ABSTRACT
Much of the serious writing about dance over the last ninety years has until recently ignored the question of representations of gender. This is because dance has not been thought of as a representational practice. Consideration of what theatre dance might suggest about the nature of femininity or masculinity has appeared irrelevant to what has generally been thought to be the true nature of dance as art. One can see this idea of dance in two often-stated modernist and formalist views: that the highest standards in dance are permanent, natural and lie outside history; that dance today transcends the outmoded representational forms of the nineteenth-century and earlier European tradition.
