ABSTRACT
An important challenge facing teachers of dance analysis today is to achieve a balance between a systematic and thorough approach to dance study (including dance analysis and choreography – and I see these two as intimately linked) and one that is appropriately flexible, inclusive and open-ended. So one wants to draw upon sound theoretical foundations and encourage attention to detail, but at the same time avoid the prescriptive and formulaic. This, of course, is much easier said than done. Postmodern choreographies seem to pose problems for traditional models of dance analysis in terms of their choreographic construction, as well as the sorts of statements that they make. It follows that those concepts of dance analysis that base dance’s perceptual features on temporal, spatial and dynamic qualities will be inadequate for the discussion of dances whose central concerns provide a challenge to these qualities, as postmodern choreographies arguably do. Yet such concepts are embedded in widely employed models for dance analysis.
