Worlding Dance (review)

In the introduction to her edited anthology Worlding Dance, Susan Leigh Foster charts the academic conditions of possibility in which the concept of "world dance" emerged. To date, the category of world dance has received minimal critical reflection as a term shaped by the cultural, political, and economic circuits of late capitalism. The central intervention of the anthology—foregrounded in the introduction and addressed explicitly in the majority of the essays—centers on the observation that, within both US dance studies scholarship and the curricular organization of dance departments, "dance" is understood to be the high-art domain of unmarked (namely, white) ballet and modern techniques, where "world" or "ethnic" dance is envisioned as "local" and "traditional" practices populated by artists of color. Foster identifies the volume as an attempt to rigorously reflect on the racialized and hierarchized "worlds" constructed by the normative use of the term, and the eight essays collectively offer new analytic approaches to "worlding dance." The concept of worlding dance intends to challenge world dance as supplementary to dance, and to expose the power relations that sustain the distinctions between the two—an explicit attempt to avoid the pitfalls of the 1990s multicultural logic that placed under erasure the power differentials that accompany difference and generated the category of world dance. Worlding dance, then, involves "construct[ing] inquiries into dancing that would acknowledge and celebrate the complexity of any given dance's significance while simultaneously locating it within a global perspective on dance" (9).

In her opening essay on Indian dance in Sweden, Lena Hammergren investigates the intercultural transfers and negotiations of embodied repertoires that accompany globalization. To name this process, she draws on Paula Saukko's addition of the "bodyscape" to Arjun Appadurai's well-known process geographies that characterize the various flows (financial, technological, and so on) of globalization. She demonstrates how Ram Gopal, Lilavati Devi, and Rani Nair—three choreographers working in Sweden with varying connections to India—articulate danced diasporic identity within a context shaped by local and global political-economic forces.

Jacqueline Shea Murphy's piece explores how choreographer Santee Smith, a member of the Mohawk Nation, Turtle Clan, from the Six Nations Reserve, gives active expression to US Indigenous worldviews through her use of contemporary stage dance in her piece Kaha:wi. Shea Murphy ethnographically situates her spectatorship of the piece at the National Museum of the American Indian theatre in Washington, D.C., suggesting that the nondiscursive "archive" produced by Smith's work both complicates the knowledge produced by the museum's traditional curatorial practices and draws attention to the circulation of bodies in museum spaces. According to Shea Murphy, understanding dance as "archival space in turn provide[s] a model for rethinking 'worlding dance' practices that, like the conventional museum, have often contained and collected dances for easy student/viewer consumption" (34).

Priya Srinivasan's essay charts her own body's movements between India and the United States through richly nuanced ethnographic vignettes, performatively enacting the uneven global flows of bodies, labor, capital, and affect with which the world practice in question—Bharata Natyam—is bound. Through a sophisticated materialist analysis, Srinivasan focuses on the intimate details that signal the "telltale signs of bodily labor that point to 'other stories' of global capital's contradictions, excesses, and ruptures" (72). By exposing the raced and classed ways in which a traditionally denoted "world" dance form complexly unfolds on both sides of the global north/south divide, Srinivasan's essay pointedly manifests the nuanced power relations embedded within Bharata Natyam's practice.

Anthea Kraut's essay intervenes in dance historiography by illuminating the racialized power relations underlying the transformation of dance into a form of intellectual property, focusing on Alberta Hunter's attempt to copyright the Black Bottom and Hanya Holm's battle to copyright her choreographic contributions to Kiss Me, Kate. This discussion contributes to the overall aim of the anthology by demonstrating how the assumptions underlying the notion of world dance also inform the practice of copyright law. Where world dances are...