Choice Review

Albright brings to this sophisticated book more than a decade of involvement in almost all areas of dance and feminist scholarship. In the first chapter, "Mining the Dancefield," she lays the groundwork for much of her later discussion by challenging the ways in which the body has been situated in Western epistemology. Albright describes how dance comprises "a double moment of representation in which bodies are both producing and being produced by cultural discourse of gender, race, ability, sexuality, and age." She uses this theoretical framework to look at Fanny Cerrito (a 19th-century Romantic ballerina) and two 20th-century modern dance icons--Isadora Duncan and Yvonne Rainer--and then discusses Zab Maboungou (contemporary Congolese Canadian choreographer) to demonstrate "how her dancing elicits the audience's witnessing by doubling her somatic and cultural identities." In successive chapters Albright continues to discuss each person/dance with the same critical intensity and scholarly rigor that she brings to the first. Chapter 5 is especially powerful: it focuses on autobiography and the work of Blondell Cummings and David Dorfman, John Martin's "Form and Metakinesis" (The Modern Dance, 1933) and Suzanne Langer's "The Magic Circle" (Feeling and Form, 1953), universalized and abstracted dance. Albright has personalized dance and made it what it is meant to be: a living, changing art form that is informed by all who participate in the challenge of making meaning. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals. L. K. Rosenberg Miami University