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Dance Discourses: Keywords In Dance Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2012

André Lepecki
Affiliation:
New York University

Extract

The formation of what Randy Martin has called “critical dance studies” (1998) has gained increased momentum over the past decade. Martin's notion of critical dance studies clarified how dance scholarship was being reshaped by the explicit inclusion of critical theory in its methodologies and epistemologies. One of the major consequences for dance studies in embracing critical theory was the identification of dancing and choreographic practices as being also theory. Understanding dance as theory is not equivalent to seeing dance as the sole provider of the theoretical tools it needs for its own analysis (this would be intolerably solipsistic). Rather, it means that dance becomes a privileged practice ready to provide analytical tools for theorizing other areas of social performances: politics, culture, formations of disciplines and their bodies (docile or resistant). Dance is a mode of theorization that theory itself would need in order to address the social and political problematic brought by issues close to dance such as mobilization, embodiment, subjectivities, participation, representation, desire, discipline, control, etc.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2012

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References

Works Cited

Foster, Susan Leigh. 1986. Reading Dancing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Avery. 1997. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.Google Scholar
Lepecki, André. 1994. “Rethinking Words: A Field Trip in Dance Criticism.” Contact Quarterly 19(2), 2327.Google Scholar
Martin, Randy. 1998. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar