Dancing Machines: Choreographies in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. By Felicia McCarren. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003; pp. 254. $49.50 cloth.

Extract

Dancers, dance theorists, and dance historians have long confronted a double marginality—a life in dance is fragile not simply because dance is ephemeral, but its professional opportunities are scarce. Within the academy, dance is notoriously treated as a minor literature, and dance studies seldom enjoy influence outside their specialized readerships. These predicaments for dance studies can attach to more general concerns about contemporary culture. A consumer society is oriented to mass media with little value for interpersonal encounter that live performance offers. The body has been eclipsed by the machine, and the drive for speed has rendered audiences intolerant of dance's gestural nuance and impatient with its kinesthetic detail. Accordingly, the persistence of dance would seem almost perverse, a nostalgic longing for lost innocence that winds up being self-marginalizing. Against this narrative, one that can be found among dance scholars who favor more restrictive aesthetic conceptions of dance art within Western concert conventions, Felicia McCarren offers a counter-Edenic tale, one that locates dance as central to modernism's own origins, that offers a rethinking of the one-dimensionally woeful account of mechanization, and ultimately provides a reason for those outside of dance to adopt its conceptual efficacy.