Dance on Its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies edited by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot (review)

For a couple of decades now, dance scholars have been blessed with a seemingly endless identity crisis. That is, the explosion of dance scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s, and the felicitous proliferation of methodologies this engendered, has led many dance scholars to pursue specific research interests and broad disciplinary queries in tandem. Getting a grip on just what the field is up to has been a shared project, and edited collections have played a pronounced role, particularly for undergraduates, in laying out the state of the field. The origins of dance studies (particularly its debts to anthropology and literary studies), and its rise alongside related critical discourses (particularly cultural and performance studies), made for a motley origin and a constantly pluralizing maturation.

In the 1990s, a series of important collections helped to define the ever-malleable, usually interdisciplinary parameters of dance studies. Collections in the first decade of the 2000s often focused on subdisciplines or specialized lines of inquiry. One of these, Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research, took up the question of methodology head-on, considering the ways in which dance is not only subject to, but productive of, critical theory. Its introduction diagnosed two responses among scholars to the heady theorizations of the ’90s—one that embraced interdisciplinarity, and another that “emphasized the need to find methods and instruments of analysis within dance itself” (Franco and Nordera 2007, 8).

An important new volume of historical and critical essays, Dance on Its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies, edited by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot, enters the disciplinary scrum knowingly. At a few points, its Introduction frames the collection as a response to the project taken up by Dance Discourses, and plants itself firmly in the dance-centered camp. The editors are unambiguous as to why a dance-centric criticism is merited: “In their eagerness to adopt theoretical language from other disciplines, dance scholars have lost fluency in their own language” (4). I suspect that a host of dance scholars would assent to that view, but would greet a concurrent claim more warily. The editors worry that “the body is theorized as a site for the study of race, class, and gender, but many dance students are inadequately equipped to observe and write about bodies in movement,” and likewise that “monolithic assumptions impose themselves on our attention where nuance and sophisticated criticism is needed instead” (4). It is a trend, they claim, that too often leads toward “foregone conclusions.” One faint implication here is that political emphases were imported to dance studies by theoretical models external to dance; a stronger implication is that interdisciplinary emphases obscure rather than illuminate the nuances specific to dance.

Partly anticipating such objections, the editors specify that “the political nature of dance is, we think, inarguable,” but that the “wealth and ambiguity of dance’s history” can best emerge by “examining dances within their own contextual frames” (6–7). In discussing their historiographic impulses, the editors present the project as a progressive one that seeks to include a wider variety of historical actors, and many of the essays keep to that objective. The collection takes an approach that is at once historicist and formalist, reaching toward contingencies particular to dance (for example, prioritizing primary sources like dance notation), and likewise harnessing analytic frameworks particular to dance (for example, Laban Movement Analysis). It would be reductive to suggest that the editors see no place for theory, no value in cross-disciplinary work; rather, they have embraced a dance-outward approach as one means for advancing the field. Whether this dance-centrism is a necessary corrective or a questionable revanchism (or both) will and ought to be the subject of further debate.

Lurking behind this debate is a broad question: has dance studies as a field come far enough along to dance on its own two feet? The collection...