Encounter #1 Hand-drawn Spaces: I step around the corner and into a small room, pitch black except for the dull glow of three projection screens; the center one flat in front of me, the other two angling out like welcoming arms reaching to the edges of the darkness. I stay back, keeping what distance is allowed me, so I can take it all in. With little fanfare, a figure moves into view. The figure is clearly a representation of a human, a biped whose movement quality is instinctually recognizable, yet it lacks all of the features by which we categorize and contextualize in that instant of perceiving an “other.” (Check the order of your personal list and see how you were socialized—Gender? Age? Race? Ability?) Instead, this figure is formed, or perhaps I should say indicated, by lines: a chest cavity of swirling blue; a kinked, mustard-yellow appendage extending out from what seem like perpetually hunched shoulders.

From even a few feet away I feel a bit detached from this “dancer.” Lacking individuality in the way I am used to experiencing it, I don't feel compelled to attend to its dancing. So I step closer. Here, almost surrounded by the screens, my customary fourth wall protection is lost. As if on stage, I finally join this dance, beginning to feel some of that sense, that connection—my body to your body, your moving to my moving—that has kept me in this field through many lean years. Yet who am I connecting with?

More figures begin to appear and disappear: some retreat out of sight; some seem to step off into the darkness only to emerge on a different screen; and some eerily advance at me, growing into looming giants just moments before fading into darkness. It's as if they are attempting to leave their screened-in world, but disappointed to find themselves no more than projected pixels of light.

I first met Selma Jeanne Cohen on the page, in the early 1970s, as a reader of her unique anthology The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief. This ingenious volume, containing autobiographical essays by José Limón, Anna Sokolow, Erick Hawkins, Donald McKayle, Alwin Nikolais, Pauline Koner, and Paul Taylor, aims to show the variety of approaches to modern dance in the wake of Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, and it does so, brilliantly; the essays concentrate on issues of choreography, performance, and aesthetics, and while the writers' voices are quite varied, their tone is consistently, and happily, focused and plainspeaking. Ultimately, of course, the triumph is Selma Jeanne's. As the editor, she reined in these diverse temperaments by asking each of them to address two questions: What are your general thoughts about modern dance? What would you do, given infinite resources, if you were commissioned to make a dance on the theme of the Prodigal Son? A canny choice, since the subject, more or less identified with George Balanchine's ballet, is both unexpected and non-competitive for a modern-dance choreographer. One might think that Selma Jeanne's unprecedented use of a common intellectual and imaginative focus for a book of dancer autobiographies to produce intellectually and imaginatively satisfying statements might have set a model for similar volumes. However, the only interviewer, at least to my knowledge, to adopt such a technique was Solomon Volkov, who, for his 1992 Balanchine's Tschaikovsky, teased his reluctant interviewee into speaking publicly and provocatively on many aspects of ballet, for an audience of all ages, on the premise that he would be discussing the music of Tschaikovsky for children.

In 1953, we sat in a small, harshly lit room in the old High School of Performing Arts building on 46th Street and Broadway, our legs hanging, perched or straggled on chairs in front of us. We were tired from hours of technique and rehearsals, coming straight from the studio in our worn tights and warmers. A small woman with red curls and glasses spoke intensely about Louis XIV's court ballets; she evoked a world of magic, opulence, and beauty. I remember looking around me and thinking that if I had lived then, things would be very different. And I also remember thinking how kind of this woman to let us sit in such an unladylike way in her Dance History class.

Selma Jeanne Cohen has always understood her purpose in the world, and she tolerated many mishaps for her goal—to create an academic discipline out of this amusing art form. Tired as we were, we were transfixed by the clarity of her detailed descriptions of the seventeenth-century ballet form. She was straightforward, substantive, and loving.

Every so often I receive a request to anthologize my 1987 article, “The Balanchine Woman: Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers” (Daly 1987), in which I used the feminist theory of the male gaze to analyze a prototypical pas de deux. So far, I have declined each one, or proposed that the article be published in tandem with “Dance History and Feminist Theory: Reconsidering Isadora Duncan and the Male Gaze,” a 1992 essay that critiqued the very theory that had enabled the earlier work (Daly 1992). While I am grateful that “Hummingbirds” made a meaningful contribution to our understanding of how feminist theory could be a useful framework for dance scholarship, I also appreciate that both feminist theory and dance studies have come a long, long way since the groundbreaking paradigm of the male gaze.

When I wrote “Hummingbirds,” feminist theory was the most creative, rigorous, and productive discourse around. It articulated what had emerged as the fundamental issue of twentieth-century arts and humanities: representation. Feminist theory infused dance studies with a fresh, compelling set of questions that were quickly taken up, especially by younger scholars, critics, and artists. We were challenged to shift our angle of vision and expand the field of our vision. As a result, our critical acuity was honed, the dancing we chose to study became more inclusive, dialogue was opened with other disciplines, and dance literature as a whole grew more incisive, complex, and engaged.

But no question, framework, or theory ever remains fixed. I began to question the theory of the male gaze almost as soon as “Hummingbirds” was published. When I attempted to adapt the model to my historical research on Isadora Duncan, I bumped up against its limits, which led me to other theories and more questions. It also led me to critique the then flourishing “success-or-failure” brand of feminist criticism, whose brittle, reductive analyses were not only unconvincing scholarship but problematic politics as well. So I wrote “Dance History and Feminist Theory” as a companion piece to “Hummingbirds.”

In this essay I propose new initiatives I hope to see in U.S. dance studies in the next decade. Rather than attempting a comprehensive literature survey, or citing all possible relevant material, I want to identify what appears to me to be terrae incognitae—unmapped and un- or under-explored realms of dance research—and to suggest that we collectively consider what the effects might be if they were brought into focus. While there are many such terrae incognitae, I want to concentrate here on issues relating to ethnography, suggesting that we expand our methods of analysis to include more ethnographies of institutions and audiences. While some work in these areas is already part of “dance studies,” it does not predominate and has been overshadowed by work on the history or representational practices of concert dance, especially modern dance and ballet.

I suggest that we use the potential of fieldwork—that is, the sustained participation in and observation of communities, institutions, and practices—and apply this widely to a variety of sectors in the U.S., including modern dance and ballet companies, dance institutions such as archives, training schools, community dance centers, and even our own scholarly organizations. While I hope there will be more ethnographies of dancing communities, like the contact improvisers Cynthia Cohen Bull analyzes, or the dancers of the Philippine ritual dance form sinulog that Sally Ness engages, there has already been some movement in this direction and those books provide excellent models. I want to emphasize here, instead, the important potential of critical ethnographic examination of institutions and organizations. These investigations will parallel new initiatives in anthropology, where scholars such as Richard Handler and Eric Gable have taken as the subject of their analyses The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and historical site, and Sharon Traweek, who has made a point of studying physics labs (1).

Phenomenology is a method for studying experience. I employ this method in my research because it provides a first-person voice for the dancer, the choreographer, and the teacher/therapist in me. Oddly enough, the critic in all of us already uses a first-person voice when describing and interpreting the dance from our immediate experience of it, and telling others what we think about it. Written criticism formalizes the critic's sensate proximity to the dance. But what about the voice of the dancer in valuing the experience of dance, and the consciousness of the choreographer in making the dance? Where are they accounted for in the formulas for dance research and writing? The objective third-person voice necessary to a particular historical or social angle is more common. Phenomenology has given me a method for intuitive and theoretical reflections on dance from multiple perspectives. Eventually, I contextualize these within the larger framework of phenomenology as a branch of modern philosophy.

I began to write using the tools of phenomenology in 1970 when I became aware that aesthetic discourse on dance was distanced from the actual experience, and that the writers in dance aesthetics, with the notable exception of Susanne Langer, were mostly men. I wanted to use an embodied voice and to see if a woman in dance might add to the field of phenomenology. My interests eventually led me to developmental psychology, a field that has much in common with phenomenology (2). Maxine Sheets-Johnstone had already broken the ice in The Phenomenology of Dance, but she had written more analytically than descriptively, clarifying the formative (creative) basis of dance with values intrinsically located in the moving self (3). I built upon this, but I wanted to weave the intuitive voice of the dancer into a descriptive aesthetics, slipping from the first-person experiential voice to analytical third-person theory, as phenomenology does. These were the goals of my descriptive aesthetics: Dance and the Lived Body (1987) (4). Later I began to explain phenomenology as a research method for dance in my article for Dance Research Journal, “A Vulnerable Glance: Seeing Dance Through Phenomenology” (1991); and in “Witnessing the Frog Pond” (1999), I developed this more explicitly (5).

Standing at the beginning of a new century, but still faced with what was referred to at the end of the old one as the “politics of difference,” I find myself struggling with the daunting task of discussing extremely complex issues associated with dance scholarship. The issues I refer to revolve around the—all too familiar—divisions of class, gender, race, and other central signifiers of identity that have dominated a substantial part of scholarly discourse in various disciplines over the past two decades.

It is unrealistic to think that the change of the millennium clock has ushered in a new age of enlightenment that will ameliorate the kinds of confrontations over group identity that have, by now, become routine in American society. But it does not seem unrealistic to hope that a new level of clarity can be achieved in scholarly debates involving issues of racial identity and the arts—debates that, in the past, have elicited reactions ranging from indifference, to defensiveness, to volatility.

As an individual who has begun to take an active part in the divisive dialogues surrounding identity, art, and culture in turn-of-the-century America, and as an African American scholar involved in the growing field of dance studies, I have chosen to place issues of race at the forefront of the various identity markers that divide the human family into more circumspect sub-groups. In spite of the progress toward inclusiveness that dance as a performing art and as a field of intellectual pursuit has made, I believe that racially proscriptive thinking still exerts its presence with surprising force in different aspects of our discipline. My realization of the significant role that racial divisiveness plays in our society, our art, and our scholarship greatly shaped the direction of my research and is, indeed, reflected in much of the dance research undertaken by African American scholars today (1).

In 1991, when my essay, “On Dance Ethnography,” appeared in this journal, there was a small body of American research in dance that examined movement in cultural context (1). Since then, a radical shift has occurred in American dance scholarship. Cultural critique, with its attention to ethnicity, race, class, and gender, has permeated the academy, and dance historians have turned to sociocultural issues, blurring the boundaries between the sub-fields of dance. We now have a range of theories, methods, and case studies that address the cultural situatedness of dance and movement, a range reflected in the names applied to the subject: “dance ethnology,” “cultural studies in dance,” “ethnochoreology,” “performance studies,” “anthropology of dance,” and “anthropology of human movement.” While long-established paradigms continue to inspire work from structural, symbolic, and functional perspectives, two new trajectories have risen in ethnographic dance studies in this decade.

One trajectory is sociopolitical; it draws on the rapidly developing ideas and language of cultural studies. Here we talk about dance in terms of the “socially constructed nature of human movement” (Reed 1998, 503) and of “bodily theories— armatures of relations through which bodies perform individual, gendered, ethnic, or community identities” (Foster 1995, 8). We discuss globalization, transmigration, de- and re-contextualization, invented communities, kinesthetic homes, all of which address the way dance works and is worked upon in the changing contexts of world politics. We specify whether a dance affirms, resists, re-creates, challenges, undermines, or reenforces the status quo, and sometimes whether it does several of these at once, for we agree that dance as social action can be ambiguous (Desmond 1994) (2).

It is my pleasure and honor here to introduce three articles by prominent scholars and practitioners of Indian dance to celebrate a set of profound, meticulous acts of devotion—the writings of Kapila Vatsyayan. These essays, originally presented at an honorary panel for Kapila Vatsyayan at the 1998 CORD Conference, offer diverse perspectives and conceptual frames that significantly enrich our appreciation of Vatsyayan's outstanding contribution to dance scholarship. The first frame, that of Janet O'shea, focuses on the interactions between body, subjectivity, a system of dancing, and their combined implications for dance studies. Joan Erdman's frame draws attention to the ways in which Vatsyayan's vision of dance interacts with Indian culture and becomes expressed as thought, art, architecture, and poetry. Mohd Anis Nor considers the impact of Vatsyayan's scholarship on the works of East Asian scholars. Finally, Vatsyayan herself speaks in an informal interview about formative influences on her writings. Her spontaneous responses reflect and confirm issues that the set of papers have raised concerning her postcolonial experience of scholarly research.

Janet O'shea, a performer of Bharatanatyam, explores how Vatsyayan's understanding of the bodily experience of dancing informs her organization of the components of dance structures. She observes that Vatsyayan's concept of dance demonstrates how the various Indian dance forms groom the body to reflect the concepts of body-shape, posture, and of articulation of movement that are listed in the theoretical texts. O'shea notes that “this methodological framework situates dance as an active cultural participant in relation to other systems of thought” and offers a model for exploring dance as a system.

As a scholar and practitioner of Bharatanatyam I would like, foremost, to express my gratitude to Kapila Vatsyayan for her comprehensive, in-depth studies of Indian classical dance forms. Her work includes attention to both distant and recent epochs in the history of Indian dance as well as to current practice. Her analysis of many divergent sources has laid the groundwork for any academic study of classical Indian dance. She not only provides an exhaustive account of Indian dance in the past and present but also interprets the relationship among aesthetic theory texts, historical dance practice, and contemporary, classical Indian choreography in a nuanced and sophisticated manner.

Because the strengths of Vatsyayan's research are manifold, I restrict my consideration here to a narrow focus. Specifically, this discussion focuses on her concept of dance technique as an integral part of her analytical framework. This essay also addresses the ramifications of her methodology for current and future work in the field of dance studies. In particular, I consider how Vatsyayan's understanding of the bodily subject offers an important paradigm for current writings within dance scholarship, especially those that interpret dance praxis in relation to social theory (1). Moreover, I limit my attention to two of Vatsyayan's major works: Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts and Indian Classical Dance.

When I first came to the University of Chicago in 1973 to study South Asian anthropology and history, and to write about North India's musicians, I was asked whether I would be studying the ancient texts such as Natyashastra and Abhinayadarpana. “No,” I said. “I am interested in today's arts and artists, and their recent history in the courts of Rajasthan, not in ancient texts.”

Eventually I found the writings of Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan, and recognized enduring connections between ancient and modern, great and little traditions, and the importance of all arts for understanding any one of them. This realization arose from her 1968 book on India's performing arts, Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts. In his foreword Rai Krishnadasa, Honorary Director of Bharat Kala Bhavan at Benares, noted that since Indian Independence in 1947, many books dealing with its arts had been published, often “hastily written and often full of errors and even misinformation” (Vatsyayan 1968, xix). Vatsyayan's book, however, was “a breath of fresh air, clear, incisive and invigorating” (xix). She had studied historical and ancient dance texts, researched and analyzed the dance, and long practiced with dance gurus. In doing so, her book merged two traditions of learning: living “repositories of tradition,” and analysis of the “ancestry of dance movement–so integral a part of the evolution of modern dance abroad” (xix). So texts and commentaries, on the one hand, and praxis, on the other, were essential to understanding India's dance and dance traditions, and to reconstructing their history. This combination informs all her publications as well as her significant contributions to the patronage of India's dance culture. For me, it opened the pathway to a merger of text and practice, context and aesthetic process.

Beyond the Indian subcontinent Kapila Vatsyayan has become a legend. Although far from the center of the great Indian tradition, Southeast Asian dance scholars emulate Vatsyayan's work and have attempted similar studies of the classical dances within the Indie tradition in Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Many of us in Southeast Asia only hope that we can measure up to the strength of her scholarship. For us, the notion of the “great” and “small” traditions is both real and overwhelming.

Thirty years ago scholarship in Asian dance attained new heights with the publication of Vatsyayan's celebrated Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts, the first exploration by an indigenous scholar of the relationship between classical Indian dance, literature, and sculpture. In particular, Vatsyayan opened new frontiers in the understanding of rasa theory beyond its convention as mood and evocation. She explicated the notion of rasa as a state of being and aesthetic theories of dance along with the study of literature, sculpture, painting, music and theater. Her work demonstrated an implicit understanding of performance theory and of deconstruction and reconstruction processes, by which I essentially mean emic attempts to construe or interpret dance. Deconstruction involves the dismantling of a dance form, genre, or repertory into the smallest units of contrasted movements recognized by people of a given dance tradition, while reconstruction refers to the ways these movements are structured within a larger movement system (1).