Reconsidering the possible meanings of dance and disorder, Kélina Gotman's Choreomania investigates how disorderly dancing has been understood through the political conditions of its representations. Bringing attention to dance studies' increasingly interdisciplinary position, the book tells “a history that is performed in a bodily way” (11). While most scholarly works on choreomania study this topic in an exclusively Parisian context, Gotman looks at the displacement of discourse surrounding manic dance. Showing how modern notions of choreomania formed rhizomatically, she builds a bridge from nineteenth-century representations of medieval and early modern accounts of choreomania to cases in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She skillfully demonstrates how discourse on choreomania came about through a repeated set of scripted scenes. Chorea itself, Gotman argues, defies “the closure of representation” and emerges in the gap “between observation and hearsay” (89). Performed in passing, choreomania becomes what Gotman calls “a disorder of migration” (63) both...

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