If there ever was a canon of dance scholarship to be unseated by transgressive dancing in “Doc Marten boots, stiletto heels, old skool trainers and all other kinds of vernacular footwear”(200), the dirty deed was a fait accompli a decade before the release of Dancing on the Canon. Over the past fifteen years, popular dance scholarship has exploded, outpacing scholarship on Western art dance to such a degree that it seems anachronistic to suggest that popular dance is still undervalued in the academy. Granted, dance departments in the United States and Britain still value teaching technique and performance of art dance over teaching popular dance practice (you are much more likely to find university technique classes in ballet or contemporary dance than in Burlesque or headbanging). However, popular dance as a scholarly subject of research has not only become acceptable, it is downright trendy. The political intervention turned academic discipline of cultural studies, whose founding fathers examined how power structures were maintained and disrupted through popular culture, has influenced dance scholarship since the early 1990s to the degree that, as Gay Morris has suggested (Reference Morris2009), the field has been renamed “dance studies.” Given the relative cornucopia of popular dance scholarship compared to that of the 1990s, I had difficulty accepting the basic premise of Sherril Dodds's project—to elevate the value of popular dance within dance scholarship. Setting aside her somewhat outdated portrayal of the field, however, Dodds does contribute to continued expansion and depth in popular dance research through rich and nuanced analysis of her own ethnographic data presented later in the monograph.
The book is divided into two sections. In the first, “Understanding Value,” Dodds undertakes a systematic exploration of the major concepts that undergird her project—dance scholarship's canon, cultural studies, popular dance, and value—examining how each has been defined and delineated by existing scholarship. Her literature review is impressive in size and will no doubt serve as a key reference for many readers. The seemingly encyclopedic catalog does, at times, come up short. For example, Dodds rarely cites any scholarship published more recently than 2000, especially in her first two chapters when she makes a case for the marginalization of popular dance scholarship in both dance studies and cultural studies. Thus, although her characterization of these fields accurately represents their situation in the 1990s, she misses an opportunity to celebrate the progress that has been achieved over the past decade in this area, due in part to the work of scholars like Dodds, herself. Not only has Dodds been publishing scholarship on popular dance since 1997, but she has been the driving force behind the formation of an Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS) working group on popular dance and the annual PoP Moves symposium on popular dance research. The fruits of these labors have been bountiful, and it strikes me as ironic that Dodds is still trying to wage a war that she has already helped to win.
One of Dodds's major theoretical contributions is to examine a contested definition of “popular dance” and its relationship to concepts such as social dance, folk dance, vernacular dance, mass culture, and culture industry. After brief summaries of how other scholars have conceived of the popular in relation to these terms, Dodds proposes a working definition of popular dance that includes so many qualifications and contingencies that it extends several paragraphs. For example, she writes:
In relation to context, popular dance occupies a range of sites that include stage, screen or “street” locations (by which I mean common public spaces such as municipal halls, clubs, ballrooms, village greens, high streets and leisure centres), and can be performed by amateurs or professionals, depending on the “performance context.” Although I would argue that it is generally positioned as distinct from “art culture,” it can occupy “art spaces” such as galleries, museums, and subsidized performance venues. (63)
As with other aspects of her definition, it seems accurate, if somewhat cumbersome. Although I was persuaded that her working definition was plausible, I was never convinced that the project of trying to define popular dance served her greater goal of destabilizing a perceived hierarchy within dance and dance scholarship. What is gained by constructing a category that can encompass hip-hop and Bollywood but excludes bharatanatyam and ballet? Does this not merely reinscribe class-based power differentials? Furthermore, where does the work of someone like Cynthia Oliver (Reference Oliver and Sloat2010), who choreographs “art dance” based on the “popular dance” practice of calypso, fall in this schema? Will the project to define popular dance reify it such that practitioners will be discouraged from experimenting across its boundaries? Granted, Dodds is careful to qualify that “popular” is an approach rather than a product. However, I was still left wanting a stronger justification for the value of maintaining the concept of popular dance, which references such varied practices and communities with drastically divergent aesthetics, functions, histories, and access to economic and social power.
A helpful analogy might be the concept of “world dance,” which likewise encompasses such a diverse set of practices as to seem both meaningless (what dance is not part of the world?) and a means of sustaining Western power differentials (as Western dances of ballet and modern are rarely considered world forms). A lively discussion about the use of this term has erupted in dance scholarship, well-summarized in “Worlding Dance and Dancing Out There in the World” by Marta Savigliano (Reference Savigliano and Foster2009). She invokes the phrase “world dance,” not because she believes in its value (and in fact argues that it is harmful to those who might be labeled world dance practitioners), but because the word has currency and power through its use in university dance departments where classes are offered in world dance and jobs are posted for world dance practitioners. Dance scholars interrogate the use and definition of “world dance” because it is being used to powerful effect in the world outside of dance scholarship. It may be that “popular dance” is being similarly employed to maintain existing hierarchies, but Dodds does not offer enough evidence to convince me of such.
Furthermore, her definition of popular dance sidesteps the significant challenge of examining what popular dance means in non-Western contexts. For example, is a stage performance by the Ballet National du Senegal featuring the sabar, a social dance frequently performed on the street and in nightclubs, an expression of popular dance? After a brief nod to the problem by admitting that “there is clearly an underlying assumption that ‘the popular’ is a Western phenomenon,” and an assertion that she wants “to promote the potential for a more geographically inclusive understanding of popular dance”(64), Dodds devotes little ink to the topic. Her literature review of scholarship on popular dance (in which she does reference post-2000 scholarship) omits the plethora of recent literature on non-Western dance, much of which could arguably be considered popular (see for example: Castaldi Reference Castaldi2006; Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson2007; Nájera-Ramírez, Cantú, and Romero Reference Nájera-Ramírez, Cantú and Romero2009; Shay Reference Shay and Sellers-Young2005; Sloat Reference Sloat2010). The fact that her literature review in this chapter (“Writing Popular Dance”) is so extensive but by no means exhausts the literature on popular dance is further evidence that popular dance no longer needs to be rescued from the margins of dance scholarship.
The final chapter of the first half of the book, “Embodiments of Values,” is, I believe, the strongest of the theoretical section. In it, Dodds explores how theories developed in economics, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, and art history can be applied to evaluate the value of dance. Taking the well-cited theories of Marx's exchange-value and Bourdieu's concept of habitus as her starting points, Dodds complicates these by exploring a multiplicity of ways in which dance practitioners create and judge value. Dodds takes a middle ground between those theorists who suggest that mass culture is an agent of hegemony in which consumers have little agency and those who stress how popular culture is appropriated by individuals to resist and reshape systems of power. Although Dodds argues that popular dance participants create systems of value, she consciously avoids “the humanist compulsion to portray these participants as free agents able to create value systems independently of other institutions and frameworks” (99). Instead, Dodds recognizes that “popular dance practice is both shaped by and responsive to the networks of aesthetic, social, and economic value surrounding the dance event.”(99) Dodds skillfully illustrates how many of the theories she introduces in this chapter can be used to examine the construction of value in specific popular dance practices in the second half of the book, which is where I believe she makes her greatest contribution to the field.
All of the ambivalence I developed reading the first half of the book melted away when I reached “Part II: Dancing Values,” in which Sherril Dodds presents her own original ethnographic research into specific popular dance cultures: neo-burlesque; youth subcultural dancing to punk, metal, and ska music; and a British Caribbean dance club for the over-forty set. Each of the three case studies is written with specificity and sensitivity, is filled with rich description and quotes from participants, and offers insightful analysis about the way in which value is produced by a dance community. One of her critiques of previous popular dance scholarship is that it fails to adequately address the aesthetics of the dancing itself. Dodds rises to her own challenge on this point, including thick description of movement and performance that is both evocative and insightful. For example, in illustrating how paralinguistic cues are used to signal parody in neo-burlesque performance, Dodds writes:
[Little Brooklyn] is dressed as a 1950s housewife with a large beehive hairdo and rubber cleaning gloves. Before her is a table with a washing-up bowl and she begins to furiously clean a glass. She plunges her cloth into the glass, in a slightly manic style, suggesting a sexual frustration which is all the more comical as she begins to produce lots of soap suds that call to mind images of ejaculation. She then bites at the fingers of her gloves, in typical burlesque fashion, although the sexual allure that comes from the removal of satin evening gloves is turned on its head as she wrestles with these yellow rubber fingers. She removes her black polka-dot dress, pulling a series of enormous smiles and looks of shock, almost as if her strip remains slightly beyond her control. In a clever inversion of the glamorous fan dance, she uses her two washing-up bowls to mask her breasts and poses in an alluring burlesque style. In keeping with her “desperate housewife” persona, the audience laugh and whoop as she lathers up her breasts and bottom as the climax to the act. (127)
Dodds' detailed description of not only the movement, but also the costuming, props, facial expression, and audience response all offer vivid supporting evidence for her argument that neo-burlesque performances of femininity both celebrate and critique social constructions of gender.
This chapter on neo-burlesque is, I believe, the jewel of the book. Dodds masterfully weaves together the history of burlesque in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rich descriptions of contemporary neo-burlesque acts, thoughtful quotes from performers, astute analysis of its social and political meaning, and convincing arguments about how and why the tease separates burlesque from stripping. This chapter could be employed equally successfully in college courses on gender and performance or to convince a skeptical family member that your new hobby as a burlesque dancer is a feminist reclaiming of sexual identity.
Dodds's next chapter on the music subcultures of punk, metal, and ska and related dances of pogoing, headbanging, and skanking is similarly successful, even taking into consideration a few minor limitations. Although her comparative approach helps her draw more generalizable conclusions, Dodds sacrifices depth in terms of historical context for each form. Nor does she have space to examine how each dance style expresses specific formal qualities in its corresponding musical style. Dodds does, however, describe each dance style with clarity and presents convincing evidence that the act of dancing increases the value of the music. In addition, she makes a compelling case that just because a dance form is inclusive and accessible does not mean that participants regard all iterations of the dance as equally skillful.
The third case study differs from the others in two significant ways. First, it is based on ethnographic research at a single geographic location rather than in a mobile community that is defined by its commitment to a dance style or practice. Second, this chapter focuses on a population that is non-white and over forty, two identity positions that have been under-represented in popular dance research. Sunday Serenade is a weekly social dance geared toward mature Caribbean British immigrants, predominantly from Jamaica. Dodds argues that community at this event is created through inclusion (of multiple music genres, dance styles, and people from varying economic backgrounds) as an antidote to the exclusion that many of these immigrants have experienced in British society. Many questions arose for me that were not answered in this chapter—such as how gender roles were played out at this dance. I suspect, however, that such outstanding questions were a sign of how well Dodds had nurtured my investment in this community rather than an indication of any real shortcomings in her scholarship.
The larger questions that I found myself pondering at the end of the book are issues I hope all dance ethnographers grapple with on an ongoing basis. In none of these case studies did it appear that Dodds's analysis revealed anything that practitioners themselves were not already aware of. If the participants are not the target readers, who is the intended audience and how does this work benefit the communities under investigation? Presumably, readers of this book emerge with a deeper understanding of the value of popular dances such as burlesque, pogo, headbanging, and skanking. Maybe they are inspired to join a local dance community after seeing the pleasure and benefit that informants in Dodds's research glean from their dance practices. Certainly, the importance of generating more empathetic readings of what it means to engage in popular dance should not be underestimated. But will this scholarship reach a wide enough audience to shift general assumptions about these dance forms? I could not help wondering if we as dance scholars could also work toward more direct ways to benefit the communities we study.
