Customer Reviews

Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, 'Race' and Nation in Early Modern Dance

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The value of Burt's book lies in its wide-ranging scope: taking the issue of how early modern dance and the experience(s) of modernity articulated each other in early 20th century Europe and America, Burt focuses upon pressing questions of sexuality, identity, class, consumer culture, and so forth. Chapters on Josephine Baker and "primitivist" discourses of the body, as well as rationalism, mass production and the chorus line are engaging, if also open to debate. In this sense, the volume provides a good introduction to the "new critical studies" of dance, an approach which is informed by recent developments in cultural studies. However, the book is also marred by a number of factual errors (example: Burt incorrectly claims that "In 1922, [...] Le Corbusier and Jeanneret exhibited designs for La Ville Contemporaine"--unaware that Jeanneret and Le Corbusier are in fact the same person, and that the team consisted of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant) as well as editorial gaffes: names are mispelled, articles cited incorrectly. These mistakes are not simply slips or failures to catch typos, but rather reflect the book's main weakness, which is that it at once too wide-ranging and almost exclusively dependent upon secondary sources, which suggests to me that Burt's expertise does not lie in historical research, but rather in broad synthesis. As such, the book provides a useful introduction to a number of different phenomena in early modern dance, and offers some ways of approaching dance through the lens of critical studies of culture, but its arguments remain open to challenge and revision.

Ramsey Burt incorporates so much in this book that it can be overwhelming but I suggest grabbing onto what you think is the good stuff and delve into it. He combines the historical, anthropological and political happenings of the 1920s and 30s with dance so well that it's hard to image thinking of any of them as separate, in any part. I would suggest this book to any student of the dance that has had some 20th century dance history background,so that you can concentrate on the theory and discourse presented in the book.