Dance and Writing

From If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution.
André Lepecki reads 'Bodies of the text,' a collection of essays on dance, the body and feminism by Jaques Derrida, Susan Foster and others."
First published in:Ballet-Tanz, August 1995

Thus, the currently and broadly-accepted notion shared by dancers and choreographers, but also by scholars and critics alike, that the art of dance is essentially one that has a privileged and mysterious relationship with the unspoken, the un-utterable, which what is beyond or before language, is historically deconstructed by Foster. Dance was not always the art of what cannot be spoken, and the radical implication of Foster's essay is that this recent divorce between dance and meaning (the gestural and the verbal) also shaped the current relationship between the dance writer, the dance critic, with its object of study. [Emphasis mine]

A couple times at the CDA and other places recently, I feel like I see the edge of the (often sublimated) belief that dance is the "art of what cannot be spoke" and therefore also what can not be spoken about, something I just don't believe. It seems also related to the "dance is universal" – which I also have trouble with.

Yes, dance is about the body and how they move through and occupy space – and yes we all have bodies, but the way we understand and move them is largely constructed by our histories and influences.

And - that's totally fine. It's good even. "Universal" is too often code for "dominant" and "un-utterable" for "don't think so much."

And it's hard to talk and write about dance, but not impossible. And the trying is very important, since it's a part of moving any form forward.

It always good to find that some of the idea's that we take for "always have been that way", weren't always that way. That there was a kind of social decision to make them that way. It means there can be a kind of social decision to make them another way. Or 8 other ways.