between people of different walks of life in both the process of creation and in performance.

Quoting a letter of endorsement for her work from C. Ray Nagin, then mayor of New Orleans, Marylee Hardenbergh suggests that site dance can create a sense of interconnectedness that transcends our local community relationships, reminding us that we are all one in a great, eternal whole (166).5 The form has the capacity to generate a shared experience of space among those involved and to construct atmospheres in which unexpected social exchanges can take place. That Pavlik and Kloetzel dedicate the nal section of their book to site dances role in the generation of community is telling. Indeed, perhaps one of the forms greatest strengths in a social sense is its ability to forge links between those who would not otherwise cross paths. But this is not the whole story. Crucially, in its capacity to highlight community, site dance can also function to expose some of the lines that divide us. Thinking past a celebratory model, Olive Bieringa observes that site dance is riven with indicators of privilege. She recounts a comment made by an AfricanAmerican man at a BodyCartography event, Man, I just scratch my nuts and they take me to jail. What do you clowns think youre doing? (138). Public spaces are shaped by numerous axes of exclusion including race, class, and gender; at its best, site dance can call attention to some of these tensions. As Martha Bowers phrases it, the form draws out literally into public space the muted frictions and issues of intolerance that are too often ignored or dismissed (274). Different though the choreographers proled in Site Dance are in their approaches to creating and performing site-based work, they agree that the form has the capacity to prompt contemplation about the design and use of the places in which the dances are situated. Perhaps Bowers phrases it best when she suggests that site dance carves out a discursive space for explorations of the dynamics of a given site (2756). Like the creative practice itself, Kloetzel and Pavliks Site Dance wedges itself into an already vibrant discussion of other forms of site-specic art and establishes a discursive space for explorations of the various issues that crop up when dance moves out of the theater and into

alternative sites. The book provides abundant material for the development of any number of theoretical threads that treat embodiment, movement, public space, spatial politics, and the social relevance of the artsissues that continue to grow in urgency and consequence. Alana Gerecke Simon Fraser University

Notes 1. Bernhardt is the founder of Dancing in the Streets in the Bronx, New York City, which is an organization that has been committed to the development of site dance since 1984. 2. Based in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York, Bowers is the executive director of Dance Theatre Etcetera, a community-based organization that has strong ties to its local neighborhood and a nearly two-decade-long performance history on the Red Hook waterfront. 3. Bieringa founded the BodyCartography Project in 1997 in San Francisco, and was joined by Otto Ramstad in 1999. The co-directed, sitespecic, dance and improvisation group is now based in Minneapolis and teaches and performs internationally. 4. Duckler is founder and director of Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre (formerly known as Collage Dance Theatre). Formed in 1987, the site-specic dance company is based in Los Angeles. 5. Hardenbergh, the artistic director of Global Site Performance, has been choreographing large-scale, site-based dances since 1985. Based in Minneapolis, Hardenbergh continues to choreograph and present her work internationally.

William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography: It Starts from Any Point edited by Stephen, Spier. 2011. London/New York: Routledge. xii + 186 pp., alphabetical list of works, chronological list of works, index. $30.95 paper. doi:10.1017/S0149767712000186

The conceptual category of choreography has recently been expanding to include a wide range of artistic, scholarly, and social concerns
DRJ 44/2 WINTER 2012

117

that may or may not derive from the practice of dance, or even performance. What the term choreography is being asked to do in this current interdisciplinary context depends a great deal, of course, upon who is asking and from which eld the question arises. But in framing exhibition curating, urban planning, digital-information design, and social networkingas choreographic work, these disparate elds are borrowing from dance new ways of conceiving their own disciplines in terms of organizational complexity and the relational, affective, and perceptual dimensions of embodiment. At the same time, many professionals in the eld of contemporary dance are approaching choreography in broader terms that de-emphasize the primacy of the dancing body in order to explore new theories, practices, media, and performance relationships. Some have claimed in pararevolutionary rhetoric that, choreography is emancipating itself from dance and must be recognized as a practice that is, in and of itself political (Spngberg 2012). This theoretical disembodiment of choreography from within the eld of dance can also be seen as a strategic move in the ongoing battle of dance and performance for recognition by those disciplinary elds that, by denition and centuries of philosophical prejudice, have excluded body-related disciplines. William Forsythe is a choreographer who has dedicated his career to redening the conceptual and disciplinary boundaries of ballet specically, and choreography more generally. His recent work has been playing a major role in the current reevaluation of choreographys scope, and has forged vital new conversations between dancers, architects, curators, musicologists, lmmakers, graphic designers, cognitive neuroscientists, and philosophers. But it is also important to see Forsythes contribution to these debates as the logical extension of the work he began over thirty years ago, challenging the ossication of thinking that had prevented ballet from developing into a fully modern let alone contemporaryart form. This rst English-language monograph on Forsythes work, edited by Stephen Spier, assembles various histories, theories, methodologies, and critiques of Forsythes work from his pioneering analytic approach to ballet to his more recent endeavors to introduce choreographic knowledge practices to other disciplinary elds.1

Several essays focus on Forsythes twenty years with the Ballett Frankfurt, disentangling ballets physical mechanics and the cultural forms of romanticism from which they emerged. Others attend to the ensemble performance works of The Forsythe Company and Forsythes independent choreographic objectshis site-specic and gallery installations that generate choreographic encounters with the public. Several contributors to the book are current or former collaborators of Forsythes who offer a range of perspectives and analyses of various creation processes.2 Forsythe has been widely celebrated for revitalizing what many had dismissed as the dead idiom of ballet by asking how it might be spoken as a living and still-evolving physical language, and how it might voice contemporary concerns instead of merely reiterating aesthetic dogmas of the nineteenth century. In her essay for the book, Senta Driver casts Forsythe as a contemporary Nijinskya visionary artist of the classical tradition who has advanced the art form at least as much as modern choreographers who abandoned ballet altogether. In his introduction, Spier counts Forsythe amongst the greatest artists of our time for fundamentally questioning the supposed precepts of his own medium (3). But for those critics who extol ballet in so far as it strives to rene and perfect a classicized ideal, Forsythes search for alternative methodologies and outcomes has been perceived as nothing less than the wanton disregard and dissolution of the grand tradition. In a chapter entitled Splintered Encounters: The Critical Reception to William Forsythe in the United States, 19791989, Mark Franko insightfully explores the genealogy of the rift between the conservative anti-intellectualism of much of the critical ballet establishment in the U.S. and Forsythes theoretically savvy iconoclasm (defensively derided as European)a rift that, remarkably, still persists to some degree in spite of the international acclaim and exuberant audience engagement that has followed Forsythes thirty-six-year career. Reactionary reviewers have at times heaped language so excoriating as to be amusing upon the aesthetic affronts they perceive in Forsythes most innovative work (not the least of which turn out to be his dancers use of spoken language onstage, as well as his own critical theoryinformed conversational style). Confronting

118

DRJ 44/2 WINTER 2012

these attacks, Franko rightly frames the issues as philosophical and ideological rather than purely aesthetic. As critic and longtime follower of the Ballett Frankfurt and The Forsythe Company, Roslyn Sulcas explains in her essay for the book, Forsythe dared to propose that ballet can be approached most productively as a conceptual and historical category worth investigating, rather than as the pre-ordained solution to the problem of how to go about dancing. In an essay on systems of linguistic and physical memory in Forsythes early work, Frankfurt-based performance scholar and critic Gerald Siegmund examines Forsythes grammatical play with classical ballet vocabulary as well as spoken language in Artifact (1984). Extracting balletic ideas from the conventional phrasings of their standard usage, Forsythe set them circulating as speech acts of dancing. In so doing, he explicitly recast ballet from immutable doctrine to an available subject of inquiry. Since then, Forsythe has continued to examine how ballets organizing principles, coordinative geometries, and perceptual habits might be dissected, exposed to parallel ideas in other disciplines, and recombined to produce new states, forms, and congurations of knowledge. He has expanded and diversied ballets scope while maintaining the integrity of its logicif not all of its assumptions. As choreographer Jonathan Burrows puts it, Forsythe rearranged all of the furniture whilst leaving the room recognizable (Burrows 2010, 112). Once Forsythe had reconceived ballet as a subject in and of itself, he could then investigate it as intellectual, physical, and creative work that quality which the aesthetics (if not the practice) of classical ballet most fervently disavows. While classical ballets extremely demanding training, exacting work ethic, and hierarchical teaching and employment practices have fed public fascination with the genre, the aesthetic codes of virtuosity in ballet performance have served to obscure actual effort and naturalize subjugation. Forsythe, by contrast, seriously grapples with existential and ethical questions about how to work, as well as with the practical challenges of how to make the work of dance and choreography visible. Problems of work such as what counts as work, who does it, and with whom; what kinds of knowledge it draws upon and generates; how it functions; how it

might lead to consequential outcomes; and how to recognize ithave been central themes in performances such as Die Befragung des Robert Scott (The Questioning of Robert Scott) (1986, 2000), Human Writes (2005), and You Made Me a Monster (2005), as well as in Forsythes choreographic objects installations including City of Abstracts (2001) and Instructions (2003). Similarly, Forsythes awardwinning pedagogical CD-ROM, Improvisation Technologies (1999), aimed to explain and demonstrate the Ballett Frankfurts working methods for improvising, while his Synchronous Objects (2009) project created a digital score to visualize the choreographic workings of the performance piece One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000) by mapping, indexing, and diagramming its cues, movement themes, alignments, and organizational structures.3 Taking ballet or choreography as a subject of inquiry and the impetus to work requires engaging in research, analysis, and creative thinking. In his own contribution to the book, the essay Choreographic Objects, Forsythe writes that most approaches to dance have overly invested in dances corporality to the extent that they have failed to recognize the intelligence of dance practice. Complying with dominant philosophical tendencies to treat the work of the body as precognitive, he argues, the eld of dance has perpetuated a false self-conception that has hindered it from clearly stating its own intellectual principles and participating in thoughtful and fruitful exchange with other disciplines. Thinking analytically in the realm of dance, as in any other, involves looking insightfully, hypothesizing about what is perceived, and constructing theories that attempt to assimilate what is known, frame investigations into the unknown, create new correspondences, and spawn new practices. In dance, however, the fact that the work of thought correlates to highly visible, energetic, and, most signicantly, ephemeral transformations of the body draws attention toward the spectacular, affective, and eetingleaving sustained practices of knowledge production too often unexamined. In performances throughout his career, Forsythe has explicitly thematized the work of translating knowledge from one idiom to another, as in The Loss of Small Detail (1991), 7 to 10 Passages (2000), Human Writes, and Three Atmospheric Studies (2006). He has
DRJ 44/2 WINTER 2012

119

identied, as a source of generativity, the residual networks that emerge from accumulated traces of connections and misconnections. The essays by his collaborators each discuss instances of how Forsythe constructs various systems of translation and the effects that these processes produce. Multidisciplinary scholar and former Forsythe dramaturg Heidi Gilpin theorizes how Forsythes work of the late 1980s and early 1990s transposed rationalized strategies of physical orientation into approaches that fragment and multiply forces in the body, producing movement with a sense of falling out of form and disappearing. Digital artist and scholar Christopher Salter outlines the dynamic complexities of technical iteration and feedback between sound, digital systems, moving bodies, and architectural space in Ballett Frankfurts Eidos:Telos (1995). Dancer and choreographer Dana Caspersen explains the thinking required to accomplish physically challenging translations between the focus of the dancers gaze, coordinative geometry of limbs, and behavioral state in Decreation (2003)the pivotal work between Forsythes two companies. Current dramaturg Freya Vass-Rhee suggests how strategies for translating visual stimuli into movement have developed new multimodal perceptual synergies in Three Atmospheric Studies and other recent works of The Forsythe Company. But Forsythes analytic process of reconceiving choreographic practice by retooling its dening categories and terms is made most explicit in his own essay, where he begins by unpacking the denition of choreography in order to expand its spheres of relevance and to access some of its untapped potential. Interestingly, Forsythes argument that choreography be thought as separable from the dancing body returns the concept of choreography back to its etymological roots in writing. And while Forsythe has long been interested in the ways in which a body could be understood as performing a kind of writing-through-movement (which the Improvisation Technologies CD-ROM so elegantly demonstrated), there was a time when he quite forcefully resisted the converse propositionthat movement of the body might be transcribed into a readable text. Gilpins essay recounts Forsythes argument (which was corroborated by an expert in Labanotation) that the notation of his

choreography into a written score was virtually impossible given the complexity of its timings, orientations, and coordinations. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, generating choreographic complexity was such a priority for Forsythe that the prospect of translating what was happening into a xed, written score could be seen only as anathema to the dynamism of the work. In recent years, however, Forsythe has revisited the idea of the score in several different ways, such as in the concept of breath scores (addressed in Vass-Rhees article) and in the online digital media score Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced, which is the pilot project for Motion Bank. But in his recent writing, Forsythe chooses to extrapolate the concept of the score specically into the realm of three-dimensional objects and interactive installation environments. Forsythes choreographic objects (described by Spier in the books nal essay) serve as scores, in so far as they present choreographic ideas in material form, extended in time and space beyond the dramaturgical connes of a one-off performance experience. These scores do not transcribe movement, but call attention to how ideas produce movement and how movement occasions ideas. Only one, Instructions, addresses its audience via the written word. The other objects are read as the public engages physically with them. The choreographic work performed by the object and the work of reading it (in both senses of apprehending the mode of engagement that the object affords, as well as responding to it by moving) permanently resides in the object itself, yet only unfolds and produces knowledge in the dynamic play of the encounter. For Forsythe, the purpose of analyzing the categories of ballet and choreography, investigating how they work, submitting their denitions to translations of various orders and degrees, and seeking what other work might arise from thinking them through differently has always had to do with engendering, articulating, and perceiving complexity. The complex states of thinking, dancing, and seeing that his work simultaneously demands and produces, work transformational magic as they expose translational labor. Rebecca M. Groves Stanford University

120

DRJ 44/2 WINTER 2012

Notes 1. This publication was partially conceived as an update and expansion of the special issue on Forsythes work in the journal Choreography and Dance, edited by Senta Driver in 2000. Four of the authors who originally contributed to the journal issue have updated their articles or have written entirely new essays for this book. Six other writers have joined the conversation in the volume, including Forsythe himself. In 2004, Gerald Siegmund edited a Germanlanguage collection of essays on Forsythes work, William Forsythe: Denken in Bewegung, which, unfortunately, has not yet been published in English. 2. I was also one of Forsythes collaborators from 20022006, rst as dramaturg of Ballett Frankfurt, and later as executive director of the Forsythe Foundation. 3. See Forsythe (1999); Forsythe, Palazzi and Zuniga-Shaw (2009); and Groves, deLahunta, and Zuniga-Shaw (2007).

Form of Dance Literature. In Knowledge in Motion: Perspectives of Artistic and Scientic Research in Dance, edited by Sabine Gehm, Pirkko Husemann, and Katharina von, Wilcke. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 91100. Siegmund, Gerald, ed. 2004. William Forsythe: Denken in Bewegung. Berlin: Henschel. Spngberg, Mrten. 2012. Choreography as Expanded Practice, Barcelona, 2931 March 2012. Choreography as Expanded Practice. http://choreographyasexpandedpractice.word press.com/2012/02/25/choreography-as-expa nded-practice-barcelona-29-31-march-2012-2/ (accessed March 5, 2012).

Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures edited by Susanna, Sloat. 2010. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. 393 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth. doi:10.1017/S0149767712000198

Works Cited Burrows, Jonathan. 2010. A Choreographers Handbook. New York: Routledge. Driver, Senta, ed. 2000. William Forsythe. Choreography and Dance: An International Journal. Vol. 5, Part 3. Newark, NJ: Harwood Academic Publishers. Forsythe, William. 1999. William Forsythe: Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye. [CD-ROM + booklet]. Karlsruhe: ZKM. . 2012. Motion Bank: A Context for Moving Ideas. http://motionbank.org/en/ (accessed March 5, 2012). The Forsythe Company GmbH. Forsythe, William, Maria Palazzi and Norah Zuniga-Shaw. 2009. Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced by William Forsythe. http://synchronousobjects. osu.edu. (accessed March 5, 2012). The Forsythe Company; Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design and Department of Dance at The Ohio State University. Groves, Rebecca M. Scott deLahunta and Norah Zuniga-Shaw. 2007. Talking About Scores: William Forsythes Vision for a New

Today the scholarly study of dance is well on its way to gaining academic legitimacy, but the progress is slow: in the United States there are not many PhD programs in Dance Studies, and jobs for dance scholars are few and far between. Nevertheless, dance scholarship continually gains in breadth, depth, and sophistication, while also entering into fruitful exchange with any number of other elds and theoretical domains. These exchanges have been critically important in allowing dance scholars to explore how and why dance matters to politics, geography, youth, urban sites, and more. Just as important, such engagement has shown the academy more broadly that dance like any other kind of cultural production is itself politically, historically, and culturally complex, multifacted, and above all, relevant. It is this move away from a more didactic and documentary impulse that has allowed scholarship on dance to ourish; the dominance of that same problematic impulse in this volume is, therefore, its greatest weakness. With twenty-one contributions arranged geographically, Making Caribbean Dance is at once hefty and unwieldy. The chapters come from a range of authors with a corresponding range of backgrounds: many are dancers themselves, some are dancer/scholars, others are choreographers, some are primarily researchers.
DRJ 44/2 WINTER 2012

121