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 mas- ochistic 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: ’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 came to tell stories. Foster’s purpose in telling this story is to contextualize the narra- tives 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 sto- ries 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, (). 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 bal- let 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 bal- lets 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 cen- tury 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 balleri- nas. 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 discur- sive 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 un- derstood 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 per- formance, 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 narra- tive 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 cri- tique. 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 femi- nist yet indulge in narrative pleasure? To the degree that Foster’s narrative exploits narrative pleasure in its cri- tique 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, psy- chological 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 charac- ters (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. Thus she finds th-century ballets more open to homoerotic identification because they fea- tured large groupings of nymphs or fauns. She argues that viewers could iden- tify with these homogenous societies. In early action ballets, like Sallé’s, the male and female dancers both had charisma. Viewers could find either charac- ter desirable. In th-century ballets, there were fewer opportunities for same- sex attraction and identification, because heterosexual storylines became dominant. Only the ballerina was granted charisma, because production was engendered and presumed a male viewer with heterosexual desire. Although Foster reads a conservative message in Giselle, she finds in it an opportunity for homoerotic identification. (Here’s the synopsis in a nutshell: Giselle, a young peasant, falls in love with Albrecht, an aristocrat, who betrays her and causes her death. In death, she joins a society of vengeful female spir- its, the Wilis. When the Wilis command her to destroy Albrecht, she instead saves his life.) Foster suggests that the Wilis offered a place for homoerotic identification. The Wilis, she writes, with their “joyful vengeance providing a thrilling embodiment of influence and ruled by a female leader, offered a scandalous but intriguing alternative social organization” (). I have to ad- mit that it never occurred to me to identify homoerotically with a group of dancing women.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.1999.43.2.159 by guest on 25 September 2021  Books

While narratives can be read as emblematic of the struggle between social, political, and sexual forces, they can also be read from within the psyche of the viewer. In a ballet like Giselle, then, the characters and plot represent not just the interplay between external political or social forces, but also conflict- ing internal aspects of ourselves. I identify not only with Giselle or the Wilis because I’m a woman like them, but rather with all the characters, including Albrecht. And it is by identifying with Albrecht, the dominant narrative sub- ject in terms of patriarchy and class, that I locate the transgressive quality of the desire that defines this ballet. As I have argued elsewhere, his desire, which is consummated in the second-act , is one of the most erotic moments on the stage and is deeply colored with ta- boo—passion for a vampirelike figure that will lead him not to socially sanc- tioned procreation (heterosexuality), but to his death (Bruner :–). For Foster, Giselle’s essentially conservative message is reinforced by the fact that, by saving Albrecht’s life, Giselle is complicit in her own containment. This action “underscores the availability of the feminine for use as an Other on which dominant patriarchal structurings of power could continue to thrive” (). Yet, just as Giselle (femininity) complicates things by being complicit in her own narrative, social, political, and sexual oppression, so Albrecht (patriarchy) cannot be blamed as villain; his transgressive desire and passivity resist the restraints of narrative. For me, Giselle is really about patriarchy’s self-doubts; I read it as undermining certitude of any sort. While I wish Foster had gone farther or in a different direction theoreti- cally, this desire says more about my leanings and preferred critical practice than the success of her enterprise. Her purpose was to explore the many subtle changes that together made narrative ballets like La Sylphide and Giselle pos- sible while simultaneously maintaining a critical distance from her material. This she has done admirably.

—Jody Bruner

Reference Bruner, Jody  “Redeeming Giselle: Making a Case for the Ballet We Love to Hate.” In Re- thinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the , edited by Lynn Garafola, –. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

Jody Bruner won the  Gertrude Lippincott Award for the best article published in dance for “Redeeming Giselle: Making a Case for the Ballet We Love to Hate,” in which she applies psychoanalytic thoery to ballet’s narrative structure. She completed her MFA at York University with an annotated bibliography of narrative history.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.1999.43.2.159 by guest on 25 September 2021