In this book, Jennifer Roche interrogates her experiences as a dancer within the context of four choreographic projects created by Rosemary Butcher (UK), John Jasperse (USA), Jodi Melnick (USA), and Liz Roche (IE). In each case, Roche commissioned works to be made for her, with the book documenting her insider reflections on these projects in her role as co-creator and performer.

As an articulation of an extended Practice as Research (PaR) project, the book foregrounds the act of performing in a way that to date has been little seen. Most PaR has focused upon the maker as researcher and thereby maintained the hegemony of the choreographer as authorial and authoritative voice. So while the nature of embodied and tacit knowledge has been much debated in PaR, there has been little attention paid to the creative labor and knowledge of performers. Roche expands this discourse, using first person accounts to ground her writing and to stress the significance of an embodied approach, positioning herself as “a source of knowledge and as capable of self-representation” (ix). This is significant, for as Roche points out: “The elision of the dancer's perspective from mainstream discourse deprives the art form of a rich source of insight into the incorporating practices of dance” (ix).

The book is arranged around the four choreographic projects, which become springboards for Roche's wider thinking about a dancer's identity. In her first case study, “Descending into Stillness: Rosemary Butcher,” Roche describes the intersecting labor of the dancer and choreographer in Butcher's work. Butcher asks her dancers to respond to complex, abstract, and image-based instructions; improvise on themes emerging from her research; and operate within scored structures. Roche describes how Butcher brought visual sources into the studio and asked the dancers to draw on their emotional states and life experiences in order to write their own scores. Through such activities, the choreographic materials and movement parameters were formed. The shape of the work developed over time through a layering process, with Butcher offering individual feedback to the dancers to forge the work. Yet while the dancer in many different, fluid, and democratic ways can be seen to contribute to the dance, Roche writes that she “is still engaged with the schema instigated by and co-located in the composite body of the choreographer” (30). In light of this observation Roche reflects: “I don't feel that I am getting a style or a way of moving through a conscious attempt to fulfill Rosemary's aesthetic. Rather, I feel that I am building a structure on which to hang the form that is already there between us in the room” (31). She concludes: “Although it's Butcher's vision, something is being shaped by both of us and I am anchoring it through my embodied self in movement” (42).

In “Veils within Veils: John Jasperse,” Roche reveals a very different process in developing the work entitled Solo for Jenny: Dance of (an undisclosed number of) Veils (2008). Roche states that for Jasperse, the individual dancer is not central to the development of a work. Rather, while allowing serendipity and the working environment to influence his process, he shares material across different dancers and projects, such that ideas and materials are reiterated across different works. Throughout the chapter, Roche focuses upon the act of performance and the ways in which it engendered in her a sense of agency. She notes how the shifts between multiple states that the work required, alongside the sharing of elements of the solo with other dancers, meant that she felt she alternated between subject and object positions and had a complex sense of being part of a plurality rather than occupying a singular identity in the dance.

The next two chapters focus on projects with Jodi Melnick and Liz Roche, respectively. Both continue the established theme of ownership, and position the body as multiple, complex, and mutable. In Melnick's work, the dancer/choreographer relationship appears to be based on the transmission of a body to body practice, and Roche poetically writes: “I was in a fluid state of being, responding to minute details and shifts in my bodily sensations” (64). In the work with Liz Roche, she further describes the multimodal stimuli that are at play within the process of dancing and that become encoded over the course of rehearsals to suggest that, “In dance, the choreographic piece is built up over time through creative experimentation, rather than dictated as an already complete plan from choreographer to dancer” (95).

As is clear in the above descriptions, throughout the book Roche emphasizes the role of the dancer as a collaborator who is deeply engaged in and contributing to the creative process. In each case, the nature of her relationship to the choreography differed. While shifting her position in each context, Roche argues that over time the dancer forms a “moving identity.” To elaborate this notion she takes us on a journey through Deleuze and Guattari's (Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi1997) concept of “molar identity,” in which being multiple is composed by numerous selves rather than being contained within a singular or molar identity, via Braidotti (Reference Braidotti, Buchanan and Colebrook2000) and Shusterman (Reference Shusterman1999), among others, to note how: “Dancers metaphorphose in the moment of becoming through dancing, in a dialogical encounter with the choreographer as the other, thus producing various dancing selves through embodied complexity. Contemporary dancers embody multiplicity as a fundamental part of their career path and dancers are capable of being many dancing bodies in one through incorporating a range of different movement styles” (117).

This figuration of the dancer offers a useful additional dimension to other conceptualizations of the dancer by, for example Foster (Reference Foster and Desmond1997), Davida (Reference Davida1992), and Louppe (Reference Louppe1996). As Roche relates, these authors have each characterized the dancing body as “hired” (Foster), “eclectic” (Davida), and “hybrid” (Louppe). Yet rather than the body being over-written or hybridized, for Roche the dancer's “moving identity” is located in both an individual way of moving and the incorporation of different movement experiences accrued over time. These movement experiences are embodied as part of the moving identity of the dancer as fluid traces, rather than as a fixed archive of dance practices, and are multiple in nature, having the potential to reform and be redefined temporarily. Such insights help take our understanding of a dancer's identity forward and provide a way of articulating her agency as a site through which the potentialities of what Roche calls her “creative dancing signature” can be recognized and acknowledged.

The book was a pleasure to read, particularly so because it starts to fill the gap in the paucity of writing that articulates the dancer's perspective. As such, it is a welcome addition to dance discourse.