Presence of Randy Martin

Dance studies as an academic discipline in the Western world is now sufficiently established to have its own lore. Knowing about the destabilizing importance and political function of gossip and storytelling (Besnier 2009), we want to start this special issue celebrating Randy Martin’s formative impact on the field with one such tale. The dancer, scholar, and social activist Randy Martin who established himself as an influential voice in our field in 1998 with the seminal publication Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics was never hired by a dance department. Yet, as the story goes, he did interview with one of the main Dance Studies departments in the early years and was asked during the interview if, as a dancer and sociologist, he could commit to his future work being situated in the parameters of the field of dance studies. Apparently Randy replied that he could not. At that time he was professor in the department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute, was subsequently appointed associate dean of the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, and, in 2000, became chair of the Department of Art and Public Policy; in 2006 he founded the MA in Arts Politics. Interestingly enough, he never really left the field of dance and informed it with all his future publications, his administration, and his pedagogy.

We bring this story back to life here because it allows us to understand Randy Martin’s unique contribution to dance studies and at the same time forces us to think about the parameters of the discipline. How does Randy’s work inform our discourse? And what has our discipline become in relation to other fields of inquiry and as a political force?

It is also worth noting in this connection that at the start of his career Randy was a professional dancer before turning full-time to intellectual engagement. Randy began taking dance classes at UC Berkeley in the late 1970s concentrating on Graham technique with David Wood and Marnie Thomas Wood. During his Master’s work at the University of Wisconsin he met Claudia Gitleman who, at a summer workshop, encouraged him to come to New York City and study with Alvin Nikolais and Murray Louis. Between 1983 and 1988 Randy danced with Claudia Gitelman, Martha Bowers, Pooh Kaye, and Nina Martin.¹ Throughout the 1980s he was presenting his work as both a choreographer and a theater director.² He also practiced clowning. Hence, it was the case that Randy’s thinking and writing on dance were embedded in his dance and theater practices.

As a dancer, Randy had to have been affected by the economics of production during the 1980s when, under Reagan, the strategy of nonprofits was beginning to saturate the field alongside the ultimately untenable entrepreneurial idea that dance was a business.³ In his last book, Knowledge LTD. Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative (2015), Randy gave detailed attention to the conundrum of philanthropy in the United States and the dilemma of the artist’s survival. His experience as a dancer surely influenced his idea for the creation of an MA in Arts Politics at NYU. His analysis of arts funding in Knowledge LTD., such as it is in the United States, was far from enthusiastic. He did not express his advocacy for dance blindly. The question of how Randy’s work informs our discourse today in dance studies is thus one that demands reflection across his entire corpus. (For this reason, we include a checklist of his major publications in this special issue). And, finally, the disciplinary question we raise also relates to Randy’s own intellectual formation in the academy. Sociology was the discipline within which his thought was initially schooled, yet a reflection on ethnography and an interest in theater was also present at an early stage of his writing. No matter what discipline we evoke—either academically or performatively—Randy’s relation to it was purposively precarious and in this way can be said to have performatively foreshadowed his interest in precarity and volatility later in...