As Brooks Schmitz recognized, the improvement of dance education will arise from a better understanding of the dance teacher's knowledge in relation to its pedagogical delivery. Although research on teacher knowledge has become a major focus of research in general education (Elbaz 1993; Leinhardt 1990; Schön 1983; Shulman 1986), such research is absent in dance.

Iranian women's comic improvised traditional theatre is a rich and important, but little-known, source of performative and textual material that has been rarely documented or discussed by serious students of folklore and dance, either in Iran or in the West. I argue that this amateur theatrical form performed and created by women for other women is the single most important source representing the multivocality of traditional Iranian women of all classes. Both in content and performance, these theatrical plays or games are a unique form of expression that needs several analytic approaches to elucidate its meaning and place in women's lives as well as in the wider area of traditional Iranian performance practices.

The term coined by S. A. ‘Enjavi-Shirazi, the Iranian folklorist and literary scholar, to describe the theatrical plays performed by and for women, bazi-ha-ye namayeshi, is probably best rendered in English as ‘theatrical’ or ‘dramatic’ plays. The bazi-ha (ha denotes the inanimate plural in Persian) are basically folk or traditional plays and games (bazi can mean either play or game, namayeshi translates as dramatic) that are primarily created and performed domestically by women throughout many parts of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan.

In introducing and teaching art-critical skills—i.e., the skills of description, analysis, interpretation, and judgment—the greatest challenge for teachers of college and university dance students is to teach them confidently to formulate interpretations of the dances they see. With modest effort and practice students are able to gain proficiency in describing the visible features of a dance, as well as in marshaling descriptive/analytical evidence into defensible reasons for an aesthetic judgment. But the concept of interpretation is often difficult for students to grasp for two reasons. First, interpretation is tied to the philosophically slippery term “meaning.” Second, there is little consensus among theorists, artists, critics, and educators on what “interpretation” actually is, or how to go about doing it. This uncertainty in the professional ranks naturally filters down to students, causing some of them to grow nervously silent when faced with questions about meaning in dances and other works of art. Once silenced, of course, students are more likely to accept at face value the interpretive arguments of others rather than to develop their own aesthetic perspectives.

If students are to become critically literate, however, it is imperative for dance educators to explore with them various approaches to interpretation. Only then is it possible to present to students—as I will try to do here—an account of interpretation that they will find sensible, easy to articulate, and directly applicable in their own critical practice.