Dance Studies in the International Academy: Genealogy of a Disciplinary Formation

Prologue

For the past thirteen years, I have been traveling to the United States from my home country of Germany, first as a graduate student in California and later as a professor living in New York. Every time I pass through immigration, I am asked a series of questions regarding my final destination and my occupation. The latter always leads to some confusion, because when I am asked what I do, my accent seems to turn “dance history” into “dentistry.” Forced by phonetics to use the term “dance studies,” when confronted by the blank face of the customs officer, I inevitably embark on an explanation of what “dance studies” might be. Just in the moment when I finally see some comprehension of my profession lighting up the officer’s face, the question is asked: “And we pay you to do this?”

I constantly find myself in the position of having to explain my work. Usually I avoid a long-winded, defensive justification by comparing dance studies to one of its neighboring disciplines: “It is like art history, just writing about dance instead of paintings.” That usually does the trick, but it leaves a foul taste in my mouth. I know that dance studies isn’t like art history and I certainly don’t want it to be. Dance permits and requires a different set of theoretical and practical tools for its study than, for instance, a painting, a sculpture, or a performance art piece. I was a dancer myself at a time and in a country in which dance and other performative forms were powerful regulators of public discourses, as well as tools to resist censorship. I embarked on an academic career in dance studies because I wanted to think about the constructive powers of a form I appreciated as a practitioner. But I also wanted to understand the relationship of the political to dance’s aesthetic principles and techniques.

Ironically, the collapse in 1990 of my country, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and with it the socialist educational system in which I had begun my studies as a student in Leipzig, forced me to move to the two countries that had a much firmer history of dance studies in the academy and consequently dominated the international discourse in (and structure of) our discipline. At the University of California, Riverside, where I studied for my PhD, I suddenly found myself surrounded by an eclectic group of international dance scholars: white North Americans, Asian Americans, Mormons, Brazilians, Argentineans, Mexicans, Taiwanese, and Italians. Their diverse comprehension of dance and the theoretical focus of the program at Riverside broadened my studies, and eventually my teaching, by including considerations of identity constructs and cultural studies. My subsequent employment at the University of Surrey, Guildford, in Great Britain exposed me anew to a nationally regulated dance curriculum and posed new questions about dance studies as a discipline inside a national academic discourse. My recent transition to a small liberal arts college in New York City with a vocationally oriented dance department has heightened my awareness of the schism between vocational training and academic discourse inside dance departments. The following reflection on these stations of my trajectory in the academy should offer material for a dialogue on the function of dance studies in the increasingly international and corporatized university and college education, its disciplinary and institutional structure and status, and its relationship to other disciplines.

Introduction

Among the presentations during the First National Ballet Conference in East Germany in 1977, one finds a surprising contribution by Kurt Petermann, the late director of the GDR Dance Archive. It stands out because unlike all the other talks, there is no discussion of any aspect of ballet practice. Rather, Petermann elaborates on “Aufgaben und Möglichkeiten der Tanzwissenschaft in der DDR” (Tasks and Potentials of Dance Studies in the GDR) and advocates the creation of dance studies as a discipline inside the academy (Petermann 1980). The strategic placement of Petermann’s elaborations amid presentations on the development of ballet at this highly visible conference in East Germany revealed the growing importance of Petermann’s effort to the East German government. Nine years later, the first students were admitted into the Tanzwissenschaft diploma course at the College of Performing Arts in Leipzig, creating the first (albeit short-lived) academic course in dance studies in Germany. Similar dance studies programs were started around this time in the United Kingdom and the United States. The concurrent emergence of dance studies as a movement in the international academy begs the question, What social and academic developments gave rise to the disciplinary inquiry into dance? How does dance studies situate itself in relation to national, institutional, and disciplinary demands? Answering these questions will help position dance studies in constantly shifting academic landscapes and possibly provide suggestions for future developments.

An attempt to answer these questions requires a dialectical approach that addresses the relationship between intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary concerns. In other words, I discuss for dance studies what Foucault calls the “discursive formations” of disciplinary objects and fields inside a discipline in conjunction with Bourdieu’s understanding of the academic habitus of a discipline for the production and sustaining of cultural capital (Foucault 1972; Bourdieu 1998) in larger academic and national structures. Illustrated through my introductory anecdote, my transnational position literally points at the transition from nationally demarcated knowledge production to the increasingly globalized vision for dance studies. I am fully aware of my privileged position in this academic market economy; however, it is important to rethink previously nationally demarcated disciplinary structures shifting into global configurations. Even though such globalization is organized through Western, and above all U.S., hegemonic economic power—the lingua franca in dance studies is English—it is wrong to think of local cultures, as defined by Jigna Desai, as passive receptacles of such domination (2004, 6). Rather, local cultural production—which, of course, includes knowledge production around culture—“can offer the opportunity to explore not only the relationship between culture and modes of production but also the possible ways to negotiate global processes” (Desai 2004, 7). Desai understands the subversive local reception of transnational products as one definition of such global processes.

Another important part of this negotiation is the increasing corporatization of university education through its disengagement from the production of national and humanist subjectivity (Readings 1996). Bill Readings’ poignant analysis in The University in Ruins describes various shifts in the function and focus of university education, leading to the currently dominant corporate structure. Readings defines the modern university coming into being through the production of knowledge based on Immanuel Kant’s concept of reason as the central defining idea laid out in his 1797 Streit der Fakultäten (The Conflict of the Faculties, 2005). Kant’s departure from empirical knowledge (often in service of religious institutions) toward an understanding of knowledge as capable of critical reflection on knowledge production paved the way for Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt’s concepts of education, leading eventually, to Bildung as the cornerstone of university education.¹ The German idealist process of Bildung provides the humanist subject with the capacity to interpret and influence social structures. The main component for such Bildung is culture—or in Schiller’s terminology ästhetische Erziehung (aesthetic education)—as a regulatory perspective and object of education (Schiller 2000). It is regulatory because culture functions as a controlling mechanism in human development to avoid negative side effects, such as the destruction of nature or civilization.² Culture in this discourse is decisively nationally demarcated, and as a result universities (and in many European countries also theater) are major state institutions supporting the construction of national identification and the bourgeois citizen as national subject.

Readings saw a waning of this role with the erosion of nations through globalization and the resulting development of universities into global corporations. His view has been confirmed by current analyses of the growing reliance on adjunct and student labor (Berry 2005; Bousquet 2008; Aronowitz 2000), labor disputes for the acknowledgement of graduate students as university employees in the University of California system in 1998, or national strikes in England regarding adjustment of faculty salaries to national inflation in 2006.³ The analysis and the activism prove the erosion of the position of the tenured professor as a towering personification of university culture and a move toward administrative power—a shift that impacted many disciplines through reduced funding, a product-oriented concentration on excellence and outcomes assessment, and a focus on education as career development and not on the experience and process of learning. It is in relation to this transition from the university as a national institution whose mission is Bildung to a global corporation concerned with accountability that I am situating my discussion of three graduate programs in dance studies.

To understand the impact of this shift and the formation of these programs in relation to the differing national and academic structures, I want to compare the Tanzwissenschaft program in Leipzig with the dance studies curriculum at the University of Surrey, Guildford, and the dance history and theory curriculum at the University of California, Riverside. I have reviewed documents from these three programs in conjunction with visionary publications by founders of the programs in higher education—what I call the academy.⁴ The three programs share a pioneering effort in establishing dance studies as an independent academic—and decisively theoretical—discipline. My main concern in this article is the evocation of disciplinary genealogies in the Foucaultian sense that highlights the tensions between existing discourses (Foucault 1984). Although I am concerned with emergences and developments, I am less invested in the re-creation of masculinist myths of origin, or even a corrective history of disciplinary discourses that influenced dance studies, and on which dance studies had its impact. In other words, I am not interested in ascertaining when a program started which inquiry first but rather in establishing the national and disciplinary contexts of a program and, more specifically, how a program structured itself in relation to its matter of inquiry: dance, choreography, and corporeality. All three programs share a focus on dance and a struggle to define themselves in relation to other disciplinary discourses and the way dance has been studied previously; their different visions for the definition of dance studies as an academic discipline make them constructive case studies for intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary concerns in dance studies.

As much as the decision to focus on these three programs seems to be influenced by my academic biography, it is actually defined by the issues raised by the distinct approaches of these three programs and the specific national cultures within which they had to position themselves. The programs in Leipzig, Surrey, and Riverside championed archivization, analysis, and choreography, respectively. These foci were developed and theorized by the founding figures of these departments, yet they were also determined by a corresponding struggle for a national identity, the rethinking of nationality in a postcolonial world, and the altered understanding of national and other identity constructs in a globalizing economy. The timing and scholarly agenda of these programs make them an interesting case study because they allow an understanding of issues specific to the discipline of dance studies yet they are also indicative of disciplinary discourses in academia and society. There are many other programs, visions, and individual attempts to define dance studies. My focus on these three programs neither tries to erase these other valuable discourses nor set them up as antagonistic to these three visions. Rather, my essay should be read in relation to other visions and analyses and should be seen as opening up a dialogue with them.

The focus on the three programs situates the investigation in a specific time frame of the 1980s and 1990s, which allows for an understanding of the shift in the function of dance studies in relation to changes in academic institutions. Such contemporary histories of dance studies can be analyzed in relation to earlier developments of dance education in academia and performance culture. There is a remarkable body of valuable literature available describing the beginning of dance education in the three national contexts (Adshead 1981; Barthel and Artus 2007; Gitelman 2003; Hagood 2000; McFee 1992, 1999; Ross 2000; Tomko 1999; Winkler and Jarchow 1996). The histories of physical education, modern dance, women’s liberation, and the hygiene movement were important influences on the development of the three programs in dance studies. They laid the groundwork for existing divisions of intellectual and manual labor as a central aspect of dance education. An investigation into these divisions of labor has to be extended toward rethinking the split between vocational or conservatory style training on the one hand and a humanities-based exploration, in the sense of Bildung, on the other. The set of complications and references that comes with these divisions of labor are often evident in the everlasting discourse on the relationship between theory and practice, which often stands in for the dichotomy of performance/production versus intellectual enquiry. The split, which occurred differently in all three countries, originates in part in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of education and, more specifically, in a transformation of the university that geared some institutions of higher education toward professional training.

Germany kept the distinction between universities that enlighten and provide Bildung (and possibly lead to university careers) and the Fachhochschulen providing vocational training. Contemporary professional dance training still occurs mostly in conservatorystyle institutions. The British system established the distinction with the existence of universities and polytechnics/conservatoires as well yet dissolved some of the distinctions with a series of transformations of polytechnics into universities. Depending on the focus of a particular department, dance departments in Great Britain often have a more equal balance between studio classes and classroom instruction, yet there are still vocational institutions or conservatories solely focused on the training of professional dancers, such as the Royal Ballet School (Adshead 1991). These conservatories established partnerships with university programs to gain degree-granting rights.⁵ The United States, which took British educational structures and German disciplinary concerns as models, introduced dance through teacher training and physical education (Hagood 2000, 19–101). Yet most contemporary university departments in the United States that label themselves exclusively “dance departments” have as their main objective the training of the dancer, choreographer, pedagogue, and/or administrator.⁶ In these departments, dance studies has to position itself in service to this main objective.

As all of us in higher dance education know, this hierarchy between the manual labor of training and the intellectual labor of theorization/historization is much more complex than it appears. We know that training is intellectual labor, and an increased attention to the physicality of theorization has challenged the ephemeral nature of thought (Foster 1995). As Mark Franko reminds us, the category of labor in relation to dance incorporates ludic and aesthetic considerations (2002, 2). Such a stance also challenges Marxist categorizations that assign labor a major function in the creation of the “base” of society and dance as artistic production, and thus ideological institution, a place in the superstructure.⁷ Yet, when dance training is situated in universities or colleges, it often communicates only to a certain extent in technical or scientific terminologies and establishes itself more often in descriptive categories, such as excellence or competitiveness. That is especially noteworthy given that the increasing corporatization of universities also favors the values “excellence” and “competitiveness” as part of its discourse because these concepts allow ranking and thus speak to the student-as-consumer (Readings 1996, 27).⁸ Still, the preparation of students for an artistic career prevents dance departments from aligning themselves successfully with such larger discourses. Thus, training-oriented dance departments struggle to prove that their applied knowledge is economically beneficial for a professional career and must justify their place in the university structure that focuses on Bildung. In other words, even though dance departments often see themselves as preparing their students for the life of a dancer, choreographer, or dance administrator, they constantly have to justify their market value inside the academy with respect to intellectual academic discourses.

At the same time, vocational dance departments often define themselves in antagonistic terms with the seemingly theoretical educational value of dance studies curricula or anthropological inquiries, unless they are structured in service of the dance training— which in most cases takes shape as traditional dance history or dance ethnography courses. ⁹ Susan Manning alluded to this problem when she raised the issue of the division of dance studies into historical and cultural investigations (Manning 2006). Most notable is the way the historical and the cultural situate themselves in relation to dance practice. Traditional dance history objectifies dance as a product, whereas cultural investigations— triggered by a missing canon (in a Western sense) in non-Western practices—are able to consider the practice of choreographing and dancing. So-called cultural investigation in dance might also include a self-reflexive integration of choreographic structures into its methodologies. Such practice could potentially challenge the division between dance education as Bildung and vocational dance training, something that dance history as it exists in many dance departments cannot.

The division of labor into intellectual and vocational for dance is further complicated by the gender connotation of dance as feminized; the predominance of women working in dance departments additionally contributes to this connotation (Daly 1995; Desmond 1997; Foster 1991). Yet, it is interesting to add a consideration of class politics to this already established hierarchy, something that has not been abundantly explored in relation to academic structures. The production aspect of dance education and its emphasis on training positions it closer to manual labor—and thus lower in the academic hierarchy. Theoretical considerations in dance or about dance are allowed a much higher position. Yet, most importantly, such differing positionings inside the academy as a result of gender and class hierarchies often expose the gender and class politics of neighboring disciplines, such as music, art, and theater, and in the larger field of social science and humanities. Dance and dance studies also evoke the “body” to varying degrees, much more than even fine arts and art history, music, or theater and performance studies (Jackson 2004, 37–38). As a result the discourse in dance is reduced to embodied knowledge or simply the body (in the singular). This, of course, further feminizes the discipline in the larger academy. Dance studies programs always have to situate themselves in relation to feminization; the Leipzig, Surrey, and Riverside programs took different routes to address this issue.

Archivization, analysis, and choreography—the three approaches of dance studies in Leipzig, Surrey, and Riverside, respectively—are also methodologies in dance studies. However, I am not providing an investigation of methodologies and methods in dance studies. Such work has been done in all three national contexts (Dills and Cooper-Albright 2001; Foster 1986; Adshead 1981, 1988; Carter 1998; Buckland 1999; Brandstetter and Klein 2007). I am interested in the three programmatic visions as overarching approaches that determine the methodologies and methods used in each institution. The “discursive formations” articulating these visions are in no way complete, logical, and chronological but instead define “a field in which formal identities, thematic continuities, translations of concepts, and polemical interchanges may be deployed” (Foucault 1972, 126–27). It is important to understand the tensions between these different approaches and institutional/national structures to envision possible directions and strategies for the future of our discipline.

Leipzig

Kurt Petermann founded the dance archive in Leipzig in 1957 primarily as a collection of folk dance material.¹⁰ This specific focus on folk materials aligned itself with the socialist government’s effort to utilize concepts of the folk for the creation of a uniquely East German national identity. Founded in 1949, the GDR struggled to distinguish itself as a decisively socialist, yet still distinctly “German,” nation. A return to folk material from geographical areas inside the East German territory provided socialism with a much-needed localized connotation. The folk, and hence folk dance, foregrounded Marxist-Leninist definitions of cultural production by establishing the people as the most important productive force behind any artistic output.¹¹

This utilization of folk extended anthropological and archival projects of the beginning of the twentieth century in Germany and France. As Inge Baxmann shows in her research on the Archives Internationales de la Danse, founded in 1931, such a focus on the collection of native and foreign movement forms went hand-in-hand with an extensive theorization of choreography’s social impact on, and reflection of, different cultural structures (Baxmann and Cramer 2005, 17). For example, Marcel Mauss’s research on everyday movement vocabulary was supposed to lead to an archive of body techniques that would document corporeal knowledge for future analysis, which in turn could make possible the mapping of human societies (Baxmann and Cramer 2005, 18). This approach to archivization as living knowledge and theorization with an emphasis on national identity determined other archival projects throughout Europe.

For instance, the dance archive in Leipzig soon extended its collection into other forms of dance to provide an understanding of the entire socialist society that was struggling to define itself. The archive set about documenting larger ballet companies, amateur dance performances, and national as well as international dance competitions. Unique collections from the endowment of famous dancers, choreographers, and dance historians such as Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, Gret Palucca, the controversial dance critic and scholar Fritz Böhme, and the folk dance scholar Erich Janietz, extended the collection. Archival publications under Petermann’s editorial guidance included the Documenta Choreologica—a series of reprints of historical dance literature—and a comprehensive Dance Bibliography. The bibliography amassed information on every single publication in the German language on dance from the fifteenth century to 1963, the year of the bibliography’s inauguration. The structure of the Dance Bibliography in seventeen categories speaks to the all-encompassing endeavor and, at the same time, emphasizes the preservationist focus by freely mixing categories defined by kind of publication (periodicals, reference books, program notes), kind of dance (stage dance, folk dance, children’s dance, social dance, ballroom dance, amateur dance, pantomime), contexts for dance (dance in fine art and photography, dance in scientific and social contexts, dance in film), and contributing elements of dance productions (music for jazz, folk, ballroom, and stage dance, stage settings and costumes), with dance history.

Petermann’s 1977 vision for a dance studies curriculum in East Germany emphasized the preservationist endeavor, yet he organized it much more in concordance with other disciplines, and thus followed the model established by the Archives Internationales de la Danse.¹² Evoking Schiller’s famous statements on the importance of history in education, Petermann set out to establish Tanzwissenschaft as one of the main tools for an “objective understanding” of social structures (1980, 50). He lamented the exclusion of dance studies from this intellectual project and cited the historical reasons for this exclusion: dance, in his words, is “an oral culture” (1980, 49).¹³ Still, he demanded that Tanzwissenschaft move beyond a simple historical and aesthetic consideration of movement.

As an academic model, Petermann divided Tanzwissenschaft into three areas: fundamental studies of dance, historic subjects, and choreology. Interestingly enough, Petermann also included dance reviews in a diagram of Tanzwissenschaft’s structure, while still positioning it outside the three main areas. This deliberate exclusion of dance criticism from Tanzwissenschaft differs from the American approach to early dance studies as it situates Tanzwissenschaft closer to its neighboring disciplines, such as theater studies and music studies.¹⁴ The main problem with dance for Petermann is its nonmateriality, and all of his efforts were geared toward the construction of a tangible object, which then could be categorized and stored for future analysis.

Peterman offered three options for the establishment of Tanzwissenschaft in the academy. He favored the one that would see Tanzwissenschaft as a specific area of study within the department of choreography at the School of Performing Arts in Leipzig. In his opinion, this combination would allow a strong connection between training and research. Petermann didn’t live to see the first students enroll in the new course in 1986; he died in 1984. Yet his understanding of Tanzwissenschaft as an academic discipline, modeled after German disciplinary structures and in the service of the preservation of dance, was reflected in the curriculum of the Tanzwissenschaft program in Leipzig.

The curriculum had to engage with an ongoing debate about the cultural status, pedagogy, and preservation of Ausdruckstanz (German modern dance) in East Germany. As Ralf Stabel documented, East German state officials—and Palucca as the country’s only surviving Ausdruckstanz practitioner—had a complex relationship to archival practices and theorization (Winkler and Jarchow 1996, 101–20). The government favored Sovietinfluenced ballet and folk dance as tools of socialist realist representation and repressed Ausdruckstanz as being too individualistic. Palucca mistrusted existing archival methods for their inability to capture her oeuvre or to document improvisation, which held a central position in her pedagogy. She also didn’t find any scholar qualified enough to understand her pedagogical methodology. Yet, an increasing number of dance practitioners pressured the government to preserve Palucca’s—and with this Ausdruckstanz’s— important contribution to dance in East Germany and socialist society in general. The founding of the Tanzwissenschaft curriculum at Leipzig, with considerable input from modern dance, was supposed to create scholars qualified to notate and archive the waning Ausdruckstanz tradition for future generations in East Germany, and thus preserve the national culture.

University structures in East Germany were highly regulated: specific classes were assigned at designated times during students’ duration of study. To cultivate a significant knowledge of dance techniques, Tanzwissenschaft students in Leipzig were grouped with students in choreography and pedagogy tracks. Thus, when I started the Tanzwissenschaft course in 1988, we trained for nearly two years with the choreographers and pedagogues in ballet, modern dance, German and Hungarian folk dance, medieval dance, improvisation, and jazz dance. In addition we had to take classes in performance analysis, labanotation, the history of ballet, Ausdruckstanz and modern dance, dance criticism, and Tanztheater, as well as serve as dramaturgical assistants for one semester at one of the main dance companies, in my case at the Leipzig Opera. Music education took up another sizable chunk of the curriculum, with music theory and specific courses on the history and theory of ballet music as well as introduction to composition, piano, and music analysis and aesthetics. Dance and music education was supplemented by Marxist-Leninist philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, and aesthetics, as well as art history. Additional classes in theater studies were historical in orientation.

Overall, the curriculum focused on the accumulation of empirical knowledge and training in dance, with the goal of providing the dance scholar with the information and methods necessary for understanding dance as a finished product. Classes in improvisation and aesthetics raised epistemological concerns in relation to dance and interrogated methods and methodologies regarding dancing and choreographing as processes. This focus on the process of dancing and choreographing, and with it an attempt to utilize dance practice as a structural device, eventually shifted more into the center of the curriculum. With the opening of the Berlin Wall and the erasure of the GDR as a national entity—and along with it the erasure of the entire East German educational structure—West German educational standards affected our course of study as well. The chaos of the transitional phase from East German to West German systems allowed us the relative freedom to decide on our own curriculum. It opened the prescribed curriculum to a modular approach. We chose to move away from the choreography and pedagogy curriculum into theater studies.

This meant a stronger exposure to Rudolf Münz’s work on theatricality and, with it, a utilization of theatrical practice for the historicization and theorization of theater (Münz 1989). Münz defines theatricality as a relationship between four different occurrences of theater in society. The first occurrence is the often-surveyed theater as an institution with all its historical elements, such as location of theater and its buildings, different approaches to acting, costumes, stage designs, and dramatic texts if available. This was complemented by a survey of theater of the everyday.¹⁵ Yet, to understand and expose these two occurrences of theater—especially the often-disguised theater of the everyday—as a theatrical practice utilized by dominating power structures, one needs to consider what Münz calls “anti-theater.” This is theater that is deliberately artificial, and Münz uses the examples of commedia dell’arte and the harlequin (or clown) to understand the construction of representation in “anti-theater” as purposely visible. “Anti-theater” reveals theater as artificial representation by emphasizing the theatrical apparatus—technique, role playing, mask—as commonly disguised elements in institutional theater and in the theater of the everyday. Finally, to fully understand theatricality one also needs to consider any prohibition of theater or censorship of specific kinds of theater (Münz 1989, 70). Religious tracts against theater and the prohibition of abstract theater during the Formalism Debate in the socialist countries are examples of this fourth occurrence.

Even though Münz situates his investigation of the four occurrences of theater within a theater-historical approach, his approach to theater history is neither empirical nor positivistic. Rather, his definition of theatricality as a relationship between the four occurrences of theater shifts the focus of theater studies toward a theorization of relations between the practice and social system similar to an investigation that often falls under the umbrella term “performance studies” in the United States. Münz moves beyond a simple broadening of theater into other realms of society by also demanding that the methodologies for the study of all four occurrences of theater have to be rethought in dialogue with specific practices. This avoids a construction of theater as an object of study and shifts the focus to processes and practices that de-naturalize theater. The shift also rethinks established academic hierarchies in which a tangible object in the form of a score or written drama takes precedence in disciplinary discourses over seemingly ephemeral practices, such as choreography or improvisation.¹⁶

Most importantly, exposure to Münz’s de-naturalization of theater through the display of its artificiality and an emphasis on everyday theatricality allowed us to question the preservationist focus of our previous Tanzwissenschaft curriculum. Münz rethought theater, which in its institutional form was one of the main bourgeois vehicles for the establishing of a German national identity. Archivization of national culture in Tanzwissenschaft likewise supported the creation of a distinct East German national identity. Exposure of both theater and archivization as part of an ideological state apparatus forced me to rethink Petermann’s approach to Tanzwissenschaft and its placement inside the School of Performing Arts in Leipzig, and to look for alternative models for dance studies in the academy.¹⁷ My employment at the University of Surrey in England provided me with an alternative national model.

Surrey

In The Study of Dance Janet Lansdale addresses the difference between theorizing dance and dancing. “The person who develops theoretical structures which underlie the process of studying dance has an aim which is broader than ‘how to do a plié’” (Adshead 1981, xiv).¹⁸ Throughout her career, Lansdale has maintained that dance is an object of academic investigation. The hierarchy of dance theorization and practice informed her influential and extensive contribution to dance analysis and education in Britain and internationally: it created dance studies as an independent discipline in the United Kingdom with clear disciplinary boundaries.

The Study of Dance, in conjunction with the 1983 publication Dance History: A Methodology for Study co-edited by Lansdale and June Layson, became the guiding texts and chronicles for the establishment of dance studies in the United Kingdom. Yet, it is the 1988 Dance Analysis: Theory and Practice, co-authored and edited by Lansdale,¹⁹ that determined the theoretical focus of dance studies at the University of Surrey and in the United Kingdom.²⁰

The Study of Dance explores dance and dance studies in a British context by providing a history of the development of the field in the United Kingdom; it also establishes Lansdale’s focus on epistemological concerns in dance studies. She defines an academic discipline through the

coherent collection of ideas, objects and/or experiences which justify interest and close examination. . . . [t]his examination might be theoretical (in making statements about), practical (in learning how to make, create or perform) and/ or evaluative (in learning how to criticise, appraise, make judgements about). A discipline with these features contains notions of standards applicable to understanding theoretical structures and revealed in the ability to apply principles of procedure in practice, and in making judgements within the framework of the activity.

(Adshead 1981, 11)

Applying this general definition of a disciplinary field to dance,²¹ Lansdale translates the investigation of ideas, objects, and experiences into the main categories of making (choreography), performing, and appraising (appreciating) dance (Adshead 1981, 78). Choreography incorporates both the ability to create dances and the knowledge of underlying principles of dance production. Performance is defined as “skill involved in bringing the dance into existence” (techniques) and the ability to interpret a given choreography (Adshead 1981, 81). Appreciation means critical enquiries such as “description, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation” (Adshead 1981, 82). Lansdale envisions the execution of all three categories both in “theoretical studies” and “practical demonstrations.”²² Finally, she situates her inquiry in a historical, spatial, and social context, which allows her to propose various models for establishing dance studies as an academic discipline in the British academy.

Lansdale always emphasizes that a dance form itself determines how it should be studied (Adshead 1981, 108). As simple as this statement may seem, it nevertheless clearly defines dance studies as its own discipline that is governed by the structure of its object of investigation. Thus—following Lansdale—methods and approaches to the disciplinary inquiry have to engage not only with the content of dance as a social, ritual, or artistic form, and with their historical and spatial contexts, but also must mirror the structure of dance in all its differing aspects and manifestations.²³ The importance of this position becomes clearer when looking at Lansdale’s opening of Dance Analysis, in which she states that “a satisfactory analysis which starts from the dance has yet to be fully worked out” (Adshead 1988, 13). She establishes dance analysis as the “central core” of the emerging dance studies discipline, which at that point in 1988 existed at BA, MA, and PhD level in Britain (1988, 6). Other disciplinary discourses, such as anthropology, history, psychology, and sociology, were contributing to an understanding of dance’s place and function in a social context. Yet, as Lansdale criticizes, “a deep and informed response to the dance itself” is still missing (1988, 6, emphasis in the original) and with it an “understanding of the making of the dance and the results of that process—the dances as objects in their own right, to be appreciated for their own sake.” Lansdale sees this as a “refining of the skills of appreciation” (1988, 7).

With this statement an interesting shift occurred between The Study of Dance and Dance Analysis—a modification that constructed dance as an object and analysis as predominantly theoretical and central to dance studies. Whereas The Study of Dance determines that choreography, performing, and appreciation are equivalent in their value for dance studies, Dance Analysis elevates appreciation as the outcome of analysis and the central component of dance studies. This shift is important because it marginalizes choreography and performance in the academic investigation. Even though analysis pertains to choreography and performance, and hence is important to the practitioner and educator, only analysis establishes dance studies as “academically viable” (1988, 6).

The predominantly theoretical construction of analysis becomes clear when Lansdale establishes description, contextualization, interpretation, and evaluation as its components. These scholarly activities define the dance scholar as a highly informed and educated spectator looking at dance as an object of study. The scholar is knowledgeable of structural specifics of dance as well as of cultural and historical circumstances. These skills situate analysis in a social context—something that Lansdale not only insisted on in her early publication but that was also mirrored in the structure of the programs at Surrey²⁴ and that she emphasized again in a response to Susan Manning’s attempt to clarify the division between historical and cultural study of dance (Adshead-Lansdale 2006). Lansdale is aware of the necessity to extend any investigation into an artistic form beyond a historization of Western forms into a theorization of non-Western dance cultural. Yet, it is not always clear how the distinct structures and functions of non-Western forms are reflected in an appropriate approach to analysis, given that the dance as the object of investigation is supposed to dictate the form of analysis.

Attempting to define what structures fields of inquiry or disciplines, Michel Foucault investigates the relationship between the object of a discourse and the structure of the discourse itself. He points out that we might be tempted to define a disciplinary inquiry by its object, yet in the course of the discursive practice we restructure the object as needed and in alignment with the artificial rules of the discourse (1972, 46). Ultimately, such colonizing practice might be less concerned with an understanding of the object itself but more invested in the institutional power gained through the establishing of the discourse as a field. It is worth considering Foucault’s inquiry into the basis of disciplinarity in the context of the University of Surrey and larger social structures in the United Kingdom.

Due to continual reduction of governmental funding, many universities in the United Kingdom are increasingly run like corporations. University structures are often determined by administrative and financial needs, and departments are treated as product or clients. During the nearly five years of my employment, the University of Surrey restructured itself three times. Financial motives, not academic needs, were the justification for these restructurings that shifted the dance department every single time into another governing body and aligned it with different disciplines. The number of new hires of administrators outdid the number of hired academics, and the pay scale reflected this as well.²⁵ Departments rent their space from the university, which, of course, in the case of the dance department, with a much bigger demand of space per student than, for instance, a business department, proved very expensive.²⁶ Such corporatization revises the traditional function of the university as a nationalizing institution in the United Kingdom. However, to cope with this change and to hold on to some of the national importance and its former function as a creator of citizen subjects, the educational system in the United Kingdom is nationally controlled, with clear national guidelines on benchmarks and outcome assessments. ²⁷ This colonial holdover of national supervision of a corporate structure (see the East India Company) is poised for change because the United Kingdom eventually has to engage in a more rigorous reflection on its colonial power in the current postcolonial world that will force a rethinking of the category of the citizen (Gilroy 2004, 121).

The focus on analysis as the main approach of dance studies reflects all of these struggles. Dance studies is able to establish itself as a discrete and viable discipline inside the corporate university because it is able to provide a distinct object of study and a discourse that is informed by this object: dance. Even though the object of its investigation seemingly structures analysis, a predominant reliance on analysis actually restructures the object, thus administering power over the object without always acknowledging this reflection of a colonial taxonomy.²⁸ Rather than simply denouncing analysis in the name of its intrinsically problematic characteristics, we should continue to recognize and theorize the possible hegemonic power of analysis to thereby enable a reflection on its function in the academy and in society.²⁹

Riverside

Well into the re-questioning of choreography and dance that took place as a result of so-called postmodern dance in North America, Susan Leigh Foster inserted her voice through the publication of Reading Dancing (1986). Influenced by her dance training and choreographic practice, cultural criticism, and Hayden White’s investigation into underlying narrative (and hence fictional) structures of cultural and political discourses (the academic discipline of history), Foster categorizes four contemporary approaches to choreography, technique, training, and dancing. Her analytic categories allow her to rethink dance at different points of its structure. Literally picking up every aspect of dance creation, performance, and reception, and moving around these building blocks to analyze them from all directions, she disentangles them from convention and their cultural referents. This move owes much to a structuralist approach that theorizes language and texts as cultural products, allowing for the interpretation of the underlying structures of social systems. The construction of dance—from its initial training to final reception— as text, and the purposeful emphasis on logical and scientific categories and methods, denaturalize the entire process of dance making. As a methodology for dance studies, this approach also gives the discipline a framework and definition for a more equal status in the academy, one comparable to that of art history or theater studies.

Yet, as much as Foster focuses her reading of dance on dance as a sign system, her conceptual framework does not lose sight of the political and cultural potential of dance. This attention to the historical and social is informed by poststructuralist critiques of structuralist universalizing practices.³⁰ It entails a critical evaluation of the methodologies and position of the dance scholar as well as a rethinking of dance history from a genealogical perspective. Thus, Foster reconstitutes dance with all its elements into a text with readable structures and at the same time theorizes the dance scholar’s reading practice as an important aspect of knowledge production. This focus on how knowledge is created in relation to sign systems and their cultural referents shifts the focus of dance studies away from interpretation and historiography toward a dance studies fundamentally informed by choreographic processes.

Foster and the faculty of the dance department proposed a PhD program in dance history and theory at the University of California, Riverside, in 1991.³¹ The program promised “a formal and academic base for advanced research in the emerging field of cultural and historical studies of dance” (Foster 1991, 5). It strove to be interdisciplinary, culturally inclusive, and exclusively theoretical. At the same time the proposal purposely omitted discourses that were often of importance to dance departments focusing on dance training and choreography, such as kinesiology, ethnology, aesthetics, and therapy.³² This choice clearly moved the program away from the mission of training dancers, choreographers, and dance pedagogues, thus establishing itself as a purely academic endeavor focusing on “research and writing about dance” (Foster 1991, 10).

The degree highlighted the historical and reconstructive component in its proposal and drew parallels to art history as the study of art that did not rely on actual training in artistic practices. This again determined dance studies at Riverside as a theoretical discipline that emphasized the translation of dance into writing and the reconstruction of dance out of its sources as key issues for the PhD The actuality of the program, which admitted its first students in 1993, shifted this focus away from analysis, documentation, and reconstruction (and with it from historical issues) and emphasized conceptual theorizations of dance across time and cultures—especially the relationship between dancing and writing as diverse sign systems embedded in social structures.³³

To understand this shift it is worth looking at the 1996 anthology Corporealities (Foster 1996). All of the essays in the volume display a creative engagement with writing in relation to dance, yet more importantly many of the essays also communicate in their form the very content of their investigation. Evoking a complex choreography of power networks of movement and embodiment, the texts visualize the impact of different positions and voices. Such enlivening of language and specifically writing through the approach of choreography as a theory neither objectifies dancing nor does it substitute writing for dancing. Rather, the translation from dancing into writing is problematized without erasing structural differences between both forms.

Up to this point, the direct translation of dance into other sign systems had occurred only through various notation systems and the reverse move in music visualization. With the focus on translation of dancing bodies into writing, the essays in Corporealities shift their attention away from dance as an object to dancing as choreographing of historical, social, and aesthetic relationships. Such consideration of the structure of dance is no longer predominantly analytic but rethinks the form and its social context. This kind of writing still engages with archivization and analysis but with a different strategy for both. It situates them in the activity of the choreographic and the translation process rather than a final product. Thus, 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.³⁴ This transition was an important theoretical and political move by Foster and it allowed the discipline to firmly establish its place in North American academia and lastingly impact discourses in neighboring disciplines.

The dance history and theory program at Riverside started at a time of major shifts in university and social structures. As Readings postulates, the impact of cultural studies on the Anglo-American university and its focus on culture as no longer determined by national literary tradition or canon shifts “culture” into an umbrella term that no longer has a specific referent (1996, 118). As a result, Readings defines “culture”—and I would add other terms, such as “identity” and possibly “choreography”—as a self-referential site and strategy, which thereby loses its potential for intervention. The application and theorization of these concepts performed valuable work in their initial utilization. Their detachment from concrete social referentiality is not the cause of changes in academia and society but a symptom. Consequently, Readings aligns this “dereferentialization” with the shifts in the function of the university from a nationalizing institution to a transnational corporation. Simultaneously with the end of the Cold War, the site of capital’s self-reproduction also shifted from the nation-state to the global stage. If we align all these developments, then a possible relationship between globalization, corporatization of higher education, and specific poststructuralist strategies of intellectual inquiry come into view. Thus, for our discipline it might be valuable to investigate choreography as a seemingly unmarked strategy and site of inquiry to understand its potential complicity in the globalization process and both its positive and negative effects.³⁵ Such reconsideration of choreography is especially constructive because our discipline is still fairly young and the impact of changes in construction and application of key concepts are felt more acutely. I could envision a similar theorization to the one that Münz attempted for theatricality. This would allow a comprehension of institutional interests in the construction of choreography, its disguises, and even possible hegemonic moves.

Conclusion

National differences in the university and attendant social structures determined the pioneering model for dance studies in each country discussed. Tanzwissenschaft at Leipzig originally served the nation-building demands on education in East Germany with its attention to preservation of the final product of dance through a focus on archivization. Only the fading of East Germany’s national structures provided space for a questioning of archivization as Tanzwissenschaft’s preferred strategy. Surrey created a tangible object through a focus on analysis of all aspects of dance to establish distinct disciplinary methodologies and methods for dance studies. In the postcolonial national space of the United Kingdom, analysis—with its control over the object dance—emulated some of the hidden imperial dominance. The conflict between increasing corporatization of university structures and nationally regulated education furthered the focus on analysis because it provided the necessary disciplinary authority and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1998, 36). Riverside initially strove to create analytic systems for dance studies yet shifted its focus toward choreography as a strategy for the theorization of dancing. Choreography as a seemingly unmarked and neutral structure participates to a certain extent in the globalizing hegemony of North American capital.

The three visions for dance studies and their materialization into three programs theorize dance with distinct, yet not wholly discrete, strategies. None of these approaches to the discipline are monolithic. Rather, they all relate to each other and utilize aspects of each other’s methodologies and those from neighboring disciplines. I have stressed their distinctions to use them as models and to understand their politics in relation to the national and educational contexts in which they exist.³⁶ I am aware that such international comparison and critique in itself is an authoritative and globalizing strategy. As I stated initially, I have been privileged in my ability to move between these national systems through my professional life. However, I want this privilege to further a discussion of relationships, accesses, dominances, and erasures instituted through our disciplinary discourses and structures.

Postscript

I am not calling for the abolition but for a rethinking of any one of these strategies. They have a place in how we think about dance. To that point, archivization is still an important approach.

Save the Tanzarchiv Leipzig!

Currently, the Tanzarchiv (dance archive) Leipzig is to be integrated into the administrative structures of the University of Leipzig. As productive as this may sound, the shift of universities from national institutions to international corporations does not allow for sufficient attention and allocation of resources to the maintaining and theorizing of a former nationalizing instrument. The Tanzarchiv Leipzig is one of the few dance archives in the world, and it not only houses an invaluable collection but is also continually adding works determined to improve the comprehension and extension of the collection.

You can write to Frau Staatsminister Dr. Stange, Sächsisches Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst, Postfach 10 09 20, 01079 Dresden, and to Prof. Dr. Franz Häuser, Rektor Universitaet Leipzig, Ritterstr. 26, 04109 Leipzig,rector@uni-leipzig.de, to demand the independence of the Tanzarchiv. For more information contact the Tanzarchiv atinfo@tanzarchiv-leipzig.de.