Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Companies, Representation and Power (review)

Rich with myths of the past and nostalgic allusions to days gone by, folk dance helps us better understand the workings, limitations, and concepts of nation, nationalism, and ethnicity. Through casting and choreography choices, movement, and costuming, folk dances can make visible gender and class relations, even when these are not overtly portrayed. Because folk performances bring together tourists, diasporic communities, and dance enthusiasts of all ages, they are rich sites for assessing the multiple levels of performance present on a stage committed simultaneously to entertainment and state. Author Anthony Shay, a performer with forty years of folk dance experience in Russia, Eastern Europe, and North America, gives an insider view of six national folk dance companies.

Choreographic Politics opens with a brief theoretical exploration of nationalism and the value of folklore versus "fakelore" (18), the latter a stylistic construction that enhances the aesthetics of costuming and changes choreography to give a (possibly) tourist audience the "authentic" dance they want to see. The author describes in great detail performances in Russia, Mexico, Croatia, Egypt, Greece, and Turkey, and one of his skills is making it easy for a reading audience to envision these offerings. Shay treats dance performances as theatre, providing a useful context for those familiar with dynamics of stage presence and set design. The strong suit of this book, though, is not its attention to choreographic nuance or technique but what it presents of the performance of nation. The dances Shay observes serve as a way of theatricalizing national identity; he is attentive to "the gaps and absences" (169) of authentic peasant culture in the made-over staged versions of their dances. But his descriptive ability stops short of assessing the metaphorical valence to cultural muscle flexing he observes. For example, although the author appreciates its "visual spectacle" (59), he offers no analysis of the importance of Russian "over-the-top acrobatic prowess" (59) evident in the Moiseyev Dance Company's first tour to Los Angeles at what he describes as "the height of the Cold War" (59). Most frustrating in the text is the failure to consider the multiple desires involved in creating fantasy fakelore and national authenticity when specific performances and company repertoires are discussed.

Each nation's section is organized in basically the same way, which makes the book user-friendly as a reference tool. Discussions of company history and choreography, repertoire, dancers and dance training, music, finances, and national stereotypes appear in each chapter, although not all categories are equally addressed in each of the nations. In the chapter on Greece, for example, "the burden of history" (169) looms large, while little attention is paid to costuming; for Turkey, nationalism is a rich category, but music plays a small role. In the most successful chapters, Shay describes thematic patterns that apply in several of the countries. One of these is dating rituals, which often occupy center stage in a move that seems simultaneously to proclaim "it's fun in the village" (57) and to account for a heterosexual, healthy, and productive national population. He reads the steps between young villagers as a "potent symbol" (63) which can be wielded as a "useful political tool" (63), real or imagined, for audience, cast, and sponsors.

While "fakelore" poses concern for those attached to accuracy, class politics inform a different brand of authenticity. Many national traditions originate with a peasant class, and when these dances are made "folklore" and professionalized, tensions arise. In the chapter devoted to Croatia, a rural woman's video interview startles the author; she says the national company "dances our dances better than we do" (110). There is no further discussion of the tensions authenticity produces. A drawback of this book so rich with observation, personal interviews, and experience is that it offers interesting descriptive details while eschewing a theoretically charged discussion of, for example, who...