Reviewed by:

• Choreographies of the Living: Bio-Aesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance by Carrie Rohman
• Kari Weil

Is it because dance is considered the most "animal" art form that it has been marginalized by art critics? This is one of the important questions raised in Carrie Rohman's Choreographies of the Living, a well-argued and physically attuned book that seeks to foster new interactions between animal studies and dance studies. Symbolic language and rational concepts are the spiritual gifts that have long supported notions of human exceptionalism and link us to the divine as opposed to the earthly or animal. The human is above all a subject of language and to be praised as such. But to be a subject of language is also to be subject to language and to the distortions that words produce. This is one reason that the linguistic turn in literary studies has been followed by efforts to identify other forms of communication that are less easily manipulated by structures of discursive power and are more evocative of what [End Page 534] might hide beneath or outside human language. It is the glory and power of dance that it does just that, argues Rohman. Dance is animal art because it originates in what is sensed rather than cognized, and so in what resists being conceptualized. Dance is to be glorified, not marginalized, for that.

Rohman is herself a life-long dancer, and in bringing dance studies and animal studies together her aim is less to explore how other animals dance or might be described as choreographers than to argue that the aesthetic impulse that is central to dance is a "bio- impulse" that has its origins in what humans share with other animals, if not with life itself (3). Such is the "bioaesthetic" that she identifies in works by writers, choreographers, and illustrators from early modernism to the twenty-first century, including Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Rachel Rosenthal, and Merce Cunningham. What is the bio-impulse? To help define and describe that aesthetic, Rohman turns primarily to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as well as to Elizabeth Grosz, whose theories (among others) pulse through every chapter. She quotes Deleuze and Guattari's suggestion that "perhaps art begins with the animal," and that the very purpose of art is "to make perceptible the imperceptible forces that populate the world, affect us, and make us become" (8). Rohman follows these thinkers in concluding that art comes from what is prior to or outside what we humans perceive, from those "invisible forces," intensities, and vibrations that move us to become other than we are. The aesthetic impulse, in other words, is an expression of Deleuzian "becomings." Grosz offers a more material, if also more ecological, vision of the artistic drive as originating, in Rohman's words, "within the strivings of life itself," or in response to the earthly and cosmic forces through and with which we create our lives rather than merely live them (9). Rohman quotes Grosz's assertion that "it's not man's nobility that produces art, it's man's animality" (9), while further noting that, for Grosz, animal artistry is inherently sexual insofar as its purpose is to produce pleasure.

In provocative readings, Rohman traces evidence of this animality in signs of vibration, intensity, and/ or sexually/creative/affective becoming, although one might question whether intensity and vibration are always creative, even if pleasurable. In chapter 1, Duncan's barefootedness is highlighted as evidence of her prioritizing the movement of the inhuman and as rebuff to a Heideggerian prioritization of the hand and of handedness. Chapter 2 opens by linking the screams of a rabbit, a woman in labor, and a young tenor as traces of those "life practices" that, according to Rohman, Lawrence understands as part of the "life rhythm" (49) or "cosmic forces in which all creatures . . . participate" (49), and whose pulsing she tracks in his poem "Tortoise Shout" and his novel Women in Love, where Gudrun dances in time...

审核人：

• 活着的舞蹈编排： Carrie Rohman的文学，艺术和表演中的生物美学
• 卡里·威尔（Kari Weil）

是否因为舞蹈被艺术评论家边缘化而被认为是最“动物”的艺术形式？这是嘉莉·罗曼（Carrie Rohman）的《生活编舞》中提出的重要问题之一。，这本经精心设计且身体协调的书，旨在促进动物研究与舞蹈研究之间的新互动。象征性的语言和理性的概念是精神的礼物，长期以来一直支持人类例外论的观念，并将我们与神而不是尘世或动物联系起来。首先，人类是语言的主题，因此应受到赞扬。但是，要成为语言的主体，也要受语言和词语所产生的歪曲的影响。这是文学研究在语言学转向之后紧接着努力确定其他形式的交流的原因之一，这些形式的交流不太容易被话语权的结构所操纵，而更能唤起人们的关注[End Page 534]可能藏在人类语言的下方或外部。罗曼认为，这正是舞蹈的荣耀和力量。舞蹈是一种动物艺术，因为它起源于被感知而不是被认知的事物，因而起源于被概念化的事物。为此，舞蹈应被美化，而不是被边缘化。

罗曼（Rohman）本身是毕生的舞者，在将舞蹈研究和动物研究结合起来时，她的目标不是探究其他动物如何跳舞或被描述为编舞，而是认为舞蹈的核心美学冲动是“ -冲动”源于人类与其他动物共享的东西，如果不是与生命本身共享的话（3）。她在从早期现代主义到二十一世纪的作家，编舞家和插画家的作品中确定了这种“生物美学”，包括伊莎多拉·邓肯，DH劳伦斯，弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫，瑞秋·罗森塔尔和默斯·坎宁安。什么是生物冲动？为了帮助定义和描述这种美学，罗曼主要转向吉勒·德勒兹（Gilles Deleuze）和费利克斯·瓜塔里（FélixGuattari）以及伊丽莎白·格罗兹（Elizabeth Grosz）的作品，他的理论（包括其他理论）贯穿每一章。她引用了德勒兹和瓜塔里的建议，即“也许艺术始于动物”，艺术的真正目的是“使可感知的，遍布世界，影响我们并使我们成为世界的不可察觉的力量”（8）。罗曼跟随这些思想家得出结论，认为艺术来自我们人类感知之前或之外的事物，源于那些使我们变得与众不同的“看不见的力量”，强度和振动。换句话说，审美冲动是德勒祖的“行为”的表达。格罗茨（Grosz）用罗曼（Rohman）的话说，“在生命本身的努力之内”，提供了一种更为艺术的，甚至是更加生态的，对艺术驱动力的见解。或是回应地球上的宇宙力量，并以此来创造我们的生活，而不仅仅是生活（9）。罗曼引用格罗斯（Grosz）的断言，即“艺术不是人类的贵族，而是人类的动物性”（9），同时进一步指出，就格罗兹而言，动物艺术本质上是性的，其目的是产生愉悦。

在挑逗性的阅读中，罗曼（Rohman）通过振动，强度和/或性/创意/情感倾向的形成来追溯这种动物性的证据，尽管人们可能会质疑强度和振动是否总是富有创造力，即使是令人愉悦的。在第1章中，邓肯的赤脚被强调为她优先考虑非人类运动的证据，并拒绝了海德格尔对手和惯性的优先考虑。第2章通过将兔子，劳动妇女和年轻男高音的尖叫联系起来，作为那些“生活习惯”的痕迹，据罗曼（Rohman）说，劳伦斯将其理解为“生活节奏”（49）或“宇宙”的一部分。 ……所有生物……都参与其中的力量”（49），她在他的诗《乌龟喊》中追踪了他们的脉搏。在古德伦跳舞的时候...