The Brooklyn Rail

Suppose you lost the titled introduction to Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study, leaving you to infer what connects its twelve brightly colored, saddle-stitched booklets. You might notice that each contains an eclectic treatise on dance, or that all are authored by a choreographer, the likes of which include mayfield brooks, Thomas F. DeFrantz, maura nguyễn donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Annie-B Parson, Javier Stell-Frésquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia, and Andros Zins-Browne. Even so, the word “history” may not rise to the top of mind—unless perhaps in a spirit of negation.

Published by Dancing Foxes Press, Wesleyan University Press, and Big Dance Theater, Dance History(s) stands out in a historical record distinctly lacking in sources authored by dance practitioners themselves. Moreover, the existing literature is often overwrought with descriptive accounts of performances and specific oeuvres by critics and historians. To circumvent these approaches, editors Thomas F. DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson bind the collection with a prompt: “Who is in your imaginary dance family tree, FROM the beginning of time to YOU/now?” This question frames the following texts, offering a way to think outside of the conventional boundaries of dance writing.

Answering with a certain literalness, many authors devote their booklets to speculative family trees. In Letters, Eiko Otake strikes up an epistolary romance with those who inspire her, living and deceased. Her addressees include her long-time mentor and Japanese dance theater pioneer, Kazou Ohno, as well as those who she’s only met in the archive, such as Dore Hoyer, a dancer who tragically spent all her resources on staging one final production before taking her own life. In six letters, Otake draws on advice to “dance with the dead,” discovering a sense of kinship in the emotional and material struggles of dancers like herself. In Somewhen Else maura nguyễn donohue undergoes a parallel project, where she cites hundreds of influences, which range from compendium co-authors to bell hooks and Donna Haraway, as equally comprising her lineage. In donohue’s words, “to quantify my ineffable experience of artistic influence is to land like the apple in a Newtonian world when I fluctuate into quantum and metaphysical realms. All this material is immaterial.”

Others indulge in creation myth-making to delineate the medium’s fantastical origins. In The Future Histories of Black Dance, Thomas F. DeFrantz embraces science fiction to chronicle the birth of dance, i.e. a series of electrical impulses felt by ancient microcellular organisms. Later, futuristic cyborgs reclaim these non-human origins, dissolving back into electricity and pure movement. Also drawing from the non-human world, mayfield brooks adopts a fable structure in What Came Before the Heartbreak to name plants as our first dance teachers. As the story goes, though ancient humans lost their primordial knowledge of movement to modernity, brooks tells of their reintroduction to this plant-based prehistoric form of sensory awareness. Here, these authors diverge even further from anything we might recognize as a dance history as they unanimously advocate for principles of embodiment and sensuality through a veil of speculative fiction.

Through recurring small scores, prompted exercises, and outward-facing questions, this collection also implicates us—the reader. In Watch me, Ogemdi Ude includes a short score which asks for our participation: “1-2 on balls of feet. Right foot steps forward and cross body at a slight diagonal. Both hands are flexed with left elbow bent and hand up and right elbow straight with hand down at the side.” And so on.

Here, we are invited to become performers ourselves, even if just for a moment. In this way, we join the “family” which often defines dance, not by formal training or professional occupation, but as a member who moves, sharing motion with the many people who have come before.

Most traditionally, dance history has been founded in descriptions of dancers, performances, productions, companies, and choreographies. This may be intuitive, as how else could the fleeting medium of performance be canonized, if not through language? In the twentieth century, criticism found a home in dedicated publications and recurring newspaper columns, facilitating a dance community that could extend beyond class and New York City limits (a tradition which prevails in locales like the Rail’s Dance section). Circulating accounts of performances, audacious dancer biographies, and sharp production takedowns accrued cult followings around certain performers and performances. Defending against accusations of dance criticism being purely formalist, Deborah Jowitt writes: “Descriptive writing—a certain kind of it—is the best way I know to assert the interdependence of content and form, of narration and movement’s ‘secret truths.’” For better or worse, writing that documents dance has been inseparable from its remembrance. Working from this premise, editors DeFrantz and Parson depart from traditional description as they hand the reins to lesser represented historians: choreographers.

Dance History(s) markedly departs from conventions of its namesake over and over again, abandoning history as a systematic study to instead embrace it as a palimpsest. But what makes this compendium so enticing is that its authors actually seem entirely untethered by those traditions of dance writing rooted in ethnography that they functionally oppose; equally, they make nearly no strides to reconstruct past artifacts or ethos of their dances. While there are certainly corrective measures happening—the majority of the compendium authors are non-white and make frequent reference to decolonial praxis—the writing itself is never reactionary. Every booklet reads as incredibly earnest and singular, opening up a refreshing and liberated space for dance writing.