Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (review)

In the hands of a less able and adventurous scholar, Anthea Kraut's Choreographing the Folk could have been executed exclusively as a salvage mission, to unearth and reclaim Zora Neale Hurston's Depression-era work for the dance stage. Known for her literary work, as novelist, playwright, and folklorist, Hurston has been largely absent from the dance historical literature, in spite of her path-breaking choreographic stagings of Africanist folk material in the 1930s. As Kraut points out, Hurston's omission is paradigmatic of what Brenda Dixon Gottschild has called the "invisibilization" of the Africanist artistic legacy in the history of U.S. dance practices, and, as such, cause in and of itself to write a book reclaiming Hurston's place in the canon (8). As such, Kraut's book is a deft corrective to the historiographic legacy in dance studies, of segregating movement formations into categories determined by race and genre. Yet Kraut's imagination, tenacity in the archive, and embrace of empirical and theoretical complexity push this effort into wholly unexpected and satisfying places, to craft a book that fulfills, even as it transcends, its restitutive role.

Kraut's personal and scholarly stakes in the project, which she offers in the preface, guide her approach to her subject. Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Kraut writes of the pleasure she felt in jazz dance classes, "gratified" by the "physicalization of the rhythm" (ix). A historical survey of black dance in college prompted an awakening of sorts, pushing her to articulate questions that eventually propelled the research for this book: "Why had it been so easy to participate in and become passionate about a dance form without learning its history? How had my white body become the site for the continued erasure of black bodies from the received history of American culture" (x)? From this vantage point, Kraut identifies the book as a "recovery project" with a critical difference. Correcting invisibilization in ways beyond revaluation, Kraut seeks to "understand the conditions that enable certain subjects and performances to be forgotten—as well as an inquiry of the implications of restoring those subjects and performances to the historical record" (x).

Kraut situates her inquiry into the causes of Hurston's erasure in the artistic and cultural environment in which she worked, also taking into account the mechanics of her artistic labor itself. Why, Kraut asks, did productions such as Asadata Dafora's Kykunkor (1934) and the "Negro Dance Evening" (1937) emerge as precedent-setting standards "in the stagings of diasporic forms in the field of black concert dance" (170), when they followed Hurston's popular folk review The Great Day (1932) by several years? Were there aspects of Hurston's working methods or productions that led audiences and critics to underestimate their value? Or might the problems with valuation have had more to do with viewers' prejudicial assumptions about choreographic authorship and the artistic worth of folk material? As measure of her ability to entertain complexity, Kraut invites such difficult questions, contending that, "On the most basic levels, then, the recovery of Hurston's dance practice provides an opportunity to query the terms we use to talk about dance as a mode of artistic production and to interrogate our very categories of art" (13).

Kraut's revisitation of Hurston's choreographic labor, therefore, is intentionally not driven by potentially essentialist nostalgia that trades on dated stereotypes of "authenticity" and therefore sees African American vernacular cultural formations as immune from the exigencies of the marketplace. As Kraut convincingly shows, close attention to Hurston's artistic and entrepreneurial savvy paints a complex picture of a dance artist who "both capitalized on the period's widespread interest in the folk and strove to set her work apart from other undertakings. At every stage of production, she fought to set the terms of representation for the folk and to assert her own...