Worlding Dance, edited by Susan Leigh Foster, and featuring eight admirable essays thoughtfully crafted and elaborated in accessible style, will undoubtedly become a key text in world dance courses taught across the globe. Eight scholars come together and are featured as a “collective” in this book. Five of the eight, Lena Hammergren, Yutian Wong, Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Priya Srinivasan, and Ananya Chaterrjea, focus their attention on specific world dance forms and discuss these within socio-historical and socio-political frameworks. Anthea Kraut, Susan Foster, and Marta Elena Savigliano adopt a more general perspective. They investigate large themes relating to copyright laws, the institutionalization of the term “choreography” in modern dance practices, and “world dance” traditions, teasing out their implications for the development of dance studies more broadly and specifically in the age of globalization.

Foster introduces the book with vision and clarity. She situates the compilation within the immigrant history of the global city of Los Angeles and the history of the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, which sponsored the collective and facilitated their ruminations on world forms. Foster explains that at UCLA, the title World Arts evolved out of an earlier nomenclature “Ethnic Arts,” which in turn grew out of, and was allied with, curricular interests in Folk Arts. Both strands of specialization were retained in the Dance Department at UCLA in the 1960s. The Dance Department, in turn, became the Department of World Arts and Cultures in the 1990s.

Foster acknowledges that the substitution of “world” for “ethnic” at UCLA has “worked euphemistically to gloss over the colonial legacy of racialized and class based hierachization of the arts” (1–3). I noted this while teaching at UCLA in the 1990s, and marked the glossing over as representing a problematic new beginning for “ethnic” dance forms such as Bharatanatyam, taught as part as of the ethnic arts curriculum at UCLA since the 1960s. In the last chapter of my dissertation, I elaborated on this problematic by discussing the making of the World Dance Mural displayed spectacularly on the entrance walls of the new Department of World Arts and Cultures.

Many of the chapters in Worlding Dance use the ethnic/world relabeling to challenge the ideological foundations of the two overlapping nomenclatures. Conceived broadly within a global modernity and dance migration perspective, the chapters explore exclusionary politics and processes of collection, classification, naming, and labeling, and track their impact on the life of international artists and the specific world dance traditions they embody and transmit.

All eight chapters work self-consciously with the knotted quality of history writing that historian Dipesh Chakravorty has described as Granthi. A Hindu term, “Granthi references all manner of jointed articulation such as those that compose the skeleton” (9). Using this complex concept-metaphor, scholars work through the knotted histories of their specific dance examples, move in multiple directions, and explore new ways of writing/thinking/choreographing dance history as “contradictory, plural and heterogeneous” (10). All authors work at the intersection of history and theory, discourse, and practice, and articulate new narrative styles and tactics to discuss their diverse case studies.

Yutian Wong and Lena Hammergren investigate Asian dance histories by using the concept of the mobile, international traveling artist living and working simultaneously out of local and global worlds. Wong argues that Michio Ito's international fame in Europe and America was based on his status as an exceptional Japanese artist, able to transcend national boundaries. In her own words, “Exceptionalized, the international artist is conceptualized as an individual who is simultaneously exotic in his/her worldliness and familiar in his/her exoticness. … internationality is evidenced by the perceived ability to transcend national boundaries, while maintaining a reified point of origin” (150). Wong explores this ambivalence, inherent in the construction of the international artist, and shows how this double narrative falls apart at the moment of Ito's deportation, when he is spectacularly written out of Asian American dance history.

Lena Hammergren provides a different elaboration of the international artist, focusing on Ram Gopal's Bharatanatyam performances in Sweden, and the Swedish nation's relationship to the emerging formation of the United Nations. Hammergren contrasts Ram Gopal's identity formation with Lilavati Devi, a member of Gopal's dance company, and argues that while both dancers were international, they embraced different nationality and gender positions for themselves. Hammergren discusses these two differences by invoking the theory of “bodyscapes” and “heterotopia.” Both concepts point to shifting world views and utopias. I reversed this methodology and articulated a different theoretical framework to discuss the international legacies of T. Balasaraswati (1918–1984) and Rukmini Devi (1904–1986), two pioneer revivalists of the Bharatanatyam dance tradition. I suggested that we think identity formation within institutional frameworks and as something articulated strategically from within specific local/global institutions in which both artists lived and worked (Meduri Reference Meduri2004).

Jacqueline Shea Murphy also uses the notion of mobile dancing bodies to discuss Kaha:wi performance, staged as a live theatrical event, albeit within the historical context of the Native American museum in Washington, DC. Murphy uses this performance to explore similarities and differences between the museum's representation of Native American culture and Native Americans' perceptions of their own culture. Murphy argues that the staging of Kaha:wi within the museum context is radical in that it enables plural investigations of bodily knowledges “interweaving in and out of relation to one another—in museum, theatrical, and scholarly spaces” (50).

Annaya Chatterjea and Priya Srinivasan work with questions revolving round the global production of Bharatanatyam and folk traditions of Bengal. Chatterjea uses the metaphor of Alta, the red lining painted on the feet of Indian dancers, as a thread to weave a “quilt-like narrative” exploring class inequalities in dance production and performance realized within the local context of contemporary Bengal. Priya Srinivasan, in a similar manner, reads Bharatanatyam through the analytic metaphor of the “unruly spectator,” using it as a theoretical framework to read against the grain of the ideal Bharatanatyam dancing body.

The “unruly spectator” is an interesting concept, as it elaborates on the Western notion of the male flaneur and also the “distracted female spectator” that I had proposed as a spectatorial model to read against the grain of the ideal Bharatanatyam dancing body in the late 1980s (Meduri 1988, Reference Meduri1996). Srinivasan rearticulates both concepts by situating the “unruly spectator” within a Third-World “material-list” context, including the multiple “histories of capital flow and domination” (53).

While the aforementioned scholars investigate specific case studies, Foster, Anthea Kraut, and Marta Savigliano explore more general themes dealing with the institutionalization of dance as a research field. Foster's essay discusses the ideological legacy of choreography, historicizes the emergence of this key term in modern dance practice of the late 1920s, and shows how it created new racialized “typologies and classifications” of world dance traditions, including African and Asian dance practices. Kraut similarly extrapolates from copyright law to forge an argument about racialized power relations underwriting the transformation of dance into a form of intellectual property. Since copyright is used as a tool for both consolidating and contesting power, Kraut urges “us to scrutinize specific historical, social and political contexts in which copyright claims rise and play out” (94).

The concluding essay in the volume, written by Marta Savigliano, focuses appropriately on the study, research, and commoditization of World Dance as a new discursive field, and examines different philosophical and cultural assumptions informing its constitution. “What does World Dance actually represent at the historical juncture? What is the effect of imposing the World as a qualifying categorization on dance as a set of aestheticized movement practices in the era of so-called globalization?” (163). Savigliano traces the development of the term through multiple archives and knowledge registers and proposes that we think of World dance as a radical rubric, capable of taking over and replacing Dance as a field (170).

Worlding Dance is especially valuable to me as I teach the World Music and Dance module at Roehampton University. In this module, conceptualized as a part-theory and practice module, students are exposed to world forms, including Irish dance, English step dance, Morris dancing, African dance, Bharatanatyam, and Kathak. But they study these forms not as named techniques, as noted by Foster in her essay, but as embodied cultural practices and traditions. I remember teaching Bharatanatyam/Kathak as authorless, uncopyrighted forms inscribed in collective national and heritage histories both at UCLA and in the Department of Dance at Riverside in the 1990s. But I could not teach the same forms from within older historical frameworks at Roehampton University in 2005, because British dance students are aware of the legacy of international artists such as Shobana Jeyasingh and Akram Khan and familiar with their single-authored creations, which they study as part of their undergraduate GCSE education. For British dance students, Bharatanatyam/Kathak are not “ethnic” or uncopyrighted, authorless traditions, but manifest themselves as relocated “world” traditions!

Worlding Dance is a timely addition to dance scholarship because it is inscribed self-consciously within the all-encompassing history of the globalizing moment. This moment demands from us all a necessary forgetting, which we enact with varying degrees of awareness, every day, in our different teaching/performance practices realized in different corners of the globe. The authors in this book recognize this contingency of lag-time and grapple with the problem of historical memory by engaging creatively with knotted and jointed histories that link ethnic/world forms today. Taken together, the chapters offer us, in the words of Foster, “a tool box of tactics that, far from constituting a revisionist world history of the dance, will hopefully promote on-going debate over the worlds that dancers create and the worlds we create for them” (12).