ABSTRACT
For excellent reasons, dance academe today is eager to site dance within an interdisciplinary framework, to raise the level of dance scholarship itself by drawing on academic traditions of longer standing, and, by engaging with what is valuable to dance from other disciplines, to lessen the risk of reinventing the wheel. The major thrust of this interdisciplinarity has been towards contextual studies of dance, using models from literary criticism and the social sciences, in a direct response to the key raging academic debates of our times. In recognizing their responsibility to take part in such debates, dance scholars have tended to distance themselves from the analysis of movement structures, those formalist aspects that some would say are special to dance. This essay suggests that this separation does not necessarily have to happen: it attempts to integrate these apparently oppositional perspectives, dance theory and broad cultural theory, and to open a dialogue between them. Indeed, in-depth analysis of structure is seen to make its own special contribution to an understanding of the “broader picture.” I also suggest that the discipline of musicology provides one very useful methodological model for this formalist area of analysis. There is the proviso that one cannot apply every musical idea unreservedly to dance. Nevertheless, in the analysis of dances, especially those without plot, music provides obvious parallels for thinking, or, at least, appropriate starting points for argument. Its theories also relate directly to my focus of study, musical/choreographic relationships, a study that draws together my two areas of specialist training.
