Dance Historiography
The study of how dance history is written, including the sources, methods, and assumptions that shape historical accounts of dance.
Definition
The study of the methods, sources, and theoretical assumptions underlying the writing of dance history.
Scope
This topic examines the methodology and theory of writing dance history: the typology and criticism of sources, the problem of an ephemeral object, the politics of canon formation, and the influence of broader historiographical and cultural-studies frameworks. It is reflexive, asking how historians construct their narratives and whose dance gets recorded.
Core questions
- What constitutes valid historical evidence for dance?
- How do historians handle the gap between an ephemeral act and its surviving traces?
- Whose dance practices are included in or excluded from historical canons?
- How have cultural studies and theory reshaped dance history?
Key concepts
- source criticism
- the archive
- canon formation
- ephemerality
- the repertoire
Key theories
- Source typology and evidential criticism
- A methodological framework classifying dance evidence by type and reliability, insisting that historical claims be grounded in critically interrogated primary sources.
- Cultural-studies turn in dance history
- The reorientation of dance history toward questions of power, identity, and representation, drawing on cultural studies to challenge formalist and canonical narratives.
History
As dance scholarship matured in the late twentieth century, historians turned reflexively to questions of method, debating how to write the history of an unscored art. The 1980s methodological literature and the later cultural-studies turn established historiography as a self-conscious sub-field concerned with sources, canon, and the politics of representation.
Debates
- Archive versus repertoire
- Theorists debate whether dance knowledge is best preserved through documentary archives or transmitted through embodied performance, with implications for what historians can claim to know.
Key figures
- Janet Adshead-Lansdale
- June Layson
- Gay Morris
- André Lepecki
Related topics
Seminal works
- layson1983
- lepecki2004
Frequently asked questions
- Why does dance pose special problems for historians?
- Because dance is ephemeral and rarely fully notated, historians must reconstruct it from indirect and incomplete traces, making explicit attention to sources and method especially important.