Inside/Beside Dance Studies: A Conversation Mellon Dance Studies in/and the Humanities

Introduction

by Noémie Solomon

The conversation that follows is excerpted from two public roundtables that took place at Brown University in June 2013, as part of the Mellon funded initiative Dance Studies in/and the Humanities.¹ Titled respectively “Inside” and “Beside” Dance Studies, the roundtables featured scholars who exchanged thoughts on a series of vital issues at stake for the practice and study of dance in and beyond academic contexts.² The event was located halfway through the course of a weeklong summer seminar that gathered nearly thirty scholars at different career stages—late PhD students, post-doctoral fellows, early-career and senior faculty members—and which unfolded through a series of research presentations, the sharing of pedagogical tools, discussions on publication and professionalization, and reflections on the “state of the field”—what dance studies might need, want, or do in the current critical conjuncture. Through the speakers’ distinct experiences and vantage points, the public platform addressed a constellation of themes immanent and adjacent to that of Dance Studies. This edited conversation, an abbreviated and reorganized notation of sorts, seeks to outline some of the key questions that were discussed that day around dance research: the specificities associated with dance as an object of research and methodological lens, and how choreographic practices and theories might operate as an aperture, triggering a series of new roles and functions for the performing body across broad epistemological and political fields.

Many of the contributions take to task the delimitation of what might sit inside versus beside dance studies. Invoking dance practices’ ongoing engagement with and redefinition of questions of movement and stillness, locations and borders, inclusion and exclusion, the discussants remind us not only of the inherent challenges brought forth by dance’s institutionalization or incorporation within academia, but also some of the potentials it may open up in regard to current crises—particularly those sweeping the arts and humanities in the U.S. Here, dance’s constitutive, restless motions can make forceful and timely interventions in reorganizing regimes of knowledge and perception. And yet, dance’s precariousness as a field or a discipline often prompts anxieties—has it any indigenous methodology? what is the nature of the knowledge it produces if any?—questions to which a series of choreographic, administrative, and political measures respond. Hence the drawing of a distinct territory and the tightening of dance’s borders: its strategic partitioning to the space of the body and the physical, and to that of the studio and the theater. In this light, that which is given to be seen of dance and of the dancing body is utterly political, in a similar fashion to that which is positioned as inside, beside, and outside its study—distinctions that too often seem to reiterate the dichotomy between practice and theory. Not only is dance, since the very inception of the modern discipline of choreography, a battlefield for the shaping of the political body, but it also constitutes a laboratory for subverting and re-assigning the ways in which the body relates to fields of visibility. A series of choreographic experimentations and research gestures thus challenge and re-imagine the relation between that which is inside and beside the dancing body: through emptying out its depths and interiority, or by prompting a series of affective connections between heterogeneous bodies, these acts address and re-function dance’s many techniques, vocabularies, codes, affects, and histories.

The participants also note the ambivalent function of the slash in relation to dance and humanities—Dance in/and the Humanities. What is the nature of the relation at work? Is dance performing an alliance, a critical intimacy, or a gesture toward interdisciplinarity? Does it signal its inclusion and swallowing, as it is disseminated across the humanities...