BOOK REVIEWS

would be betterfor being permanentlyfixed or for being fugitive; even the long term effectsthat particularmethods (e.g. notation) may have upon the practiceof dance are considered.It is shown that no single method of recording is best, and that ideally a number should be combined. Everything said is sensible, intelligent,alert:comments and stricturesare telling and authoritative.Yet importantlacunae remain.For example:more should have been said about the slipperiness of the term identity.The kind of identityused to prove copyright is far removed from the of the dance work as an interpreter pursues it. The firstis identity the demand for some merely uniquely linked characteristic, to an author's equivalent fingerprint or handwriting. The second is in the nature of a search for a normativeideal, for a realisationof a work's core aesthetic properties, its very raison d'etre. Pace is to be Despite such minor reservations,A Measured intent on acclaimed. understanding warmly Anyone seriously dance will find this book, like its predecessor,indispensable. Trevor Whittock

BORDERTENSIONS: DANCEAS DISCOURSE: OF THE PROCEEDINGS FIFTH STUDY OF DANCE CONFERENCE

University of Surrey, 20-23 April 1995 Guildford:University of Surrey, 1995, 386 pp., ?17.50 p/b This unedited volume of conference proceedings, consisting of thirty-fivepapers alphabeticallyordered by author, supplemented by descriptionsof performancespresentedat the conference, is inevitablyheterogeneous in approach and uneven in quality. But the level of competence and interest is very high, and the effortsof the conferenceorganizershave resulted in a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. With its up-to-date bibliographies,it should be a landmarkin dance studies. The title BorderTensionsis significant, and is explained in
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DANCE RESEARCH

Professor Adshead-Lansdale's opening address.She explainsthat the first such conference, in 1981, concentrated on the distinctiveness of dance, 'carving out our own field of study in the higher education sector'; but this approach ran the risk of isolation, and the present conference seeks to relate dance research to such related fields as music, theatre and the visual arts, as well as to approaches of general contemporaryinterest: feminism, postmodernism, and cultural criticism. The 'border tensions' arise from these conflictingnecessities of maintaininga distinctiveacademic and bureaucraticidentity while emphasizof dance from other activities.Evidently,all ing the inseparability were aware of this chosen emphasis, because made participants all of them have been at pains to identify some border or some tension on which to hang their contributions.Each paper seeks to go beyond mere descriptionand chronicleand addressitselfto some debatable issue. Not all attempts to achieve theoretical interest are equally successful. In the only paper that explicitly addresses the methodological question, Helen Thomas points to the futility of merely citing a string of fashionable theorists (Foucault, Baudrillard,Bourdieu and such) as authorities,without actually engaging their thought. And Thomas herself seems to exemplify a pervasive weaknessthat she does not discuss, when she devotes a page to expounding Lacan's revisionof Freud without explaining why the mere fact that a voguish theoristhas said something is a reason for believing it. The word 'discourse',much favoured by the contributors,may suggest that the currencyof a phraseology in certain circles suffices to confer authority on one's without any need for evidence or argument. affirmations, The demand for theorizinghas affecteddifferentcontributions in different ways. Iris Garland, for instance, introduces an account of T6rtola Valencia, a dancer long popular throughout the Hispanic world in which she was a cult figure among the young literati, by saying that 'one of the consequences of postmodern cultural theory is the consideration of voices that have been marginalised or silenced in the development of our disciplinarycanons'; but since Valencia never formed either a company or a school and left no legacy of technique, and Garland does not say what was distinctive in her dancing or what the (unspecified)literatifound interestingin it, her neglect
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by historians hardly needs postmodernistexplanations. If such forgotten figures are restored to memory, it will probably owe more to the need of graduate students for ever-newdissertation topics than to any revolutionin the method of dance studies. Ann Daly, by contrast,cites the authorityof Bourdieu'swork on 'distinction'to show how many featuresof IsadoraDuncan's dancing, together with what she said about it, were designed to align it with upper-classart, as opposed to the mere 'entertainment' as which theatre dance had been traditionallyidentified. The brevity necessitated by the conference format, however, prevents Daly from making a convincing case; one is left wonderingwhy the alleged manoeuvreswould have worked, or whether they would all have located Duncan in the same social stratum. In fact, the hierarchy of prestige suggested by Daly's treatmentseems much less powerfullystructuredthan the social movementswith which earlierwork on Duncan has familiarised us; perhapswe should take Daly's presentationratheras a mere promissorynote for more elaborate treatment to be published elsewhere. Meanwhile, the invocation of Bourdieu contributes little to our understanding. Several of the papers explore the theme of the male or masculine gaze: in dance, female bodies are looked at by male eyes. The favouritereferencehere is Laura Mulvey's Visualand Pleasures Other (1989). Perhapsthe most imaginativetreatmentof this theme is by Valerie A. Briginshaw, who contrasts the distancing eye of the travellingmale with the engaged body of the situated female. Several papers on this topic are perceptive and suggestive. But some contributorsare a little hasty: some failed to make clear to themselveshow they take the construction of genderto be relatedto the factualityof sex, othersoverestimate the dichotomy in today's dance world between female performers and male spectators.In the last public dance performance I attended(MacMillan'sManon,National Ballet of Canada,5 May 1996), there seemed to be as many men as women among the principal dancers, and women in the audience notably outnumbered men. Is this really exceptional? A more obvious demographic differencebetween audience and performerswas that the formerwere very much older. Other contributionson gender differentiation in dance include Maria I. Koutsouba's observation of a failed attempt to cross
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gender lines in a Greek festival, Alexandra Carter'saccount of the symbolism of gender in English music-hall ballets between 1884 and 1915, Linda J. Tomko's treatmentof the re-gendering of English traditional dance on its introduction to the United States, Trish Winter's bewildered and bewildering encounter with aerobics videos, Stacey Prickett'spresentation(too dependent on its accompanyingvideos, alas) of Joe Goode's inspired playing with gender identifications, and M. A. Greenstein's account of the astonishingcase of the Los Angeles choreographer Frank Guevara, who crossed many borders and encountered tensions on all of them. Shortageof space preventsme from naming all the papers in this outstanding collection, even those I found most valuable. Readers are urged to forage for themselves. Francis Sparshott

HISTORY CHOREOGRAPHING
Edited by Susan Leigh Foster. Indiana Bloomington: University Press, 1995. 257 pp., photographs, diagrams,bibliography,index. ?27.50, cloth; ?13.99, paperbound. The notion of a mind-body split has dominatedwestern intellectual life for centuries. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, music scholars parroted Aristotle on the superiority of theoryto practice:it is betterto be the one who writesabout what is done than the one doing it (vide Lambertus: 'Any ass can bray').Some yearsago, teaching a movementworkshopas partof a seminar on dance criticism, I was taken aback by the young university teacher of dance history and aesthetics - once a dancer, I believe - who said flatly, 'I don't do practical.' These days, dance scholars are more likely to experience, in some way at least, what they'rewriting about, and 'the body' has become a hot topic, a subject for investigation in a variety of disciplines.In February 1992, Susan Leigh Foster, author of the much acclaimed, debated, and cited Reading Bodiesand Dancing:
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