Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process. By Bruce Kirle. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Pp. xv + 252 + 30 illus. $30.00 Pb; $60 Hb.

Abstract

consumption that will never find its fulfilment as there is no such thing as total presence of the self. Thus the fatality of presence lies in its hiding of a fundamental loss (Mangel). Certain experiences, among them the experience of one's self, can never be had without some kind of mediation. Therefore, Siegmund argues, dance's 'presence must make the detour through absence in order to escape the status of mere exchange of information, styles, and movements in a perennial present, in order to make possible an irretrievable experience, such as death, for dancers and for the audience' (p. 33). Siegmund and Lepecki meet in this aspect of fundamental melancholy within dance, movement and the bodies that serve as instrument in its visualization and conceptual definition. Both books undoubtedly offer dance studies a wealth of critical input. After being fundamentally challenged by Exhausting Dance and Abwesenheit, dance and performance may never be as easy again as they may have hoped to be.