Current music scholarship on the relationship between sound and movement addresses a variety of topics including multimodality (Chion and Gorbman Reference Chion and Gorbman2019), choreomusicology (Veroli and Vinay Reference Veroli and Vinay2018), musical meaning (Cox Reference Cox2016), and the Black Atlantic (Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson2012). While much of this scholarship assumes some aspect of an ecological or an embodied approach, Collaborative Intimacies in Music and Dance proposes several alternatives. Addressing an interdisciplinary audience, editors Evangelos Chrysagis and Panas Karampampas present a collection of essays that explore sound and movement in terms of space, corporeality, ethics, and issues of ethnographic method. The book grows out of a conference panel on music and dance collaborations organised for the 13th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists held in 2014. Not all of the panel participants, however, appear in the present volume.

The editors eschew any one relationship between music and dance in favour of diverse ethnographic approaches. The chapters therefore make a number of different contributions. Chapters address musical spaces as sites of ethical self-fashioning, focusing on aspects of music and dance research that do not depend on musical structure. In some chapters, contributors explore the implications of sound and movement for ethnographic methods. Other chapters evaluate the constitutive roles of non-performers in musical events and scenes.

The collection is organised in five parts consisting of two chapters each. An author biography, notes, and a bibliography follow each chapter. Part one presents case studies of sound and self-awareness. The first chapter by Tamara Kohn and Richard Chenhall analyzes the sound experience of an aikido dojo and a shakuhachi lesson to examine “being in sound as a tool of ethnography” (p. 29). In chapter 2, Yuki Imoto investigates the intersections of identity and musical practice among professional classical musicians from Japan who live and work in London. Both chapters shed light on self-awareness in terms of discursive constructions of identity and the embodied experience of sound.

The next part examines pedagogies of bodily movement. Brenda Farnell and Robert N. Wood engage in dialogue in chapter 3 to reflect on Wood’s approach to choreography and the kind of intimacy that develops among the dancers in his company. In chapter 4, Bethany Whiteside describes the face-to-face social interactions that she uses in a variety of participatory dance spaces that comprise her field sites. Both chapters describe processes of interaction that organise relationship in dance spaces.

Part three focuses on musical practices and ethical self-fashioning. In chapter 5, James Butterworth presents a portrait of the animador (an MC), whose gendered commentary and exhortations to drink facilitate the construction of ethnical selves by concert-goers at a Peruvian huayno spectacle. In chapter 6, Chrysagis focuses on the ethics of money in descriptions of the career trajectory of a music promoter in Glasgow, as he moves from the DiY scene to status as an independent promotor. Both chapters examine ethical positioning as shaped by social interaction in musical scenes and draw on a conception of agency operating beyond the individual.

In the fourth part, authors address bodies dancing in heterogenous time and space. Ruxandra Ana reports in chapter 7 on how rumba dancers enact “authenticity” for tourists in Cuba. In chapter 8, Mimina Peteraki explores the use of two iconic cinematic dance scenes as touchstones in contemporary Greece for articulating discontent about the economic crisis. The chapters show how people use dance in everyday life to create meaning relevant to present contexts.

The fifth and final part of the book addresses motion, irony, and life-worlds. Karampampas contributes chapter 9 on irony and style in an Athenian Goth scene, illustrating how goths comment on exclusion and inclusion by ironising themselves and others through talk and movement. In the final chapter, Borut Telban presents a rich study of an all-night ceremony performed by the people of Ambonwari, Papua New Guinea. Both authors show how gesture, language, and performance come together in the expression and experience of group belonging.

While the book offers quality scholarship, the collection lacks focus. By accommodating a wide variety of issues and approaches, the editors end up losing conceptual and comparative power. The title “Collaborative Intimacies” is an evocative construction, which promises an exploration of the collective dynamics of music and dance, but the volume is hampered in achieving its full potential. The volume might have benefited from an afterword that develops a point of overlapping concern among the chapter—such as the insight in chapter 6 that subject position cannot be “squarely centered upon ‘the individual’” (p. 157), which is of current interest among scholars of music, dance, and anthropology alike. This said, scholars with interest in the specific areas or issues covered still will find individual chapters useful and, in some cases, inspiring.