ABSTRACT
The writings on dance collected in this book demonstrate the range and depth of late twentieth-century scholarship and show that dance can now fully claim its status as a culturally significant and intellectually viable field for study. In one sense, of course, dance has been 'studied' throughout the ages and in most cultures. In modern Western history, for example, in the courts of Tudor England and the European Renaissance, skill at dancing was a vital attribute and dancing masters formally disseminated the steps, patterns and essential social and performance etiquette. Dance was not only practised but also studied from various perspectives such as its social function; its anatomical basis; its educational value; the problems and potential of its aesthetics and the theoretical basis of its performance technique.1 This theoretical tradition was sporadic, however, and by the end of the nineteenth century the Victorian moral backlash against dancing prohibited the development of a solid body of serious literature.
