Stravinsky Dances: Re-Visions across a Century (review)

Stravinsky Dances is monumental. At 505 pages of text and an additional ninety-nine pages for notes and appendices, it is considerably longer than current monographs edited, of necessity, to reduce publishing costs. It has the heft of a reference book and is dense with details. Having already published her highly regarded book Moving Music (Dance Books, 2000), Jordan now tackles the composer of the twentieth century, whose life and career, encompassing exile, migration, and changing aesthetics, speak to the many geo-political-cultural realities of the time. With the centenary of Stravinsky's best-known choreographic score almost upon us—Jordan calls Le Sacre both "icon" and "monster"—her book will spark fresh discussions and insights, and deserves to be read widely.

Jordan's point of departure is "Stravinsky the Global Dancer" (SGD), an online database that she created in collaboration with Larraine Nicholas, which currently provides documentation for a staggering 1,251 dances known to have used Stravinsky's music. Maintained by the University of Roehampton's Centre for Dance Research, the database, largely fished in December of 2002, currently provides information on choreographies created as late as 2008, and additions are welcomed. The database is fascinating in its own right, and it is easy to see how it influenced Jordan to explore networks of choreographies. One can search by year, choreographer, musical score, company, and country of performance. Within a couple of searches, I had identified correspondences that merited further exploration; "Ragtime for 11 Instruments," composed in 1920, largely after ragtime's heyday, for example, returned choreographically in the U.S. in the 1980s, perhaps as part of the Scott Joplin revival. In some productions, Stravinsky's score indeed was used along with works by Joplin and Ellington.

I came to the book as a musicologist for whom Stravinsky remains a touchstone and whose works, from the lush romanticism of Firebird to the austerity of the Requiem Canticles, have charted the aesthetic currents—notably neo-classicism and serialism—of twentieth-century modernism. Based on the reactions of some of my students, the rhythms, harmonies, and instrumental timbres of Le Sacre, what we used to call its "primitivism," still have the power to shock. I vividly recall the experience of the Joffrey Ballet's "reconstruction" of Nijinsky's choreography, and in many respects date my interest in dance research from that event, as I realized how my musicological training, beset by its own struggles to capture the experience of sound in time, had ignored the dancing body. In the presence of the choreography and the glorious Roerich sets and costumes, the score could no longer remain aloof and resistant to messy, violent, ritualized, dying bodies.

As Jordan cogently argues, "Movement changes musical perceptions" (11). Paying attention to choreography makes us hear the music differently; indeed, Le Sacre with the Joffrey sounded entirely new. Jordan's well-chosen subtitle emphasizes her focus on how specific scores changed both in Stravinsky's own life and in the years since his death, as choreographers, those who knew him personally and more who did not, continue to have something to say with his music. Through the meeting of the sensory planes of sight and sound, we look and look again and hear afresh. While her meticulous analyses provide evidence that the music changes what choreographers did with movement, more importantly, from my perspective, she suggests how choreographers may have caused Stravinsky, like the rest of us, to hear his own music differently and to rethink his compositional choices over time.

With as many stories as Jordan has to tell, structure and pacing is everything. Her six chapters move us both backwards and forwards through time, as Stravinsky is danced by various collaborators. The opening chapter, "The Composer's Perspective," is an especially useful introduction to Stravinsky's life as one lived in and through the theater, broadly understood. Jordan distills previous Stravinsky scholarship, presents Stravinsky's own statements...