11 Bk Reviews 150-162

Books also observed (somewhat contrarily), “‘at the end of twenty minutes, everyone there remarked: ‘It’s strange, we never felt or heard the news before. There’s actually a war going on in Vietnam, unemployment everywhere.’ […] Until this moment, they were anesthetized in the face of world news’” (). The idea of masochism as a viable form of institutional critique isn’t exactly an easy sell, particularly given its popular connotations (even the artists themselves recoiled from the term). And though proving it so may be all the more difficult, the proof is in the pudding. Hence while O’Dell successfully deconstructs masochistic performance for its metaphoric and structural value, she doesn’t convince me of its social relevance. In this regard her thesis fails. To a great extent, this failure is owed to the performances themselves, which were often cryptically high-minded. Burdened by a need to theorize theory, O’Dell’s analysis forcibly takes a discursive turn; in many cases, one interpretation necessitating the next in an endless chain reaction. Within such a stricture, psychoanalysis becomes more of a descriptive model and less of a critical tool or methodology, the result being that O’Dell moves further and further away from an exegesis of the work’s political implications—those “larger issues” she writes of, but alludes to summarily. Despite the above shortcomings, Contract with the Skin weaves a thorough and compelling narrative, laudable for its synthesis of contractual and psychoanalytic theories, its redemption of masochistic art practice, and its commitment to a much misunderstood group of artists. O’Dell might not have achieved all she set out to, but her efforts to map new terrain deserve nothing short of praise. —Jane Harris Jane Harris is a New York–based critic and curator. She has contributed to various art publications including Art in America, Art/Text, New Art Examiner, Perform- ing Arts Journal, and Sculpture Magazine. Choreography & Narrative: Ballet’s Staging of Story and Desire. By Susan Leigh Foster. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ; pp.; il- lustrations. $. cloth. Susan Leigh Foster’s latest history is a welcome addition to dance scholar- ship, adding to the under-researched yet fascinating gap between the Baroque and Romantic periods. Choreography & Narrative explains how ballets came to tell stories. Foster’s purpose in telling this story is to contextualize the narratives she has danced and to account for the rift between pure dance and mimed gestures that haunts experimental choreographers today. Foster limits her study to explaining how dancing bodies began to tell stories in Paris between the s and the s. She begins with one of the first narrative ballets, Marie Sallé’s Pygmalian, and ends with the pinnacle of narrative ballet, Giselle (). In her introduction, Foster compares three ver- sions of the Pygmalion myth to demonstrate the growing sophistication and complexity of the story. According to Foster: “ballet achieved its narrative voice and coherence by turning the female dancer into a commodity and the dancing body into a no-body” (). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.1999.43.2.159 by guest on 25 September 2021 Books The bulk of this book is pure history. It tracks the changing goals of dance reformers and choreographers and explores in detail how these goals were met with modifications in dance technique and pedagogy, staging and costuming, evaluative criteria and the theoretical understanding of dance’s function. The substantial history chapters are each followed by close readings of various ballet scenarios and brief, whimsical “Interludes” focusing on technical devices used to propel the narratives forward. Starting with the th-century reformers’ dissatisfaction with the status quo, Foster’s story is richly textured with many fascinating threads. One of these threads traces ballet’s changing function. In the s, ballet functioned to re- inforce and represent the social and political hierarchy. Early narrative dances of the s were instructional; they functioned to help audiences better un- derstand humanity and to embrace social and political hierarchies. Action ballets of the revolutionary s demonstrated patriotic fervor, and in the s dancers danced to increase their ability to manage their bodies. Ballets of the s functioned to reflect dominant social values concerning gender, class, and race, and were characterized by the polarization of roles, where male characters and forces of nature overcame females, Europeans overcame non- Europeans, and privileged classes overcame nonprivileged classes. Another interesting storyline elaborates the political and aesthetic struggles between ballet and opera at the Paris Opéra and entertainment at the boulevard theatres that often included dance. Another describes the dancer’s fall from sexual equality, and from social, political, and economic grace. In the th century the Paris Opéra saw an equal number of male and female dancers, who had equal pay, rights, and privileges. Both men and women danced the same move- ment vocabulary. As employees of the king, they wielded significant political power. After a brief bout of liberalism in the s, postrevolutionary conserva- tism and capitalism reordered Parisian society. The Paris Opéra was transformed from a state-run theatre to a self-sufficient business that commodified its ballerinas. There were no longer equal numbers of male and female dancers at the Opéra, but a surfeit of female dancers, many of whom were demimondaine. Foster goes on to explain how the developing anatomic knowledge of the body and advances in pedagogy led both to virtuosity and the body’s objecti- fication. The scientifically objectified body was seen as perfectible. Foster also explores dance’s changing relationship to language, or its discursive status. In the latter half of the th century, dance was understood to have a one-to-one correlation to natural language. Ballets were expected to correspond exactly to their published scenarios. By the s, dance was understood as beautiful and ephemeral but unable to convey ideas. Ballet had lost its discursive status and was relegated to the land of love. One thing that strikes me about Choreography & Narrative is the overdeter- mination of narrative. As a history of storytelling built up with close readings of some of the stories told by dance, it can itself sustain a narrative analysis. For Foster, the morality of her narrative is informed by her feminist ideology. Her story of narrative in ballet is thus a tragic one, recounting in detail how the rise of narrative meant the downfall of the female. Narratives (historical or otherwise) unfold by introducing a disruptive force into a situation. Typically, narrative obstacles represent forces, such as feminin- ity, that threaten the patriarchal establishment. In Foster’s narrative, narrative itself is cast as the narrative obstacle. Choreography & Narrative opens with a statement of the author’s ideological stance, informed by the typical post- Cunningham choreographer’s struggle to “contest traditional roles for male and female dancers, to reconfigure discursive and figural elements within performance, and to elaborate strategies for commenting reflexively on the work of art” (xvii). Into this ideological landscape, Foster introduces the disruptive Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.1999.43.2.159 by guest on 25 September 2021 Books force of narrative pleasure. The story unfolds—a give-and-take between narrative pleasure and ideological disapproval. In spite of her critique of storytelling, there is no question Foster indulges in the pleasure of narrative; the joy she gets from weaving and telling stories from the primary materials she uncovers saturates this book. With narrative cast as the narrative obstacle, this history ends tragically with Giselle, which Foster reads as the pinnacle of Romantic narrative ballet in which the heroine is always doomed. By using narrative structure, however, Foster implicitly replicates the kind of tyranny she critiques. She alternates between narrative pleasure and its critique. This pattern of alternation underscores the distance between the poles of narrative pleasure and ideology. Foster doesn’t directly grapple with the conflict that lies unresolved at the heart of this book: How can one be a feminist yet indulge in narrative pleasure? To the degree that Foster’s narrative exploits narrative pleasure in its critique of narrative pleasure, it doesn’t satisfactorily account for the nature of narrative pleasure. She points out that choreographers elicited narrative in- volvement by staging the psychological states of the characters they depicted (), thus extending to all the capacity to empathize with another (). This implies viewers are drawn into the characters’ and the narrative’s interior, psychological space. Yet her argument that narrative created the downfall of the ballerina is achieved with readings of scenarios that focus on the narratives’ surfaces and move outward to contextualize them historically, politically, and socially. Foster’s readings trace the implications and outcomes of the plots and examine the coherence, motivations, and activities of the characters. This kind of reading reduces narratives to slogans, based on their moral message or out- come. Characters are judged by how active they’re allowed to be. Thus the most progressive action ballets, according to Foster’s ranking, are the ones in which audiences can identify with ballerinas who are allowed to take some kind of action. Sallé’s Pygmalian, for instance, is privileged because the characters (Pygmalian and his creation Galathea) are each developed as characters. Only in Sallé’s ballet does Galathea, by teaching Pygmalian how to dance, participate in her own identity. In these readings, the theme that seems to fire Foster’s ideological flame most is that of sexual identification. Like her interpretations of characteriza- tion and morality, Foster reads sexual identification on the narratives’ surfaces and favors ballets that allow for homoerotic identification.

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