Editor's Preface

Extract

Dance research has grown tremendously in recent years. In striving to develop significant methodologies and approaches individual researchers have turned to other disciplines to explore their modes of inquiry. Dance researchers have become immersed in the theories and ways of such areas as biography, deconstructionism, ethnography, feminism, linguistics, phenomenology, and semiotics, and have applied the approaches they found to dance research.

In June, 1989, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro hosted and cosponsored a Congress on Research in Dance regional conference titled Modes of Inquiry: Critical Issues in Dance Scholarship. The preliminary call for papers stated:

Conferences on dance research focus on the products of scholarship. The processes which led to the products, and the issues that arose from those processes, are often left undisclosed and unquestioned.

Research methodologies have the potential to reveal and to illuminate. They provide a lens which gives sharper focus to some elements while masking others. A primary question becomes, what is revealed and what remains concealed by a particular methodological approach? Methodologies provide order and language to inquiry and, as a result, research reflects the order and language of the method as clearly as it does the phenomenon.