Adversaries of Dance: From the Puritans to the Present.

Robins, Marianne ; Robins, Roger

Adversaries of Dance: From the Puritans to the Present. By Ann Wagner. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. xvi + 442 pp. $39.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.

In this ambitious study, Ann Wagner attempts to "lay out the scope and substance of American opposition to dance ... and [to understand] why such antidance attitudes existed" (xiv). She admirably meets the first objective with a detailed survey of the debate over dance from the Reformation era onward, but falls well short of an explanation of the function and meaning of that debate.

Wagner opens with a brief analysis of the American debate's European antecedents, and then devotes the bulk of her work to a chronological presentation of the controversy between adversaries of dance (mostly clergymen and evangelists) and its defenders (authors of etiquette books, urban reformers, and, for the later period, advocates of liturgical dance). She then concludes with a thirty-five-page synthetic survey of the broad contours of antidance polemic over the past five hundred years with an eye to its social, ethical, religious, aesthetic, and gender-based components. While suggestive, the summary does not depart significantly from earlier interpretations, such as that of Jeremy Goring, and does not show cognizance of recent scholarship on European precedents such as that of Skiles Howard on England or Anne Wery on France.

Adversaries of Dance is grounded on impressive research into primary sources, and Wagner grants those sources the preeminent role in her work. Indeed, the core of the book is deferential to a fault on this point, and many of the work's liabilities can be traced to Wagner's reluctance to subordinate her documentation to an interpretative thesis. One consequence is that the book reflects rather than explains the repetitiveness of antidance literature. Another is that the book sometimes acquires an air of randomness. Nevertheless, the book remains quite valuable as a compendium of the arguments and actors who figured prominently on either side of the controversy over dance since the sixteenth century.

Scholars interested in the meaning of polemic and antidance rhetoric may be put off, however, by Wagner's tendency to doff her overcoat and join the flay, pointing out the flaws in the antidance argument. We learn that antidance clergymen and evangelists gave no evidence of having witnessed or participated in the dancing they condemned, that they employed "specious reasoning" and unreliable information, and that their statistics are not to be trusted. As a comment on polemical literature, it seems beside the point, since at issue is the larger cultural matrix within whose terms and vested interests the "flawed" logic made sense.

Wagner does consider a wide range of factors that may have informed the opposition to dance, including social changes (urbanization in particular), the evolution of gender constructions, and religious transformations ranging from the Reformation to the emergence of conservative evangelicalism. But the relationship between antidance tracts and this context needs to be further problematized. For example, the author grants adversaries of dance a monopoly on gender oppression. Never does she consider that dancing itself may have constituted a form of gender control.

On the more positive side, Wagner locates American antidance literature within the broader tradition of European discourse about dance. By identifying foundational precedents, she is able to explain the often anachronistic nature of these arguments, which tended to be shaped more by the demands and definitional terms of a self-referential tradition than by any acquaintance with actual contemporaneous practices. But she stops short of a full interpretation of that tradition. Given the persistence of these arguments (some seemingly impervious to change), one might have expected the author to reflect on the role that the tradition played in defining a form of revolutionary conservatism successively embodied by such movements as Calvinism, nineteenth-century revivalism, and the conservative evangelicalism of our own day.

Just as the rejection of dancing served better to define confessional affiliations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, it seems to have constituted a mode of self- and other-definition for various oppositional and reform movements within American Christianity. But to elucidate that function within the American context would require a more precise use of the term "evangelical" than is found here, where it serves as a rough synonym for "dance opponent," and applies to such disparate characters as the English Puritan Christopher Fetherston and the American evangelist Charles Finney.

Wagner's final section suggests the potential outlines of a synthetic interpretation. Generally constructive, it also advances some questionable propositions. With reference to the critical issue of the relation between attitudes toward dance and attitudes toward the physical body, wagner claims that "adversaries universally adhered to a Platonic and Cartesian hierarchical mind-body dualism" (366). But understandings of the body among all of the groups involved in this debate were surely more complicated than this. For example, the Holiness and Pentecostal movements that have been among the past century's most virulent critics of dancing have always combined their world-rejecting rhetoric with profound attention to the physical body: witness the prominence of faith healing in both movements and of glossolalia in the latter.

Finally, to claim that "in the antidance literature, the absence of grace in its theological and aesthetic dimensions, coupled with the presence of the law is striking" (396) is to miss entirely the constructions of religious meaning that enabled so many of dance's adversaries to imagine themselves to be the true champions of the doctrine of divine grace, even its last, best defenders. The fact that they did not choose to express thanksgiving through ordered bodily motion, and for various reasons condemned their neighbors who did so, does not suggest that they subordinated grace to law or banished joy from their premises, as both Calvinist hymnals and revivalist trembling amply attest.

Marianne and Roger Robins Westmont College