ABSTRACT
Dance scholarship is developing at a pace never experienced before, its energy and creativity recalling the choreographic outpouring of the 1960s and 1970s “dance boom” years. A decade ago we could expect little more than a handful of forward-thinking work each year. This has expanded into a flood of books, articles, conferences and symposia on dance history, criticism, and theory. Nor has growth meant simply an increase in the flow of material being produced. Ann Daly remarked in 1991 that dance scholarship had both the potential to enrich what we already know of dance “as an aesthetic, cultural, and political phenomenon,” and to lead it “into a more prominent place in the humanities and social sciences” (1991:50). The potential Daly saw a few short years ago is being realized in a host of studies that puts the dancing body at the center of research cutting across a multitude of disciplinary lines. This new dance scholarship is flourishing on both sides of the Atlantic, as witnessed by such recent conferences as “Written on the Body,” sponsored by the American Dance Guild in 1994 at Denison University in Ohio; a multidisciplinary conference devoted to the work of Sir Frederick Ashton entitled “Following in Sir Fred’s Footsteps” at the Roehampton Institute, London in 1994; “Engendering Dance: Engendering Knowledge: Dance, Gender and Interdisciplinary Dialogues in the Arts,” presented by the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) at Texas Women’s University in 1994; and “Border Tensions,” held at the University of Surrey in 1995, which explored the changing character of discourse in dance.
