Kélina Gotman's Choreomania: Dance and Disorder catalogues the constellation of fictive discursive forces that have historically constituted the “dancing disease” as a medical and anthropological curiosity. Through an engagement with extensive literature involving the so-called bodily disorders of jerks, ticks, and other purposeless movement, Gotman offers a thoroughly original analysis of choreomania as a methodological apparatus and a forceful figure driving anti-dance bias (14). While Gotman does not attempt to give an embodied account of the choreomanias themselves, she demonstrates the bodily nature of discursive forces that have driven historical analysis. This speaks directly to her concerns regarding methodology and her focus not merely on an “interdisciplinary approach” but on a functioning critique of disciplinarity more generally.

Gotman's goal is to engage a wide range of disciplines with a historical focus, re-imagining the notion of choreomania in familiar case studies as well as identifying choreomanias that prior had not been understood as such. Her concept of choreomania exceeds the notion of the dancing disease as more commonly understood (generally, as a psychophysical disorder) to attend to forces that afflict both the individual and “the unthinking horde” (299). “This horde appears as the phantasmic negative against which a fiction of scientific lucidity (and cultural universality) arose, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, paradoxically, anecdotally” (299). While some contemporary workFootnote ¹ on choreomania has acknowledged the cultural bias at play in evaluating these outbreaks, Gotman's text is the first robust analysis of the historical socio-political forces and existential anxieties that have crafted the notion of choreomania in medical literature and beyond. Treating choreomania not just as a concept saturated with colonialist and orientalist bias, but as a functioning orientalism in and of itself, Gotman convincingly argues that this horde is often fashioned as feminized, “dark” and “obscure,” (299) and therefore unintelligible in the context of Enlightment era rationale.

Her writing is dense with theoretical terminology and fields of discourse. This style effectively performs the multiplicity of historical forces at work in her analysis and situates her own proliferation of this academic terminology. Interconnected nineteenth and twentieth century scientific, medical, and religious texts constitute the terrain through which she proposes several key concepts which help the reader to trace the evolution of the concept of choremania. She engages the discourse of imitation and mimesis quite significantly, in addition to crowd theory and the theorization of hysteria. The goals of the text resonate with the New Materialist Footnote ² style of interdisciplinarity, taking seriously the interplay of ideological forces and biology (which she follows Foucault in identifying as “biopower”). She does not, however, engage with any New Materialists directly.

Engaging the central Foucauldian insight, Gotman treats historicity as a form of reasoning which is itself choreographic. In this text the dancing disease is both the product of discursive forces and a tool for decentering those forces. Or, better put in Gotman's words, “choreomania, then, designates at once the object and its critique” (4). Gotman theorizes a sense of history that continues to regulate our concepts in obvious and not so obvious rhythms. She makes clear how discursive efforts, as both discourse and the production of concepts, pulse through the body, threading (and over/underwriting) collective subjectivities. This approach expands dance studies to address cases of movement which are unchoreographed, unintended, and presumed illegible, thereby pursuing a more nuanced account of what dance itself entails.

Through a variety of case studies, including the paradigmatic example of choreomania, “St. Vitus's Dance,” Gotman outlines several concepts that operate as methodological insights and offerings for the reader. The terms that she identifies and develops are all significant theoretical contributions to transdiscursiveFootnote ³ work, modeling the author function that Foucault systematically proposed. Delineating how this terminology functions in the text with admirable lucidity, Gotman's case studies trace the migrations of discursive gestures that invest the object of concern (choreomania) with profound philosophical and anthropological questions.

In a style she self-identifies as “rhizomatic,” her reading of Foucault's method through a Deleuzian lens emphasizes ideological, material, and geographical dimensions when contemplating how thought itself moves. “These entanglements may cluster, knot, and congeal into intellectual nodes, what I call discursive zones of intensity.” (2) She refines this terminology even further, identifying choreozones as a term and concept that denotes zones of intensity concerning motion more specifically: aesthetic and political forces that are “on the move” (2). Gotman evaluates a particularly strong example of this kind of affective swirling in her investigation of the Ghost Dance by Native Americans of the American West. Dancing “emphatically in place” (231) by the Ghost Dancers is a novel recognition of an example of choreomania and choreozone, even as it appears quite different from more traditional narratives of corporeal frenzies.

In an effort to describe the specific shifts at work in this rhizomic disciplining, Gotman uses the term translatio. This term is seemingly the most significant for her methodology, as choreomania is constituted by these translatios; shifts in how disorderly bodies are conceived in medical literature throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the “migration” of these “intellectual gestures” (13) as “Geo-choreopoltical” (39). Medical and religious explanations for the dancing disease are traced by Gotman through a particular translatio in chapter 3, that of the patron saints St. John and St. Vitus in regards to unruly corporealities (73). Her evaluation of Paracelsus's treatise on dancing disorders and treatment is a keen, rigorous interrogation of the terrain of intellectual forces at work in his research and the various translatios that made his conclusions possible.

As a conscious choice, Gotman has not focused on the kinesthetic phenomenology of these dancing bodies and the way they may or may not have experienced this dancing disease. Many of these discursive distinctions are made with the effort to reissue the notion of choreography: to assert that “the history of thought is itself choreographic.’ (2) As an alternative to more common notions of the dancing body as ephemeral, she proposes this supposed disorder, as choreomania, to be a choreography of border drawing, shaping what becomes legible to us as objects of history. This approach leaves space for violent dimensions of choreography to become more available for analysis, teasing out not just the inherent possibility that movement itself initiates but also the lines of thinking it shuts down, as exemplified by the orientalist/colonialist/modernist violence that she makes palpable through an analysis of choreomania.”

Her attentiveness to the “border drawing” inherent in disciplinarization does not just complicate the kind of dancing bodies that dance studies and performance studies can absorb. This gesture also constitutes a refusal of these classifications altogether. (299). While this approach has produced an incisive critique of the historicity of choreomania, it also raises broader questions about the pitfalls of dismantling or dismissing disciplinary lines. There are virtues in protecting discursive borders for academic fields of/by subjugated groups, whose disciplinary resonance has been a hard won corporeal and discursive recognition. Gotman seems to give little consideration to these concerns, as evidenced by the claim in the introduction, seemingly unsupported, that the text provides a “distinct view of disability” (17).

She does indeed provide methodological tools for many concepts (and/as fictions) to be reevaluated. However, a specific contribution to the field of disability studies is a curiously ambitious claim, especially since asserting specific contributions to a field seems out of step with her broader ambivalence of said disciplinary categorization. She does not engage extensively with this realm of theorization, and while she briefly cites major disability studies theorists, this moment in the text stakes claim to territory that the work otherwise downplays. Still, the text is an impressive model of a transdiscursive analysis that unveils the colonial orientalism of dancing disorders to be bodies in revolt. Choreography, as border, in the style that Gotman executes, is a concept ready to be animated, mechanized, and interrogated by embodied scholarship in many fields of discourse. Gotman's Choreomania provides a substantive foundation for us to do so.