Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study, a collection of twelve self-contained booklets, features contributions by artists and scholars mayfield brooks, thomas f. defrantz, maura nguyễn donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Annie-B Parson, Javier Stell-Frésquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia, and Andros Zins-Browne. The booklets offer a view into the various locations in which these dancers make work: a farm in Japan, the shore of New York’s Rockaway Beach, and football stadiums in the U.S. South. Even as they offer individual booklets, these artists often intersect with one another in the creative space of writing, citing parallel influences and trajectories or direct collaborations with each other. The structures necessary for dance-making in physical space, a practice of gathering and remembrance, intervene to illuminate this interconnectedness that extends to readers.
In colorful array, the booklets are tactile and can be read in any order; with separate titles and bindings, I enjoyed placing texts into piles based on formats of writing that resonated with me at various points in time. The cover of the collection, which folds out into a large poster, presents a forest that exemplifies the expansive field in which dancers play with positive and negative space. On the poster’s opposite face, an introductory text encourages dancers to write: “There should be a million of these books,” declares DeFrantz (Reference DeFrantz, DeFrantz and Parson2024, 1). Sixty-one illustrations by Parson surround DeFrantz’s text. They also prompt physical movement; a reader may need to inch toward the poster to examine small labels on these drawings. The images offer additional means to see the ways in which modes of representation can fill a two-dimensional surface. Dance enthusiasts may recognize Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof (Reference Bausch1978) in Parson’s drawings; standing tall, two dancers in gowns lean forward and pull back their hair to show their faces, aware of their display on stage. Other dancers drawn by Parson remain anonymous: in another snapshot, children gather outside, for example, to play Double Dutch. The editors of the collection, therefore, place writing, dancing, and hands-on methods of knowledge-making on equal levels in the study and creation of dance history.
Moving beyond the format of artist interviews, Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study reveals that choreographers remain cautious of archives and fixed chronologies of dance history. In many ways, the collection echoes sentiments of previous edited books including The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory (Bissell and Haviland Reference Bissell and Haviland2018) and The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Beliefs (Cohen Reference Cohen1966) that value embodied knowledge in dance historiographies. More broadly speaking, the booklets may recall methods of note-taking, questioning, and writing generated by postmodern dancers of the 1960s in the U.S. The collection fills critical gaps in dance history, however, in its ability to showcase a diversity of perspectives that present layers of timelines and memories. As if gathering in a studio, the disparate paths and life experiences of these dancers form part of a larger historical record, bound through their written accounts.
Many of the authors’ contributions resist words, with the acute understanding of how inscription participates in the ecosystem of archives that selectively preserve and erase dance histories. “For the record, I can write actual sentences. Do academia,” writes Donohue (Reference Donohue, DeFrantz and Parson2024, 1). The clarity of this statement positions the writing that follows as a commitment to play with language, which results in a collage of poetry and movement scores that bind histories of Asian diasporas and Donohue’s dance experiences in the U.S. In another booklet, Stell-Frésquez raises the issue of translation, reflecting on the dominance of English language in the production of political thought on indigenous dance practices. Brooks echoes similar concerns and writes a creation mythology that speaks of elders who believed “humans had put too much faith in words” (Reference Brooks, DeFrantz and Parson2024, 8). The ways in which these artists navigate the parameters of written expression, what serves as their dance score, reveals their solutions to these concerns. In cataloguing their preoccupations with the limits of language, I summarize four booklets below that synthesize patterns in the authors’ documentation of moments of discovery in dance.
Miller’s booklet “This is How Dancing Happens” focuses on her “first times” in dance (Reference Miller, DeFrantz and Parson2024, 9). “I remember remembering,” she writes, as she lists moments in dance that have etched themselves into her memory with a clarity that makes them available to archive through words and drawings (2024, 9). Dancers endeavor to reach for “the sun”—a metaphor for revelatory experiences—as they make daily commitments to remain available to possibilities in dance by showing up to studios to complete their work (2024, 1). As Miller yearns for the sun, she finds support in the city below that serves as her playground: she takes the reader through New York, mapping the repetition of her various commutes and naming locations that include St. Mark’s Church and The Henry Street Settlement. Miller acknowledges the rhythm, timing, and communal structures in dance that can align to make discovery available. Miller ends with a list that samples words in her booklet, a distillation of her experiences that succinctly expresses gratitude and excitement for the wisdom that dance continues to offer her.
Otake’s booklet stands out in its attention to the rituals of writing that establish a connection to the deceased. She writes letters to dancers who have passed, including Dore Hoyer, Kyra Nijinsky, and Mura Dehn. Otake grants readers access to the intimacy of her memories as she speaks to her friends and teachers. She recalls, for example, the time she sent Kazuo Ohno photos of Spanish dancer “La Argentina” that inspired Ohno to create a performance based on a single memory of watching her perform. Otake’s letter to Anna Halprin, who passed in 2021, is riveting. Otake discusses “a profound strangeness regarding time” as she remembers Halprin in her youth (Reference Otake, DeFrantz and Parson2024, 27). Otake fills in the gaps of timelines we might otherwise not glean from academic texts on her work. Letter writing, a slow form of dialogue, constitutes a method of imagining dance history. These letters reveal the generosity of what an artist chooses to share through the public action of writing practices.
Okpokwasili’s “Entangled” starts from the womb, “a song in the key of water,” that introduces a “first collaboration” in dance between a mother and child (Reference Okpokwasili, DeFrantz and Parson2024, 1). Okpokwasili then shares the thrill of learning Double Dutch, dancing in Nigerian weddings, and training in Japan with Min Tanaka (2024). She reflects on her relationship to the natural environment as she dances in streams of water on Tanaka’s farm, acknowledging discomfort and the possibility of encounters with nature in this work. She later shares the first time she was asked to dance against a fire hose in Ralph Lemon’s Come home Charley Patton (Lemon Reference Lemon2004). Careful to insert these reminders about historical uses of water during the Birmingham Campaign of 1963, “Entangled” offers expanded possibilities for interpreting Patton, informed by Okpokwasili’s insights with natural elements as both peaceful and violent.
Ude’s “Watch Me” decentralizes New York as the hub of dance history in the U.S., and allows majorette dancers in Texas, Georgia, and Alabama to speak for themselves. Photographs make Ude’s focus clear: rows of Black dancers in sharp poses fill stadium bleachers in shimmering costumes that privilege the collective. The author places these women in the lineage of Josephine Baker and describes their actions to “slap,” “pop,” and “sit” as they move their hips to the sounds of marching bands (Reference Ude, DeFrantz and Parson2024, 17). Ude laments the ways in which her training asked her to discard the knowledge of her first language in dance. The text eloquently manages to spotlight majorettes in Ude’s personal search for a sense of home in their movements.
These texts establish dancers as diligent documenters of memory, necessary for the form of dancing itself: they strive to remember what has been erased from archives, archive what is worth sharing, and create lists of dancers that they have seen, even if they are left with fragments of their movements. Valencia details memories of dancing with family in the U.S. and Mexico, brooks creates a memorial for a whale on a beach, and Hennessy remembers dancers who have died. Zins-Browne writes about remembering a dance that happened for the “first time,” or rather, materialized as an emergent practice in the artist’s decision to dance (Reference Zins-Browne, DeFrantz and Parson2024, 1). Readers may be surprised to read the prompt that the authors received to “write a story about history that didn’t necessarily center them!” (Reference DeFrantz, DeFrantz and Parson2024, 1). These dancers meet one another in their task to evade the self, entangled in their stories as the authors of memory.
Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study comments on larger trends in the field of dance studies. Suitable for a wide audience, including undergraduate students of dance, the collection posits that artists and scholars form a collective consciousness that shapes dance history. The booklets undoubtedly prompt readers to look for more information. How do these dancers move? What library of academic books or historical context would help readers understand these memories? A future book project driven by choreographers might also contend with the knowledge necessary to comprehend the poetic verses and questions posed by a circle of dancers in this generative work. These texts would pair well with Lemon’s “An Incomplete Chronology” in Come home Charley Patton (Reference Lemon2013) or Simone Forti’s timelines in The Bear in the Mirror (Reference Forti2018) that engage with similar formats of writing. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild’s reflections on intertextuality in “Some Thoughts on Choreographing History” would additionally complement the collection’s theoretical threads that grapple with the primacy of words in shaping worldviews. Dixon-Gottschild acknowledges that there “is nothing new under the sun, only variations on prior patterns and processes” (Reference Dixon-Gottschild and Desmond1997, 173). The collection offers a useful point of departure for individuals that choose to embrace the challenges of decision-making in dancing and writing to pen their perspectives on dance history.
