John Durang: Man of the American Stage, The Art of Dancing in Seventeenth-Century Spain: Juan de Esquivel Navarro and His World, and The Dances of the Processions of Seville in Spain's Golden Age, and the editor of Women’s Work: Making Dance in Europe before 1800. She was editor of Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, and thINKingDANCE.org.
Brooks applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Theatres of the Body: Dance and Discourse in Antebellum Philadelphia, and reported the following:
Page 99 proves a surprisingly good place to grasp my book’s themes and methods. In fact, the structural midpoint of the book’s text lands on page 99, which opens chapter 4 of the book’s six chapters. Chapter 4, “Dancing ‘Philadelphia in Slices’ — The 1840s,” introduces the literary discourses that engaged dance, with authors “reporting, puffing, critiquing, condemning,” and describing, from their standpoints, how they experienced dancing.Learn more about Theatres of the Body at the Temple University Press website.
Throughout Theatres of the Body, each main chapter covers roughly a decade of Philadelphia’s dance history, as linked to a selected discursive element. The book explores connections between dance and visual art in 1820s Philadelphia in chapter 2, dance and political themes (the 1830s) in chapter 3, chapter 4 draws on literary connections in the 1840s, and the scientific drive of the 1850s shapes chapter 5. Each of these themes, and others—religion, reform, music, immigration, education, and more—weave through each chapter, but the stated discursive focus remains the highlight of each dance decade, each chapter. Page 99 alerts readers to the interconnections of dance with significant cultural drives (in this case literature, publication, narrative) and, with the chapter’s opening line about George G. Foster’s newspaper serial “Philadelphia in Slices,” it also points to the “different classes, races, employments, and tastes” among “those who danced or watched dancing” in theatrical and social settings.
Philadelphia’s complexity, generating and exemplifying the turbulent unfolding of the young United States, brought its people’s embodiment of humanity, of change, of personal and group narratives, of individual and aspirational expression to a pitch of excitement and meaning in the antebellum period. Questions of equality, rights, and human status urgently motivated action, including the dancing seen on streets, social-dance floors, and stages of the “mythic” city of Philadelphia, where the founding documents of the new nation were forged. A crucible of national formation, the City of Brotherly Love was also a hotbed of dance training, performance, and commentary as the nation moved toward the cataclysm of Civil War. What role did bodies play here? Digging into the dancing of that age helps us grapple with the weight and ramifications of that question.
--Marshal Zeringue
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