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  • Intellectual Underpinnings
  • Leslie Satin (bio)

A few family snapshots:

  1. 1. One day, my father and I stood, chatting, in a bank lobby. "I just don't get it," he said. "You've got more brains in your head than you have in your feet."

  2. 2. My husband sings in an a cappella chorus, and for one Mother's Day concert we all wore necklaces emblazoned with words our mothers had never said. "Choreography and dance," mine proclaimed. "What a wonderful career choice!"

  3. 3. After watching me perform some years ago, one of my children offered the following critical précis: "Your bra was sticking out."

I could go on with tales of familial, as well as fraternal and collegial, disinterest and disappointment, not to mention resentment and the occasional frisson linked to artist children and parents, associated with a career that seemingly joins the extremes of narcissism, the temporal and physical limitations mandated by the life cycle of the human body, and the apparent separation from the left-brain activities supported by other fields and disciplines. Common Western wisdom has it that dancers are dumb, in both senses: the silent wordlessness of traditional concert dance, and the absence of intellect long associated with the profession. Dancing is viewed as an articulation-in-motion of the Cartesian split, its thoughtless activator lulled by the gentle tapping of computer keys coming from the other, smarter side of the room. As far as family goes, I'm mostly over it. And I've sounded off on this before, complaining, for one, about a brilliant theorist who refused, at a workshop, to remove her socks—to engage her material body when her discursive body, however contingent, was so comfortable.

Aren't we past this tired rift? Yes, I think, and no. Like others of us who are both dancers and scholars, I live on both sides of the room; exploring the mind/body relationship is central to my dance practice, my teaching, and my writing. It is precisely that interaction of the experiential and the intellectual that draws me now to the studio, now to the computer, imbuing one temporary situation with the implications of the other. I—we—revel in both our material and our discursive bodies.

In the dance world there is a long history of intellectual inspiration and involvement, however suppressed in the discourse. Ideas and language, spoken and written, have a prominent presence in the dances themselves, among dance practitioners, between dancers/choreographers and critics/ scholars. Yvonne Rainer's twin sentiments—"the mind is a muscle" and "my body remains the enduring reality"—continue to function as skeletons, as it were, for continuing discussions and debates about what it means to see dance, to do it, to get it.

But even in much of academia, dance remains suspect as a field for research and as an epistemological source for that research. We encounter the perplexing aesthetic and intellectual conservatism of college dance students who talk the talk but are proudly antagonistic to postmodern dance, historical or current, often without having actually seen any of it. And in the studio we pine for, or insist on, or maybe have bodily experience that transcends or bypasses cognition.

What I focus on here is an uplifting observation from the contemporary dance world. (I'm talking about the "downtown dance" world of New York City, not the [End Page 99] world at large.) This is the resurgence of interest, especially among younger choreographers, in the explicit interplay of ideas and dance-making that resonates in their dances; that embodies their knowledge of their experimental choreographic and artistic forebears—not only the Judson Dance Theater but adherents of a range of improvisational, theatrical, and performative practices; and/or that recalls the intellectual excitement underlying earlier avant-garde choreographic movements. There is much to say about these performances and the ideas that inform them. In this panel, though, the topic is dance and writing, and so for the moment I am keeping my eye on the discourse: how we talk and write about dance.

There are many reasons for the resurgence of public thoughtfulness, primary among them our extraordinary access, via the Internet, to information and...

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