Kélina Gotman's recent monograph Choreomania: Dance and Disorder covers vast historical and geographical ground to reveal the unattended and undertheorized history of unchoreographed dance and performance through the valence of dance manias and surfeit movement. Traversing a global geography that connects Europe with the colonial worlds of Africa, the Americas and the Antipodes, Choreomania teaches us how dance has functioned as both a symptom of and a cure for numerous diseases, with particular focus on accounts of St Vitus's dance, hysteria, the tarantella and the Ghost Dance. The author analyses numerous discursive and illustrative records of these and other dancing diseases, manias and crazes to raise noteworthy questions about sociopolitical constructions of modernity, with particular attention to gender and the global politics of colonialism.

The descriptions that surface through Gotman's close readings of archival material are not those that one would normally find in dance studies texts, but they are fascinating despite (or perhaps because of) their tendency towards the repulsive; dancing subjects foam at the mouth, move spasmodically and without meaning, and even (in one gruesome instance) have their limbs torn off by fellow participants in dancing hordes. Ultimately, the abjection of such descriptions contributes to one of Gotman's most compelling arguments: choreomania as defined through European discourse comes to signal the ‘“disorder” of colonial revolt’, and traces a genealogy ‘for thinking about concepts of dance imbricated in the geo-politics of protest’ (pp. 21–2). Choreomania thus offers a significant contribution to the field of dance and performance studies by proposing a mode of reading social bodies, crowds, mobs and movements through the historical aporias of the unchoreographed, the illogical and the excessive. This reading foregrounds the construction of racial abjection, orientalism and the ‘dark continent’ through the performance and reperformance of choreomania as it ‘travels with its translations in and out of colonial outposts and missionary, medical, and government archives’. Throughout, its jagged gestures indicate a thrilling and dangerous ‘proximity to ancient times, suggesting foreign bodies served as imaginary access points to an ever-receding past’ (p. 171).

Although the book is published by Oxford's Studies in Dance Theory series, its archival, historiographical and theoretical content is equally valuable to dance, theatre and performance studies. One of the most persistently rigorous aspects of Choreomania is Gotman's attention to her methodological choices, which she varies broadly and effectively to draw enormous import from her widely divergent examples. Perhaps most strongly grounded in Foucauldian theories of genealogy and biopolitics, Gotman effectively calls upon a rich range of scholarship – from Edward Said to Homi Bhabha, Giorgio Agamben to James Clifford, Joseph Roach to Mark Franko, and many more critical theorists of race, coloniality and queerness – to extract political and social meaning from her chosen examples. Moreover, Gotman's meticulous justifications for her historical methodologies press not only how bodies are read through historical writings, but also how the movements of the body alter our conception of history. Stressing Rebecca Schneider's model of history as something that ‘remains before us’ (p. 141), Gotman analyses cross-historical re-enactments of choreomania within a mode of temporal ambiguity to suggest ‘that a choreographic motion that does not just reveal history's fits and fainting spells’, but the zigzags ‘of ideas and bodies across time revealing that “history” is never linear; nor is it ever entirely “past”’ (p. 141). Thus the historical examples and zones of intensity to which Gotman attends translate fluidly across time to inform contemporary geopolitics and even become proximate to the histories and futures before us.

This is to say that Choreomania is as progressive in its historical methodologies as it is in its provocative analyses of heretofore undertheorized modes of movement, dance and gesture. I have no doubt that it will deeply impact dance and performance studies as a pathbreaking analysis of social bodies in motion as well as an inspiring example of how the durable roots of rigorous critical and historical methodologies strengthen scholarship that stretches so far across geography and time.