About Dance Studies, From the Dark Side

I have to admit I am slightly suspicious about the push in dance studies to proclaim the territory of knowledge specific to dance.  How is this not just a way to justify dance as an academic specialization, thereby proclaiming the need for more Departments of Dance, more Administrators of Dance, and more lines of funding for Dance?  I am questioning whether this push to demarcate dance serves knowledge –or power structures.

I am really crossing over to the dark side today.

Asking this question has the effect of shooting my own self in the foot.  As a scholar in dance, I am supposed to want funding to justify academic activity in dance.  Plus I would like to have money for groceries.  I would like to have a job.  The practical side of me says, yes, you need to be clear about what dance does and what dance knows so that someone will pay you to work in, and write about, dance.

Another side says, “what is it all for?” This side of me would rather exit stage left and grow my own radishes while dancing naked in the moonlight in my garden than to participate in this circling of the wagons.

I should give some context–several events have brought me to this state.  First of all, I am taking a Ph.D. level class at the moment.  It is the most idea-heavy dance class I have taken thus far and has involved discussion of extensive readings on the history of analysis of movement.  I’ve never been one to argue that we need to just stop thinking about what it means and just dance, but this class is threatening to push me over the edge.  I am suddenly remembering my experience with the  Forsythe Symposium last year – that of being overwhelmed with conceptual thinking, feeling unable to keep up and synthesize, and starved for sensory experience and information, which feels so much more real to me personally.

There is also the fact that I personally miss performing, and creative activity in general.  I have whined enough about this and will leave it at that for now, and add that this is getting better.  I’ve got some things in the cooker.

Then there was something Norah Zuniga-Shaw mentioned in her presentation of Synchronous Objects to my PhD class the other day.  She told an anecdote of a presentation of her research to a group of musicologists, whose initial reaction was to wonder why the dancers in “One Flat Thing Reproduced” were not dancing to the music.  To me, this, and other exposure I have to the field of musicology, causes me to think of that field as a closed, antiquated, self-referential academic dinosaur.  Is this really the direction that dance wants to go?

I also had a talk this morning with someone who attended the discussion at the Wexner last night between painter Luc Tuymans and curator TJ Clark.  The discussion apparently turned to the idea of painting as a site of knowledge in itself.  From the sounds of it Clark credited Tuymans with reinvigorating painting after the postmodern breakdown of the form.  I am fine with the idea of using and reusing a form for the layers of information it can then convey.  I do not hold with any evolutionary ideas that say we must always push to the next form, new forms, and thus discard painting.  But something about the story makes me wonder if these two had other motivations to justify painting as a valid and living art form?

I am suspicious of the academic need to maintain existing forms for the sake of power structures.  I would rather see dance as a tradition die off than to have it be preserved in formaldehyde.

In my flair for the dramatic, I may be setting up an unecessary dialectic again.  Is it really vitality and creativity vs. academic specificity, or can I reframe this as a both/and situation?