Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America By Rebekah J. Kowal (review)

Rebekah Kowal's Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America illuminates a lesser-known chapter in American dance history, in which dance critics, impresarios, and presenters determined the course of dance on the concert stage and bolstered the United States' postwar position as a global superpower during the early cold war by separating dance forms into categories of self and other. Kowal argues that performances of what critics at the time called "ethnic" and "ethnologic" dance (6) mirrored the United States' postwar globalist stance toward learning about foreign cultures and celebrating diversity on terms that did not conflict with national priorities such as communist containment. Kowal advances a new historical narrative in which the United States asserted global dominance through dance presenting. She deepens conceptions of how "dancing enacts a kind of 'doing' that is both representational and constitutive" (200), or how dancing produces speech acts, allowing dancers' bodies, corporealities, and compositional decisions to bring history and subjectivity into being (Kowal developed this argument in her 2010 book How to Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America). The case studies in Dancing the World Smaller are significant for considering dance's political ramifications. As much about New York City as the dance occurring there, Kowal's monograph addresses how the city became a central arbiter of dance aesthetics.

Adopting the book's title from a 1943 dance review that suggested dance could bring people together across national and cultural differences, Kowal defines "dancing the world smaller" as "a concept that imagined that a single dancing body could contain and/or stand for multitudes of other bodies and, presumably other peoples" (31). She demonstrates how this conceit grounded the cultural institution of concert dance and became steeped in the workings of white supremacy. Dance critics defined mid-century modernism by holding the now-anachronistic terms "ethnic dance" (nonwhite practitioners performing dances from outside Northern European / American traditions) and "ethnologic dance" (white practitioners researching and performing dances from cultural contexts outside their own) as foils for abstract modern dance. These terms contributed to spectators' desires for authenticity, a perceived closeness to what they imagined practices looked like in a real or imagined past.

Chapter 1 details how the Around the World in Dance and Song series that Hazel Lockwood Muller produced at New York's Museum of Natural History from 1943 to 1952 upheld the critical divide between modern dance and ethnic dance. Muller presented practitioners in the museum's auditorium as well as in its exhibits as living dioramas. Kowal fastidiously constructs the narrative of these performances through archival administrivia, correspondence, and clippings. She shows how Muller's presenting decisions aligned with changing practices at the Bronx Zoo and the Museum of Modern Art for immersive exhibits. Kowal also explains how the touristic relationship between audience members and performers, which mapped onto imperialist American attitudes toward cultural differences while reducing cultural Others to curiosities, gave crucial power to presenters because their actions determined the trajectory of concert dance as well as American colonialist attitudes toward non-Anglo practices.

In chapter 2, Kowal offers an even-handed examination of Russell Meriwether Hughes, an ethnologic practitioner with a complicated legacy known as La Meri, who produced well-intentioned but ethically suspect cultural tourism by teaching dances from multiple traditions, which she learned in situ. Kowal uses the example of La Meri to illustrate how ethnologic dance offered a counterpoint to dominant forms of ballet and modern dance yet re-centered white prominence. Kowal also deftly navigates the nuances of aesthetic tensions in La Meri's relationship with dancer Ruth St. Denis in their joint venture School of Natya, which became La Meri's Ethnologic Dance Center. While critics understood St. Denis's work as modernist and so evaluated it as individual artistic expression, they framed La Meri's as ethnologic, to be measured by its adherence to what scholars...