How to Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America (review)

Rebekah Kowal begins How to Do Things with Dance by noting that two key events in twentieth-century African American history occurred in a two-day period. Choreographer Alvin Ailey's signature work Revelations premiered the day before the Greensboro sit-ins began on 1 February 1960. Kowal pairs the dance and the protest to argue for what she calls an "emerging progressive body politic" (7) in postwar America. Together, dance and social protest offer evidence of how people used their bodies—onstage and off—to represent and spur social change. Kowal's argument builds upon a central premise of much of dance studies: dance is socially produced and socially productive. But she goes further, positioning dance not just as one expressive mode of American culture, but as a key contributor to embodied social action in the decades after World War II.

Kowal's book has far-reaching implications for dance as interdisciplinary inquiry. As the book's title suggests, Kowal draws explicitly from theories of efficacy and action that are foundational to performance studies to argue for the social and political import of dance. Kowal's ideas are most evocative when she interlaces dance history and performance theory with American studies scholarship. With a few notable exceptions, scholarship about American concert dance has made few inroads into American studies. How to Do Things with Dance is a step in the right direction toward transgressing this disciplinary barrier.

How to Do Things with Dance also makes inroads for dance in scholarship on the cold war. Kowal situates dance within the cold war contexts of containment and consensus, showing how leading dance figures in the United States—many of them African American, female, and/or homosexual—"struggled to live and to make sense of lives that deviated from what was considered normal while seeking security in association with the dominant culture" (15). Exploring this cultural double-bind, Kowal historicizes the American dance community's claims to "universalism," explaining the term's strategic deployment to legitimize dance and provide cover for radical agendas unacceptable to the mainstream.

Kowal focuses on ten American choreographers—Talley Beatty, Merce Cunningham, Katherine Dunham, Martha Graham, Anna Halprin, José Limón, Donald McKayle, Pearl Primus, Anna Sokolow, and Paul Taylor—considering how the artists' seminal works and biographies contributed to and were produced by larger trends in American postwar culture. Most of her chapters focus on two or three choreographers, relating them to one another by way of a unifying cultural theme.

The idea of "universalism," for example, is the subject of Kowal's first chapter. Drawing from newspaper criticism and documentation of UNESCO and the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), the group that chose choreographers for US State Department dance tours, Kowal contrasts prewar American choreographers' political positions with postwar claims of supposedly apolitical universalism. She argues that the postwar rhetoric of universalism aimed to situate dance and the body as universally accessible platforms capable of facilitating global communication without compromising the individual artist's autonomy.

In the second chapter, Kowal connects this notion of universalism to larger ideals of domestic consensus and containment, persuasively demonstrating how Graham and Limón, the first two choreographers sent abroad by the State Department, manipulated the idea of universalism. Dances like Graham's Appalachian Spring and Limón's The Moor's Pavane largely uphold the normativity of heterosexual marriage, a key social relationship underpinning cold war ideas of domesticity, while also choreographing critiques of marriage. Kowal's careful, thoughtful discussion of the Bride's (Graham's role in Appalachian Spring) ambivalence about her impending marriage will serve as accessible performance analysis for readers outside performance studies and exemplary for those within it.

The next two chapters, which focus on Sokolow and Primus, chart the women's embodiment of urban and diasporic subjectivities as divergent from postwar universalism. Kowal poses Sokolow's Rooms (1955) as a provocative counterpart to mid-twentieth-century sociological studies...