NEO-BURLESQUE: STRIPTEASE AS TRANSFORMATION by Lynn Sally. 2021. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 288 pp., 50 illustrations. $26.95 paper. ISBN: 9781978828087.

Abstract

and the A-Men,” Aramphongphan examines the “how” of this relationship, drawing attention to Fred Herko’s performances in both spaces, and the interplay between efficiency and inefficiency that underpins some of the aesthetics of the time. In the last chapter, however, Aramphongphan turns toward historiography, asking why the austere and reductive elements of Judson—the “No Manifesto” Judson—have eclipsed acknowledgements of the balletic, vaudevillian, and queer sides of the group’s work. One of the reasons, Aramphongphan claims, was the presence of Robert Rauschenberg, whose ascendence in the art world afforded him greater status than other Judson artists. In addition to his iconic status, Rauschenberg and the elite circle around him—a circle that included Yvonne Rainer and Robert Morris—were more ready than other Judson Church artists to write about their work, thus consolidating a minimalist narrative from a pluralistic whole. Homophobia also played a role in shaping this art history. While Rauschenberg and Steve Paxton openly lived together, they maintained a public façade of asexuality or heterosexuality. Jill Johnston, who collaborated with the balletic Fred Herko and who also documented Judson concerts in her bold, experimental writing, found herself the subject of hostility for her relationship with Lucinda Childs: “To find a favored party of their group in bed with the critic, who was moreover of the wrong sex, was a territorial affront” (144). Historically, Childs has been described as a Rauschenbergian disciple, a partial truth that does not encompass her other work with James Waring’s company of ballet, vaudeville, Warhol, and camp. These and other “straightening devices” (153), which, as evidenced in this book, include censorship, miscategorization, erasure, dismissal, and outright bigotry, combined with the flattening of historical discourse as a whole as it is streamlined for scholarly audiences, has resulted in losses from our understanding of dance and art. Placing queerness back into the narrative, Aramphongphan also connects the Ballets Russes into this canon, allowing for a discussion of Orientalism, effeminacy, and excess in the work’s closing pages. This in turn leads to a discussion of “imaginative possibilities,” or how today’s artists might reclaim postmodern art spaces for artists of color, and others who have been excluded from the history of fine art and dance. Overall, Horizontal Together is a hopeful work that offers new insight and critique in the service of a more inclusive historical practice. I recommend it to students and scholars interested in reclaiming dance/art history, and for those working with queerness and interdisciplinary scholarship. Aramphongphan makes a persuasive case for a “semiotics of kinesthetics” (8) illustrating throughout the text that bodies and the way they move can create a significant impact on how a community expresses itself. Through dance, and art, bodies in the 1960s used the semiotics of horizontality to create, and state their place, in a network of queer artistry.