Dancing on the Canon

Abstract

In Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, dance scholar Julie Malnig (2009, p. 1) describes popular dance as ‘a kind of poor relation within the scholarly hierarchy’. She calls upon the work of Brooks McNamara to argue that, while the grand visions of cultural production are revered within the academy, popular forms of entertainment traditionally remain ‘hidden in the recesses of culture’ (Malnig, 2009, p. 1).¹ Although the publication of Malnig’s anthology indicates that popular dance no longer occupies such a marginalized position, it nevertheless raises the questions why we might privilege one artistic practice over another and how we make judgements of worth through our intellectual pursuits. In his essay ‘The Good, the Bad and the Indifferent: Defending Popular Culture from the Populists’ (1991), sociologist Simon Frith suggests not only that Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is superior to a Mills and Boon romance novel, but that ‘the Pet Shop Boys are a better group than U2 and that Aerosmith has no value at all’ (1991, p. 105). In response, one might wonder whether it is his position as a university professor, being a self-proclaimed popular music fan or a precious universal quality located in these artists and their works that affords him the credentials to make such indisputable assessments of cultural worth.