ABSTRACT
National dance culture embraces obviously the art forms of dance and mime seen in the theatre and outside the theatre as well as folk dance and social dance and dance education wherever this takes place. It is not remembered always, though, that national dance and mime culture embrace other aspects of these arts sometimes inadequately considered and supported. These other aspects receive inadequate consideration because they are seen still to be marginal to professional performance or to the network of national folk dance activity or to formal educational provision notwithstanding unrest around the dance element of the national curriculum. Yet these aspects become more and more important the more our society changes its values under the impact of new economic and social structures and technological change. There is no way that a book of this nature could present the detail of each of these aspects to which references have been made in the general argument. The portrait of national dance culture would be incomplete, however, without some extra indication of why I drew attention to these aspects in the first place and why they are significant, socially and artistically, to the rest of the dance culture of which they are a part. I present here, therefore, a taste-no more-of seven such aspects in appendices about the dance and physical education controversy, dance and dance scholarship in higher education, images of community dance, new cultural contributions to British dance, youth dance, dance with the elderly and handicapped, dance and cultural policy for Europe.
