Sally Banes is, arguably, the preeminent dance scholar of our time. She almost single‐handedly put postmodern art dance on the map with her books Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post‐Modern Dance (Houghton Mifflin, 1980), Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (UMI Research Press, 1983), and Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (Wesleyan University Press, 1994). And she is revered within dance circles for her ground‐breaking treatment of feminist issues in dance performance in Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage (Routledge, 1998). But as this recent anthology of Banes's work makes clear, her contribution to the academic and artistic interests of the dance community is far more complex than can be appreciated by reading only her most well‐known books. The omnibus shows that when dance is taken from the stage to the page in Banes's intellectually sophisticated yet characteristically fearless (and sometimes irreverent) way, the results are not just interesting, they are philosophically provocative.
Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing is a retrospective of Banes's distinguished career, from her beginnings in the early seventies as a dance critic for a small alternative paper in Chicago to her auspicious presentations at gatherings of the dance world's intellectual elite. It opens with her first published review, “Substanceless Brutality,” a critique of an early performance of the now famous dance company Pilobolus. Even in her maiden voyage as a professional dance writer, Banes's critical voice and questioning mind take center stage. In the context of arguing that the performance was acrobatically adept but lacking in artistic significance, she broaches several intellectually substantive issues, including the question of how to distinguish good dance technique from good dance art and the extent to which drawing such a distinction is made problematic by the fact that dance is an embodied—and seemingly ephemeral—art form. From the beginning, Banes resisted the “substanceless” in both dance performance and dance criticism. In her three decades as a dance writer, she has consistently pushed her audience to grapple with both the phenomenal and the noumenal aspects of the art form, and Before, Between, and Beyond showcases her ability to penetrate beyond surface appearances to the underlying realities of concert dance.
In the “before” section of the anthology, entitled “Dance Before Midnight: Dance Journalism 1974–87,” we see Banes begin her quest to untangle issues of ephemerality, artistic immediacy, embodiment, gender, cultural influence, and dance history as she strives to meet a midnight deadline. This section presents early critical pieces written for the SoHo Weekly News, the Village Voice, and Dance Magazine, several of which she co‐authored with her husband, Noël Carroll. In these pieces, we find clear and vivid descriptions of the work of such diverse and historically important choreographers as Meredith Monk, Paul Taylor, and Bill T. Jones as well as unabashedly honest commentaries on the performances of a wide variety of professional dance companies. The range of dance styles and forms examined in these reviews is striking, as is the fact that while all of them include a high level of description, none is mere reportage.
The “between” section of the book presents Banes's work at the intersection of dance as pure art and other socio‐artistic spheres. The papers collected here are “between” in two senses. First, they bridge the gap between theater dance and the broader world by examining dance in relation to popular culture, films, law, politics, and academia. Second, they represent work Banes produced at an intermediate stage of her career. In these pieces we can see the fertility of Banes's mind as it considers dance in new a key, for instance, when she investigates the popularly influential, but often overlooked, “dance instruction song” from its roots in the early twentieth century through the dance crazes of the Twist, the Swim, and the Locomotion and when she argues for the (surprising) claim that academic institutions—often thought of as the enemies of “the artistic fringe”—have been the major supporters of the avant‐garde in dance since the 1960s.
The final section of the book, “Beyond the Millennium,” consists of Banes's most recent scholarly dance writing, including heretofore unpublished papers that she delivered at conferences in 2001 or was scheduled to present prior to the debilitating stroke she suffered in 2002. The articles in this section represent Banes's richest and most expansive thinking on all things dance, including reflections on the status of dance in popular music videos and a highly original cultural analysis of the oft cited but rarely examined ballets George Balanchine choreographed for circus elephants in the 1940s.
What is particularly appealing about Before, Between, and Beyond is that it highlights the extent to which Banes's writing has contributed to philosophical aesthetics as well as to the canon of dance history and theory. Although it would be inappropriate to characterize her work as analytic philosophy or to claim that the pieces in the anthology argue for a unified theory of dance art, her distinctive approach to the historical, cultural, and artistic aspects of dance (which is characterized by dissection, conceptual analysis, and theoretical synthesis) is philosophically informed and intellectually provocative. Readers should, however, be aware that not every essay in the book is likely to whet the philosophical appetite. Several pieces are lengthy documentations that serve historical rather than theoretical purposes. In addition, because the anthology is dedicated to tracing the arc of Banes's multifarious career, the anthology has a rather fragmentary quality at times. If, however, the reader does not expect the volume to provide the kind of clear, sustained argument characteristic of Banes's other books, he or she may find much of philosophical interest in its pages.
First, because Banes resists easy answers, her writing often raises those questions about the art form that are of central importance to philosophers of dance. What is a dance? Can elephants be dancers? Can danceworks be preserved or are they essentially ephemeral? In virtue of what are two dance events performances of the same artwork? Sometimes, these “big questions” emerge indirectly from Banes's discussion of dance world practice or from her critical take on a particular performance or choreographer's body of work. At other times, Banes takes up these sorts of queries head on, as in “Nearly Sort of Not Dance Maybe,” where she notes, “The result of the recent history of postmodern dance is that while our fundamental ideas of what dance is have been shaken, we are left feeling that lines should be firmly drawn somewhere and redefinitions attempted: if anything can be dance, what's the point of making distinctions between dance and nondance at all?” (p. 111). In this review of a multigenre performance event entitled Almost Dance, Banes shows us why the philosophical issue of how to distinguish dance from other performing art forms has acquired a special kind of urgency—and difficulty—in light of recent dance history. Having motivated the relevant philosophical problem, she challenges the reader to wrestle with the task of drawing lines in the right places, but only after suggesting several thought‐provoking possibilities, including the idea that a performance event counts as dance if it makes the viewer “feel like dancing.”
Banes's critical treatment of Almost Dance is an excellent example of how her work invites aestheticians to expand and enrich their theoretical conception of what is relevant to—and what is at stake in—discussions about the nature and value of dance art. Here, her open‐ended suggestions challenge the dominant philosophical conception of where and how to draw the line between dance and nondance by encouraging a shift of focus away from the abstract notion of “the institution” (or “the Republic of Dance”) toward the visceral experiences of audience members. One need not endorse any of her bold suggestions to see that Banes has her finger on the pulse of important features of dance that are often dismissed or overlooked by traditional analytic theories. For this reason, her writing makes a distinctive contribution to philosophical aesthetics by pointing us toward fresh avenues for reflection and thereby reminding us that, when it comes to answering “the big questions” about dance art, our spade is far from turned.
Second, Banes's essays contribute to philosophical aesthetics by opening up alternate ways of seeing, to use a phrase made famous by Monroe Beardsley, “what is going on in a dance.” Many of the philosophically pertinent issues that emerge from Before, Between, and Beyond do so only because Banes is able to convince us that something that appears to be nothing more than a circus act or a man lying motionless atop a maze in a SoHo loft is an aesthetically important occasion of art dance. And because she brings both philosophical acuity and profound insider knowledge to bear in her writings about the goings‐on of the studio, the theatre, the street, and the soundstage, Banes constantly draws our attention to a variety of aesthetically charged issues in her discussions of dance art. For example, in “Olfactory Performances” and “The Scent of a Dance,” she approaches dance “through the nose” and endeavors to provide a taxonomy of the olfactory sensibilities in dance performance, thereby taking the first critical steps toward legitimizing smell as a genuine domain of aesthetic experience and artistic accomplishment. And in “A New Kind of Beauty,” an essay originally commissioned for Peg Brand's anthology Beauty Matters (Indiana University Press, 2000), she demonstrates the fertility of dance as an entry point into broader issues in aesthetics, such as the relationship between beauty, the body, and ethical norms.
Thus, though Banes has always written with the voice of a dancer‐critic‐historian, Before, Between, and Beyond foregrounds the extent to which her work has also consistently exhibited a tendency toward the philosophical. Her penchant for thinking deeply and critically about dance even in the context of reviewing performances for small local newspapers is well captured by a comment made in one of the anthology's introductory essays: “[Banes] is a natural and brilliant generalizer. She thinks she knows what the essence of a thing is, and she wants to tell us” (p. xvi) while also always “correcting the too‐simple position” (p. xviii). And what Banes's lifetime of work teaches us may be just this: philosophical reflection about art need not be done—and perhaps should not be done—from our armchairs where visions of sugarplums (and other abstracta) dance in our heads. Instead, it can be productively and revealingly done with two bare feet planted firmly on the rosined floor of the dance studio.
