Reworking the Ballet: Counter-Narratives and Alternative Bodies (review)

In her book, Vida L. Midgelow discusses the ways in which so-called reworkings of ballets can display attitudes towards gender, sexuality, and cultural difference. She concentrates mainly on dances that were made after 1980, and especially reworkings of Swan Lake and Giselle by contemporary choreographers. At first I was thrilled that someone had taken on this fascinating and important subject, since reworkings have been such a phenomenon during the last several decades. But soon the book's central argument began to unravel.

The text is composed of two parts. The first begins with an introduction of the theoretical framework and establishes the research field. It also gives an overview of terms, such as "reworking," "reconstruction," and "adaptation," along with the ways they are used in dance and other arts. This part also outlines some of the features of the well-known reworkings made by such choreographers as Mats Ek, Matthew Bourne, and Mark Morris, noting how they remolded dance vocabulary, retold narrative in new contexts, and used cross-dressing. The second part consists of more extensive dance analyses of works by Susan Foster, Javier de Frutos, Raimund Hoghe, Shakti, and Masaki Iwana, and Midgelow herself. The central elements in these reworkings are erotic representations of female and male bodies and how they express a multiplicity of sexual and cultural identities.

Reworking the Ballet is based on Midgelow's doctoral thesis at the University of Surrey, which may account for its rigid and repetitive structure and style. Each chapter ends with a brief recap, and the final conclusion repeats what is said earlier, without expanding on it. In the beginning there is a promise to discuss the context and politics of reworkings, but the former, in particular, would require more exploration. For example, it would have been interesting to consider the larger social and cultural context of England during the 1990s when Bourne made his Swan Lake, or of Sweden in the 1980s when Ek choreographed his Giselle and Swan Lake. What was happening in the society and in the field of dance in those countries that helped produce such reworkings?

The strength of the book lies in its recognition of the intertextual nature of the reworkings being considered and discussion of their diverse connections with their source(s). Midgelow includes a number of different types of dance in her analyses, some of which depart radically from their sources, mixing different dance genres and cultures. The sections discussing dances at the crossroads of Butoh (classical Indian dancing), ballet, and gender in the works of Masaki Iwana and Shakti provide the most interesting reading. Analyses also show how de Frutos, Hoghe, and Foster all used self-conscious fragmenting and deconstructing in their works, creating ambiguous relationships with source texts. Midgelow justly asks what makes Foster's Lac de Signes (1983) and Ballerina's Phallic Pointe (1994) reworkings, since they do not follow the form, style, narrative, or aesthetic of Swan Lake or Giselle. The answer is that "they are fundamentally based on these pre-existing dances. Her dances exist because of them and remark upon them" (84).

At the heart of reworkings is always the complex relationship with the "original"; that is why they are particularly intriguing. It is important to remember that one cannot revisit a historical dance source, that is, a nineteenth-century ballet, because we lack the original work. What the choreographers are now reworking is our contemporary ideas of these ballets. For some time, the idea of originality has been questioned in the ballet classics. The ballets' "texts" are unstable: few in dance research today presuppose ballets as authoritative, universal, and unchanging. Still, Midgelow represents reworkings as fighting against the seeming illusion of fixed form and meanings.

The book takes sides loudly and clearly. According to the author, the most important feature of the reworkings she discusses is their potential critical stance toward ballets from the classical and romantic canon. She concedes that some choreographers might have chosen these particular...