Letters

It was enlightening to read the Dance Research Journal 41(1), 2009, issue on “Dance, the Disciplines, and Interdisciplinarity.” For years, postgraduate studies of dance have had fledgling status in various disciplines, e.g., aesthetics/philosophy, anthropology, education, history, physical education, physics, psychology, and sociology. Dance as a discipline whose academic study can culminate in a doctoral degree is the new kid on the block. The articles in DRJ 41(1) raise some issues that are applicable across disciplines. Permit me to add to the dialogue.

Good history calls for getting the facts right. Repetition of inaccuracies may “validate” misstatements. The Riverside dance program is said to strive to be interdisciplinary and to rely on Reading Dancing (1986) as a sign system that includes the political and cultural potential of dance. Jens Richard Giersdorf in “Dance Studies in the International Academy: Genealogy of a Disciplinary Formation” echoes a common belief: “Up to this point, the direct translation of dance into other sign systems had occurred only through various notation systems . . . the shift that occurred from Reading Dancing to Corporealities moved dance studies from an investigation of dance as a sign system to choreographing of relations. This transition was an important theoretical and political move by Foster . . . and it allowed the . . . impact [on] discourses in neighboring disciplines” (37).

However, this phenomenon also occurred years earlier: To Dance Is Human: A Theory of Nonverbal Communication (1979), written by an anthropologist/dancer. The work presents how dance comes into being, emanating from natural movement, its communication potential, developments in culture and society, and individual creativity. The 1979 book explores the translation of dance meaning to a verbal sign system and vice versa and offers a tool to probe for meaning in movement (a semantic grid with devices and spheres of encoding the meaning of dance). Heretofore, there were only notation systems to symbolize physical movements. The dynamics of performance and reception, underlying structures of dance, and how dance “choreographs” relations in society, education, gender, and politics are discussed in To Dance Is Human.¹ Anthropologists study human behavior and its meaning in the context of process, culture, history, society, and politics. The meaning of dancers’ messages can be ambiguous and have multiple interpretations, which anthropologists seek to discover. They consider what people say, do, and how these acts mesh with their contexts to ascertain possible meanings. Anthropologists generally follow the poststructuralist insistence that an analysis can never be exhaustive or final and that there is an absence of ultimate meaning. Categories are fluid and overlapping. Indeed, anthropologists often spend years analyzing and reanalyzing some of their data.

My approach to the semiotics of dance, recognized in a number of disciplines and in various countries, emerged during doctoral study in anthropology at Columbia University in the mid-1970s. Required to take a linguistics course, I realized that knowledge of modes of conveying meaning in verbal language can illuminate the understanding of the nonverbal language of dance.² Verbal language and dance have communication similarities but, of course, differences. So I adapted semiotic concepts and perspectives to create the semantic grid to probe for meaning in dance. Semiotics, subsumed within linguistics, is also interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and open-ended. In studying physical anthropology, I became aware of the evolutionary presage and import of dance communication. Humans attend to motion to survive— to distinguish prey and predator, to select a mate, and to anticipate another’s actions and respond accordingly. The body’s motion “talks” and people “listen.” Humans first learn through movement, sensory-motor activities form new neural pathways and synaptic connections throughout life, and the merger of body, emotion, and cognition allows the communication of meaning in dance.³

To extend knowledge in a particular academic domain requires first knowing the state of existing knowledge and engaging it. Academics are expected to read, digest, and analyze the literature, note omissions, inconsistencies, and erroneous statements, and distinguish what has been done from what needs to be done, not merely list relevant work in a bibliography.

Innovation is often heralded with so-called new semiotic, poststructuralist, postcolonialist, postmodern, and cultural and critical theories and methodologies. Related concepts include reflexivity, hegemony...