ABSTRACT
The author discusses the philosophy of dance, beginning with Cohen’s distinction among ritual, social, and theatrical dance, noting that competitive dance, which plausibly counts as sport, does not fit neatly into these categories. Artistic dance is framed as paradigmatic. The author defends Beardsley’s theory of dance from criticism by Carroll and Banes based on task dances and then critically evaluates problematic claims in McFee’s theory: that dancers are not artists, that dance on film is not really dance, and that dance means what the choreographer intended. Considering sportification, unlike chess and videogames, dance may be sportified, in certain cases, because it involves gross physical skill and is performed in nonvirtual environments. Despite the potential overlap between dance and sport, however, the tension between sport and art remains.
