Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890-1920.

Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890-1920. By Linda J. Tomko (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999. xvii plus 283pp. $38.95/cloth $18.95/paperback).

Linda J. Tomko has set herself an ambitious task with Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890-1920. Not only is she attempting to invigorate scholarship and redirect thought on an entire era of dance history, she is trying to do this for diverse audiences: her colleagues in the field of dance history and also those in American Studies, Women's Studies and Social History for whom dance may rarely have been an object of scholarly inquiry. This division causes some problems at the same time that it makes for exciting, enlightening reading. Tomko's problems are hardly hers alone, however. Dancing Class epitomizes the growing pains of interdisciplinarity many of us in performance scholarship are currently experiencing; as we embrace new discursive practices and modes of inquiry, we must negotiate between emerging and established fields of knowledge for an increasingly eclectic readership. Tomko's work may best be categorized as Performance Studies, and as such it foregrounds id eas of theatricality and performance as part of larger social and cultural formations.

Tomko argues in her introduction that "applying social history methods to dance analysis brings dance 'in' from the margins of U.S. historical and critical inquiry and locates it among other social modalities through which people operated in American society" (xiv). Her work is a "cry to recognize bodies as powerful sites for social and political contestation" (xvii). But she also concludes that her study enables "a close scrutiny of the narratives that have been spun for twentieth-century American dance" (220). Tomko appears torn at times between these competing agendas; her revisionist project ultimately favors her home discipline, but those outside the field of dance studies will nevertheless find her writing clear, widely informed, and insightful on the function and perceptions of dance for the social agencies and cultural reformers whom she investigates.

Tomko breaks her study into six chapters. Chapter One introduces us to the exercise regimens and corporeal ideologies imported to the United States from Europe simultaneous with the growth of industrialization and immigrant populations in the nineteenth century. She contrasts the German system of "extensive" bodies to the Swedish preference for "poised" bodies, then analyzes how these two modes of physical training came to be marked by class, gender, and ethnicity. She reviews the place of social dance in American culture -- especially immigrant culture--during this same period, setting the stage for her detailed discussion of physical education and dance instruction and performance to follow. Tomko reads the Progressive era "as a complex of disciplines for the body" (34) integrally related to questions of labor, childrearing, and interpersonal dynamics.

Tomko's second chapter unpacks the notion of "women's cultural practices" (39) for the era by focusing on the work of some prominent figures in modern concert dance: Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, and Ruth St. Denis. Tomko argues that the sponsorship of these female dancers by a network of other women, especially wealthy New Yorkers who produced their performances, often in private homes or for women's groups, was a transgression of the traditional means and loci of theatrical performance--an appropriation of cultural power with specific class and gender implications. Referring to both feminist film theory ("the gaze") and reader response criticism, Tomko questions the ahistorical application of the former for dance, but suggests that the latter may be appropriate to an understanding of female audiences' construction of meaning from choreography that attempted to present the woman dancer as other than a figure of sexual desire.

Chapters Three through Six function collectively to analyze the complex role of dance in settlement houses and early parks and recreation agencies. One of the most significant questions Tomko poses in these chapters is who is societally empowered to dance and how does such dance signify culturally? She contrasts the emerging modernist ideology that "claimed for 'art' an autonomous realm and aesthetic import" to one that carries a "social welfare instrumentality" (163). Not only does this relate directly to the ongoing debates over "high" vs. "mass" art, it also has broader pedagogical, scholarly, and cultural implications that resonate with arts instruction, research, and practice through the present day.

Tomko continues to highlight the role of gender by showing how women came to be the primary administrators, teachers, and students within these civic organizations. Chapter Three looks closely at the Lewisohn sisters, who became central forces at the Henry Street Settlement House in New York City and later founded the Neighborhood Playhouse to expand upon their aesthetic and social mission. As the training ground for some of the young women who went on to be pioneers of modem dance, these organizations formed an important historical backdrop not only to an artistic discipline, but also to a locus of scholarly inquiry that has not been sufficiently interrogated. "The master narrative which has historicized modern dance as an autonomous art here stands revealed as an ideological, and not an inevitable, construction" (135), asserts Tomko. Particularly given the communitarian spirit of the settlement houses, Tomko highlights the striking irony that women dancers emerged from their studios to champion notions of "the artist" as an individual uniquely privileged to create aesthetic work of value for the culture at large.

Tomko's final object of inquiry is the folk dancing that served as a "performative activity" (170) imbricated in both originary culture and the mediated form of its enactment in the cultural nationalist projects of the settlement houses and community agencies. Tomko traces the evolving relationship between these civic groups and the public schools, which increasingly came to rely on them for pedagogical direction as well as teachers. She shows how folk dance, derived from the national dances of Western European immigrant cultures, was transformed to provide an "urtext" for American dance (205). Tomko asserts that the "functionalization of dance for establishing Americans' sense of a national heritage has proven largely unique to the Progressive era" (211), but that dance remains the most accessible form of aesthetic expression for the greatest number of people in our society.

It is this last point that makes Dancing Class such an important text for social and cultural historians. We may well ask why scholars have so consistently overlooked the analysis of this form of physical and aesthetic expression, practiced socially by many of us, particularly when so much critical attention is lavished on what we passively consume. Tomko's study shows how much we have to discover about the centrality of dance to our history, our culture, and our national identity.