In this decidedly topical study, nine authors reflect on issues relating to performance of past dances, asking how earlier works can/should be retained and performed. The authors, almost all of whom are practitioners, do not resolve the issue, but they do provide multiple methods and ways of embracing the past. Contentious terms such as reconstruction, reimagining, and reenactment are neither unpicked nor debated, but age-old questions of how the technical values of the past can be embraced by those of today are confronted. Writing in the foreword, Robert Cohan believes the book's essays to be unique, in that the role of the dancers and directors in retrieving a dance from the past has rarely been credited or acknowledged, let alone written about before by the participants themselves. Similar issues to those in Transmissions were addressed in Stephanie Jordan's edited collection, Preservation Politics: Dance Revived Reconstructed Remade (Reference Jordan2000), and Mark Franko's edited edition, Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (Reference Jordan2018). While the contributors in Jordan's collection are mainly concerned with reconstructing historical works in order to preserve the past, those in Franko's edition prioritize reenactment, which, for Franko, transcends issues of preservation. The essays in Lesley Main's book are more concerned with focusing on how the past is transmitted and what happens when dancers embody earlier techniques and styles.
Introducing the book, Main claims that the major problem facing today's dancers is interpreting movement, informed by diverse training styles, made on earlier bodies. Central to each essay is transmission because it illuminates the complex layers of dance practice and the varied range of decisions that practitioners need to make (2–3). Many chapters stress the need to grasp the idea or meaning of the dance and the choreographer's intention. This is not the place to argue for the notion of intentionality, but it is not confronted in any of the essays and deserves further investigation.
Divided into nine chapters, spanning most of the last century, the book deals with artists from Rudolph Laban to Robert Cohan, ex-Graham company dancer and founder of London Contemporary Dance Theatre (LCDT) in 1969. The chapters can be grouped into manageable sections of three, three, and two. Representing the early twentieth century are discussions of works by Laban, Mary Wigman, and Madge Atkinson (1885–1970), founder of the dance form known as Natural Movement. The essays consider the difficulty of accessing and performing a dance when the sources are limited and neither the choreographer nor the technique remain, though some early film footage of Wigman exists. Different problems are raised when the dances of Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham, and Yvonne Rainer are contemplated. While Graham and Humphrey are no longer living, their techniques are still practiced, and Rainer is still engaged with presentations of Trio A (1966). But, apart from the latter, the chosen dances are from the 1930s and thus created on bodies embracing techniques that were still embryonic. In the final two chapters, Rosemary Butcher (1947–2016), a postmodern British choreographer and visual artist influenced by the Judson Church group, and Cohan revisit some of their earlier works.
The chapters focus on how these early dances provide stimulus for reinvention. The book's Transmitters believe that the dances merit reviving and that audiences find these historical works thought-provoking. Through these reconstructions, reimaginings, and revivals, new forms emerge, although their success depends on today's performers and their understanding of the work's meaning.
Beginning with Alison Curtis-Jones's “reimagining” of an early “lost” Laban work, Dancing Drumstick (2013), the chapter deals with transmission and “archeochoreological methods,” a term coined by Valerie Preston-Dunlop (Franco Reference Franco and Franko2018). Like Preston-Dunlop, Curtis-Jones aims to create “a new living archive” (12). With few material remains, she used Laban's choreological principles, Choreutics, and Effort. A key source was his pupil, Valerie Preston-Dunlop, whose own recreations of Laban's dances are appraised by Susanne Franco (Reference Franco and Franko2018, 143–164). Franco claims that because Preston-Dunlop highlighted only a selection of “aesthetic and ideological features,” she failed to address the most “reactionary and controversial aspects of his dances” (146). Similar issues could be raised about Curtis-Jones's approach, and her dancers benefitted from the experience, in particular from the use of Laban's principles as a training method.
Moving from the body-as-archive to the disembodied performance in Fabián Barba's reenactmemt of Wigman's dances, Barba discusses his own embodiment of Wigman's dance in which he found that his physical body was present but his modern dance inheritance absent. Although his dance background in Ecuador was helpful, this was mainly because his teachers embraced the main tenets of Ausdruckstanz, its individuality, its autonomy, and its cultural context but not its technique. He had extensive sources; not only were some of the dances recorded, but he was also able to work with three of her students. As with Drumstick, the dancer has to embody the expressive qualities and materialize them in the space. Does Barba succeed in getting close to producing a living and moving image of Wigman? Watching film of the performance (Barba Reference Barba2013), his understanding of the Effort actions does not appear to embody fundamental aspects of Wigman's dances, since they comprise only Effort actions. This may be because his own dance training did not support the qualitative elements of Wigman's performances. Nevertheless, for many of today's audiences, it seems he has succeeded in retrieving Wigman (55).
In the following chapter, the difficulties of embracing the style of an early twentieth-century “natural” dancer for a contemporaneously trained ballet dancer is explored by Maria Salgado Llopis. Using her own body as an epistemological tool, she explores the cultural values of an earlier era through the dance work, for which her own training does not equip her. She divided the chapter on Madge Atkinson's Wind Tossed into two sections, the context of the dance and the ways in which it can be transmitted today. As with the previous chapters the important link was the archived body of a student of Natural Movement, Jacqueline Ferguson, who worked with her. Ultimately, Llopis failed to access the aesthetics of the past and writes that, despite the excellent support from Ferguson, she found it impossible to immerse herself in the earlier “communities of practice” (79). However, she argues that the experience brought her valuable historical knowledge of a past practice. Issues are raised here about meaning. If the aesthetic values of the earlier dance cannot be physically embraced today, is the meaning of the dance also lost?
The following three chapters take us to seminal choreographers from the United States, Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham, and Yvonne Rainer. Each created what became modern and postmodern dance, and the writing is about how to transmit a dance in a technique which is still current, yet conceived on earlier bodies. Lesley Main's chapter on Humphrey defines transmission as “the means through which the conceptual framework and choreographic intention of a work is conveyed” (87). Is this enough to retain the meaning? Main believes so; her task was to “unlock(ing) and release(ing) new possibilities” (91). A community of practice still exists for Humphrey dancers, and consequently, despite small changes in the dance, it was possible to release the meaning. Drawing on historical sources, Main concludes that the work remained as a “vital ‘living’ entity that has transformative capacities” (105). And, because Humphrey's technique is rooted in her choreography, this close alignment enabled the meaning to survive.
Graham, too, embedded her technique in her works, but the problems in embracing past works are similar to those encountered in ballet. Namely, bodies, values, and technical nuances have changed, and today's dancers are not so immersed in 1930s technique. Written by Kim Jones, a Graham practitioner, issues of performance practice and responsibility to the choreographer are raised. A major thrust of the chapter is the notion that Graham, in mounting Chronicle (1936), was making a political statement. She resisted aligning with the leftist dance movement of the period, but refused to perform in Nazi Germany at an International Dance Festival prior to the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, despite an invitation from the Ministry of Culture and Propaganda (Prickett Reference Prickett1989). Jones uses original sources from the 1930s to immerse the students in the era, her argument being that the politics of the 1930s informed the dance and these are “inextricable” from the period (121). Even if today's dancers find it difficult to engage with history, she concludes that this is vital to the work's meaning. For Jones, Transmitters need to be “researchers/scholars/dancers/ performers, choreographers, archivists and collaborators” (136).
Sara Wookey is a named Transmitter for Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966), and she focuses her discussion on what this entails. Learning a dance in which it seems as though nothing is happening beyond walking and juxtaposing various body parts, proved more taxing than expected for Wookey, and does still for today's performers. She interprets the transmitting process as more of an exchange, which includes her experiences with Rainer as “dancer, choreographer and friend” (156), and she engages with both the narratives of the Judson Theatre and its social and political context. Rainer's demand that the dance should be communicated on a one-to-one basis enables Wookey to think critically about “dance, performance, subjectivity relations and art object” (159). This develops her knowledge as a Transmitter as well as emphasizes the value of interpersonal connections in dance. We are left wondering what will happen when Rainer and her Transmitters (described as such and approved by Rainer [149]) are not there to oversee the dance, since Rainer does not believe that film provides sufficient material for performers. Trio A was perceived as a radical approach to dance in the late 1960s; that it should still have “authenticity” as a maxim for its performance is thought-provoking and highlights the complexity of historical embodiment.
The final chapters introduce Rosemary Butcher and Robert Cohan. Both revisit earlier works and build on the experience, transforming them into new pieces for today. Butcher notices how much her past contributes to the present, but the chapter, written from an interview with Butcher by Stephanie Sachsenmaier, concerns issues of “time, archive and memory that are at stake in her choreographic work” (165). She found that returning to past works allowed her to conceive of them differently, changing and shaping the works in another way. Butcher was tasked with making a work based on Allan Kaprow's 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959). Kaprow's piece demanded public participation, in which he used music theory and dance, inviting the public to complete several tasks. Selecting aspects of his work, she interpreted it as a process rather than a product, as Sachsenmaier notes, “Butcher has ‘taken over’ aspects of Karprow's thinking that she encountered in his archive … [and] was also preoccupied with how to give form to memory in her choreographic invention” (184–185). It proved to be one of her last pieces.
Paul Jackson, Cohan's biographer, introduces the final chapter. It reflects on a revival of Forest (a work Cohan made for the London Contemporary Dance Theatre in 1977, evoking mystery and loneliness, which was restaged in 2006 for the Phoenix Dance Theatre and subsequently by Anne Went [Donnelly]) and Cohan's response to unfamiliar dancers. His dances have been preserved on film, through his classroom technique, by Anne Went (Donnelly), and by Yolande Yorke-Edgell of the Yorke Project, a London-based company. As with the previous chapters, Cohan was more concerned with retaining the intention of the work and the sensation of the movement in preference to the actual steps (195).When Forest was restaged by Donnelly in 2014, she had access to numerous sources, including film and dancers’ memories. When the movements had to be altered, Cohan approved them. Different dancers required changes in the movement, and as long as the spirit of the work remained, Cohan was content. Despite being almost ninety, Cohan agreed to make a new work for Yorke-Edgell. Using an earlier work, Agora (1984), as a starting point, he created Lingua Franca (2015). The title emerged because of the different embodied dance backgrounds of the dancers. Although modern dance existed in Britain before Cohan's arrival, his involvement allowed it to flourish on the foundations of Graham's work. As Jackson indicates, Cohan's works had almost disappeared, but the successful restagings have reawakened interest and shown the value of recreation, thus supporting Main's belief that new possibilities emerge from revisiting the past.
This edited collection will resonate with both practitioners and academics. The examples it gathers together uncover the difficulties, joys, and complexities of communicating earlier dances to current performers and audiences—raising issues, triggering debate, and providing marvelous resources for further study. It is an innovative and useful collection.
