DANCE & COSTUMES: A HISTORY OF DRESSING MOVEMENT By Elna Matamoros, 2021. Berlin: Alexander Verlag. 468 pp., 170 illustrations. $48.55 hardcover, ISBN: 9783895815478.

Abstract

performance of an Aboriginal war dance on the football field and subsequent calling out of racism, is a further expression of Indigenous embodied sovereignty that unsettles the colonial occupier. In chapter 7, Rothfield reveals how SJ Norman and Goodes command that white Australia take stock of their position as “colonizing other” (200). Their counter-narratives, as embodied innovations, created an atmosphere of disequilibrium making possible something other than the mere repetition of colonial narratives. Rothfield offers a conception of the body as midway between the intellect and the chaotic multiplicity of impulses. In concluding, she notes it is impossible to abandon entirely the plane of the subject. The uncanny is but a “glimmer,” an invitation to move otherwise beyond habits of practice and the acquired codes of dances that are learned. Great dancing can be construed as the “informed manipulation of divergent forces” (140). Embracing this plurality can be the marker of skillful and great dancing. In her conclusion, Rothfield quotes Deleuze: “in a book, there is nothing to understand, but much to make use of” (228). Dance and the Corporeal Uncanny is a conceptual book offering tools for thinking with and through dance in the studio, on the stage, in the stalls, and importantly on the side of and beside dance. At the time of writing, dancers’ desire for velocity, amplitude, attunement, and reach has been frustrated by an extended health crisis, which saw a shift to online classes and restrictions on the proximity, palpability and scale of dance. New habits formed and the perceptual thresholds dancers are accustomed to were transformed within this new kinesthetic milieu. In navigating radical changes to the dance landscape, Rothfield’s book is timely in its offering of thinking tools that can be applied to a range of dance contexts including educational, choreographic and scholarly. These tools privilege somatic attention, corporeal diversity, the elasticity of time and movement innovation toward a kinesthetic literacy that deepens understanding of dance’s ontology beyond aesthetic categories. As a contribution to Dance Studies, Performance Studies and Philosophy it is an invitation to form new corporeal-conceptual relations, reconfiguring what it means to move dance thinking and perceive dancing in ethical ways through a reconsideration of the experience of what dancing does.