efficient, mechanical gestures and its assembly-line aesthetic of anonymous detachment and group synchronicity, it emulates not the external form but the internal logic of technology in the age of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford. Clustered around these poles we encounter an assortment of artists—including Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Michio Ito, and Josephine Baker—whose dancing, or writings on dance, bear a more or less obvious relation to these two central categories.

Dancing Machines is both stimulating and frustrating, in about equal measure and perhaps for the same reasons. Its greatest accomplishment, for this reviewer, is to bring together a diverse body of literature that attests to the importance of dance in the program—the multiple and often conflicting programs, actually—of aesthetic modernism. The militaristic rants of F. T. Marinetti, for example—his futurist Dance of the Shrapnel, Dance of the Machine Gun, and Dance of the Aviatrix—combine with the utopianism of William Butler Yeats, the ethnographic preoccupations of Michel Leiris, and the ruminations of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein to describe a domain of surprising coherence that is not typically acknowledged in the voluminous literature on the "alternative modernisms" of the early twentieth century. The omissions, such as the Stage Workshop led by Oskar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus, or the theatrical-utilitarian costume designs of the constructivists Ljubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova, are inexplicable but not necessarily fatal.

Despite the shift of emphasis suggested by McCarren's focus upon dance, choreography, and the discourses surrounding them, her book contributes rather little to an area that has been covered quite exhaustively by historians of dance and theorists of Dada, surrealism, futurism, symbolism, and the rest. Readers unfamiliar with the Parisian avant-garde may be delighted to learn of the cross-disciplinary collaborations between Erik Satie and Francis Picabia for Rolf de Maré's famous Ballets suédoise, or between Picasso and Jean Cocteau for Diaghilev's Ballets russe, but McCarren's commentaries are built almost entirely upon the existing primary and secondary literature (often summarized in excessive detail) and contribute a suggestive framework but no new information. Her premise that dance—as performance and as choreography—was not immune to the stimulus of the machine age is soundly developed, though it is not particularly surprising.

As Isadora Duncan sweeps across the stage while Josephine Baker wiggles, Dancing Machines affords us an interesting perspective on the now familiar concept of "alternative" or "contested" modernisms: The imagery of "modern" dance could be mythic or industrial; critical of the machine or inspired...