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A Dancer Thinks About ' Dance ' Cross-Culturally
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Copyright Year | 2011 |
| Abstract | Like many girls in America, I started taking dancing lessons at an early age and continued with them for most of my childhood. In my early tvventies, after completing one bachelor's degree, I decided to change directions and study American modern dance full time, entering the dance program at the University of Minnesota. Choosing to study dancing at a university meant that I also began to study the academic disciplines which are concerned with the dance, which meant that my exposure to dance forms from other cultures began slowly to increase. At some point (I don't remember exactly when), I realized that movement is not a universal means of communication. The meanings of specific movements are culturally determined, and persons from tvvo different cultures can misunderstand each other's movement and body language as easily as they can misunderstand each other's spoken languages. As I was introduced to the work of anthropologists who are studying and writing on human movement systems, particularly those of non-western cultures/ I became aware that the way different cultures think about movement and organize movement systems is also far from universal. It is important for dancers (and here I especially mean people studying or performing in western concert dance genres) to realize that the ways in which the dance fits into our culture and the way we determine what is or is not a dance applies only to our culture. There has traditionally been a tendency to see ballet as the ultimate development of the dance and to classify all other forms in relationship to ballet: modern dance considered as a reaction to ballet; 'social', 'folk', 'ethnic', and 'primitive' dances seen as evolutionary precmsors or off-shoots of ballet. In recent years, scholars in many disciplines have begun to examine the ways in which their traditions have been ethnocentric and to attempt to correct that situation. Correcting ethnocentrism in the study of the dance means placing the dances and dance forms of western culture along side of, not above, those of other cultures. It also means acknowledging when dances from other cultures have influenced dance forms and choreographers in our culture. This paper represents a kind of 'personal anthropology' (see Williams 1991: 287-321) concerning ideas encountered through the anthropological study of human movement systems -in particular ideas about the crosscultural use of the concept 'dance' as a classification for human movement and how the use of the term 'dance' and adjectives such as 'primitive' or 'ethnic' contribute to western ethnocentrism. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://jashm.press.illinois.edu/9.3/9-3ADancer_Fenton115-124.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
