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Power and the Dancing Body cal and amoral. Itfragments and diminishes the experience ofthe work, for artworks are made and judged in a world that is moral, social, and cognitive. We are witnessing a shift in critical values during the present period. An "anxiety of evaluation" has manifested itself in American criticism in many ways over the past thirty years or so - from an insistence on pure description to debates about cultural relativism. Even the growing emphasis on the political dimension of evaluation noted above is linked to an anxiety ofaesthetic evaluation when artists and critics themselves challenge the "right" of the critic to judge a work created by someone outside of her "race"/ethnicity/class/gender/etc. This anxiety now deserves to be put to rest. Although evaluation should not be the only function the critic performs , it is a valuable and crucial aspect of the critic's work. If evaluation causes anxiety, it is, nevertheless, unavoidable. Power and Dancing Dancing Bodies Change the World 5 the Body Dance historians often start from the premise that dance reflects society. For instance, in Time and the Dancing Image, Deborah Jowitt writes: Western theatrical dancing ... has always been responsive to current trends. At its most profound, like the other arts, it reflects aspects of the current world picture; at its most superficial, it acknowledges the current fashions.... The dancer's image has been subject to many alterations since the beginning ofthe nineteenth century in response to the immense social, political, scientific, and technological upheavals that have characterized the period.... Trying to view the dancers ofthe past as products of their age ... is a challenge [italics added].! For Jowitt, dancing and dancers do not produce culture, but are products of it. Dancing and dancers reflect intellectual and material trends in other spheres of human activity; they do not catalyze trends. Choreographing History Conference, Riverside, California, 1992. 43 44 Writing Criticism / History Similarly, on a panel on American bodies and American culture in the mid-1980s, I insisted that the physical body reflects the social/political body. I used a binary model- influenced by the anthropologist Mary Douglas - that contrasted smooth versus shaggy body styles as symptoms of tightly versus loosely controlled cultural styles. And I argued that the smooth, controlled, virtuosic bodily images purveyed through various strata of both black and white dance cultures in the eighties (from the heroine and the breakdancers in Flashdance to Michael Jackson to the avant-garde choreographer Molissa Fenley) were metaphors for a "greed and glitter" era that stood in direct contrast to the hot effervescence and improvisation of sixties and early seventies dance styles (from James Brown to the twist to the postmodern group the Grand Union).2 The presupposition·assumed by reflection-theory dance historians is that, whether on stage or in social life, dance is a mirror or a microcosm where the workings of culture, everyday life, and even government are actively registered from above on passive bodies below. Ina variation ofthis notion of cultural modeling, Sally Peters writes that "the roots of [exhibition1ballroom dance are popular and mirror views ofmale/female relations specific to period or culture," even though she sees this as "ironic since performance requires artistic collaboration, not mere submission as may occur in social dance."3 Thus, for Peters, a double reflection takes place in the theatricalized arena of exhibition ballroom dancing, for the gendered roles that society has inscribed on bodies on the mass level "trickle up" to the level of artistic choreography. However, I want now to advance another view of the role of dance in society. I do not want to deny that dancing bodies may at times reflect the way things are, but I want to emphasize that they also have the potential to effect change.4 While we might easily acknowledge that ritual dancing in traditional societies alters reality (or at least is believed to by the faithful), we tend to diminish the efficaciousness of both theatrical and social dancing in modern Western culture. Yet even the standard dance history books supply proof that Western theatrical dancing has the capacity to change the world. For instance, Catherine de Medici's court spectacles were not merely the expression or reflection, but the very medium of political negotiations. Queen Catherine's ballets were part of political life, and they were usually conciliatory, uniting opposing political and/or religious factions. But Lincoln Kirstein suggests that the Massacre of St. Bartholomew and the civil war in France that...

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