Choreographies of the Living: Bio-Aesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance by Carrie Rohman (review)

Is it because dance is considered the most "animal" art form that it has been marginalized by art critics? This is one of the important questions raised in Carrie Rohman's Choreographies of the Living, a well-argued and physically attuned book that seeks to foster new interactions between animal studies and dance studies. Symbolic language and rational concepts are the spiritual gifts that have long supported notions of human exceptionalism and link us to the divine as opposed to the earthly or animal. The human is above all a subject of language and to be praised as such. But to be a subject of language is also to be subject to language and to the distortions that words produce. This is one reason that the linguistic turn in literary studies has been followed by efforts to identify other forms of communication that are less easily manipulated by structures of discursive power and are more evocative of what might hide beneath or outside human language. It is the glory and power of dance that it does just that, argues Rohman. Dance is animal art because it originates in what is sensed rather than cognized, and so in what resists being conceptualized. Dance is to be glorified, not marginalized, for that.

Rohman is herself a life-long dancer, and in bringing dance studies and animal studies together her aim is less to explore how other animals dance or might be described as choreographers than to argue that the aesthetic impulse that is central to dance is a "bio- impulse" that has its origins in what humans share with other animals, if not with life itself (3). Such is the "bioaesthetic" that she identifies in works by writers, choreographers, and illustrators from early modernism to the twenty-first century, including Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Rachel Rosenthal, and Merce Cunningham. What is the bio-impulse? To help define and describe that aesthetic, Rohman turns primarily to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as well as to Elizabeth Grosz, whose theories (among others) pulse through every chapter. She quotes Deleuze and Guattari's suggestion that "perhaps art begins with the animal," and that the very purpose of art is "to make perceptible the imperceptible forces that populate the world, affect us, and make us become" (8). Rohman follows these thinkers in concluding that art comes from what is prior to or outside what we humans perceive, from those "invisible forces," intensities, and vibrations that move us to become other than we are. The aesthetic impulse, in other words, is an expression of Deleuzian "becomings." Grosz offers a more material, if also more ecological, vision of the artistic drive as originating, in Rohman's words, "within the strivings of life itself," or in response to the earthly and cosmic forces through and with which we create our lives rather than merely live them (9). Rohman quotes Grosz's assertion that "it's not man's nobility that produces art, it's man's animality" (9), while further noting that, for Grosz, animal artistry is inherently sexual insofar as its purpose is to produce pleasure.

In provocative readings, Rohman traces evidence of this animality in signs of vibration, intensity, and/ or sexually/creative/affective becoming, although one might question whether intensity and vibration are always creative, even if pleasurable. In chapter 1, Duncan's barefootedness is highlighted as evidence of her prioritizing the movement of the inhuman and as rebuff to a Heideggerian prioritization of the hand and of handedness. Chapter 2 opens by linking the screams of a rabbit, a woman in labor, and a young tenor as traces of those "life practices" that, according to Rohman, Lawrence understands as part of the "life rhythm" (49) or "cosmic forces in which all creatures . . . participate" (49), and whose pulsing she tracks in his poem "Tortoise Shout" and his novel Women in Love, where Gudrun dances in time...