Dance Narratives and Fantasies of Achievement

Abstract

It is surprising how negligent sociology and cultural studies have been of dance. As a leisure practice, a performance art and as a textual and representational form, dance continues to evade analysis on anything like the scale on which other expressive forms have been considered. And while dance theory and dance criticism are well-developed fields in their own right they do not offer the kind of broader social and cultural analysis which is still so much needed. Dance history tends to be either empirical (and anecdotal) or else collapsed into the biographical details of great dancers. Some of this work is, of course, a useful resource for the sociologist of dance. It is here that we come across the many accounts of the impact of Isadora Duncan’s techniques, and the descriptions of the network of artists, painters and dancers, mostly Russian exiles who came to live in Paris in the early years of the century. The immensely interesting biography of Nijinsky, written by his widow in 1933 (with a postscript in the 1958 edition) provides a fascinating glimpse of dance culture and its links with the other high arts in the early years of the century.¹

At first the child sat numbed, tense. Then chills began going up and down her spine. Her hands clenched. She could feel the nails piercing the flesh of her palms, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, only this — only loveliness mattered … Yes, she would dance — and nothing would stop her, nothing, nothing in the world.

Gladys Malvern, Dancing Star, London, Collins, 1965

So what will be a girl’s reactions? … She dances, thereby constructing for herself a vital subjective space … The dance is also a way of creating for herself her own territory in relation to the mother.

Luce Irigaray, ‘The Gesture in Psychoanalysis’, in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed T. Brennan, London, Routledge, 1989