Rhythmic Subjects: Uses of Energy in the Dances of Mary Wigman, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham (review)

This book by Dee Reynolds focuses on a theme that is fundamental to an understanding of twentieth-century dance, namely, the fact that energy, rhythm, and kinesthesis are central to the discourse on modernity and modernism. Since the innovative deployment of energy enabled choreographers and dancers to take an active part in the processes of modernization, Reynolds, by analyzing the role of energy in the thinking of three pivotal choreographers—Mary Wigman, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham—has made a groundbreaking and long overdue study of a key aspect of dance in the modernist and postmodernist periods.

At first glance, the title Rhythmic Subjects would appear to be contradictory, as it was precisely the categories of subject and identity that modernism—whether in art, philosophy, or psychology—had tended to undermine by subjecting them to critical scrutiny. Rhythm, movement, energy, and the limits of the individual had been the subject of debate since the end of the nineteenth century. It is this aspect of the rhythmic—the potential for opening up, for shifting, for overstepping boundaries—that is the focus of Reynolds's study. This enables her to raise the issue of "kinesthetic imagination as the activity of a split subject" (11), the questions of the relationship between "movement quality" and energy, and the related discourses.

In the introductory chapter and again in the concluding section, Reynolds elucidates at length and with great erudition the theoretical and methodological complexity of attempting a historical description of modern dance in terms of energy, variously conceived. Proceeding from the phenomenological theories of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, including such modernist studies of perception theory as Theodor Lipp's theory of "Einfühlung" (empathy) based on "inner mimesis" as well as current neurological studies, Reynolds traces in her first chapter, "Life Rhythms," the highly variegated state of discourse on the subject of energy that is central to modern dance. In a concentrated summary of the vitalistic theses on the relationship between "rhythm" and beat advanced by Ludwig Klages, Rudolf Bode, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, and many others, Reynolds identifies the central parameters of the energy debate and the contradictory positions of the "rhythmic movement" in the Germany of the 1910s and 1920s. This is only one example of Reynolds's staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of the subject. The book is a profound survey of the very extensive research that has been done on free dance and modern dance. It also offers historians specializing in this field a great deal of information gleaned from an intensive study of the sources (especially the material on Mary Wigman and free dance in the Berlin archives). The profound scholarly basis of the entire study is accompanied by a very well-considered and transparent approach to questions of methodology and their theoretical reflections.

The analyses of the choreographies are based on a differentiated and clear application of Laban's effort/ shape system (and its further development by Lawrence and Bartenieff). This approach involves not only an analysis of movement but also a historical logic, being first and foremost an energy model, that gave rise to the question of the kinesthetic quality of movement, from which Laban's effort system was developed in the 1920s and 1930s. The difficulty of making "energy" the subject of analytical discourse and visualizing it in specifically aesthetic and kinesthetic analyses of choreographies is probably the greatest challenge confronting Reynolds in this study. Yet she is adept at seeing through these difficulties and solving them. Reynolds introduces the felicitous concept of "kinesthetic imagination," which enables her not only to capture the complex phenomenon of the kinesthetic in terms of subjective perception, of self-awareness/proprioception, and the phenomenology of the turbulent body-space relation in keeping with philosophical phenomenology but also, by combining the various embodied-subject theories with concepts of "imagination," to incorporate the social, historical, and political dimensions of the kinesthetic, to view its...