Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, and Equity by Kate Mattingly (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, and Equity by Kate Mattingly
• Crystal U. Davis (bio)

Kate Mattingly. Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, and Equity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2023. Pp. ix + 244. $85.00.

In Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, and Equity, Kate Mattingly offers an archival and autoethnographic analysis of how dance criticism has provided the frameworks within which dance history, careers, and curricula have developed and thus shaped the dance field. It engages a number of ongoing discussions in the field of dance, from the relationship between the moving body of dance and writing about dance; to the evolution of values and orientations in dance curricula; to the emergence of digital dance performance; to the tension between critic and artist, as well as the role of racial bias that culls the potential of dance criticism to reify a more racially inclusive span of dance performance. It also presents historical connections between these varying topics in an innovative way, thus helping to strengthen our understanding of dance history through the influence of dance criticism.

Mattingly starts with John Martin's significant role in forging the terms and frameworks of talking about dance. Martin's influence includes the well-worn term "modern dance" itself, aesthetic orientation of how to look at and talk about dance, and what is deemed valid and what is invisibilized in dance criticism's early years. Mattingly continues by articulating the ways in which a theatrical approach and orientation to critiquing dance no longer served many dance artists as postmodernism began to disrupt the existing aesthetic expectations and storylines of early modern dance pioneers. In this context, the artist-critic emerges, where dancers begin to write about their work on their own terms, about the work of dance critics, and even the discourse of dance criticism itself. As dance critics continued to write about dance, the first dance programs in higher education began to emerge. Mattingly eloquently articulates the debate of early dance programs between dance as artistic prowess and technical display prominent in performance environments and dance as physical research process more aligned with the academic world of inquiry known in the humanities. Upon striking this distinction, this book continues by elucidating the emergence of Dance Studies and its relationship to dance as an academic field of study. Mattingly concludes with a rousing glimpse into the democratized future trajectory of dance criticism emerging in the proliferation of digital platforms that offer new frameworks for dance. This historical analysis of the dynamic relationship between dance criticism, the performing body, and digital performance and archive integrates an explicit critique of how invisibilized voices and artists now have access to digital platforms through which to offer these new frameworks for experiencing dance and dance criticism. [End Page 296]

Most impressive in this book is the integration of conversations between dance criticism, dance academia, dance performance, and digital dance. It is this integration that makes this book a valuable read in each of the areas mentioned from writing about dance, dance history, movement analysis, dance curriculum, and critical theory courses on how power operates within the field of dance performance, academia, and criticism. Mattingly also makes visible the role of racial bias and exclusion of Black dance performances, choreographers, and critics by White dance critics who either wrote scathing reviews or wrote nothing at all about Black dance performances. The book illustrates, for example, how Martin obscured the work of Black artists such as Charles H. Wlliams, Katherine Dunham, and Asadata Dafora while elevating artists like Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and Agnes de Mille. In so doing, Shaping Dance Canons does a meticulous job of conveying the influence Martin holds in establishing frameworks such as early, "tropes of Black dancers as 'natural' performers" (50). Using examples like Yvonne Rainer, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Graham, and Jill Johnston, Shaping Dance Canons marks the tide shift of dancers critiquing dance critics and the practice of dance criticism as the Judson Dance Theater becomes a significant dance performance and experimentation space. Mattingly maintains her commitment to naming the invisibilizing of Black dancers in asserting that, even as this tide shifted in the midst of the socio-political climate of...