Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014, 288 pp., with 34 monochrome ... continuity in six communities among dancing white and black Kentuckians, .... American town a few miles south of the campus of the University of Illinois.
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exercises, could open them up to injury. The lack of accurate anatomical or somatic information means that the book would not be appropriate for most university dance departments. Much of what is known about butoh is still conveyed via word-of-mouth and embodied research at workshops. The Anglophone literature is sparse though growing. In this sense, any new publication is of value to butoh scholars and performers. When Butoh Dance Training stays specific to Alishina’s personal method, it provides an interesting window into one possible butoh training method. At times, however, the book synechdochically mistakes Alishina’s method for butoh itself. At other times, the book depends on generalizations about Japanese dance, Asian dance forms, and contact improvisation that most scholars will find unsatisfying. That said, the book is aimed at practitioners rather than scholars. In the preface, Alishina describes the book as a ‘cookbook’ for dancers that offers ‘recipes’ they may sample and make their own. Indeed, this may be the best way to make use of the book, choosing those exercises that seem interesting, and leaving those that are unclear behind. Rosemary Candelario Texas Woman’s University DOI: 10.3366/drs.2016.0169 Susan Eike Spalding, Appalachian Dance. Creativity and Continuity in Six Communities, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014, 288 pp., with 34 monochrome photographs, $95 & $30. ISBN 978-0-252-03854-9 h/b and 978-0-252-08015-9 p/b. Susan Eike Spalding has produced, in this book, a most welcome and thorough study of Appalachian dance with a particular focus on the creativity and continuity in six communities among dancing white and black Kentuckians, Virginians and Tennesseans. Over 25 years’ worth of fieldwork and source study, including in depth interviews and observations coupled with Spalding’s engaging writing style makes this not only an informative historical and ethnographic account, but a story that brings alive the views, sounds and humanity of the contexts and events she describes and through the local voices she lets speak for themselves. She subtly combines the development and changes to the freestyle clogging and other forms of social dancing in these areas against the sociocultural, political and economic backdrop of the combination of native Americans, immigrant Europeans and African Americans drawn together to work at the timber mills, the coal fields and steel plants. There are two overarching themes, one of a continually evolving and dynamic nature of tradition and the other in the shaping of that evolution by the creativity of individuals and groups of people. Of course other themes shine through such as the effect of cultural exchange in the evolution of tradition, how
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national policies and trends effectively influence the same, and the consequences of industrialization. Also, and very strongly, does the influence and support of individuals and institutions on dance creation and perpetuation become clear in the examples given. Spalding sets the tone of her thorough investigation well by dispelling the myth of isolation of the Appalachian region. She points out, quoting Dunaway, that the ‘agrarian myth’ of the self-sufficient Appalachian subsistence farmer has its roots in the Jeffersonian era and that this notion has been perpetuated and reborn as ‘a creature of the urban imagination’ (p.11), and that the dance traditions are representations of ‘pure’ Irish or English heritage, or that the perceived severe isolation maintained a persistence of very old dance expressions. On the contrary, Spalding writes ‘the region was never as homogenous, as poor, or as isolated as was once believed, and many kinds of social and theatrical dance were available to residents of the region as early as the 1790s’ . . . the region was already part of a ‘world system’ of economy’ (p.11). The Cherokee and Shawnee were trading skins and furs with Europeans pre eighteenth century and predates the later criss-crossing of European and African descendants bringing with them and sharing their heritage and ideas throughout the region. She describes in good detail the primary forms of recreation of the Appalachian people of late nineteenth and early twentieth century which were footwork and square dancing, and that these dance forms had great variety in the different communities at the time. While at the same time Spalding details how British folk music collector Cecil Sharp’s observations and writings, being the first detailed descriptions available to the outside world but grounded in his romanticized beliefs, only highlighted a small segment of the whole. She also outlines the idealistic influence through dance on education exerted by the physical education teacher Elizabeth Burchenal and the independent dance teacher Mary Hinman (for example), both of whom were influenced by Cecil Sharp, in the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Eastern Kentucky in the early decades of the twentieth century and the legacies of their work. What predominantly stands out in this work is that Spalding allows the voices of the people to speak and illustrate the scenarios, the feel, impact and meaning that the various dance types had, and still have, on their communities. There so many highlights of excellent ethnographic writing interspersed with interview conversation that it is hard to single out particular ones. But hearing the voices of the black community describing their breakdowns and new dance styles emerging in Mr Perry’s Sweet Shop in Dante, Russell County, Virginia from the 1940s onwards gives warm insight into some of the values in the surrounding coal mining communities. Or to learn about the selfless work by Richard Jett in providing ‘A good time will be had by all’ at Hoedown Island in the Natural Bridge Resort Park in Kentucky, where decades of emphasizing inclusivity and enjoyment in dance at every weekend from May to October from 1962 to 2006 comes to life through Spalding’s narrative.
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This is an excellent contribution to dance scholarship in general but in particular to those with interest in the socio cultural place of percussive footwork and social dance forms, and in Appalachian culture in general. Mats Melin Irish World Academy of Music and Dance University of Limerick Ireland DOI: 10.3366/drs.2016.0170
Joanna Bosse, Becoming Beautiful: Ballroom Dance in the American Heartland, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015, 174 pp., $25 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-25208063-0. Joanna Bosse opens her book, Becoming Beautiful: Ballroom Dance in the American Heartland, with a description of Jerry Springer’s appearance on the popular reality TV show, Dancing with the Stars. Springer is notorious for his loud, foulmouthed style, and many fans of the show, as Bosse explains, were incredulous that he could become a contestant; it seemed like a cruel joke. But by the end of his run, which lasted more than three weeks, Springer had won over the hearts and minds of his audience and had transformed himself from a brutish lout into a poised and competent dancer, proficient enough to perform the waltz at his daughter’s wedding. How did he do it? According to Bosse, he had ‘become beautiful’ to his television audience. Acknowledging the sentimentality built into the show, Bosse concludes that even so, it was ballroom dance that had changed him, that had made him appealing, that had made him, yes, a thing of beauty to his adoring fans. This is the aim of Bosse’s book: to explore the feelings of ‘beautifulness’ inspired by these dances and discover ‘the ways in which amateur hobbyist dancers perform their social reality and imaginatively forge new ones in dance and music’ (44). In Becoming Beautiful, Bosse, an ethnomusicologist, conducted ethnographic fieldwork at the Regent Ballroom in Savoy, Illinois, a small mid-western American town a few miles south of the campus of the University of Illinois. The dancers at the Regent generally represented the demographics of Savoy itself: overwhelming middle- and upper-class white – a group that Bosse contends ‘has evaded extensive ethnomusicological inquiry’ (15) – with some dancers of Asian, African, and Latin-American descent. In five chapters, Bosse takes us deep inside one community of social dancers, a group of people less interested in the competitive world than in dancing for the sheer pleasure of it. A devoted ballroom dancer herself, who intersperses the chapters with descriptions of her own dancing experiences at the Regent, Bosse’s mission as a researcher was to learn more about this pleasure, this transformative potential of the ballroom experience. Her analysis is intriguing. Written with authority and sensitivity, the book is on one hand a close ethnographic description, on the other an
