ABSTRACT
Few people in education are formally charged with a concern for “educating” the body. Those who are include physical education teachers and teachers of dance. There is, in our schools, little notion of what East Europeans used to call “physical culture,” that is a notion of corporeal development that was seen as part of an integrated approach to developing “the whole person.” For the most part, physical education remains distinguished from (and subordinated to) development of the mind. Yet, dance and dance teachers find themselves located most often in the shadowy region of the arts where, in usually vague ways, aesthetic development is referred to as a matter of both heart and mind, body and intellect, and imagination and skill. Little work has been done to show how dancers come to understand their own peculiar location in the world—one that, as this chapter shows, positions them towards the culture in some very contradictory ways. An exploration of how these individuals think about their work and their lives might illuminate the larger contradictions of the culture as it relates to questions of body, knowledge, and meaning. As we will see here dance, like all aesthetic practices, struggles with its tendencies towards social critique and transformation, and its position as a peripheral, isolated, and alienating set of experiences.
