Butting Out: Reading Resistive Choreographies Through Works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha.

Butting Out: Reading Resistive Choreographies Through Works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha

By Ananya Chatterjea Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. 398 pages, illus. $70, unjacketed cloth; $29.95, paper.

Ananya Chatterjea analyzes the works of Zollar, the American founder/director of Urban Bush Women, and of Chandralekha, the Indian choreographer and feminist, offering a political and layered reading. Addressing Zollar's landmark Batty Moves, Chatterjea acknowledges black women's histories of slavery and abuse, as well as Western notions of hyper-sexuality. She interprets Zollar's celebration of the black female body-and the derriere in particular-as a radical and transgressive move. She discusses Zollar's movement vocabulary not as an attempt to oppose ballet, but as a choice to move between the cultures of Western modern dance and African-influenced aesthetics.

Chatterjea, who herself is a choreographer, gives a similarly alternative reading of Chandralekha's Raga, a piece usually cast with women but which Chandralekha cast with two men instead. This gender exploration asks the question, Can there be an "alternative notion of femininity" that can be performed by men? By two Indian men? And if not, then what does this say about perceptions of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and national identities?

Butting Out challenges the models by which choreographers of color have been measured. Chatterjea proposes an examination of each artist's choice about presenting dancers in performance, considering the complex histories and politics that are wrapped up in the way these bodies move onstage. In the path broken by Brenda Dixon Gottschild in The Black Dancing Body, Chatterjea repositions the ways we "see" women artists' work, moving that which has been marginal to the center. Judging by the language of her text, her audience is clearly scholarly-something she plainly admits. But the book is worth every discipline-specific word.