Queer history doesn’t just live in the passing of legislation, or tragic news headlines, or protests. It lives in the stories of individuals, too many of whom are forgotten too soon, buried in the archives if they are even present as ghosts haunting interwoven histories. Jill Johnston in Motion: Dance, Writing, and Lesbian Life by Clare Croft challenges the notion of who and what queer histories can be uncovered in dance archives, highlighting the historical erasure of lesbian life through a deep analysis of performer, activist, feminist, and dance writer Jill Johnston’s life from the 1960s to the 1980s. As opposed to simply locating queer women in the archive, as “a salvage project,” which Croft cites from Tavia Nyong’o, Croft “keeps intimate company” with Johnston and the lesbian histories that are often excluded (3). By integrating Croft’s own lesbian histories with Johnston’s, the book travels backwards and forwards through time to reveal to the reader Johnston’s immense influence on dance, writing, and dance writing.

In Jill Johnston in Motion, Croft argues that dance was a driving force in Johnton’s work as a writer and activist, but also in her life as an openly lesbian woman in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Croft asserts that it was through dance where “Johnston learned that where one focuses one’s body, how one approaches others’ bodies, and how one offers their body to others are potent actions that can be used to social and political ends” (2). Divided into four chapters and three interruptions, preceded by an introduction and followed by an epilogue Croft calls “Last Sentences,” the text carries the reader through time, shifting from the past to the present and back again weaving in Croft’s own lesbian dispositions in her analysis of Johnston’s life over two decades. Croft situates herself as a lesbian performer, activist, and writer herself, and courageously speaks to her own experiences to allow embodiment of life to guide many of her inquiries. This text is the first of its kind bringing together Johnston’s criticism, activism, and performance life by way of her feminist thinking, to reveal the traces in the archive of lesbian dance life. Importantly, Croft is keen to make clear that this book is not a biography of Johnston, but instead utilizes Johnston’s lesbian life as a dance critic before and after Stonewall to explore “theories of how to engage with performance, what it means to be an audience, and what it means to be a lesbian in public” (25).

Each chapter utilizes what Croft called “lesbian adjacencies” to place Johnston in dialogue and relationship with other lesbian writers, artists, and thinkers to make “a conscious revising of Jagose’s observation of how often literature renders lesbians as always adjacent to the categories of woman and gay man” (17). Using this methodology, Johnston is in metaphorical conversation with Susan Sontag, Gertrude Stein, Yvonne Rainer, Agnes Martin, Audre Lorde, and Lorraine Hansberry. Of these pairings, Croft admits that some of them situate “white lesbian alongside white lesbian” while others are more “uneasy fits,” particularly when considering “the possibility of lesbian adjacency and racial difference together” (17). In Chapter 1, “She Was a Critic,” Croft focuses on Johnston’s approach to dance criticism from 1955 to 1965, where Johnston embraced messy words to queer (and critique) the act of criticism. In this chapter, Croft brings in lesbian writers Susan Sontag and Audre Lorde to explore the erotics of writing and expand the narrative of Johnston to include her concerns of embodiment and feeling in her own writing. In “Interruption 1. Up on the Roof” Croft explores Johnston’s performance with Fred Herko in the Andy Warhol film, “Jill and Freddy Dancing (1963).” Like Johnston’s dance writing, Croft leans into description and sensation, to bring the reader into the film, and into Johnston’s practice of embodiment. Chapter 2, “She Was an Audience,” looks at the years from 1965 to 1969 to trace Johnston’s role as an audience member and her move into experimental, queer, performative writing that “celebrated the complexity of collectivity that constitutes being an audience,” (79), a strategy that Croft names “powerlisting,” and places in dialogue with Lorde’s work and Lorraine Hansberry. For Johnston, Croft writes, being an active spectator allowed her to imagine herself in the role of critic, as a part of the performance itself. In “Interruption 2. Born of Paper,” Croft utilizes Phelan’s iterative nature of queer death to frame Johnston’s use of dance in her multiplicity as critic and lesbian feminist and her inspiration French critic and poet, Guillaume Apollinaire.

Chapter 3, “She Was a Lesbian Feminist” focuses on Johnston’s columns in the Voice from 1970 to 1975 and the queer postmodern choreographies of the feminist movement. In it, Croft examines the choreography of the “so-called gay/straight split and the marginalization of women in gay liberation protest” (118), the rift between white lesbians and lesbians of color, and the “scores” of her writing which “promoted new forms of lesbian alignment” (118). In “Interruption 3. We Can Hear You: Reading with the Body,” Croft looks at letters from Johnston’s readers to assert that Johnston’s writing activated their bodies creating a new recognition for women readers. Chapter 4, “She Was a Writer” begins with Johnston’s 1996 book Jasper Johns: Privileged Information and then moves into the lesbian artists who frequently appeared in her columns: Gertrude Stein, Yvonne Rainer, and Agnes Martin to reimagine Johnston’s engagement with the term lesbian. Woven through this chapter is Johnston’s own position on mental health, diagnosis, and institutionalization for mental health. Finally, the epilogue, “Last Sentences,” is Croft’s embodiment of a repeated lesson from Johnston herself, “an ending is not the end” (193). Instead, Croft braids together past and present by bringing together a recounting of Johnston’s dinner at Kate Millett’s home in 1988 with her own experience of participating in Dyke March on the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall to end the book with "playful scramblings of time and place” (34). The last eleven lines of the book are Scores for Jill that ask us, the readers, to move with Jill, who was ever in motion.

At the risk of sounding dramatic, I believe that Jill Johnston in Motion is a book that we all have been needing. Croft invites readers not only to read alongside Johnston’s work from the 1960s to the 1980s, but to feel alongside her in the present. I was particularly struck by Croft’s intermittent stories of how she did this research as a lesbian dance scholar and writer and how it mirrors Johnston’s own life. As an example, Croft recounts an experience of being asked if she is a woman in a women’s bathroom in 2016, but ends the story with a journal entry that she read a year later in which Johnston experienced the same questioning in 1974, to which Jill responded “I’m a horse” (19). Croft’s descriptive writing is powerful in the way that it can take me from sharing the fear in her stomach of being questioned in a public restroom to giggling out loud at Johnston’s assertion that she was a horse in just a single sentence. Croft’s channeling of Jill in such detail allows me to imagine being right there with her. This work of feeling alongside Croft resurfaces throughout the text, and it anchors me, both in body and time, but also in the possibilities of powerlisting which is threaded throughout the text as a mode of highlighting the complexity of queer possibilities.

It is a profound and important thing that we call from the archive the ghosts that have been historically excluded. Jill Johnston was a force for dance criticism, and still I found one longing unmet as I read this incredibly satisfying text. One of my hopes for the field of queer dance studies is that we continue not only to acknowledge racial inequity but to write more about it. Croft acknowledges the “limits to the possibilities Johnston could imagine for lesbian” and that “questions of race were largely not part of her reckoning,” but our acknowledgements can only go so far, and I wonder how we can, as a field, attune more deeply, more collectively to the gaps (14). Johnston herself used Black nationalism as an inspiration for “dyke nationalism,” but it is murky to discern where Johnston stands and if she was willing to have “deep engagement with Black thought or the Black people authoring and enacting them” (15). Croft expresses desire for space for lesbians of color as more than reactive agents to racism, and through lesbian adjacencies Johnston is in dialogue with lesbian of color writers, artists, and thinkers here in the twenty first century, but in some ways, to me, whiteness’ ordinariness remains. Croft handles these gaps with grace and acknowledgement, even though I am left wishing to speak to Johnston’s ghost to know more.

Ultimately, I believe that this book will soon become (if it is not already) required reading for postmodern American dance and for queer dance, but to me the greatest strength is Croft’s tenderness and acute sense of when to bring her own self and sense of being into the work as a means of acknowledging both the presence and absence of lesbians in the archive. She writes: “In my case, there are many lesbians in the archive, and one of them is me: a dance theorist and critic born a decade after Stonewall who identifies as queer, as a lesbian, and as a feminist. Jill Johnston would probably run those terms all together—queerlesbianfeminist” (5). In a moment where we are seeing how queer bodies are being rendered invisible, this book is a balm and a portal into Johnston’s lasting impact on dance criticism. Like Johnston, Croft’s writing becomes a sort of dance, a queer moving to and through the tender playfulness necessary for really seeing Johnston in her fullness. Like Johnston, to read Croft’s writing is to understand the interconnectedness of bodies and words. And like Johnston’s writing does for Croft, this text allows me to dance with Clare.