Butting Out: Reading Resistive Choreographies Through Works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha (review)

Few manuscripts connect theory to practice in as provocative and productive a manner as this volume. Chatterjea ties together many strands of theory—including critical race, postcolonial, aesthetic, materialist, and feminist—into a disarmingly personal and potent knot, destined to shift paradigms surrounding performance and its reception. Writing to tether readings of particular dances to a history of ideas, the author hopes to "suggest that racial and cultural difference are matters neither personal nor ontological, but of construction" that "need to be understood through critical engagement" (xiii). Far more than an exploration of the choreography of its two outstanding artist subjects, this remarkable volume shakes the very foundations of dance studies as an area of inquiry.

Chatterjea moors her troubling of complex theoretical waters with readings of dances by two women who both direct internationally known companies and are choreographers who have "radicalized the cultural production in their communities, weaving the aesthetic and the political in powerful signification" (xiii). According to the author, Zollar and Chandralekha engage "a politics of defiant hope" (42) in their work, a commitment that demands simultaneous consideration "without attempting a 'cross-cultural' study in the mode of liberal relativism": one that speaks instead to "emerging notions of global resistances to white and Western dominance and the urgent energies gathering around possibilities of alliances along lines of progressive politics and color and across national borders" (171). Indeed, "resistive identification" becomes a strategy of the volume as a whole, as a methodology to move through varied modalities of analysis that draw on the work of cultural theorists including Homi Bhabha, Susan Bordo, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak, and Cornel West.

To ground her analyses, Chatterjea must dismantle a slew of assumptions that permeate typical narratives of performance history in the West. She fractures the notion of tradition as a stable term, a maneuver of some import in the marketplace of professional dance production. Taking on the implications of official culture, within which "problematic hierarchies are created," she notes how hegemonic notions of tradition "tend to even out differences among local practices" which then constitute "another kind of mainstream, mobilizing an exclusive route of legitimization" for innovations in performance (7). In this, women artists, "particularly in postcolonial contexts, have been scripted in 'tradition' and entrusted with the responsibility with embodying cultural continuity," a task above and beyond the call of their white Western counterparts (20).

Among many stunning formulations, Chatterjea's complication of the postmodern stands out. As she wonders how the postmodern might "manifest itself in my brown body, Indian passport in hand, when I make dissonant the rhythms of my classically ordered feet, even as I hold on to my tribhangi-bent body" (107), she deftly brings into focus the urgent need for nuanced articulations of broad categories, including modern, primitive, and postmodern. Arguing for an awareness of "specific reference to the cultural contexts in which they are articulated," Chatterjea calls for alternative formations that can encompass the innovations of artists of color within their particular relationship to traditional practices. This becomes crucial: "in the lack of theorizing the context in which they are located, the changing and volatile cultural and political context of their work, they appear as ahistorical figures somehow transcending their otherwise 'age-old' legacy" (112). Claiming an impatience with the "selective oppositionality" of Euro-American postmodernism, Chatterjea wants to theorize a radical postmodern, one that is not, however, "postmodern eclecticism, but rather necessary intersections of synchronous and diachronous modes to create cultural contexts of depth, without modernist nostalgia" (134). This resistant aesthetic becomes an important marker of the radical postmodern, a "notion of reclaiming the past through politics, memory, and desire, rejecting a simple notion of recuperation, subverting some of the obvious attitudes and assumptions of the modern, mediating a contemporary relationship with 'tradition' and 'culture' through constructed and reconstructed narratives" (170).

Chatterjea also raises the so...