Queer Dance: Meanings & Makings, edited by Clare Croft, traces a pulsating embrace of queer studies and dance theory. From the relational glint of the sequin to the “capacious archive that is queer dance,” this fine gathering of essays interrogates queer dance as a subject and method of speculative and performance research (2017,7). Centering its contributions in feminist and antiracist calls to practice intersectionality in arts and in criticism, the volume's wide-ranging writings roam nightclubs, burlesques, line dances, traditional and concert forms as well as radical protest art. Across eras of crisis and remembrance, both personal and political, these essayists’ approaches share polyvocal and coalitional sensibilities anchored in embodied study (2), entangling race, gender, and sexuality in wide-ranging approaches to method and expression. As such, the writers anthologized in Queer Dance shift the contours of dance and queer theory, illuminating polysemic strategies of composition as well as of activism and survival onstage and off.
Dance Studies, Croft observes in a forceful introduction, thrives in entanglements of black studies, feminism, and queer performance. Employing legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw's lenses of unequal and overlapping opportunity and disenfranchisement, this tightly curated selection takes fresh approaches while also emphatically asserting equivalencies of queer dance in cities and rural gatherings, concert and popular genres, diasporas and intensively local practices. Seventeen thought-provoking essays, a website, and a performance series linked to the volume's launch offer queerly heterogeneous yet coherent editorial and curatorial praxes, asking what it means to create a queer present (24).
Taken up like a relay across this collection of texts, urgency rallies the volume's political claims. Remembering the bearing of the body of deceased activist Jon Greenberg, borne in his coffin in Act Up protests into the streets of New York City in the midst of the nineties AIDS epidemic, Jennifer Monson insists on the mnemonic capacities not only of movement, but also of political movements, addressing counterarchives of defiant memory, sex, and ceremony while sharing scores of frankly sweaty, erotically charged dance (223). Yet dance floors, Croft reminds readers, “are not utopias,” a reflection that offsets Kareem Khubchandani's eloquent revisiting of childhood memories, of Indian aunties on the dance floor in Accra, Ghana, in a fashioning of queer origin stories as well as futures (5). Queering the critic and also the performer, the volume approaches dance techniques with an eye to virtuosity as well as to survival. In Thomas DeFrantz's coining of “queer-made” dance and scholarship sustain ontologies borne of “effort, by we who need [the queer made's] presence” (170–71). Decentering an account of Orlando's Pulse massacre, slightly offset at Queer Dance’s heart, Justin Torres’ “In Praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club” avows the “imperative … to be transformed” while it resists yoking memory to the prioritizing of those who enact violence (182). Across these sites of beauty, resilience, and fear, the essayists’ accounts conjure kinesthetic as well as worldly beloveds, challenging as well as cherishing what it means to move queerly through the world.
The gift of the volume is its concerted pluralism, organized in three thematized parts: queering the stage, sociality, and intimacy. Queer Dance’s sites of memory also reposition hegemonic institutions, contesting the discourse of the nation as well as of the city, decentering Manhattan and ultimately urban centers as privileged sites of queer myth-history in eras of gentrification. Peter Carpenter's “Last Cowboy Standing: Testing a Critical Choreographic Inquiry,” offers line dancing as a participatory score in the midst of the AIDS crisis, tracing a “metonymic chain of associations” of the cowboy and gay rodeo across US nationhood, homosexual iconicity, and Manifest Destiny. Jennifer L. Campbell's “Dancing Marines and Pumping Gasoline: Coded Queerness in Depression-Era American Ballet,” glimpses cruising grounds in paintings, nudes, and illustrations, offering coded insight into fluid trios and pairs in early twentieth-century ballets. While Greenwich Village tenement windows become intimate stages in Hannah Kosstrin's study of political feeling in Anna Sokolow's Rooms (1963), speculating kinetically into the felt architectures of the closet in dances created during the antihomosexual persecutions begun in the McCarthy era known as the “lavender scare.”
Other essays in Queer Dance contest epistemological separation of dance and music. Angela Ahlgren's study of taiko drumming becomes an intimate score, bringing attention to inherited ways of knowing that divide sound and movement. Delving into taiko's training philosophies, Ahlgren articulates pathways that engage sound and movement together as she recounts her own, past romance, pieced together in retrospect, across performance documents. Also imbricating sound and movement, Michigan-born Irish dancer and researcher Nicholas Gareiss queers the footfall, the fiddle, and the step, showing these “sounding together” in homoerotic readings of traditional Irish dance and music. In “Our Love Was Not Enough,” Sandra Chatterjee and Cynthia Ling Lee interrogate Asian diasporic dance traditions across Euro-American etymology, provenance, and circulation of the term “queer,” approaching diasporas’ plurality with the assertion that dances deemed “traditional” speak to postnational presents (2017:49). Interrogating the spectator's view as well as that of the critic, Emily Wilcox's “Women Dancing Otherwise” attends to centuries of homoerotic spectatorship in China, noting the eliding of this spectatorship in China's contemporary dance scene and taking up queer feminism as a stance of critical response to such seeming erasures. And yet, as Croft points out, though this volume importantly investigates international and diasporic forms, it all but relies on US artists and scholars based in US institutions, a concentration revealing urgent horizons in the field and the critical importance of voices beyond US and North American academic worlds.
Queer Dance also takes up potent gender-queer performance, histories of racialized performance media, and disability. Lou Henry Hoover's celebration of the show boy and the fan dance rejoices in performances of gender exceeding both masculinity and femininity, recalling performing as a butch-identified lesbian, in full showgirl regalia, in the Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga: Cheek to Cheek Live!” at the Lincoln Center (40). Julian Carter's “Chasing Feathers: Jérome Bel, Swan Lake, and the Alternative Futures of Re-enacted Dance” summons the “fleeting trace of swans across time” while tracking a queered durée of canonical concert dance, the ballet blanc, and historiography (109). Raquel L. Monroe's “‘Oh No! Not This Lesbian Again’: The Punany Poets Queer the Pimp-Ho Aesthetic” writes from the midst of an audience, as white spectators vocally withdraw from a queer, black cabaret duet throwing down an erotic challenge to silence about HIV/AIDS in hip-hop. Disclosing erotic and economic investments in the arraying of dancing women and asymmetrical power relationships, particularly in music videos, the Punany Poets reconfigure hip-hop tropes as critically queer as well as playful performances of safe sex and consent. Patrick McKelvey, in “Choreographing the Chronic,” unfolds the “chronic” of seropositivity and seroconversion as temporalities—while examining Arlene Croce's astonishingly antitheatrical New Yorker article “Discussing the Undiscussable” (1994). Retracing the Americans with Disabilities Act, HIV/AIDS, and the mimetic, McKelvey's essay disentangles Croce's medicalizing perspective from a political critique of autonomy deeply resonant with contemporary protests against restricting access to medical care in the United States.
The book concludes with social practice artist Anna Martine Whitehead's testimony from within Keith Hennessy's early twenty-first-century performance Turbulence (a dance about the economy). “Freedom is unsustainable,” she provokes, in an essay on resilience as well as collapse, recounting a police raid on her home, a nauseating social media search for a missing friend and lover, and witnessing the “devastating lack of hegemonic protection” exposed in the 2008 financial crisis (282, 283). Recalling José E. Muñoz's formulation of gestic legacies, Whitehead concludes Queer Dance with a potent response by means of Africanist dance, “freak technique,” and ecstatic survival. In building a methodological case for what queer dance can do, moreover, Queer Dance importantly enacts Doran George's call for the “deviant use of the archive” (103). Mourned by a wide community since he unexpectedly passed away in 2017, George is the author of “The Hysterical Spectator: Dancing with Feminists, Nellies, Andro-dykes, and Drag Queens” and remains vital in this constellation of writings. Positing the “hysterical spectator” as a force of world making, George refuses “to separate feminist, queer, and transgender viewership,” avowing all at once as an indivisible coalition of life and work (86). This coalitional practice persists also in the sensibility into which George brought many in and beyond this volume into conversation, a labor accompanied with an unforgettable persuasiveness.
As the work of queer dance scholars refuses the limitations of disciplinary constraint that write certain bodies and practices out of cultural history as well as legibility, the volume and its contributors innovate when they interrogate gender in a plurality of performance, media, cultural, and historical contexts. Tracing a reimagining of labor and aesthetics as well as of worlds through rich essays, these polyvocal studies of a lushly queer imagination streak across the medium of the dancing body, affording writerly rigor and revelations of theory's potency. Invoked in the twists and insights of danced reconfigurations of time, space, and social relation, Queer Dance’s inviting of anxious questions potently fosters pluralism otherwise. The volume's move to refuse limitations is political as well as compositional, offering vibrant, active bibliographical work, method, and conversations across forms, building a robust methodological case for—as well as powerfully dismantling—what queer dance can do and what it has been presumed to mean.
