Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement

262 Pages·2005·0.724 MB·English

by  Andrew Hewitt

SOCIAL CHOREOGRAPHY
POST-CONTEMPORARY INTERVENTIONS
Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson
Social Choreography
IDEOLOGY AS PERFORMANCE IN DANCE
AND EVERYDAY MOVEMENT
Andrew Hewitt
Duke University Press Durham and London
2005
∫ 2005 Duke University Press
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Contents
Introduction: Social Choreography and
the Aesthetic Continuum 1
1
The Body of Marsyas: Aesthetic Socialism and
the Physiology of the Sublime 37
2
Stumbling and Legibility:
Gesture and the Dialectic of Tact 78
3
‘‘America Makes Me Sick!’’: Nationalism, Race,
Gender, and Hysteria 117
4
The Scandalous Male Icon: Nijinsky and the Queering
of Symbolist Aesthetics 156
5
From Woman to Girl:
Mass Culture and Gender Panic 177
Notes 213
Index 249

Introduction
SOCIAL CHOREOGRAPHY AND
THE AESTHETIC CONTINUUM
In 1796 Friedrich Schiller—arguably the nineteenth-century’s leading
proselytizer and disseminator of an idealist aesthetic of bourgeois
humanism—chided the tardy contributor of an essay on dance to the
following year’s issue of Musenalmanach for not profiting from ‘‘the
newly awakened interest in this art.’’∞ In contrast, by the beginning
of the twentieth century Havelock Ellis—a significant champion of
dance—could cite as characteristic a contemporary’s 1906 evaluation
that ‘‘the ballet is now a thing of the past and, with the modern change
of ideas, a thing that is never likely to be resuscitated.’’≤ The historical
arc traced between these two aesthetic assessments serves nicely to
map out the field of the central arguments in this book. A dance histo-
rian might wish to demonstrate what ‘‘went wrong’’ with theatrical
dance in the years that separate these assessments—and, indeed, to
explain why Ellis, a fervent amateur and promoter of dance, would
himself in turn so quickly and definitively be proved wrong. This book
is not a work of dance history in that sense, however—although it does
seek to suggest new interpretive paradigms of interest to dance histo-
rians and critical theorists alike. When my consideration here of social
choreography does focus on dance in the stricter, or theatrical, sense of
2 Social Choreography
the word, the aim is neither to produce an immanent dance history—
examining the emergence of certain forms and codes according to an
internal logic—nor, indeed, to locate dance within a broader social
history. The historical claims I make in this volume might be said to
work in the opposite direction: they are claims for the historical agency
of the aesthetic as something that is not merely shaped but also shaping
within the historical dynamic. By attempting to reconnect to a more
radical sense of the aesthetic as something rooted in bodily experience,
I use the category of social choreography as a way of examining how the
aesthetic is not purely superstructural or purely ideological. Social cho-
reography is an attempt to think about the aesthetic as it operates at the
very base of social experience.
Substantiating such claims might begin by returning to Schiller. Even
though the general ‘‘newly awakened interest’’ of which he writes was
aroused by performances of theatrical dance, Schiller’s own interest lay
primarily (although not exclusively) in dance as a social phenomenon.
In a famous passage from a letter of 1793 to Christian Körner, he writes:
I can think of no more fitting image for the ideal of social conduct than
an English dance, composed of many complicated figures and perfectly
executed. A spectator in the gallery sees innumerable movements inter-
secting in the most chaotic fashion, changing direction swiftly and
without rhyme or reason, yet never colliding. Everything is so ordered
that the one has already yielded his place when the other arrives; it is all
so skillfully, and yet so artlessly, integrated into a form, that each seems
only to be following his own inclination, yet without ever getting in the
way of anybody else. It is the most perfectly appropriate symbol of the
assertion of one’s own freedom and regard for the freedom of others.≥
In a sense, it is the history of Schiller’s observation that I trace in this
book; that is, dance not simply as a privileged figure for social order but
as the enactment of a social order that is both reflected in and shaped
by aesthetic concerns. The English dance, for Schiller, is not just an
example of the existing social order but rather a model for that order. For
him, the force of his observation lies not in the description of an En-
glish aesthetic and social phenomenon but in the prescription it entails
for his German contemporaries. Schiller gazes at a social dance from
the gallery, as if observing a theatrical performance, while with the
same regard looking across to England for a model of social organiza-
Introduction 3
tion. My central presupposition in this book is that Schiller’s project of
what I will call social choreography has been dehistoricized and de-
politicized by a prevailing modernist understanding of choreography
as an essentially metaphysical phenomenon oriented around questions
of transcendental subjectivity rather than social and political intersub-
jectivity. What is at stake in proposing an analysis of social choreogra-
phy is a threefold determination of the modern: namely, a redefinition
of modernism as an aesthetic program; a rethinking of modernization
as a social process of rationalization that would not, as is generally
assumed, compartmentalize and trivialize aesthetic experience; and,
finally, a rethinking of the relationship of two terms—aesthetic moder-
nity and sociopolitical modernity—that have either been taken to be
irremediably at odds or assumed to be reducible to each other.
Certainly Schiller’s own writing on dance elsewhere—specifically
the famous poem Der Tanz—does use dance as the figure for a self-
transcending aesthetic in which spirit and body are taken up into each
other and the subject completed/annulled. This sublation, however, is
not itself one that negates historical time. It was only with the symbol-
ists of the late nineteenth century along with their international ava-
tars that the figure of the dancer would be most definitively removed to
the realms of the metaphysical. In the writings of Théophile Gautier
from the mid-nineteenth century—but most markedly since the end of
that century, with Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous essays inspired by the
dances of Loïe Fuller—the figure of the dancer within the project of
aesthetic modernism has generally served to invoke aesthetic experi-
ence in its most self-enclosing and immanent yet transcendent aes-
thetic form. In the moment of the dance, the possibility of a movement
beyond the limitations of the body is paradoxically embodied; human
potential supposedly resides as much in the vital energies that move
and displace the body through space as it does in the contingent mate-
riality of the body itself.∂ In this study, by contrast, I use the term social
choreography to denote a tradition of thinking about social order that
derives its ideal from the aesthetic realm and seeks to instill that order
directly at the level of the body. In its most explicit form, this tradition
has observed the dynamic choreographic configurations produced in
dance and sought to apply those forms to the broader social and politi-
cal sphere. Accordingly, such social choreographies ascribe a funda-
mental role to the aesthetic in its formulation of the political.