Choreomania: Dance and Disorder

Abstract

As the series editor’s foreword to Choreomania sets down, the work is an interdisciplinary study of manias of dancing. The interor a-disciplinarity of this work involves the disciplines of literary criticism, the literary and cultural theories of postcolonialism and Foucauldian historicism, dance (in particular collective or popular dancing), and the history of medicine. Moreover, the author explains in her preface that political events definitive of the decade in which the book was written (2008–2018) find themselves “in the fissures of this book,” as it elaborates nineteenth-century fantasies of dance in all its polysemanticmeanings: self-expression, revolt, disease and contagion, movement, and a concomitant biopolitics of movement. Dance, therefore, is both identifiable gestural repertoires in this reckoning and an indeterminate (often excessive) possibility of corporeal behavior. In eleven short chapters, arranged in two sections, the book offers a selective period survey (from medieval dance to the nineteenth-century pathologization of the dancing disease in Europe) and a geographical survey involving case histories drawn from southern Italy, Madagascar and Brazil, the American plains, the South Seas, and, finally, popular dance in theUnited States. The cultural phenomena studied include the medieval St. John’s dance, the early modern St. Vitus’s dance, the religious practices of the French Convulsionnaires, Charcot’s hysteria shows, the southern Italian tarantella, the Ghost Dance of the American plains, and popular dance forms in themodernist United States. A key challenge for Gotman is to define choreography as it pertains to the art of dance and its extended definition as an orchestrator of motion. Gotman offers the following: “Choreography in the sense I propose thus suggests an act of articulation, one that negotiates a border zone between order and disorder, planned and unplanned motion.” The excursive interpretive gestures get bolder—and less and less precise—as Gotman describes the act of choreography as a spectrum or “choreozone,” pertaining to a wide range of movement in between the constative and performative registers of language. The key theoretical texts that enable this expanded understanding of the