Abstract
A burgeoning interest in popular dance came to the fore in the 2001 winter edition of Dance Research Journal, which was devoted to ‘social and popular dance’. That an entire issue centred on dance practices situated outside the hallowed ground of the theatre dance canon indicated a nascent shift in dance studies towards an increasingly relativist position. In the introduction, editor Julie Malnig (2001) comments that the dances which fall within this category reveal a wide range of forms, skill levels, degrees of professionalism and performance contexts. Yet this potentially rich diversity also encounters vexing questions of classification. As Malnig asserts, ‘one of the fascinating aspects about the category of social dance itself is … the continually fluid interchange among what we call social, vernacular, and popular dances’ (2001, p. 7). Yet she only remarks on the leakiness of these terms rather than providing any delineation of their distinct characteristics. While Storey (2003) suggests that definitions of the popular are both constructed and reconceptualized by intellectuals, I would argue that the meanings and values attached to categories of popular culture carry currency within the social world. It is for this reason that I focus on the question ‘what is popular dance’?
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