ABSTRACT

The philosophical problems raised by dances like Accumulation can be quite vexing. But in our opinion, such dances are not counter-examples to Beardsley’s claim that dances are made up of actions and never mere bodily motions. Our reasons for believing this are, for the most part, contained in our gloss of Room Service. We have admitted that the search for the fundamentals of dance by postmodern choreographers is utopian. Making dances like Accumulation, which are designed to imply that dance essentially consists of bodily motions, requires that the basic movements chosen for the dance be purposively made so that a) they are not straightforwardly classifiable in terms of traditional categories of dance actions (e.g., Beardsley’s “suggestings”) and b) they are intelligible, due to their historical context, as rejections of the traditional categories. In meeting the first requirement, each movement is a type of action-namely, a refraining. Specifically, each movement is a studied omission of the movement qualities found in ballet and modern dance. In the context of the sixties, this sort of refraining implied a commitment to the idea that dance consists primarily of bodily motions. However, the movements used to articulate that position were actually anything but mere bodily motions. They were actions, refrainings whose implicit disavowal of the traditional qualities of dance movements enabled them to be understood as polemical. Thus, though we feel that certain developments in postmodern dance, specifically task dances, threaten Professor Beardsley’s concept of dance, we do not believe that the existence of dances like Accumulation challenge Beardsley’s point that dances consist of actions rather than mere bodily motions.