Movable Pillars: Organizing Dance 1956-1978 (review)

While accomplishing an important service to the field of dance through strong argumentation, this book's organization unfortunately relegates oral sources to secondary status. ¹

Four initial chapters survey the development of dance studies within academia. This cogent discussion details the role of six dance organizations in the creation of an academic platform. In Katja Kolcio's words, "dance has functioned as an epistemic intervention, namely by institutionalizing physical creative practice as intellectual scholarship . . ." (4). In addition to practitioners (dancers, choreographers, and teachers), the author argues that dance historians, anthropologists, therapists, notators, and critics also intervened, acting as "movable pillars" supporting that new academic platform. The fourth chapter is transitional, citing some oral history sources supporting the author's final theoretical points. Readers are then introduced to a second and entirely separate section comprised of oral history materials, with brief data on project design, selection criteria, and editorial policy; introductory narrator biographies preface each excerpt. Each organization is then represented by between two and six oral history excerpts of interviews by the author with narrators focusing on the founding and early development of each organization.

I am troubled by the book's organization, an intellectual division that privileges the author's theoretical discussion over her oral sources. The author's "epistemic intervention" of visceral experience into print-text academia is ignored in the book design, privileging textual argumentation over orally (and kinesthetically) transmitted primary sources. I am speculating here but the transitional chapter, titled "Performing a Public Voice," seems artificially constructed as a link between former dissertation chapters and the author's fieldwork. More work is needed to artfully weave the author's valuable argument and the voices she purports to rely on as representatives of those movable pillars. If, indeed, these pillars are the foundation of dance scholarship in academe, the actual voices (and bodies from which those voices emerge) should be given a more primary position within the author's argument.

Ironically, the author's introduction to the book cites several previously published collections of first-person accounts in dance which she feels are seminal, but not sufficient to provide support for her scholarly argument. She notes that these are almost entirely focused on oral accounts by choreographers and dancers.

The author then calls for first-person accounts that address institutional histories. If these new sources are crucial, they are ultimately not used sufficiently to justify the author's call.

Project design may provide an answer to my concerns. Kolcio clarifies the creation of her primary sources, giving a brief description of their provenance. From what I can glean, each original interview was a single-session recording, transcribed full length and previously published as Branching Out: Oral Histories of the Founders of Six National Dance Organizations (New York: American Dance Guild, 1999). These sources were recorded either by telephone or face-to-face for forty-five minutes to two hours in length, ostensibly with no follow-up interviews. Excerpts from that original set of interviews were selected, in consultation with members of each organization and agreed upon by consensus. This process reveals the author's grounded theory perspective, allowing the field to participate in generating selection criteria, though those criteria are not detailed. At the very least, readers can surmise that selection was based on ensuring a reasonable breadth of voices for each organization. However, a series of single interviews without follow-up may not provide the type of primary source material to adequately support the author's theoretical argument.

In her preface, the author notes that she "does not attempt to reconcile or hide contradictions that arise among various perspectives . . . [m]y strategy is to present multiple views and experiences . . . through revelations of multiple views and experiences . . . [and] resist narrative simplification . . ." (x). With this statement in mind, the reader is prepared for contradictory threads within the oral accounts. However, this seems not to be the case. There are some divergent perspectives, mostly about personality differences and diverse career paths, but not enough to justify...