Remobilizing Dance Studies

Opening Remarks

Randy Martin once proposed that “Dance studies, properly reconstituted, promises to help materialize in thought a whole series of problems that have run homeless through the academy as well as through the world” (Martin 1998, 181). Writing in 1998, Martin and his contemporaries attempted to ground dance within the academy and rectify the unmooring of dance from the humanities and the alienation of dance from serious critical inquiry. Dance’s homelessness within the academy would operate as the metaphor through which other “homeless” knowledges of bodies and bodily practices could find a place within academia through dance studies as an academic discipline (Martin 1998, 181). In the decade since Martin’s proposition, dance studies has come into its current form, with multiple incarnations of dance proliferating in radically different spaces, both literally in actual physical and virtual spaces and metaphorically in different intellectual spaces. Given the establishment of dance studies as an academic field since the publication of Critical Moves (1998), this essay invokes a critical inquiry into the politics involved in the disciplinary formation of dance studies and in the way we talk about dance. This will allow us to address the politics of ontological concerns regarding dance and epistemological developments in our field, specifically in an Anglo American and European context. We begin this essay from a place in which dance and dancing have become crystallized inside an academic discipline, and we ask what the presently accepted parameters of intellectual meaning making are when it comes to dance and how current practices of dance studies can be remobilized to revitalize our discipline’s political potential.

Beginning in the 1980s in the United States and the United Kingdom the academic turn in the humanities toward cultural studies, critical theory, and identity politics informed the study of the arts as a nucleus of social structures. In dance, this turn toward theory was accompanied by a shift from a modernist emphasis on technique and expression toward a postmodern investigation of choreography that locates the ontology of dance and embodiment as central to the subject of dance itself. The turn toward theory in dance would appear to mirror intellectual developments in other art disciplines, such as art history, theater history, literary studies, or film/media studies; however, these fields are often recognized as separate academic departments or named as a separate field of specialization within academic departments. A department of art and art history names and separates historical and theoretical discourse from actual art making, whereas the study of dance under the rubric of “Dance” has remained institutionally and epistemologically wedded to dancing (Giersdorf 2009).

Due to the institutional positioning of dance in the academy, the emergence of dance studies as an academic discipline in the U.S. and U.K. occurred out of twinned choreographic and intellectual trajectories in which dancers and scholars working from within dance were concerned with the conscious investigation of the politics of social embodiment. In contrast, dance studies in continental Europe was often established by scholars predominantly trained in the humanities and social sciences who applied methodologies from fields like literature, philosophy, sociology, and theater studies to dance. Even though these differences initially created radically different methodologies and definitions of politics in the discourses of English speaking and non-Anglophone scholars working in different national contexts, these differences have been sifted through a global academic exchange and the incorporation of non-Western national discourses originating in the global South and Asia.

As a result the current academic approaches to dance worldwide may be broadly categorized in three interrelated areas: dance as method and site of political agency; dance practice as research; and the ontology of dance. In order to establish dance studies as an academic field in the U.S., scholars—among them Randy Martin—attempted to recast dance and choreography as a method rather than an object of study.¹ In their work, choreography and dance become models for accessing, organizing, and destabilizing political, structuralist, and postcolonial enquiries. This approach provided a methodology for similar investigations into questions of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nationality in relationship to the...