Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings ed. by Clare Croft (review)

Queer Dance: Meanings & Makings, edited by Clare Croft, traces a pulsating embrace of queer studies and dance theory. From the relational glint of the sequin to the “capacious archive that is queer dance,” this fine gathering of essays interrogates queer dance as a subject and method of speculative and performance research (2017,7). Centering its contributions in feminist and antiracist calls to practice inter-sectionality in arts and in criticism, the volume’s wide-ranging writings roam nightclubs, burlesques, line dances, traditional and concert forms as well as radical protest art. Across eras of crisis and remembrance, both personal and political, these essayists’ approaches share polyvocal and coalitional sensibilities anchored in embodied study (2), entangling race, gender, and sexuality in wide-ranging approaches to method and expression. As such, the writers anthologized in Queer Dance shift the contours of dance and queer theory, illuminating polysemic strategies of composition as well as of activism and survival onstage and off.

Dance Studies, Croft observes in a forceful introduction, thrives in entanglements of black studies, feminism, and queer performance. Employing legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s lenses of unequal and overlapping opportunity and disenfranchisement, this tightly curated selection takes fresh approaches while also emphatically asserting equivalencies of queer dance in cities and rural gatherings, concert and popular genres, diasporas and intensively local practices. Seventeen thought-provoking essays, a website, and a performance series linked to the volume’s launch offer queerly heterogeneous yet coherent editorial and curatorial praxes, asking what it means to create a queer present (24).

Taken up like a relay across this collection of texts, urgency rallies the volume’s political claims. Remembering the bearing of the body of deceased activist Jon Greenberg, borne in his coffin in Act Up protests into the streets of New York City in the midst of the nineties AIDS epidemic, Jennifer Monson insists on the mnemonic capacities not only of movement, but also of political movements, addressing counterarchives of defiant memory, sex, and ceremony while sharing scores of frankly sweaty, erotically charged dance (223). Yet dance floors, Croft reminds readers, “are not utopias,” a reflection that offsets Kareem Khubchandani’s eloquent revisiting of childhood memories, of Indian aunties on the dance floor in Accra, Ghana, in a fashioning of queer origin stories as well as futures (5). Queering the critic and also the performer, the volume approaches dance techniques with an eye to virtuosity as well as to survival. In Thomas DeFrantz’s coining of “queer-made” dance and scholarship sustain ontologies borne of “effort, by we who need [the queer made’s] presence” (170–71). Decentering an account of Orlando’s Pulse massacre, slightly offset at Queer Dance’s heart, Justin Torres’ “In Praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club” avows the “imperative . . . to be transformed” while it resists yoking memory to the prioritizing of those who enact violence (182). Across these sites of beauty, resilience, and fear, the essayists’ accounts conjure kinesthetic as well as worldly beloveds, challenging as well as cherishing what it means to move queerly through the world.

The gift of the volume is its concerted pluralism, organized in three thematized parts: queering the stage, sociality, and intimacy. Queer Dance’s sites of memory also reposition hegemonic institutions, contesting the discourse of the nation as well as of the city, decentering Manhattan and ultimately urban centers as privileged sites of queer myth-history in eras of gentrification. Peter Carpenter’s “Last Cowboy Standing: Testing a Critical Choreographic Inquiry,” offers line dancing as a participatory score in the midst of the AIDS crisis, tracing a “metonymic chain of associations” of the cowboy and gay rodeo across US nationhood, homosexual iconicity, and Manifest Destiny. Jennifer L. Campbell’s “Dancing Marines and Pumping Gasoline: Coded Queerness in Depression-Era American Ballet,” glimpses cruising grounds in paintings, nudes, and illustrations, offering coded insight into fluid trios and pairs in early twentieth-century ballets. While Greenwich Village tenement windows become intimate...