Encounter #1 Hand-drawn Spaces: I step around the corner and into a small room, pitch black except for the dull glow of three projection screens; the center one flat in front of me, the other two angling out like welcoming arms reaching to the edges of the darkness. I stay back, keeping what distance is allowed me, so I can take it all in. With little fanfare, a figure moves into view. The figure is clearly a representation of a human, a biped whose movement quality is instinctually recognizable, yet it lacks all of the features by which we categorize and contextualize in that instant of perceiving an “other.” (Check the order of your personal list and see how you were socialized—Gender? Age? Race? Ability?) Instead, this figure is formed, or perhaps I should say indicated, by lines: a chest cavity of swirling blue; a kinked, mustard-yellow appendage extending out from what seem like perpetually hunched shoulders.

From even a few feet away I feel a bit detached from this “dancer.” Lacking individuality in the way I am used to experiencing it, I don't feel compelled to attend to its dancing. So I step closer. Here, almost surrounded by the screens, my customary fourth wall protection is lost. As if on stage, I finally join this dance, beginning to feel some of that sense, that connection—my body to your body, your moving to my moving—that has kept me in this field through many lean years. Yet who am I connecting with?

More figures begin to appear and disappear: some retreat out of sight; some seem to step off into the darkness only to emerge on a different screen; and some eerily advance at me, growing into looming giants just moments before fading into darkness. It's as if they are attempting to leave their screened-in world, but disappointed to find themselves no more than projected pixels of light.

Dance critic Walter Terry was in the audience the evening of Rosalind Pierson's last, glorious performance with Virginia Tanner's Children's Dance Theatre (CDT). In his review for the New York Herald Tribune of that July 1953 Jacob's Pillow performance, Terry discussed the girls' connections to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, described the outdoor performance setting, the program, and the children as “wonderfully disciplined yet gloriously free in movement.” He concluded his performance description with this paragraph:

I don't remember my first dancing lesson; I only remember begging my mother to send me to tap class with my best friend Kenny. I wanted a pair of shiny tap shoes and I wanted to be as special as he was. My mother, a dean's wife and an admitted theatrical snob, found tap dancing “inappropriate.” After surveying a number of university wives, she sent me to a young woman who was to make history in the teaching of creative dance for children. Her name was Virginia Tanner.

At that time, Tanner's school was in a Victorian building perched high on a hill just north of Temple Square in Salt Lake City. The McCune School of Music and Arts was a very spooky place to a six-year-old who was scared of almost everything, but I braved the dark staircase with its marble busts and dark red carpeting as I climbed to the sunny top floor. In time, I learned to bypass the busts by taking the spiral servants' staircase at the back of the building, which seemed a much safer route. My climb was always rewarded with an hour's bliss.

I wish now that I could remember in detail what we did in those classes. I remember learning rhythm patterns from sized and colored pieces of paper and dancing them out. I remember making “toe toast” and sailing to far off places in a sailboat made of my rocking body and my unfurling arms. I remember being a “cute little grub,” a stalk of wheat swaying in the wind, a donkey hee-hawing. I remember dancing out my name and feeling that the movement version defined me far better than words ever could.

I first met Selma Jeanne Cohen on the page, in the early 1970s, as a reader of her unique anthology The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief. This ingenious volume, containing autobiographical essays by José Limón, Anna Sokolow, Erick Hawkins, Donald McKayle, Alwin Nikolais, Pauline Koner, and Paul Taylor, aims to show the variety of approaches to modern dance in the wake of Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, and it does so, brilliantly; the essays concentrate on issues of choreography, performance, and aesthetics, and while the writers' voices are quite varied, their tone is consistently, and happily, focused and plainspeaking. Ultimately, of course, the triumph is Selma Jeanne's. As the editor, she reined in these diverse temperaments by asking each of them to address two questions: What are your general thoughts about modern dance? What would you do, given infinite resources, if you were commissioned to make a dance on the theme of the Prodigal Son? A canny choice, since the subject, more or less identified with George Balanchine's ballet, is both unexpected and non-competitive for a modern-dance choreographer. One might think that Selma Jeanne's unprecedented use of a common intellectual and imaginative focus for a book of dancer autobiographies to produce intellectually and imaginatively satisfying statements might have set a model for similar volumes. However, the only interviewer, at least to my knowledge, to adopt such a technique was Solomon Volkov, who, for his 1992 Balanchine's Tschaikovsky, teased his reluctant interviewee into speaking publicly and provocatively on many aspects of ballet, for an audience of all ages, on the premise that he would be discussing the music of Tschaikovsky for children.

In 1953, we sat in a small, harshly lit room in the old High School of Performing Arts building on 46th Street and Broadway, our legs hanging, perched or straggled on chairs in front of us. We were tired from hours of technique and rehearsals, coming straight from the studio in our worn tights and warmers. A small woman with red curls and glasses spoke intensely about Louis XIV's court ballets; she evoked a world of magic, opulence, and beauty. I remember looking around me and thinking that if I had lived then, things would be very different. And I also remember thinking how kind of this woman to let us sit in such an unladylike way in her Dance History class.

Selma Jeanne Cohen has always understood her purpose in the world, and she tolerated many mishaps for her goal—to create an academic discipline out of this amusing art form. Tired as we were, we were transfixed by the clarity of her detailed descriptions of the seventeenth-century ballet form. She was straightforward, substantive, and loving.

During the course of a summer dance workshop I attended many years ago, I learned a section of Doris Humphrey's Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor. Later, on occasion, I would “teach” this section to students thinking I was adding to their understanding of dance and its practice. As luck would have it, I was teaching this section again to students at the University of Wisconsin when one of my mentors, Claudia Melrose, stopped by to observe my work. Following class Claudia approached me and said, “That was very nice Tom, but what were they learning?” I replied, “They were learning a section of Humphrey's Passacaglia.” Claudia responded, “No, Tom. What were they learning?” In a flash I realized that I couldn't answer her; I hadn't really thought about the “what.” I realized the need to make a personal search for substance in dance education. Being at Wisconsin— “ground zero” for dance in higher education—I turned to the writings of Margaret H'Doubler and found in them a way of thinking that continues to inform my professional development. In many respects, H'Doubler's lifework acts as my point of departure in educational dance. As time has distanced me from my moment of epiphany, I find myself ever more in debt to the legacy of this remarkable woman.

This essay looks closely at the first stage of H'Doubler's development as a dance educator. Between the years 1916 and 1926, only a ten-year span, H'Doubler evolved from a women's basketball coach, admittedly ignorant of dance as art or in education, into the nation's foremost academic authority on the subject. Her vision of dance matured quickly and with amazing clarity; the moment of epiphany, while lying on her back in a studio in Carnegie Hall, served as the source for what she called a “way of thinking” that would serve her for the rest of her professional life. An assessment of H'Doubler's evolution as a dance educator during this period, and an analysis of her development along with her peers and colleagues in the field, provides important contexts from which to evaluate her subsequent contributions to dance in American education.

Every so often I receive a request to anthologize my 1987 article, “The Balanchine Woman: Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers” (Daly 1987), in which I used the feminist theory of the male gaze to analyze a prototypical pas de deux. So far, I have declined each one, or proposed that the article be published in tandem with “Dance History and Feminist Theory: Reconsidering Isadora Duncan and the Male Gaze,” a 1992 essay that critiqued the very theory that had enabled the earlier work (Daly 1992). While I am grateful that “Hummingbirds” made a meaningful contribution to our understanding of how feminist theory could be a useful framework for dance scholarship, I also appreciate that both feminist theory and dance studies have come a long, long way since the groundbreaking paradigm of the male gaze.

When I wrote “Hummingbirds,” feminist theory was the most creative, rigorous, and productive discourse around. It articulated what had emerged as the fundamental issue of twentieth-century arts and humanities: representation. Feminist theory infused dance studies with a fresh, compelling set of questions that were quickly taken up, especially by younger scholars, critics, and artists. We were challenged to shift our angle of vision and expand the field of our vision. As a result, our critical acuity was honed, the dancing we chose to study became more inclusive, dialogue was opened with other disciplines, and dance literature as a whole grew more incisive, complex, and engaged.

But no question, framework, or theory ever remains fixed. I began to question the theory of the male gaze almost as soon as “Hummingbirds” was published. When I attempted to adapt the model to my historical research on Isadora Duncan, I bumped up against its limits, which led me to other theories and more questions. It also led me to critique the then flourishing “success-or-failure” brand of feminist criticism, whose brittle, reductive analyses were not only unconvincing scholarship but problematic politics as well. So I wrote “Dance History and Feminist Theory” as a companion piece to “Hummingbirds.”

Work by children in every art form has been both romanticized and criticized by adults. Child art has been emulated as “natural” by artists seeking to free themselves from social and historical conventions (Lowenfeld and Brittain 1987; Read 1957, 1973) and to reconnect with qualities of purity and simplicity (Coleman 1998). Such values have been challenged by those seeking a rationale for instructional programs in the arts (Clark, Day, and Greer 1987). It often seems that educators view children as incomplete adults, in need of education and training to make them mature as well as civilized (Torgovnick 1990). This may be why the ideas and opinions of children are rarely found in research literature, even in education.

Similarly, books about how to teach young people rarely include the perspective of the student. Except in child-centered programs for young children, teachers and educational administrators generally decide what children should learn and then, at least sometimes, assess to see if it has been learned. Very little is known about how young students experience the educational activities designed by adults or construct meaning from them.

Since the early years of the twentieth century it has gradually come to pass that virtually anything, anything at all, can be considered a work of art. A sliced up cow can be art, and so can a pile of bricks or a hole in the ground. In the domain of dance, a choreographer having difficulty creating a dance work may, for example, simply walk onstage and describe for the audience how her work might have looked had she completed it. Or she can list the work in the concert program with an explanation that it will not be performed because it does not actually exist. The most advanced theories of art in circulation today would, without hesitation, confer the status of art upon either of these options as easily as upon an actual dance.

How did it come to be that such things as these could be art? The quick answer is that it is one of the legacies of aesthetic modernism to have made it possible for virtually anything to be art. As Thomas McEvilley explains:

In this essay I propose new initiatives I hope to see in U.S. dance studies in the next decade. Rather than attempting a comprehensive literature survey, or citing all possible relevant material, I want to identify what appears to me to be terrae incognitae—unmapped and un- or under-explored realms of dance research—and to suggest that we collectively consider what the effects might be if they were brought into focus. While there are many such terrae incognitae, I want to concentrate here on issues relating to ethnography, suggesting that we expand our methods of analysis to include more ethnographies of institutions and audiences. While some work in these areas is already part of “dance studies,” it does not predominate and has been overshadowed by work on the history or representational practices of concert dance, especially modern dance and ballet.

I suggest that we use the potential of fieldwork—that is, the sustained participation in and observation of communities, institutions, and practices—and apply this widely to a variety of sectors in the U.S., including modern dance and ballet companies, dance institutions such as archives, training schools, community dance centers, and even our own scholarly organizations. While I hope there will be more ethnographies of dancing communities, like the contact improvisers Cynthia Cohen Bull analyzes, or the dancers of the Philippine ritual dance form sinulog that Sally Ness engages, there has already been some movement in this direction and those books provide excellent models. I want to emphasize here, instead, the important potential of critical ethnographic examination of institutions and organizations. These investigations will parallel new initiatives in anthropology, where scholars such as Richard Handler and Eric Gable have taken as the subject of their analyses The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and historical site, and Sharon Traweek, who has made a point of studying physics labs (1).

At the MTV awards show in September 1998, Madonna performed a spiritual song in a transparent white T-shirt with three Indian Odissi dancers in their classical regalia. Within two days of this event a representative of a Hindu religious sect, the Vaisnavs, condemned Madonna for debasing Hinduism and Indian women. A significant intercultural event, which had been generating pride for some sections of the Indian-American community, had once again exposed the lack of context and historicity in interculturalism. Odissi is not merely an aesthetically pleasing dance form from eastern India; its history is embedded in various ancient fertility cults tied to ritualistic Hindu temple worship by women dancers known as “mahari(s).” The dance was also performed by young male dancers known as “gotipua(s),” who performed outside the temple. Frederique Marglin traces Odissi to the powerful cult of Chaitanya (a Vaisnavite saint reformer) in the sixteenth century (1985). She explains that, like many indigenous dance forms, it was simply called nacha before its revival in the 1950s by dance scholars and male teachers. Thus, the dance is a product of a complex mix of Hindu nationalism, regional chauvinism, and national revivalism and is embedded in patriarchal views of the role and function of women in society. Madonna's commercial interculturalism failed to take note of this: By trying to glamorize an exotic tradition she, unsurprisingly, offended the self-appointed bearers of that tradition.

Phenomenology is a method for studying experience. I employ this method in my research because it provides a first-person voice for the dancer, the choreographer, and the teacher/therapist in me. Oddly enough, the critic in all of us already uses a first-person voice when describing and interpreting the dance from our immediate experience of it, and telling others what we think about it. Written criticism formalizes the critic's sensate proximity to the dance. But what about the voice of the dancer in valuing the experience of dance, and the consciousness of the choreographer in making the dance? Where are they accounted for in the formulas for dance research and writing? The objective third-person voice necessary to a particular historical or social angle is more common. Phenomenology has given me a method for intuitive and theoretical reflections on dance from multiple perspectives. Eventually, I contextualize these within the larger framework of phenomenology as a branch of modern philosophy.

I began to write using the tools of phenomenology in 1970 when I became aware that aesthetic discourse on dance was distanced from the actual experience, and that the writers in dance aesthetics, with the notable exception of Susanne Langer, were mostly men. I wanted to use an embodied voice and to see if a woman in dance might add to the field of phenomenology. My interests eventually led me to developmental psychology, a field that has much in common with phenomenology (2). Maxine Sheets-Johnstone had already broken the ice in The Phenomenology of Dance, but she had written more analytically than descriptively, clarifying the formative (creative) basis of dance with values intrinsically located in the moving self (3). I built upon this, but I wanted to weave the intuitive voice of the dancer into a descriptive aesthetics, slipping from the first-person experiential voice to analytical third-person theory, as phenomenology does. These were the goals of my descriptive aesthetics: Dance and the Lived Body (1987) (4). Later I began to explain phenomenology as a research method for dance in my article for Dance Research Journal, “A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance Through Phenomenology” (1991); and in “Witnessing the Frog Pond” (1999), I developed this more explicitly (5).

Standing at the beginning of a new century, but still faced with what was referred to at the end of the old one as the “politics of difference,” I find myself struggling with the daunting task of discussing extremely complex issues associated with dance scholarship. The issues I refer to revolve around the—all too familiar—divisions of class, gender, race, and other central signifiers of identity that have dominated a substantial part of scholarly discourse in various disciplines over the past two decades.

It is unrealistic to think that the change of the millennium clock has ushered in a new age of enlightenment that will ameliorate the kinds of confrontations over group identity that have, by now, become routine in American society. But it does not seem unrealistic to hope that a new level of clarity can be achieved in scholarly debates involving issues of racial identity and the arts—debates that, in the past, have elicited reactions ranging from indifference, to defensiveness, to volatility.

As an individual who has begun to take an active part in the divisive dialogues surrounding identity, art, and culture in turn-of-the-century America, and as an African American scholar involved in the growing field of dance studies, I have chosen to place issues of race at the forefront of the various identity markers that divide the human family into more circumspect sub-groups. In spite of the progress toward inclusiveness that dance as a performing art and as a field of intellectual pursuit has made, I believe that racially proscriptive thinking still exerts its presence with surprising force in different aspects of our discipline. My realization of the significant role that racial divisiveness plays in our society, our art, and our scholarship greatly shaped the direction of my research and is, indeed, reflected in much of the dance research undertaken by African American scholars today (1).

In 1991, when my essay, “On Dance Ethnography,” appeared in this journal, there was a small body of American research in dance that examined movement in cultural context (1). Since then, a radical shift has occurred in American dance scholarship. Cultural critique, with its attention to ethnicity, race, class, and gender, has permeated the academy, and dance historians have turned to sociocultural issues, blurring the boundaries between the sub-fields of dance. We now have a range of theories, methods, and case studies that address the cultural situatedness of dance and movement, a range reflected in the names applied to the subject: “dance ethnology,” “cultural studies in dance,” “ethnochoreology,” “performance studies,” “anthropology of dance,” and “anthropology of human movement.” While long-established paradigms continue to inspire work from structural, symbolic, and functional perspectives, two new trajectories have risen in ethnographic dance studies in this decade.

One trajectory is sociopolitical; it draws on the rapidly developing ideas and language of cultural studies. Here we talk about dance in terms of the “socially constructed nature of human movement” (Reed 1998, 503) and of “bodily theories— armatures of relations through which bodies perform individual, gendered, ethnic, or community identities” (Foster 1995, 8). We discuss globalization, transmigration, de- and re-contextualization, invented communities, kinesthetic homes, all of which address the way dance works and is worked upon in the changing contexts of world politics. We specify whether a dance affirms, resists, re-creates, challenges, undermines, or reenforces the status quo, and sometimes whether it does several of these at once, for we agree that dance as social action can be ambiguous (Desmond 1994) (2).