Movable Pillars: Organizing Dance, 1956–1978

Conclusion

Conclusion MovingForward As the “body” becomes increasingly visible in academic discourses across disciplines, the dancer/scholar’s responsibilities and contributions similarly expand. Methodological practices develop in the field of dance, whereby knowledge that is produced within and through bodies in motion contributes a critical experiential perspective to extant structures of scholarly inquiry. Including everybody in the academic pursuit of knowledge becomes increasingly important in a global society. The preceding accounts juxtapose historical, political, and personal contexts in relation to the transformation of dance studies during the period between 1956 and 1978. The interviews demonstrate that the process of substantiating dance as intellectual inquiry was neither an obvious nor a linear development. The future of dance studies may well depend on the flexibility of dance organizations and their ability to navigate the rapidly shifting academic terrain. Dance organizations are movable pillars that can garner the institutional legitimacy to incorporate and sustain dance as a scholarly discipline. In this book, I embrace the multiple perspectives and inconsistent contexts within which creative and physical research fought for, and gained, academic credibility. I resist the urge to offer a history of the six organizations described—in the form of a narrative account—in part because much of the factual data is currently unavailable, but more so because any overarching narrative would render invisible the fascinating contradictions that I discovered . I am not interested in reconciling or hiding those troubling inconsistencies . Indeed, I still find myself working within many of these contradictions as I seamlessly move between approaching dance as a fine art, as a political act, as a systematic technical practice, and as a simultaneously empirical and somatic methodology in both my teaching and my research. This book acknowledges and identifies those contradictions.1 Possibilities for additional research are extensive and urgent, as firsthand memories and documents become less available. The six organizations are currently immersed, to various degrees, in the process of gathering their archives and defining their own histories, as noted in the 194 1. I am indebted to my former advisee and dancer/scholar Ellen Gerdes, for her clarity and insight in articulating the questions and conflicts that she encountered in the context of working on her dance thesis at Wesleyan University. sections introducing each organization. There is a need for additional historical accounts from the various other participants and perspectives that play a role in developing dance and dance studies in the United States. Moreover, and particularly as these organizations become more international in their activities, a global perspective is needed to fully understand the impact of the organizations and the time during which they formed. Conclusion: Moving Forward 195 ...