SUSAN LEIGH FOSTER

Choreographing History
Manifesto/or Dead and Moving Bodies
Silling in this chair, squirming away from the glitches, aches, low-grade tensions rever­
berating in neck and hip, staring unfocused ai some spare between here and the nearest
objects, shiftingagam, listening to my stomach growl, to the clock licking, shifting, stretch­
ing, settling, turning— 1 am a body writing. I am a bodily writing.' We used to
pretend the body was uninvolved, that it remained mute and still while the
mind thought. We even imagined that thought, once conceived, transferred
itself effortlessly onto the page via a body whose natural role a s instrument fa­
cilitated the pen. Now we know that the caffeine we imbibe mutates into the
acid of thought which the body then excretes, thereby etching ideas across the
page. Now we know that the body cannot be taken for granted, cannot be
taken seriously, cannot be taken.

A bod\', whether sitting writing or standing thinking or walking talking

or running screaming, is a bodily writing. Its habits and stances, gestures
and demonstrations, every' action o f its various regions, areas, and parts— ail
these emerge out of cultural practices, verbal or nor, tlvat construct corporeal
tueatttng. Each of the body’s moves, as with all writings, traces the physical fact
of movement and also an array of references to conceptual entities and events.
Constructed from endless and repeated encounters with other bodies, each
body's writing maintains a noiinatural relation between us physicality and
referettttaltty. Each bod}1 establishes this relation between pltysicaltty and
meaning in concert with the physical actions and verbal descriptions of bodies
that move alongside it. Not only is this relation between the physical and co n ­
ceptual nonnatural, it is also impermanent. It mutates, transforms, rentstattttates
with each new encounter.
Todays creaking knee is not yesterdays knee jogging up the hill. The way
one reaches toward that knee, as much a metaphor as any attempt to name or
describe the knee, already presumes identities lor hand and knee. But during
their interaction identities for hand and knee become modified. Together they
discover that the knee feels or sounds different, that the hand looks older or
drier than yesterday. Comparisons between past and present knees provide some
4 | F oster

sense of continuity, but the memory is also unreliable. Was it a year ago that the
knee started creaking that way? Did it cease to make that noise during running,
or after suetchvng? W hy did it hurt yesterday and feel fine today?
The body is never only what we think it is (dancers pay attention to this differ­
ence). Illusive, always on the move, the body is at best like something, but it never
is that som ething. Thus, the metaphors, enunciated in speech or in movement,
that allude to it are what give the body the most tangible substance it has.
Organized collections of these metaphors, established as the various disci­
plines that scrutinize, discipline, instruct, and cultivate the body, pretend
permanence of and for the body? Their highly repetitive regimens of observation
and exercise attempt to instantiate physical constants. Thousands of push-ups,
plt<fs, or Pap smears later, the body appears to have consistent features, a clear
structure, identifiable functions. If one is willing to ignore all subtle discrepan­
cies and to uphold the statistical averages, one can almost believe in a body that
obeys nature’s laws. But then it suddenly does something marvelously aberrant:
it gives out, coines through, or somehow turns up outside the bounds of what
w'as conceivable.
This is not to say that the body’s latest unanticipated gestures occur beyond
the world of wriiing. O n the contrary, the body’s newest pronouncements can
only be apprehended as hncoluges of extant moves. A sudden facility at physical
feats figures as the product of pasi disciplinary- efforts to render the body faster,
stronger, longer, more dextrous. The onset of illness signals deleterious habits,
psychological repression, a cleansing process. A ny new sensation of sex issues
out of an expanded, but not alternative, sensorium. These new writings, even as
they jar perceptions with then arresting inventiveness, recalibrate, rather than
raze, bodily semiosts.

How to write a history o j this bodily writing, this body we can only know through
its writing. How to discover what it has done and then describe its actions in words.
Impossible. Too wild, too chaotic, too insignificant. Vanished, disappeared,
evaporated into thinnest air, the body’s habits and idiosyncrasies, even the
practices that codify and regiment it, leave only the most disparate residual
traces. And any residue left behind rests in fragmented forms within adjacent
discursive domains, 5ftll, tt may he easier to write the history o j this writing body
than o f the pen-pushing body The pen-pushing body, after all, bears only rite thin­
nest significance as an inadequate robotics, the apparatus that ja ils to execute the
minds will.

What markers of iis movement tnighi a bodily writing have left behind!1But
fast, w hich writing bodies? empowered bodies? enslaved bodies? docile bodies?
rebellious bodies? dark bodies? pale bodies? exotic bodies? virtuoso bodies? femi­
nine bodies? masculine bodies? triumphant bodies? disappeared bodies? All these
genres of bodies first began moving through their days performing what they had
learned how to do: carrying, clim bing, standing, sitting, greeting, eating,
dressing, sleeping, touching, laboring, fighting. , . . These quotidian activities—
not just the signing of a decree, the w aving of the battalion into action, the
 Choreographing History I 5

posing for a painting, not just the bod}' on the rack, oozing with puss, foaming
at the m outh— these bodies’ mundane habits arid minuscule gestures mattered.
These “techniques of the body," as named by Marcel M auss and Jo h n Bulwer
before him, bore significance in the way they were patterned and the way they
related with one another. Each body performed these actions in a style both
shared and unique. Each body’s movement evidenced a certain force, tension,
weight, shape, tempo, and phrasing. Each manifested a distinct physical struc­
ture, some attributes of w hich were reiterated in other bodies. All a body’s
characteristic ways of moving resonated with aesthetic and political values. The
intensity of those resonances are what permit genres of bodies to coalesce.
Yet each body’s movements all day long form part o f the skeleton of
meaning that also gives any aberrant or spectacular bodily action its luster. Those
everyday patterns of movement make seduction or incarceration, hysteria or
slaughter, rounmzarion or recreation matter more distinctively. The wriiing body
in the constant outpouring of its signification offers up nuances of meaning that
make a difference. The w riting body helps to explicate the blank stare of the
black man in the white police station, the raised shoulders and pursed Ups of the
rich woman walking past the homeless family, the swishing hips and arched eye­
brows of gay men as a straight couple enters their bar, the rigid stance and
frowning forehead ol the single woman waiting at the bus stop next to the con­
struction site. Or pul differently: the waiting body helps lo explicate the blank
stare of the black man in the white police station, the blank stare of ihe rich
woman walking past the homeless faintly the blank stare of gay men as a straight
couple enters their bar, the blank stare of the single woman waiting at the bus
stop next to the construction site. Each body's distinctive pronouncements at a
given moment must be read against the inscription, along with others, it continu­
ously produces. A blank stare does not mean the same thing for all bodies in all
contexts.
H ow to get at this skeleton o f movements meaning for any gtven past and
place? Some bodies' quotidian movements may have been variously recorded in
manuals— ceremonial, religious, educational, social, amorous, remedial, mar­
tial— that instruct the bod}; or in pictures that portray it, or in literary or
mythological references to its constitution and habilsc In their movements, past
bodies also rubbed up against or moved alongside geological and architectural
constructions, m usic, clothing, interior decorations . . . whose material remains
leave further indications of those bodies' dispositions. Insofar as any body’s
writings invited measurement, there endure docum ents from the disciplines of
calculation addressing the body's grammatical makeup— iis size, structure, com ­
position, and chemistry’— that tell us something about what shape a body was tn.
These partial records of varying kinds remain. They document the encoun­
ter between bodies and some of the discursive and institutional frameworks that
touched them, operated on and through them, tn different ways. These do cu ­
ments delineate idealized versions of bodies— what a body was supposed to look
like, how it was supposed to perform, how it was required 10 submit. O r they
record that w hich was nonobvious, those details of bodily comportment co n ­
strued as necessary to specify rather than those deemed self-evident. Occasionally,
 j. O J l C U

they reflect patterns ofbodt.lv deviance, whether tronic, inflamtnatory, inverted,

or perverted, I'rom the expected. Whatever their take on bodies, these documents
never produce an isolable and integral single physical figure, but instead stock an
antiquarium storeroom with the sharded traces of bodily movement across the
cultural landscape.
A historian of bodies approaches these fragmented traces sternum leading, a
sign (in the Ubsi since, say; the eighteenth century) that his or her own body is
seeking, longing to find, the vanished body whose motions produced them. Yes,
the historian also has a body, has a sex, gender, sexuality; skin color. And ibis body
has a past, more or less privileged, more or less resiricted. This historian’s body
wants to consort with dead bodies, wants to know from them: What must it fume
felt like to move among those things, in those paiterns, desiring those proficien­
cies, being beheld from those vantage points? M oving or being moved by those
other bodies? A historians body wants to inhabit these vanished bodies lor spe­
cific reasons. It wants to know where it stands, how it came to stand there, what
its options for moving might be. It wants those dead bodies to lend a hand in de­
ciphering its own present predicaments and in staging some future possibilities.
To that end historians’ bodies amble down the corridors of documentation,
inclining toward certain discursive domains and veering away from others. Yes,
the production of history is a physical endeavor. U requires a high tolerance for
sitting and for reading, for moving slowly and quietly am ong other bodies who
likewise sit patiently, staring alternately at the archival evidence and the fantasies
it generates. This physical practice cramps fingers, spawns sneezes and squinting.
Throughout this process historians’ own techniques of the body— past prac­
tices of viewing or participating in body-centered endeavors— nurture the
framework ol motivations ihat guide the selection of specific documents. One
historians body is drawn toward domestic labor and the panoply ol sexual prac­
tices. Another responds to etiquette, fashion, and dance, but ignores training for
sports and the military. Another frames questions around physical education,
anatomy, and medicine, bui avoids representations of the body in painting; an ­
other looks to hunting or the crafting o f musical instruments alongside the
practices of pornographic publishing. Another looks for excessive gestures in
highly contained places, One looks for physical repetitions; another for exagger­
ations; another for defiant actions. W hatever the kinds and amounts of bodtlv
references in any given constellation of practices, they will Weld versions of his­
torical bodies whose relation to one another is determined as much bv the
historian’s body history' as by the times they represent.
In evaluating all these fragments of past bodies, a historian’s own bodily ex­
perience and conceptions of body continue to intervene. Those bodies of the past
were “plumper,” “less expansive in space," “more constricted by dress” than our
own. They tolerated “move pain,” lived with ‘'more dirt." The “ankle was sexier,"
the “face less demonstrative,” the “preference lor vertical equilibrium more pro­
nounced,” than in our time. They "smelled,” or “shaved,” or “covered themselves”
tn a different way. They “endured more,” “strained harder,” "held on more tena­
ciously.” Even the space ‘’between” bodies and the codes for “touching” and
“being touched" signaled differently from today.
 Choreographing History 1 7

These comparisons reflect no; only a lamiluirity with corpo-reaiities but also
a historian’s interpretation of then political, social, sexual, and aesthetic signifi­
cance. Any of the body’s features and movements— the space it occupies, us size
and dispositions, the slowness, quickness, or force with which u travels, a body's
entire physicaiiiy— reverberate with this cuiuirai significance twice over: Physi­
cal actions embodied these values when the body was alive and kicking, whatever
documentary apparatus.registered us actions then reevaluated as n remscrtbed
the body’s semiotic impact.
But if those bodies of the pasi incorporate a historian's bodily predikciions,
its political and aesthetic values, they also take shape from the formal constraints
imposed by the discipline o f history/ Historians' bodies have been trained to write
history' They have read widely among the volumes that compose the discourse of
history' and from them learned how to stand apart in order to select iuformaiioti,
evaluate us facricity, and formulate us presentation m accordance with general ex­
pectations for historical research. From this more distant locale, ihey work to
mold the overall shape o f hisioncal bodies by asking a certain consistency, logic,
and continuity from the many and disparate inferences of which they are com ­
posed. They have also listened to authorial voices w ithin histories that strive to
solidify themselves so as to speak with iranscendental certainty: From these voices
ihey have learned that pronouncements about the past should issue m sure and
impartial tones. They have deduced that historians’ bodies should not affiliate
with their subjects, nor with lellow historians who likewise labor over the secteis
of the past. Instead, those voices within past histories teach the practice of still­
ness, a kind of stillness that spreads across time and space. 3 stillness ihat
masquerades as om niscience. By bestiUing themselves, modestly, historians ac­
complish the transformation inio universal subject that can speak for all
But dead bodies discourage this staticity. Thev create a stir out ol the assim­
ilated and projected images from which they are concocted, a kind of stirring
that connects past and present bodies? This affiliation, based on a kind of kin­
esthetic empathy between living and dead but imagined bodies, enjoys no primal
status outside the world of writing? It possesses no organic authority; it oflers no
ultimate validation for sentiment. But it is redolent with physical vitality and em ­
braces a concern for beings that live and have lived. Once the historians body
recognizes value and meaning in kinesthesia, it cannot dis-unimatc ihe physical
action of past bodies tt has begun to sense.

Tensing slightly closed eyelids, some bodies dimly appear: glancing, grasping, running in
fear, standing stoically, sitting disgraced, falling defiantly, gesturing cmicingiy. In that
dream-like space that collects filmed or performed reconstructions of the past,
visual images from the past, and textual references to past bodies, historical
bodies begin to solidify. The head li/ts cn an angle; ihe rib cage shifts in ihe side; the
writing body listens and waiis as fragments of pasi bodies shimmer and ihcn vanish.

if writing bodies demand a proprioceptive affiliation between pasi artd

present bodies, they also require interpretation of their role in the cultural pro­
duction of meaning: their capacities for expression, the telauonships between
b F oster

body and subjectivity they may articulate, the bodily discipline and regimenta­
tion of which they are capable, the notions of individuality and sociality they may
purvey. The facts as documented in any recorded discourses, however, do not a
body’s meaning make. They substantiate the causal relationship between body
and those cultural forces that prod, poke, and then measure its responsiveness.
They substantiate only bodily reaction. They lie askew from a body’s significance
and in its wake. And even a historian’s movements among them cannot draw
them together so as to fashion meaning for a past body's candid stance or telling
gesture. The construction of corporeal meaning depends on bodily theories— ar­
matures of relations through which bodies perform individual, gendered, ethnic,
or communal identities.r
Bodily theories already exist embedded in the physical practices with which
any given historians body is familiar. Each of his or her body's various pursuits
elaborates notions o f identity for body and person, and these conjoin with the
values inscribed in other related act unties to produce steadier scenarios of who
the body is in secular, spectacular, sacred., or Itmtual contexts. Any standardized
regimen of bodily training, for example, embodies, in the very organization of its
exercises, the metaphors used to instruct the body, and tn the criteria specified
for physical com petence, a coherent (or not so coherent) set of principles that
govern the action of that regimen. These principles, reticulated with aesthetic,
political, and gendered connotations, cast the body who enacts them into larger
arenas of meaning where it moves alongside bodies bearing related signage.
Theories of bodily significance likewise exist for any prior historical
moment. Circulating around and through the partitions of any established prac­
tice and reverberating at the interstices among distinct practices, theories of
bodily practices, like images o f the historical body, are deduced from acts of
comparison between past and present, from rubbing one kind of historical docu­
ment against others. In the frictive encounters between texts, such as those
expressing aesthetic praise, medical insights, proscriptive conduct, and recrea­
tional pursuits, theories of bodily significance begin to consolidate.
The first glimmerings of body theories put meaning into motion. Like the
shapes that pieces from a puzzle must fit, theories contour bodily significance
within and among different bodily practices. Theories allow' interpolation of evi­
dence from one practice where m eaning ts specified to another where it has
remained latent, thereby fleshing out an identity for bodies that informs a specific
inquiry’ and also the larger array of cultural practices o f which they are a part.8
Theories tnake palpable ways in which a body’s movement can enact meaning.
Not all writing bodies, however, fit into the shapes that such theories make
for them. Some wiggle away or even lash out as the historian escorts them to
their proper places, resisting and defying the sweep of significance that would
contain them. In the making of the historical synthesis between past and present
bodies, these bodies fall into a no-mans-land between the factual and the forgot­
ten wriere they can only wait for subsequent generations of bodies to find them.I

I gesture in the air; a certain tension, speed, and shape flowing through arm, wrist, and
hand. I scrutinize this movement and then fee 1my torso lift and strain as I search for the
 Choreographing History 9

words that would describe most accurately this gesture’s quality dad intent. I repeat the
movement, then rock jbrward insistently, pressmg/or a conversion of movernent into
words. A sudden inhalation, I haven’t taken a breath in many seconds. I am a body-
yearning toward a translation. Am I pinning the movement down, trapping it,
through this search for words to attach to it? This is what we thought when we
thought it was the subject doing the writing. We thought any attempt to specify
more than dates, places, and names would result in mutilation or even dese­
cration of the body’s movement. We gave ourselves over to romantic eulogies
of the body's evanescence, the ephemerality of its existence, and we reveled
in the fantasy of its absolute untranslatabilityri Or else, and this is merely the
complementary posture, we patted the mute dumb thing on the head and ex­
plained to it in clearly enunciated, patronizing tones that we would speak for it,
thereby eviscerating its authority and immobilizing its significance.

It is one thing to imagine those bodies ol the past, and it is another to write
about them. The sense of presence conveyed by a body in motion, the idiosyn­
crasies of a given physique, the smallest inclination of the head or gesture of the
hand— all form part of a corporeal discourse w hose power and intelligibility
elude translation into words. Bodies' movements may create a kind of writing,
but that writing has no facile verbal equivalence. In com mencing to write a his­
torical text, discrepancies between what can be moved and what can be written
reqitire of historians yet another form of bodily engagement and exertion. Yes,
the act of writing is a physical labor, rendered more vividly so when the subject
of that writing is bodily movement resurrected from the past by the imagination.
But to construe bodies’ movements as varieties of corporeal writing is al­
ready a step in the right direction. Where bodily endeavors assume the status of
forms of articulation and representation, their movements acquire a status and
function equal to the words that describe them. The act of writing about bodies
thereby originates in the assumption that verbal discourse cannot speak Jor
bodily discourse, but must enter into "dialogue’’ with that bodily discourse/1 '1The
written discourse must acknowledge the grammatical, syntactical, and rhetorical
capacities of the moved discourse. Writing the historical text, rather than an act
of verbal explanation, must become a process ol interpretation, translation, and
rewriting of bodily texts.
How to transpose the moved m the direction of the written. Describing
bodies’ movements, the writing itself must move. It must put into play figures o!
speech and forms of phrase and sentence construction that evoke the texture and
tuning of bodies in m otion. It must also become inhabited by all the dillerent
bodies that participate in the constructive process of determining historical
bodily signification. How could the writing record these bodtes’ gestures toward
one another, the giving and taking o f w'eight, the coordinated or clashing m o­
mentum of their trajectories through space, the shaping or rhythmic patterning
of their danced dialogue?

And what i/ the bodies I am wriiing about spring oj] the page or out oj my imagination.
I don't know which, and invite me to dance. And what if \ follow and begin to imitate
 lU M tR

their movements. A s we chance alongside one another— not the euphoric dance of the
selj-aharcdoned subject, not the deceptively effortless dance oj fryper-disciphricd bodies,
but instead, the reflexive dance oj self-critical bodies who nonetheless _find in dancing
the premise o j bodily creativity and responsiveness— I’m not leading or/ollowing. It
seems as though this dance we are doing is choreographing itself through me and also
that I am deciding what to do next. Dancers have often described this experience
as the body taking over, as the body thinking its own thoughts . . . but this is
as inaccurate a s it is unhelpful; it is merely the inverse, again, of the pen­
pushing body.

At some point, historical bodies that have formed in the imagination and
on the written page can seem to take on a life o f thetr own. The historical in­
quiry' takes on sufficient structure and energy’ to generate meaning and to narrate
itself. Its representational and narrational determinants, infused with their
authors energy' and with the vibrancy' of dead bodies, begin to perambulate on
their own. W hen this translormation in the nature of the inquiry occurs, a cor­
responding redefinition of authorial function also takes place: The author loses
identity as the guiding authority and Unds him or herself immersed in the
process of ihe project getting made. This is not mystical; it’s really quite bodily.
Rather than a transcendence o j the body, its an awareness oj moving ivith ns well as in
and through the body ns one moves alongside other bodies.
The transformation in authorial identity shares nothing in common wuh the
appearance of modest objectivity that the universal subject works to achieve. The
universalist voice, even as it strives not to contaminate the evidence, not to ne­
glect any point of view, nonetheless treats the hisioncal subject as a body of facts.
Similarly, the partisan voice, fervently dedicated to rectifying some oversight and
to actively exposing an area of deficiency in historical knowledge, approaches the
past as fixed sets o f elements v.-tvose relative visibility needs only an adjustment.
If, instead, the past becomes embodied, then it can move in dialogue with his­
torians, who likewise transit to an identity that makes such dialogue possible.
In this dancing out of all the parts that have been creaied, historians and
historical subjects reflect upon as they reenact a kind of improvised choreo­
graphic process that occurs ihrouglioui the research and writing of history: As
historians’ bodies alfiliate with docum ents about bodies o f the pasi, both past
and present bodies redefine their identities. As historians assimilate the theories
o f past bodily practices, those practices begin 10 designate their own progres­
sions. As translations from moved event to written text occur, the practices of
moving and writing partner each other. And as emerging accounts about past
bodies encounter the body of constraints thai shape ihe writing o f history, new-
narrative forms present themselves.
To choreograph histoty, then, is first to grant that history is made by bodies,
and then to acknowledge that all those bodies, in moving and in documenting
their m ovem em s, in learning about past m ovem em, continually conspire to­
gether and are conspired against. In the process of com mitting their actions to
history, these pasi and present bodies transit to a mutually constructed semiosis.
Together they configure a tradition of codes and conventions of bodily significa-
 Choreographing History 1]

lion that allows bodies 10 represent and coinm uiiieate with other bodies. To­
gether they put pen to page. Together they dance with the words. Neiiher
historian’s body nor historical bodies nor the bod}' of history become fixed
during (his choreographic process. Their edges do not harden; their feet do noi
stick. Their motions form a byway between their potential 10 act upon and be
acted upon. In this middle ground they gesture toward one another, accu m u ­
lating a corpus o f guidelines for choreographic signification as die}' go, making
the next moves out of their fantasies ol the past and their memory of ihe present.

Ambulant Scholarship
In his essav '‘Lesson in W riting,'’ Roland Barthes contrasts Western and Bunraku
puppet traditions in order to imagine a bodily writing. Where the conventions
o f Western puppet performances hide ihe puppeteer backstage either above or
below the puppet, the Bunraku puppeteers hover just behind ihe puppet, o n ­
stage and tit full view. Where Western puppets consist of glove-like sacks svhich
the puppeteers’ hands animate, or jiggling, jointed appendages strung up to the
puppeteers' conirolling hands, Bunraku puppets are propped up with sticks
swiftly relocated by the puppeteers in order to shift their bodily positions. Para­
doxically, Barthes observes, ihe physical presence of ihe puppeicers in Bunraku
helps to give the puppets an uncanny corporeal power. The Western puppet re­
mains an instrumentality, a simulacrum o f the body, whereas the Bunraku puppet
performs its concrete abstraction. In its corporeal writing wc see 'fragility, discre­
tion, sumptuousness, exiraorditiary nuance, abandonment ol ail triviniiiy, [and]
melodic phrasing ol gestures. . .
The image ol the Western puppei. in its causal dependence on ihe puppet­
eer, succinctly summarizes the treatment of the body in Western scholarship
since the Renaissance. Concepiualized as a natural obieci. the body has regis­
tered, but never manulactured, psychic or social lorces: it has conveyed, but
never articulated, unknown or untamable realms of experience. .As a mechanics,
the body has constituted a topic of research insofar as it houses diseases, aliena­
tions, and frailties, or as it decomposes into chemical or structural components,
or as it demonstrates rellexive and instinctual responses, or as it reflects ihe re­
sults of regimentary programs of training thai transform it into athlete, actor,
soldier, or dancer. As a metaphor for unknown anti mysterious lorces, the body
has stood in for the unconscious, desire, libidinal or sexual impulses, or irra­
tional, whimsical or perverse aciions. As a bearer ol cultural svmbols, the body
has been aligned with the feminine, the decorauve, the pleasurable, or the fash­
ionable. In each ol these capacities, ihe body, like the Western puppet, is
construed as an index of forces that act upon and through n. Its fascination as a
topic of research resides m its responsiveness as an instrument of expression and
m the degree to which it eludes precise verification of its instrumentality.
In this reification, the body shares with women, racial minorities and colo­
nized peoples, gays and lesbians, and other marginalized groups the scorn and
neglect of mainstream scholarship.'2 The canonical thrust of Western scholarship
has worked at every turn to deny and repress or else to exotieixe the experience
J. rO b T F .R

of these peoples just as it has dismissed body-centered endeavors and the par­
ticipation of the body in any endeavor. The critiques of canonical scholarship
established in feminist and queer theory, postcolonial and minority discourses of
inherent racial, class, and gendered biases have immediate relevance for a schol­
arship of the body. These critical inquiries explicate techniques of dismissal used
m canonical scholarship that find direct analogues in scholarly approaches to
body-centered endeavors. The unease felt by dancers, for example, working in
the academy shares with the Native an exasperated sense of the skewed terms in
which cultural exchange has typically occurred. Little wonder that dancers often
retreat into recalcitrant muteness, insisting that they can only dance their re­
sponses to all curricular and research issues.
Critiques of traditional scholarship aid in understanding strategies o! the
body's neglect, but inquiries into bodiliness can, in turn, extend these critiques
by elucidating new dimensions ol patriarchal and logocentric value systems. A
serious consideration of body can expose and contest such dichotomies as theory'
vs. practice or thought vs. action, distinctions that form part of the epistemic
foundations of canonical scholarship. The Platonic fantasy of heads unencum ­
bered by limbs or torso or by the "beast leathered just beneath the diaphragm”
has persevered as a guiding image in academic research, one whose full power
and influence conie into sharp rebel when bodily participation in endeavors is
allowed to inform the inquiry.'3 Ate not reading, speaking, and writing varieties
of bodily action? Can theory attain definition apart from the m edium in which
it finds articulation? Critical focus on the body forces new' conceptualizations of
these fundamental relations and of the arguments addressing individual and col­
lective action that depend on them.
Body stands along with W oman, Native, and Other as a neglected and mis­
apprehended subject of inquiry, but it stands uniquely as a category' that pivots
inquiry easily into any of these marginalized domains. The questions "what
bodies are being constructed here?” or “how do these values find embodiment?"
or "how does the body figure in this discourse?" can be asked within each non-
canonical field o! study. To ask such questions is to establish a possible grounds
on which to base coalitions among these various constituencies. Body thus con­
stitutes both a subject area and also a mode of inquiry that can connect distinct
fields. U bodily actions are allowed to carry their own inscriptive weight, if they
are given more than just a sex or a set of regimented requisites, then they may
empower us with a newly embodied sense of human agency. If body claims con­
sideration as more than holding ground for unconscious desires, instincts, drives,
or impulses, then it may point the way toward new kinds of coalitions and new'
forms of collective action.
The possibility of a scholarship that addresses a writing body as well as a
body written upon can be traced to widespread aesthetic, technological, and po­
litical changes in the early decades of the twentieth century. At the beginning of
the century', new' regimentations of the relations between bodies and machines
isolated the body’s physical labor, giving it intrinsic interest while at the same time
subjecting it to close analysis designed to yield the most efficient routmization of
movement.^ Cinematic representations of the body as well as its treatment in the
 Choreographing History 13

emerging field of advertising enhanced the body's visibility but also im bued it
with an objectified concreteness. Futurist artists, in their praise o f the body as m a­
chine, reduced it to abstract measurements ol velocity and force. Choreographers,
from N ijinsky to Graham and Humphrey, w orking to develop a modernist aes­
thetic, treated the body’s movement as a kind of material substance, capable of
being shaped and manipulated, even as they attributed this corporeal reality to a
manifestation o! the psyche. Thus, the body attained a new autonomous existence
as a collection o! physical facts, even as this physicaliiv was seen as resulting from
individual subjectivity or from the political and economic forces shaping the indi­
vidual.”
Tins new conception of the body is eloquently reflected m the work of
choreographer and movement theorist Rudolph Laban, whose analyses of human
movement focused on the positions of body parts, the temporal and tensile quali­
ties of movement, and on the body’s paths through space. Labans work generated
two distinct, mature notation systems, one that recorded the body's changes in
position and the timing of those changes (Labanotation), and another that docu­
mented the effort and flow of movement and the body's shaped configurations m
relation to its own parts and other surrounding objects (Effort-Shape'). Elis
systems of movement analysis also found application in a second generation of
Tayloristic research on worker efficiency. Laban’s pioneering studies elaborated,
for the first time, multiple valuables for observing movement and sophisticated
structures to explain their com bined physical eflects. At the same time, he as­
serted that the preference for specific patterns of speed, How. and directionality
clearly indicated a given psychological orientation, tn his work as a choreo­
grapher, he likewise coordinated large num bers ol amateurs m performances,
known as movement choirs, whose spatial configurations and simple movements
would not only represent but also instill in performers and audience alike certain
social values.1'
The conception of body as tangible physical!tv transporting psychological
and social values likewise registered in the scholarship on the bod>' Irom that
period, hi the 1930s the idea of the body as a subject of historical research
became more widespread, as seen m Norbcrt Elias’s epic histones ol bodily con ­
duct and M ikhail Bakhtin's examination of bodies as represented in literature.';
Elias and Bakhtin, both writing in response to the rise of lascism, locused critical
attention on the body’s relation to the state. Elias, highlighting the significance of
daily patterns of behavior, saw in these compulsory’ routines the states capacity
to infuse the body with us controlling devices. His copious lists of prescriptions
for proper comportment are designed to make manifest the increasing effort to
discipline individuals by the progressive containment of social conduct, sexual re­
lations, and affective life. Bakhtin, in search of a conception of body that admitted
individual agency, examined the body’s capacity for transgressive and rebellious
resistance through participation in carnival and other rituals o! excess. As ana­
lyzed by Bakhtin, however, the body's transgressive capacity remains contained
by society's use of the carnival as the designated site at which transgression can
occur. Furthermore, the body's power to function transgressivety is never articu­
lated in any detail, so that the body remains only an instrumentality through
IT rO ST E R

which the dark forces of rebellion and the menace of the uncontrollable are ex­
pressed.
This same decade witnessed a burgeoning of ethnographic research that
elaborated distinct identities for the body as an intrinsic feature of culture. A c­
counts by Margaret M ead and Gregory Bateson, Maurice Leenhardt, Marcel
Mauss, and Marcel Grianle am ong others gave sustained consideration to the
cultural specificity of beliefs and attitudes toward the body that surfaced as part
of their ethnographic in q u ir ie s .In this ethnographic ouevre, the body assumes
a kind of isolable existence as a category of cultural experience, as a bearer of
cultural mlormation aitd participant in the production of meaning. Yet these so­
licitous inquiries into bodily specificity are conducted as part of the larger
anthropological project of rationalizing difference within an imperialist economic
context. Thus M ead’s profile of Balinese children— full of tacit comparisons wttli
U .S . children, as in the Balinese "omission" of the crawl stage, their "meandering"
tonus, “com pliant'’ sitting, “greater eversion, extension, and rotation" of limbs,
their bodily “dependence on supporting forms"— uses the body as mediator be­
tween individual and national character, and by extension, as the instrumentality
that will both establish and transcend the relativities of cultures. Mauss, tn Ins
heroic attempt to remove techniques of the body from the anthropological
category’ of “the cultural m iscellaneous,” does so in order to study the “whole
m an,” Leenhardt, in his dual com mitment to anthropology and the ministry,
enacts the ability of a member of a dominant culture to understand and sensi­
tively interpret a ’‘primitive,” and “pre-literate” one. In each of these ethnographic
projects the cultural Other is resolved so as to rationalize a colonizing agenda that
includes humanitarian "aid,” cultural “exchange,’’ and economic "development.”^
11 these corpora of historical and ethnographic scholarship generated a pro­
fusion of categories of bodily attributes, they did not exhaust the possibilities lor
showing how those attributes could generate meaning. The body, now a pro­
liferation of physical characteristics, constituted a transparent conveyance of
whatever meaning other cultural categories invested in it. Its naturalness re­
mained unquestioned except insofar as cross-cultural comparison pointed up
culturally specific treatments of it. In semiotic terms, the conception of the body
forged in the 1930s presumed the body as a sign, consisting of cultural signifier
and physical signified, yet the relation between the two was far from arbitrary.
Not until Barthes and Foucault, writing as part of the sweeping social up­
heavals of the 1960s, does the body begin to bear a nonnatural relation between
signifier and signified. W ith the possibility that minority and colonized voices
might register their protest and be heard, the relations between body and culture
took on distinctive and multiple m odes.20 Foucaults histories track the conver­
sion of publicly punished body into privately incarcerated body and of foolish
body into mad body. His histories examine how the forces that draw bodies to­
gether lose their metaphoric magnetism and fracture into endless hierarchized
taxonomies of sameness and difference that inscribe bodies in new ways.1' In em­
bodying these epistemteally distinct structurings of meaning, the body is shown
as able not merely to manifest new meanings, but to participate in the restruc­
turing of meaning production. The body is represented as functioning among
 Choreographing History 15

endless similitndinons attractions or in relation to a set ol ntdexical vectors or as

one of the organically organized microcosms of social processes.
Yet Foucaults aggressive interrogation ol the workings ol power, even os it
elucidated the body’s varying ntodcs of representation, assigned litile il anv
agency to individual bodies. Now only a set ol arbitrary references, bodies alter
Foucault are capable of materializing in any lornt or fornttt. But are they capable
of making signs as well its embodying them? And is there some expanded con­
ception ol the transgressive bodily excesses proposed bv Baliktm that could resist
what Foucault has depicted as the hegemonic peregrinations of pow er?" Wltnt
models of body cultivate physicality as a she lor the invention ol meaning?
To approach tltc body as capable of generating ideas, as a bodily writing, is
to approach it as a choreographer m ight. Dance, perhaps more than any other
body-centered endeavor, cultivates a body that initiates as well as responds. Even
those dance-makers who see in the dancer’s body a mere vehicle for aestheticized
expression must, in their investigation of a new worlds choreographic problem­
atic, consult bodies, their own or the dancers’. During this playlttl probing ol
physical and semantic potential, choreographers' and dancers’ hodies create new
images, relationships, concepts, and reflections. Here, bodies are cast into a dis­
cursive framework where they can respond m kind to the moved queries initiated
in the process ol formulating a dance. Such bodies have, admittedly, been trained
so as to accomplish this fluency, a disciplining that strongly shapes the quality of
their interaction with dance-making. Nevertheless, they sustain a ’'conversation."
throughout the rehearsal process and sometimes in performance, that imagina­
tively invents and then lucidly enunciates their specific corporeal identities.
Traditional dance studies, replete with the saute logoc.entnc values that have
informed general scholarship oit the body, have seldom allowed the body tins
agency Instead, the}' have emphasized individual genius over the rehearsal
process and the social networks aitd utstitutioital frameworks that eitable the
production of the dance. They have glossed over the functionality ol dance in a
given time and place by using unexnmuted distinctions between artistic, popu­
lar, social, ritualized, and recreational forms of dancing. Aitd they have privileged
the thrill of the vanished performance over the enduring impact ol the choreo­
graphic intent. Still, those who make and study dancing have developed certain
knowledges of the body as a representational field and certain skills at viewing
and interpreting human movement that offer crucial insights lor a scholarship of
the body. This expertise is reflected m recent studies that have begun to ask of
dance the kinds of questions raised in contemporary critical theory about other
cultural phenomena/-
The possibility of a body that is written upon but that also writes moves
critical studies ol the body in new directions. It asks scholars to approach the
body’s involvement m any activity w ith an assumption ol potential agency to
participate m or resist whatever forms of cultural production are underway h
also endows body-centered endeavors with an integrity its practices that establish
their own lexicons of meaning, their own syntaginatic and paradigmatic itxes of
signification, their own capacity to reflect critically on themselves and on related
practices. Dancem aking, for example, becomes a form of theorizing, one that in­
forms and is informed by instantiations of bodily significance— athletic, sexual,
fashionable, mediatized— that endure alongside it. The theoretical, rather than a
contemplative stance achieved afterwards and at a distance, becomes embedded
(embodied) within the practical decisions that build up, through the active en­
gagement of bodies, any specific endeavor.
The act of translating such physical endeavors into verbal descriptions o|
them entails, first, a recognition of their distinctiveness, and then a series of tac­
tical decisions that draw the moved and the written into an interdisciplinary
parlance. Utilizing this parlance, the descriptive text can be fashioned so as to
adhere to the moved example. The organization of the descriptive narrative can
trace out the patterns and shapes that moving bodies make. The narrative voice
can take on not only a positionality and a character but also a quality of engage­
ment with and in the moving subject matter, the authorial presence thereby
exuding both physicality and mottonaltty.
As a body in motion, the wrtting-and-written body puts into motion the
bodies of all those who would observe it. It demands a scholarship that detects
and records movements of the writer as well as the written about, and it places
•at the center of investigation the changing positions of these two groups of bodies
and the co-motion that orchestrates as it differentiates their identities. This am ­
bulant form of scholarship thus acknowledges an object of study that is always
in the making and also always vanishing. It claims for the body, in anxious an ­
ticipation of this decade’s collapse of the real and the simulated into a global
‘'informatics of domination," an intense physicality and a reflexive genera 11vtty.
The essays in this volume undertake to reflect these possible new move­
ments in a scholarship of the body. The products of an interdisciplinary concern
with the body, they point toward a sustained critical inquiry into bodies past and
present by responding to the following kinds ol issues: first, how to elucidate a
more detailed reconstruction ol historical bodies, one that presents them as po­
litical, aesthetic, and also consummately physical entities', second, how such vivid
reconstructions of bodies or even a sustained attention to the category of body
might impact on the very structuring of knowledge as it is constituted in a given
discipline; third, how an investigation of the bodily reveals resonances and inter­
sections among disparate cultural practices and enables a more profound
apprehension of the body’s significance in any given practice; fourth, how a his­
torians body engages a historical subject, shaping its meaning and moving with
it throughout the process of analysts; and finally, how the scholarly text can re­
flect and even embody the theoretical concerns that a consideration of bodies
bungs forward.
Heterogeneous in both subject matter and methodology, these essays
expand, as did scholarship on the body from the 1930s. the range of bodily
actions and endeavors that deserve our attention, for what they indicate about
body and about related cultural practices. Unlike those earlier investigations of
body, they treat corporeality as polyvalent in its forms of signification and as ca­
pable of generating its own significance. These essays also enact an awareness of
the theoretical issues, concerning narrative position, form and voice, that are
foregrounded by a consideration of the body. In the reflexive analytic structure
 Choreographing History

that they elaborate, made of similar themes taken up at different moments and
for complementary but not equivalent reasons, they gesture toward the kinds of
multidisciplinary' and multiconstituent coalitions that could become possible by
giving the body serious critical attention.

Bodily Musings
l can see ihem now, Clio and Terpsichore, costumed in their combat hoots and high-top
sneakers, their lycra tights and baggy trousers, a leather jacket, a vest, under which can
be glimpsed unshaven armpits, perhaps even a bow tie or some plastic bananas as a
hairpiece. . . . I can/eel them spinning, lurching, sidling and smashing up against one
another, laughing knowingly as they wipe the. sweat o[fforeheads and from the shin be­
tween lips and noso; in a standoff carefully calculating the. other’s weight and /lexibilitv,
careening toward one another.; rolling as tine body and then/alling apart, only to circle:
around jor a fast-paced repartee, trading impersonations of past historians and choreog­
raphers they have inspired. Wiekeilly realistic details of one car icature set the other
muse in motion. These simulated bodies pop out of theirs, a kinetic speukmgan-tongues,
only to he displaced by other corporeal quiddities. Finally, they run out of steam, col-
laps e on the ground, adjust a sock, scratch an ear But these pedestrian gestures, infused
with the natural reflexiveness oj all muses, doubly btrafucalized by the attentive gaze
of the partner, commence yet another duet: the crossing of legs m response to the lean
on an elbow, a tossing of hair in response to a smjjle. This duet rejuvenates itself
endlessly: It has an insatiable appetite jo r motion.2'

But where are they dancing, C lio and Terpsichore? iti what landscape? on
what occasion? and for whom? No longer capable ol standing tu contemplative
and gracious poses, no longer content to serve as the inspiration for what others
create, these two muses perspire to invent a new kind ol performance, the coor­
dinates of which must be determined by the intersection of historiographies ol
dance and of body. But what will they claim as their dance’s origin? How will
they justify their new choreographic/scholarly endeavor?
Sifting through images of originary bodies, C lio and Terpsichore stumble
upon an account ol the origins of dance and also ol rhetoric, the discipline that,
after all, spawned that of history', iterated tn the introductions to several hand­
books on rhetorical practices written after the third century a . d . and tip until the
Byzantine period.-' These mytho-historic anecdotes locus on. the city c l Syracusac
at a moment when the tyrants Gelon and Hteron rule with savage cruelty. In order
to ensure total control over the populace, they forbid Syracusans to speak. Ini­
tially, citizens communicate with the rudimentary gestures of hand and head that
index their basic needs. Over time, however, their gestural language, now iden­
tified as orchestike, or dance-pantomime, attains a communicative flexibility and
sophistication that leads to the overthrow' of the tyrants. In the elated confusion
that follows, one citizen, a former adviser to the tyrants, steps forward to bring
order to the crowd. Integrating gestural and spoken discourses, he organizes his
arguments into an introduction, narration, argument, digression, and epilogue,
the fundamental structural categories o f rhetoric, the art of public persuasion.
18 ’ 1 F oster

In this account., the tyrants eradication ol speech— a leveling gesture that

sweeps across public and private spaces— puts all citizens, male and 1'emale,
those with expertise in logos and those who excel at chaos, on the same looting.
From thts com m on place, the rebellious bodies o l the citizens slowly infuse
movement with linguistic clout. They circulate around the tyrant, conspiring on
a tacit and circumspect ktnegraphy that not only indicates their expressive and
physical needs but also a reflexive awareness of their predicament. Eventually,
their collaborative subversion prevails, and the tyrant is overthrown. In thus
moment ol political Uminality (mid taking precisely the amount of time necessary to
leap an epistemic fault) the dancing body, forged in subversive communaltty,
feeds/bleeds into the rhetorical body, a public and powerful figure. The reinstam
tuition of speech, however, does not return the community to speech as formerly
practiced. Instead, the speaking body attains new eloquence, a new fascination,
a new and seductive hold over us listeners.
What seems so promising about this story, beyond us delicious obscurity or
us singular pairing of dance and rhetoric, as an originary pretext for C lio and
Terpsichore’s duet? They are not immediately sure, lor it takes the two muses
hours of negotiation (danced and spoken) to arrive at an interpretation they can
agree upon: Clio initially refuses to believe that the rhetorical body, once origi­
nated, had retained any resonances ol the dancing body. Terpsichore sulkily
retreats into silence, gesturing with dignity and disdain the absolute untranslat-
abihty ol her art. C lio, attempting to dialogue, praises the primordial status of
dance, mother of all the arts. Terpsichore, infinitely bored by this guilt-ridden
and misguided tribute, accuses C lio of inspiring only desiccated, static drivel.
Now; they’re mad: They stotnp; they shout; they hyperbolize; they posture; they
pinch their faces, hunch their shoulders, and spit out the most absurd and hurt­
ful provocations, then feign distress, victims of thetr own drama. But m the
ensuing silence, the choreograph)' of their combat in us full rhetorical glory
stands out. Embarrassed by thetr excesses, but intrigued by the aesthetics of their
anger, they cannot resist a candid glance at one another. Biting thetr lips to keep
from laughing, they determine to continue thetr deliberations.
Terpsichore senses the need to rationalize choreography as persuasive dis­
course, and Clio realizes the need to bring movement and fleshiness into
historiography. They both agree that they cannot help but admire the immense
power in the resistive wanness of those bodies that have tangled with the demonic
character of a tyrant. And they sense the strength of a choreographic coalition
composed of multiple constituencies. They desire bodies capable of troping, that
can render or depict, or exaggerate, or fracture, or allude to the world, bodies that
can irontze as well as meiaphurize their existence.” Troping bodies do not merely
carry a message or faitlilully convey an idea, but also assert a physical presence,
one that supports the capacity for producing meaning. Irresistibly, such bodies
retain no authority over some transcendental definition of their being, but instead
remain entirely dependent on their own deictic gestures to establish identity.
Clio and Terpsichore have watched this troping body emerge in their own
collaborations. They believe in this body that luses dance and rhetoric, but they
also sense, just as the story predicts, its sinister potential. It can become power-
 Choreographing History 19

iul enough 10 sway other bodies, cra v e n lix them in us hold. It am n o i com ­
mand such power if other bodies have learned the choreographic and rhetorical
conventions through which meaning ts conveyed. As long as ever)' body works
to renew and recalibrate these codes, power remains in many hands. But if any
bodies allow this body of conventions to overtake them unawares, then the ty­
rannical body gains the upper hand.
Determined to keep such tyrants disem bodied, Clio umi Terpsichovc finish
their cojjce, roll up Oicir sleeves, and begin to write (or is it dance?):

PostScript
The claim for a writing-dancing bodv, formulated tn response to political exigen­
cies of this specific moment, dates itself in the kind of inscription it undertakes
to make apparent. At another moment and given different political circum ­
stances, the metaphor of a bodily tropology might well prove reactionary rather
than resistive. At such a time Clio and Terpsichore might agree instead to rein­
vent a separation between body and writing so as to preserve the powers of both
rhetoric and dance. In a world, for exam ple, beyond script., one consisting only
of screens of simulacra that invite us to don virtual reality gear and dive through
ever-unlolding windows of images, what could give the body's presence or its
vanishing urgency over other visions7

NOTE 5

1. Roland Bardies opened up for consideration tins approach to bodily wnung

most palpably through his attention to the physical circumstances surrounding his own
profession as a writer— the organization of his desk, his daily routines, etc.— m his auto­
biography Refund Banhes by Roland Banhes and also in bis bnfliaru analysis of the Bunraku
puppei theater appearing both in Image, M ica. Text and in Empire vj Signs. In dun essay,
which 1 take up m the second seciiou of tins chapier, he argues dim. the dnumiic gestures
of the puppets, the pragmatic manipuiaitoiu of ihe puppeieers, and ihe hyperbolic vocif­
erations of ihe singer can each be considered as a form o! wriiing
2 Michel Foucaults studies of the body as inscribed by penai, inedicai, and sexual
sysiems of meaning have generaicd a subsianiiaf Ineraiure investigating die cultural mech­
anisms through which the body is iegubied
3. See "Techniques of the Body” by Mated Mauss ,md M m Bulwers ChiioDgiu and
Chironomia (1654,1, whose significance is addressed by Siephen GrcenbLui in hn chapter
for this volume.
4. Natalie Zemon Davis iiu rtiduee? dus issue in her article tided "History's Two
Bodies,” which served as an inspiration for this essay In The Writing of Hiskny, Michel de
Cerieau provides an eloquent ami far more deiaiied descripiion uf the disciplinary nam­
ing of die hisionan. See especially his chapter litled "The Hisionograplucal Operation."
pp. 56-513.
5. My proposal here for a kind of enipaihic reianonship beiween die histori­
ans body and historical bodies is inspired by the complex use of ihe term "passion” in
Marta Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. For Savigliano, passion is both
20 I F o ster

a culturally constructed event, susceptible to commodification and exportation, anil a

partial rousing ol feeling in response to another.
6. The concept of kinesthetic empathy is inspired by dance critic John Martins
conception of inner mimicry elaborated in hts Introduction to Dance. Martin argues that
bodies respond proprtoceptively to the shaping, rhythmic phrasing, and tensile efforts of
other bodies. Martin proposed tins etnptuhic exchange among bodies in order to justify
hts conception of choreography as an essemtalized or distilled version ol feelings which,
via inner mimicry, transfer uuo the viewers body and psyche. 1 am clearly not interested
in rattonahzing essentialist theories ol art, but 1do believe that feeling another body's feel­
ings ts a highly significant (and under-valued) aspect of daily and artistic experience
7. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies two meanings for the archaic word
theoric, one peruttrttng to the theoretical and the other to the performative. In resurrect­
ing this term, 1 am trying to gesture tn both directions simultaneously.
8. One of the best examples of theory's ability to enable the historian to apprehend
analogies among distinct cultural practices remains Raymond Williams’s essay on the
emergence of the monologue as a theatrical practice tn The Sociology oj Culture, pp. 119-47.
9. June Vail presents an informative critique of this typical posture m "Issues ol
Style: Four Modes of Journalistic Dance Criticism.'’
10. In "The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d
Others," Donna Havaway makes the distinction between "speaking with' and "speaking
lor" in her analysts of the debates over ecological issues in which certain constituencies
claim to speak lor species on the verge ol extinction.
t l. Barthes. "Lesson in Writing," in Image. Music, Text, p. 172.
12. Consider, for example, the relative prestige of the following academic subjects:
anatotnv and kinesiology, psychoanalysts and movement therapy, the history ol law and
the history of manners, literature and dance.
1 3. The reference here is to descriptions of the body found tn Plato’s Tistacuc
14 Of the many studies that take up this new conception of body in relation to
technology Siegfried Ctedtonb Mechanization TaGs Command (New York: Oxford Univer­
sity Press, 1948) remain? a landmark and influential point of departure.
15. Much more needs to be said about this originary moment in the historiogra­
phy ol the bedv. In this brief sketch that assembles in one paragraph arts, commerce, and
industry, 1 am merely trying to avoid the typical separation of art from politics and front
labor that prevailed tn earlv Marxist analyses that asserted the division between base and
superstructure cultural activities
16. Labans theories of human movement are presented tn his books The Mastery ol
Movement, Cfioreiuiys, and Modern Educational Dance. Hts early years as a choreographer
are described tn his autobiography A Life for Durum Cogent overviews ol his work are pre­
sented in Vera Makutc’s Body, Spc.ee, Expression: The Development of Rudolf Laban's Movement
and Ddnce Concepts and tn Cecily Dells A Primer/or Movement Description Iking Effort-
Shape Analysis.
17. 1 am deeply indebted to Dorinda Oturatu’s essay on the history of histones of
the body that opens her book The Body in the French Revolution. She was the first to ob­
serve the intense proliferation ol scholarly interest in the body during the 1930s, which
she traces to the threat of fascist policies in Europe. She argues that Elias and subse­
quently Foucault focused critical attention on society's capacity to infuse the body with
its controlling devices. To tins scenario of bodily infiltration and cooptation, she opposes
the unruly bodies delineated in Bakhtin’s work. In search of a conception of body that
admits individual agency, she privileges Bakhtin over Foucault in her inquiry into politi­
cal conceptions of the bodv before and during the French Revolution.
18. Marcel Mattss’s encyclopedic inventory of bodily endeavors '‘ Techniques of the
Bodv" was joined by Maurice L.eenhardts eloquent depiction ol Melanesian conceptions
of the body in Do Kamo. Person and Myth m Melanesia; Margaret Mead and Gregory Bate­
son’s detailed inquiry into Balinese socialization practices Balinese Character and Mead's
Growth mid Culture: and Marcel Griaule’s comprehensive studies of the Dogon. among
 Choreographing History j 21
others. Antonin Artaud's manifestos on the body could also be listed here as a different
sort of ethnography.
19. Space permits only the sketchiest of arguments concerning the role ol the
anthropological project tn the imperialist agendas of First World cultures. For a fuller cri­
tique the reader ts referred to Stanley Diamond. In Search oj the Primitive; Ta'al Assad, ed.,
Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter; Genii Huizer and Bruce Mannheim, eds., The Poll-
tit's of Anthropology: From Colonialism and Sexism tou-ard u View from BNcw; and Truth T.
Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Posteotnuiality and Feminism.
20. Fredric Jameson suggests this interpretation in "Petiodtzmg the Sixties."
21. 1 refer to Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Madness and CUilizution and The Order
oj Things.
22. Although 1 am about to argue that dance offers exemplary versions ol bodies
that can resist even a foucauldian conception of power, another, equally persuasive model
is provided in the final chapter ol Jacques Attah's Noise. This political and economic
history of music applies the epistemic structuring of knowledge proposed by Foucault to
the development of Western music. Attali ends his analysis with the suggestion that new
forms of composition and dissemination of music have the potential to disrupt and dis­
perse the capitalist tormnodiftcarion of music and us production. Allah's version of
composition shares with the analysis that follows the idea that individuals cun compose
alternatives to hegemonic cultural values that lie outside those value systems.
23. For example, Cynthia Novauk, Shining the Dance: Contact Improvisation and
American Culture; Mark Franko, Dance As Text: Ideologies cf the Baroque Body; Susan
Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon; Sally Ness, Body, Movement, nntl Culture: Kinesthetic
and Visual Symbolism in p Philippine Community; Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes;
Sally Banes, Greenwich Milage 1963: Avant-Garde Performance yml the Effervescent. Body; and
Randy Martin, Performance as Political Act.
24. Donna Haraway’s essay "Manifesto for Cyborgs" traces the shift Ircnt white capi­
talist patriarchy to what she calls "the informatics ol domination." a shtlt that provides the
political context for the notion of ambulant scholarship that I propose here. Ambulant
scholarship as 1develop it embraces the cyborg while also asking for a carelul accounting
of the body's physical participation tn u
25. Fiere the reader may recognize a relerenoe to Carolyn Browns exquisite essay
on Merce Cunningham titled "An Appetite lor Motion." Cunningham's influence on this
duet between Clto and Terpsichore is explicated more fully tn my book Reading Dancing;
Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance.
26. Vincent Farenga brings this account io light in his insightful article “Periphrasis
on the Origin ol Rhetoric.” Fits interest in the account is complementary to but differs
from that of the muses in that he focuses on the inability of language whether spoken or
gestured to address directly the functioning of rhetoric.
27. Remarkably, the laie-eighieenilvceniury movement theorist Johan Jacob Engel
outlined these rhetorical possibilities for the body in his extraordinary study of dramatic
gesture titled kites sur k geste et 1’action thfdtrale.