Dance and Science in the Long Nineteenth Century: The Articulate Body is a collection that approaches the body in modernity as a site of curiosity and experimentation, looking at how movement practices, dance theories, and choreography informed scientific methods and how scientific discoveries influenced dance performance. In his bestselling book The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson situates “the body” in nineteenth-century Western culture as the object of ongoing medical and scientific attempts to systematize, visualize, and understand it despite limited knowledge. Dance was one of the fields that surreptitiously allowed scientists to explore, model, and communicate bodily knowledge through both aesthetic and empirical means.
As lead editor Lynn Brooks suggests in the Introduction, we live in an era marked by digitalized bodies, the proliferation of wellness programs, and—I might add—the commodification of somatic research within the fitness and physiotherapy industry, alongside calls to integrate science and the arts in education. In this context, a book like Dance and Science not only genealogically supports in clarifying how dancing bodies have informed scientific and medical practices but also shows how dance research methods can be mobilized to challenge the biased epistemes that structure everyday knowledge, particularly in Western contexts.
The book enriches a growing set of studies that interrogate the connections between science, corporeality, and performance. For instance, the last couple of decades has seen a growing body of literature on dance and neuroscience aimed at improving the dancer’s training, legitimizing dance as a field of study (of course), and expanding the benefits of dance practice beyond traditional dance communities. Studies like Susan Foster’s Choreographing Empathy and her latest Knowing as Moving continue the Critical Dance Studies’ critique of the modern body-mind duality, decolonizing the structures that produced it. A polyphonic book like Dance and Science surveys the institutional and epistemic tensions that, throughout the long nineteenth century, culturally materialized the Cartesian binary with which we continue to grapple.
The goal of the anthology is to reflect on the close relationship between scientific practices and dancing bodies in a period in which “science” was establishing itself as distinct from natural philosophy. In her concise literature review on the topic, Brooks highlights how dance and scientific knowledge intersected during and after the nineteenth century, producing a range of outcomes: from supporting colonial projects and pathologizing specific bodies and communities, to advancing public health and expanding artistic technologies and possibilities. The essays in Dance and Science further enrich these discussions through a wide range of primary sources—from botanical and medical archives to magic rituals and dance scores—and expand our understanding of the specific role that dancing bodies, “by dancing” (3), played in shaping scientific knowledge.
The book stems from the ongoing conversations of the Long Nineteenth Century Working Group, hosted within the Dance Studies Association, specifically from the group’s 2020 symposium “Dance and Disruption: Science and Body in the Long Nineteenth Century,” originally planned to take place at Swarthmore College but moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The essays are organized to mirror the conversational flow of this academic gathering, comprising eleven longer essays and ten shorter responses. The shorter responses, in particular, situate research topics and arguments within the broader context of the long nineteenth century, highlighting connections and tensions among ideas, theories, practices, places, and events. The volume is structured in four parts: taxonomic practices; the political implications of encounters between dance and science; the formation of the notion of “self” in modernity; and an “Outro,” which distinguishes observing as a scientific act from observing as a dance process.
While the collection as a whole offers valuable insights, I focus my discussion here on three argument-driven essays that prove particularly generative for thinking about the intersections of corporeality, science, dance, and power. Sariel Golomb’s “Venus in Pieces” is beautifully written, eruditely argued, and elegantly theorized. She frames the long nineteenth century as an era whose “approach to engaging the public in body knowledge” was fundamentally “of choreographic nature” (21–22). Golomb begins by examining the gestures elicited by the renowned “Anatomical Venus” (c. 1780), a life-size wax model of a seemingly resting and docile woman whose skin and organs could be removed and reassembled. Golomb then shows how the model’s very structure established a choreographic relation between the female body on display and the largely male bodies that observed and manipulated it. Ultimately, Golomb persuasively sets in relation medicine, the entertainment industry, and the choreographic. Within the Western nineteenth-century staging of anatomical exploration, she argues, “choreography becomes a hermeneutic” (27), a mode through which corporeal knowledge is rehearsed, transmitted, and generated via a bodily surrogate before extending to living bodies (an uncited allusion to von Kleist’s automaton inevitably comes to mind here). Through her case study, Golomb makes a compelling claim for the widespread and transdisciplinary circulation of choreographic thinking in the long nineteenth century.
While Golomb’s connects the choreographic to the modern desire for a technologically hybrid corporeality (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is from 1818), Pallabi Chakravorty’s essay, “The Paradox of the ‘Subtle Body’: Dance, Tantra, and Science,” offers a genealogy of the nineteenth-century emergence of discourses around the “subtle body” in colonial India and its subsequent reconfigurations in postcolonial and global contexts. Drawing on a wide range of sources and accounts, Chakravorty highlights the tensions and novel paradigms that arise as the subtle body is translated from Indian spiritual traditions into Western scientific and medical frameworks, and further circulated through the global encounters among yoga, Indian dances, and Western somatics. Chakravorty positions the subtle body as a site of paradox, negotiation, and transdisciplinary engagement, illuminating how spirituality, science, and performance intersect in embodied epistemologies. While her essay is placed in Part II, “Dancing Ideologies: Nation, Sexuality, Sciencing,” its focus on the embodied subtle body might have resonated equally well within Part III, on physical cultures of self-formation.
Sealing the volume, Emily Coates’s essay activates some nineteenth-century meteorological archives to uncover “the sensorial, the kinesthetic, the indigenous knowledge that has coexisted all along in the positivist archives” (297) through her own performance process. Coates recounts she approached those archives with the intent of finding more about “cosmic dances” for her choreographic research. Coates engages the reader in a fascinating journey through the (scholarly and personal) “atmospheric conditions” of an intertwined historical and contemporary research praxis. In Coates’s methodological suggestion, the present articulates as a time-space of “resuscitation effort[s]” (297)—what others might call decolonial efforts—to recenter hidden, forgotten, and overseen epistemologies and dehierarchize the relationship between the corporeal and the scientific.
Books like Dance and Science in the Long Nineteenth Century offer an opportunity to periodically reflect on the directions in which dance studies is branching (Bachelor of Science degrees in Dance or Dance Science are growing in U.S. colleges) and on what interdisciplinarity means in relation to dance and academic research (considering that interdisciplinarity as both a concept and a practice remains overall undertheorized). Assembling a volume at the intersection of dance and science can imply the risk—and the opportunity—to expose and address epistemic bias across fields. While the majority of the authors are dance scholars, in her response essay, historian of science Whitey Laemmli reiterates that “dance has long served as a medium for communicating science” and that to recognize this “should help put any giggles [from scientists] to rest” (98). While the intention to defend dance in relation to dominant scientific fields is clear, this statement reiterates the idea of dance and body-based practices as mere conveyors—a mindset that underlies the use of the arts as mere vehicles to make science more accessible, or, in academic colleges, ‘more fun and less intimidating’. Critical dance studies have been contesting this reductive vision for a while.
Perhaps because of the book’s structure and the way it developed, Dance and Science does not offer a fully comprehensive definition or overview of its subtitle, “the articulate body.” The various case studies reveal the nineteenth-century Western pursuit of a body to be understood and organized physiologically, cognitively, and sensorially, in tandem with the rise of new power structures. They also highlight the role of dance theorists and practitioners in mapping potential articulations of the body. While a deeper engagement with the genealogy of the concept and its political dimensions would have strengthened the book’s argument, this gap also opens trajectories for future research around the concept of and use of the term “articulation” in dance practice and dance studies.
Ultimately, Dance and Science in the Long Nineteenth Century: The Articulate Body offers questions, theoretical suggestions, and archival insights to persevere in the inexhausted research on modernity and its ongoing influence in the present. In addition to its research value, the book’s scope makes it especially suitable for integration into college dance courses. For instance, it might be interesting to set some of the essays in conversation with the current science- and data-based representation of moving bodies as in Harmony Bench’s Perpetual Motion or Archer Porter’s Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media. Finally, this book serves both as a thought-provoking resource for readers interested in the history of science or the intersections between science and embodiment, and as valuable material for science curricula interested in integrating arts- and humanities-based inquiry.
