Rethinking Dance History: A Reader (review)

To the unsuspecting reader, Alexandra Carter's latest compendium—a collection of writings on specific moments in the history of Western theatrical dance—comes alive only in its penultimate chapter. It is here that choreographer Matthew Bourne, discussing the swan movements of his recent Swan Lake, acknowledges a debt to Nijinsky. Bourne remarks: "I wanted that Nijinsky-type use of the arms crossed over the head—as in the photographs of Spectre [Le Spectre de la rose, 1911] and Narcisse [1911]" (p. 167). It is, I suspect, the familiarity of the posture—and the photos—that enlivens Bourne's description. In the case of Spectre, the image of Nijinsky in rose petals, with arms enveloping his head, is almost iconic, owing largely to an implied androgyny.¹ But Bourne's comment becomes further alive by means of its incongruity with the surrounding pages. This is one of the few occasions in which anyone or anything "canonic"—or, to be less contentious, "well-known"—is mentioned in Carter's anthology. Of course, degrees of familiarity are contestable, particularly across disciplinary boundaries. The potential renown of native Indian Odissi (a classical dance style from the eastern state of Orissa, and the subject of chapter 13) or the late nineteenth-century ballet girl Cara Tranders (chapter 7) might pass unnoticed among many, including musicologists. Nevertheless, the foregrounding of Odissi, Tranders, and other seeming ephemera in place of those more familiar figures in dance history—I think of Jean Georges Noverre, Marie Taglioni, Théophile Gautier, and Marius Petipa, to name a few—is surprising. As is something else. Bourne's passage on Nijinsky is one of few to mention dance's most basic component, gesture. To put this another way, dance description or analysis is effectively absent from this book. There are only a handful of verbalizations of the gestural aspect and just one illustration: on the front cover (of the paperback edition) and bearing no relation I can see to the book's contents. The dance itself, along with the "well known" of its history, has become accepted consciously—or is it unconsciously?—as a historical given. Like Nijinsky's rose in Spectre, it is a phantom presence, teasing with its lost materiality.

What, then, is this book about, and how does it handle its subjects? These questions might afford a view of not only Carter's aims and strategies, but those of the discipline in which she works. The field of dance studies has in recent years witnessed a considerable expansion of its scholarly outlook. Previously characterized by biographies, travelogues, and ethnographic statistical surveys, the literature now draws heavily on cultural history, sociology, and feminist theory—on what might loosely be described as poststructuralist approaches. Carter's Rethinking Dance History is no exception. One of the book's most salient features is its reliance on a poststructuralist brand of historiography. Not only does the history offered conform to a familiar Foucauldian design (nonlinear, episodic, and comprising a series of self-contained case studies), but discussion embraces recent theoretical debate about historical inquiry and practice. In her two introductory chapters, Carter reflects on standard poststructuralist territory: the nature of history; periodization and labeling; the status of "facts"; the role of the historian; and the organization of knowledge. She goes on to illustrate how, for example, periods such as the "Romantic" or the "Postmodern" betray the historian's hand (and are "not necessarily produced by neat, all-inclusive clusterings of events," p. 12); how historical record—from primary source accounts of the Ballets Russes to recent studies of the male dancer—is contingent on authorial bias or, to quote modern parlance, "agenda" (pp. 13–14).

All this discourse on historiographical method, though, may be overstated in the context of the book as a whole. Several contributors tread the same ground as Carter, revisiting notions of historical process and narrative—often in theoretical vamps tacked onto their chapters' introductions or conclusions, or covert backhanders scattered among actual historical investigation. In chapter 3 (an account of the...