Choreomania: Dance and Disorder by Kélina Gotman (review)

Reconsidering the possible meanings of dance and disorder, Kélina Gotman's Choreomania investigates how disorderly dancing has been understood through the political conditions of its representations. Bringing attention to dance studies' increasingly interdisciplinary position, the book tells "a history that is performed in a bodily way" (11). While most scholarly works on choreomania study this topic in an exclusively Parisian context, Gotman looks at the displacement of discourse surrounding manic dance. Showing how modern notions of choreomania formed rhizomatically, she builds a bridge from nineteenth-century representations of medieval and early modern accounts of choreomania to cases in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She skillfully demonstrates how discourse on choreomania came about through a repeated set of scripted scenes. Chorea itself, Gotman argues, defies "the closure of representation" and emerges in the gap "between observation and hearsay" (89). Performed in passing, choreomania becomes what Gotman calls "a disorder of migration" (63) both as it enters public spaces and discursively spreads. [End Page e-13]

Engaging extensively with dance scholars such as Felicia McCarren, Ramsay Burt, Andrew Hewitt, and Mark Franko, Gotman defines choreography as what takes place between language and an embodied and written archive. From there, she creates a genealogy of choreography connecting present and past concepts of movement. The book challenges theories of modernity as the uncanny by showing how nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists and writers understood novel dances through earlier beliefs about excessive movement.

In addition to bringing together various disciplinary approaches (dance studies, anthropology, history of medicine, psychiatry, and sociology), Gotman explores reiterations of choreomania in France, Germany, Italy, Ethiopia, Brazil, Madagascar, the United States, Melanesia, and Polynesia. Existing outside of linear time, choreomania allows Western bodies to histrionically perform "pre-civilized" states (167), which Gotman makes clear by creating a loop from nineteenth-century texts on medieval European choreomanias, to colonial medical literature, to representations of colonized groups' dancing revolts, and finally to discourse on twentieth-century Western social dances. Showing how there were "never any 'real' choreomaniacs" (6), the book draws on postcolonial theory by Ranjana Khanna, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha. Descriptions of these excessive dances, Gotman maintains, arise from anxieties and fantasies about the dark continent of the feminine and an "undisciplined and disciplinarizable" Orient (157). Performing a political spectrality, choreomaniacs living under colonial regimes, according to Gotman, enact a sort of reverse possession. In this history of dance as order and disorder, the circulation of European diagnoses of disorderly corporeality plays a significant role in the spread of colonial thought. Gotman's study of choreomania's palimpsestical accounts complicates and expands the relationship between dance and the performance of politics or political unrest as she shines light on bodily movement's transposition of politics into formless containers of dance, theater, and disease.

Divided into two parts, the book first delves deeply into the nineteenth-century German historian of medicine J. F. C. Hecker's studies of medieval dance manias, which Gotman argues significantly shaped nineteenth-century concepts of choreomania. She demonstrates how nineteenth-century interests in antiquity and the bacchanalian Middle Ages fueled modern perceptions of disorderly or mad dancing. The second part of the book examines colonial observations of putative dancing disorders, looking first at the tarantella's representations as Italian and African projections of dangerous sexuality, savagery, antiquity, and disease. Gotman then leads us to Madagascar and Brazil where disorderly dancing fosters ecstasy-belonging and social insurgency. In her reading of colonial medical literature, Gotman shines light on how choreomania became synonymous with the inadmissible [End Page e-14] movement of marginalized groups. The final chapters analyze the subversive and unproductive expenditure of the Ghost Dance in the American West, cargo cults in the South Pacific mimetically displacing Western fantasies, and finally modern social dance crazes' attempts at mixing grace and primitivism.

This book exposes the ways in which motor disorders are perceived as dances and dances are perceived as disorders. Drawing on Wendy Brown's critique of Foucault, Gotman examines the crowd as...