In Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston, Anthea Kraut continues a recovery project, begun by novelist Alice Walker in the 1970s, of the cultural contributions of African American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960). What makes Kraut's work unique, however, is its focus on Hurston's dance stagings. Centring mainly on the 1932 New York debut of Hurston's most successful concert, The Great Day, Choreographing the Folk represents a groundbreaking attempt to resituate her as an influential dance artist, and also to reveal the cultural struggles for control over black folk dance in the 1930s.

Calling her work “a case study of invisibilization – an attempt to understand the conditions that enable certain subjects and performances to be forgotten” (x), Kraut grapples with the reasons for Hurston's exclusion from traditional dance histories. In doing so, she assigns Hurston's stage work a formative place in the development of twentieth-century dance practices, while also positioning it as a site through which commercial stagings of African American folk life met and merged with a complex vision of diaspora. Charting her argument through six chapters that consider different aspects of Hurston's work, including authorship, conditions of production, and white appropriations of her materials, Kraut devotes particular attention to the ways in which Hurston “straddled the line between authorship and authenticity” (x) – her concerts were based on her anthropological observations of black diasporic dance cultures – to simultaneously engage with and redefine popular depictions of black folk expression.

Rereading Hurston's concerts as central to the development of modern dance and to an increasing inclusion of diasporic art forms on the US stage, Kraut offers much, both to Hurston's place in twentieth-century history, and to African American and dance studies more generally. Yet Kraut is also sensitive to the problems of assigning Hurston the status of cultural “foremother,” and particularly engaging is her exploratory reading of Hurston as a “choreographer” in terms that challenge notions of individual artistry in favor of a complex vision of cultural exchange. The result is a work that tests our foundational assumptions about authorship and originality and unearths long-obscured African diasporic influences in modern dance.

Kraut, who is assistant professor of dance at the University of California, Riverside, reveals an impressive knowledge of both African American and performance studies, and her decision to divide her book into differently themed sections has resulted in a multifaceted analysis of Hurston's dance stagings. Also impressive is her navigation of the challenges of interpreting an unrecorded theatrical production. By interrogating a wide array of surviving letters, programs, typescripts and reviews, Kraut provides a detailed recovery of the content of The Great Day and the social forces surrounding its production and reception. The result is a well-rounded and in-depth analysis of Hurston's likely intentions, struggles for artistic recognition, and influence. Choreographing the Folk thus represents a long-overdue assessment of Hurston's relationship to dance studies and to embodied representations of African American expression, and is an invaluable resource for both Hurston and dance scholars.