Book Review: Dance and the `Marriageplot'

Abstract

This book explores the relationships between genders in terms of the choreography, the patterns of movement and the narratives of the bodies in the space. Sally Banes, a well-known scholar in the ®eld of the dancing arts, revisits the history of western dance (from classical ballet to postmodern performance) from a feminist perspective. She rejects any essentialist evaluation on the different styles: she focuses on the analysis of individual performances, and provides a detailed reconstruction of some 20 famous choreographic arrangements within their speci®c sociocultural context. What cultural meanings are in fact conveyed by the bodies on stage? What cultural representations of gender identities are offered by the language of the dance? These are the questions that Sally Banes provides answers to, dealing with one case at a time, in her detailed historical-materialist analysis (which at times, however, threatens to underestimate the metaphorical worth of the art of dance).The distinctive, highly original nature of this study is exempli®ed in the grid used to compare choreographic works: the`marriage plot'.`Where dances were ®rst embedded in weddings, weddings came to be embedded in dances', Banes declares (p. 5); and indeed, from 1832 La Sylphide, through to Stravinsky and Nijinsky's Les Noces (1923), and on as far as to A. de Mille's Rodeo (1942), the moment of the partner choice is seen as lying at the very core and heart of many dances. When this is not the case, as in certain speci®c historic phases ± including the early 20th-century forerunners of modern dance, and postmodern developments ± the choice of doing without the marriage plot and without its associated stylistic feature, the pas de deux, is in itself signi®cant in terms of gender representations. Thus, Banes elaborates a sociosemiotic grid with which to evaluate the performances in terms of the failure or success of the marriage plot, and of the dysphoric or euphoric affective value of the marriage in question; consequently, she takes into account the dialectic between plot, choreography and musical score, and helps us to understand the bodily language of dance and its speci®c varieties of meanings with regard to the coupling of the sexes. Thus dance may sometimes propose new con®gurations of certain well-known themes from our cultural heritage. It is the case, to quote but one example, of Tschaikovsky and Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty (1890):`in terms of female agency, when the story of the Sleeping Beauty is staged, especially in dance terms ± which require action ± it becomes dif®cult, if not impossible, to depict the protagonist as passive and immobile ' (p. 49).Dancing Women provides us with a vast and complex framework within which to formulate an analysis of dance from the cultural studies perspective, something that had in fact been lacking up until now.