Dance Studies/Cultural Studies

Abstract

In the mid-1990s several articles appeared in the dance literature calling for a greater alliance between dance scholarship and cultural studies. More recently, dance scholarship has come to be labeled “dance studies,” suggesting that such a link has occurred. Since interdisciplinarity is a key element of cultural studies, it is appropriate to investigate interdisciplinarity in dance studies by examining dance's relationship to cultural studies. This genealogical task, though, is not as straightforward as it might seem. Cultural studies' relationship to the disciplines has not been stable over its half-century of existence. Interdisciplinarity, tied so closely to cultural studies' idea of its own freedom and political mission, has proved difficult to hang onto—so difficult, in fact, that today some consider the field to be in crisis. To complicate matters further, dance and cultural studies developed along different paths; consequently, interdisciplinarity within dance studies is not always conceptualized in the way it is in cultural studies. Cultural studies was initially meant as a political and social intervention that purposefully avoided creating theories of its own, while dance research, long tied to the disciplines of history and anthropology, not only adopted many of the theories and methods of these fields but also developed theories and methods of its own as an aid in analyzing the human body in motion. Where and how, then, do dance and cultural studies meet on the grounds of interdisciplinarity? This is not an idle question; cultural studies has had a major impact on arts and humanities scholarship, and as cultural studies reaches a critical moment of reexamination, new questions arise as to the role of interdisciplinarity, both in cultural studies and in the fields it has so profoundly influenced.