Theatres of the Body: Dance and Discourse in Antebellum Philadelphia by Lynn Matluck Brooks

Theatres of the Body
Dance and Discourse in Antebellum Philadelphia
by Lynn Matluck Brooks
Temple University Press, 306 pages, hardcover $119.50, paperback $36.95

With Theatres of the Body, Lynn Matluck Brooks weaves together two seemingly disparate histories — blackface minstrelsy and the increasingly female art of ballet — to analyze embodied performance in 19th-century Philadelphia. Brooks, a respected senior scholar of dance history, organizes her book around the analysis of discourses on visual art, politics, print culture and science alongside dance productions. Each chapter links one of these overlapping discourses with a decade, from the 1820s to the 1860s, followed by a conclusion.

Brooks’ narrative emphasizes the ongoing movement of people, dances and works, especially between France and the U.S., sometimes via the Caribbean, and how this fed American theatrical culture. It also takes dance seriously as a site of political and scientific discourse. To take one example, Brooks recounts how the urge to classify and rank human beings showed itself in the pseudoscience of phrenology, wildly popular during the era under study here, but also in print media and performance. The discourses these classificatory urges produced mutually reinforced one another as well as playing a role in contemporary debates around subjects such as citizenship and voting rights. Intertextual analyses of wide-ranging works of performance and print, from Bone Squash Diavolo to the serial “Philadelphia in Slices” to
The Maid of Cashmere (a Bayadère adaptation) to E.W. Clay’s prints, support Brooks’ ultimate argument that dance itself was a form of discourse that participated in politics during this critical period of nation-building.

Brooks’ writing is precise and evocative; while the book is based on painstaking archival and journalistic research alongside a broad knowledge of secondary sources, and thus suited for scholars as well as students, it is also an enjoyable narrative nonfiction read and should be of interest to readers who are curious about Pennsylvania and Philadelphia history.

Olivia Sabee
Swarthmore College