Let me now turn to a specific illustration of these thoughts: the medium of dance.
It would, of course, have been possible to consider a number of other performing
arts as exemplification, for example music, theatre, opera, or performance art. And
it is important to remember that most performances do not exist in just one
medium of expression; for example, dance nearly always involves music and music
very often involves dance (Kemp 1996). Again, bodily skills are often taught across
different media of expression: actors may learn some dance skills and dancers some
acting skills, for example. But dance suits my purposes well. For a start, since at
least the 1960s writers on dance have been attempting to grapple with the issues
raised in this chapter (cf. Langer 1953; Sheets-Johnson 1966) and though in the
early years they often did so in undifferentiated and abstracted ways, dance studies
now provide a substantial and important archive of work which emphasizes social
and cultural difference, not least in dance’s use of spaces. Then, dance has an extra-
ordinarily rich history which, in part, can be regarded as an attempt to understand
what dance is about – by dancing. Thus dance has been the focus of attempts
to harness the body to totalitarian regimes, it has been the means of explicit or
dissimulated resistance, it has been a focus of high modernism, it is one of the key
means of mass acculturation, and so on. This is a history that can tell of medieval
dance manias, the ‘ring shout’ of African-American slave cultures, and the court
ballets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the jitterbug, disco,
and raves. Moving on, dance is important for other reasons. In particular, as one
of the key means of performance, it is posing the question that many who write
about performance want answered; it has become an increasingly central mode
of cultural expression, all the way from the street to the boardroom (George 1998),
as a contemplation which values improvisation and encourages attunement to
emergent form; and it is one of the chief means of knowingly constituting virtual
spaces through choreographic and other performance methods, all of which are
now routinely taught. And, last, dance has become a crucial political moment in
modern feminist thought. Indeed it is often difficult to separate writing on dance
and feminist writing.^24
Dance suits my purposes well for one other reason too. It has proved – and still
proves – peculiarly difficult to write about. Three reasons recur in the literature. First,
because though dance’s chief characteristics are clearly involved with generating
embodied expression and affect, they do so in ways which are often non-
representational. We might even think of dance as embodying a sixth kinaesthetic,
proprioceptive sense, the sensation providing awareness of movement and the
position of body parts (Stewart 1998). Second, because dance is, like much other
performance, an art of the now: ‘we have created and studied a discipline based
on that which disappears, and that which cannot be preserved or, posted’ (Phelan
1998: 8). Dance is a ‘one time only’ phenomenon, even when it involves repetition
of a number of performances. Third, because dance, as ‘meaning’ in motion
(Desmond 199 7 ), is not easily recorded. For many writers, video and other means
of recording lose much of what dance performance is about, rendering it sterile,
filtering out exactly the things dance knows that are worth knowing which skid
beyond the figure. In any case, until recently, there were few accessible systems
Afterwords 139