Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader (review)

A revelation occurred to me in the middle of reading Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, thoughtfully edited by Julie Malnig. In his essay "Beyond the Hustle: 1970s Social Dancing, Discotheque Culture and the Emergence of the Contemporary Club Dancer," Tim Lawrence describes the way early disco dancers in New York's downtown nightclubs did away with the heterosexual, partner-based dancing traditions that had dominated nightclub dance floors for decades and replaced them with a style of celebratory group dancing that cultivated social cohesion through displays of individual virtuosity (199). In Lawrence's description I immediately recognized a historical precedent for the kind of free form, group dancing that goes on every weekend in cities across the country, and hence for my own experiences of contemporary club going.

That our everyday embodied behaviors are shaped by specific historical conditions is one of the central lessons of the "cultural turn" in scholarship since the 1980s. The essays included in this volume bring that crucial insight to the study of North American social dance—from the colonial period to the present—with appealing immediacy. Malnig's collection offers a wide-ranging historical overview of American popular dance forms that will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars. But the book is just as significant as a survey of the current "state of the field" of social dance studies. The strongest of the essays situate American dancing bodies within specific material and social contexts and attend to the complex set of circumstances (economic, national, racial, sexual) through which they move. In so doing the volume's contributors allow us to understand the dance floor as a quasi-sacred space in which broader social relations have been alternatively ritualized, scrambled, reinforced, and subverted. Dance halls, nightclubs, and ballrooms, we learn here, are not trivial places of leisure but highly charged sites of exchange where cultural meaning is both endlessly refracted and exuberantly produced.

What kinds of dances fall under the rubric of "social" and "popular" dance, and what precisely is meant by these terms? In a beautifully composed introduction, Malnig writes that in social dance, "a sense of community often derives less from preexisting groups brought together by shared social and cultural interests than from a community created as a result of the dancing" (4, emphasis in original). This definition helps to distinguish social dance from other vernacular movement traditions like folk dancing. "Popular dance," on the other hand, refers to "a specific process by which local, vernacular, and social dance traditions become popularized in the public sphere" (5, emphasis in original). This is to say that for dances to be considered "popular" they must have "spread beyond local contexts to become . . . national or worldwide dance phenomena" (5). As many of the collection's contributors relate, localized dance traditions often become widely popular only after damaging processes of commodification and exploitation. From published step instruction manuals to television dance programs to Hollywood films, vehicles for the marketing of various social dances have frequently disavowed the dance's racialized or "ethnic" origins even as they sought to market blander versions of these same dances to the "respectable" middle-class dancing public. At the same time, the popularity of certain dance forms among young people—particularly those coded as racially or ethnically other—has often heralded broader trends of social integration. It's not surprising that the relation of the "social" to the "popular" in the realm of dance is often contentious: indeed, such conflicts drive many of the most compelling histories told in the book.

Malnig has divided the volume into five sections, containing between four and six essays: Historical Precedents, Evolving Styles, Theatricalizations of Social Dance Forms, and the Contemporary Scene. The sections are organized in roughly chronological order, so that read sequentially each traces a fairly coherent historical narrative (this is less the...