Shaping Dance Canons

“Assembled with urgent clarity and razor-sharp analytical force, this thoughtful book provokes a consideration of how it is that some writers make sense, or non-sense, of the worlds of dance we share. Mattingly helps the reader understand that dance criticism is bound up in systems of exclusion and disavowal that must be acknowledged. An offering of urgent frameworks for thinking about how arts criticism might function in a progressive, intentionally diverse twenty-first-century landscape.”—Thomas F. DeFrantz, coeditor of Black Performance Theory

“Compellingly argues that a small subset of white dance critics in the twentieth century had outsized power in determining the landscape of dance as an artistic field in the United States. Mattingly also pays careful attention to Black cultural critics who offered a counter-discourse to the white gatekeepers’ narratives. A text that every dance scholar, teacher, and practitioner should have on their shelf as an invaluable resource for understanding how the field came to be and how to chart a better path going forward.”—Joanna Dee Das, author of Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora

“In a book that weaves between Dance Studies and dance criticism, Mattingly has created an important resource for how we think about dance in the past and present.”—Dance Chronicle

“Examining dance criticism in the United States over the past 100 years, Mattingly writes with a voice that is both authentic and provocative.”—Journal of Dance Education

“Timely and immediately applicable. . . . Wherever inquiry into the unequitable pasts and presents of the performing arts and imagining of more equitable futures is happening, there this book should be, as guide, model, and inspiration.”—Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

“This book is a valuable resource for its careful historical analysis of the archive and its autoethnographic integration of those voices previously invisibilized in the written discourse about dance.”—Comparative Drama