Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference, and Connection in the Global City (review)

In the introduction to Dancing Communities, Judith Hamera reimagines the role of technique in dance, describing it as both an object of dancers' study, but also an everyday practice that brings dancers together. Hamera's understanding of technique as connective tissue makes several prominent contributions to dance studies, and also to any scholarship interested in the relationship between community-building and the arts. Illustrating how technique serves as archive, Hamera describes how dancers refashion older technical forms to forge new identities. Perhaps most significantly, she asserts that dance exists within language, functioning within legible codes just as talking and writing do. The dancers Hamera follows, drawn from four Los Angeles–based case studies, express themselves through dance technique and understand the expressions of others through that same language. Finally, as a culmination of fifteen years of ethnographic research, Dancing Communities exemplifies sensitively written and rigorously theorized dance ethnography.

Focusing an ethnographic lens on dance technique positions dancers, from ensemble members to soloists, as Dancing Communities's primary voices, a fitting outcome to Hamera's recognition of technique as communication. Particularly in the second chapter, where the author focuses on ballet school and semi-professional company Le Studio, dancers tell their own stories and explain their sense of how dance brings people together. Hamera situates ballet within the highly codified form's relationship to space and time historically, locally, and globally, writing that ballet places dancers within a doubled temporality, making them aware of both ballet's long history and its daily, detrimental effect on bodies as relatively young bodies come to feel old. Hamera shows how ballet's spatial dynamics of what she calls "home" and "roam" also pull dancers in two directions, taking them away from their familial home and transforming the space of the studio into a new home. When the dancer excels further, he or she embarks for yet another studio, again leaving and recreating home. With a ballet curriculum for students of all ages and talent levels, Le Studio mirrors a myriad of schools across the United States. However, with its extremely nurturing environment and a sizable male-student population, Le Studio, unfortunately, stands apart from many ballet schools. Writing primarily about Le Studio's adolescent and young adult students, the author describes the pulls of space and time on the dancers' sense of their bodies. For most of her subjects, the daily negotiation of ballet necessitates an embrace of other dancers in community, most often in highly gendered constellations.

Whereas Le Studio's dancers use technique to form supportive connections, Hamera's description of a Cambodian immigrant family's relationship to Khmer classical dance shows how technique's archive can be a source of community support, but also a repository of trauma. Hamera interacts with the parents—both classical dancers and former prisoners within a Khmer Rouge camp—and their three children who bristle at their parents' enforcement of dance education. Hamera constantly reflects on her relationship to a family grappling with often unnamed and seemingly unknowable violence, avoiding positioning herself as prying detective. To accomplish this, she focuses on the family's complex relationship to their personal history as embodied in dance.

Hamera's understanding of the physicality of people's interactions, within families or among strangers, stems from her conception of intimacy in dancing communities as mutually affective relationships conveyed through and with bodies. Two seemingly disparate case studies, Pilates body conditioning and butoh performance, illustrate this form of intimacy. In Pilates, the affective connection emerges among students and teachers while in butoh, connection happens between audience and performer. To explicate Pilates as intimate practice, Hamera uses Luce Irigaray's formulation "I love to you," arguing that mutual physical intimacy requires interactions where caring about another person's body does not transform that body into an object. Pilates, with its frequent one-on-one interactions and the social relationships built in the laid-back studio where Hamera studies, creates an...