Dance

In dance practice, at the beginning of the twentieth century Sergey Diaghilev's (1872–1929) experimental productions with the Ballets Russes famously challenged the aesthetic sensibilities of classical ballet by introducing parallel feet, ambiguous story lines, a lowered center of gravity, and representation of "primitive" cultures. The creation of new forms of art dance, such as expressionistic modern dance in Europe after World War I and Butoh in Japan after World War II, deliberately defied ballet's conventions of beauty but stayed within the domain of artistic performance. Aesthetic criticism accounted for and dealt with the creation of new dance genres. The purpose of aesthetic criticism remains a greater understanding of established and new dance styles, choreography (recorded in notation systems such as Labanotation), individual performances, and criteria on which stage performances can be evaluated.

The emergence of anthropology as a scientific discipline in the mid-nineteenth century, parallel with aesthetic criticism's elevation of dance as an art form and tensions in experimentation with the form, expanded a Western idea of dance to non-Western cultures and societies, often treating dance practices as folk traditions. Franz Boas (1858–1942), A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) included social dancing, ceremonies, and rituals in their field studies. Curt Sachs's World History of the Dance (English translation, 1937) offered an evolutionary and universalizing theory of world dance forms and was followed by Franziska Boas's collection, The Function of Dance in Human Society (1944). Though guided by the scientific commitment to objectivity and evaluation of empirical data, early anthropological studies interpreted dances from non-Western cultures as less aesthetically developed than those on the European stages and presented the dance traditions of North Africa, the Middle East, India, Asia, and the Americas as more primitive forms of dance. The images provided by early anthropologists were reproduced as artifacts of exotic cultures in World's Fair exhibits and romanticized in exoticized, popular stage performances such as those of Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968) and Ted Shawn (1891–1972).

Since the 1960s and 1970s, this early anthropological work on dance has been significantly revised. The idea of dance, expanded to the broader notion of movement practices, allows for greater attention to the categories that define movement systems within individual cultures, nations, or societies, as well as for comparative studies. For anthropology and its related disciplines (folklore, ethnomusicology, ethnology, and ethnography), aspects of culture are revealed in dance practices. These disciplines also look at dancing itself as a culturally constructed activity that offers information about human behavior and, by extension, culture. These interrelated disciplines, along with methods drawn from sociology, kinesthetics, and linguistics, operate with a heightened sensitivity to the imposition of Western values and desires on non-Western, indigenous, or nonindustrial cultures.

Awareness of Western ethnocentric tendencies in dance research generated different categories of analysis and new questions. Researchers began to work toward a deeper understanding of the language, customs, social structures, and modes of thinking governing localized "dance events" before attempting to interpret them. Adrienne L. Kaeppler's work on Tongan dance in the late 1970s did much to advance the study of structured human movement in a specific cultural context. In the late 1980s Paul Stoller advocated the importance of a sensual dimension in ethnographic work. Major contributors to the assessment and development of anthropological approaches to human movement in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s include Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, Anya Peterson Royce, Helen Thomas, and Judith Lynne Hanna.

The treatment of dance as a social practice and a form of expressive culture goes beyond descriptions of local customs, ceremonies, and movement idioms. Through proscribed methods of observation, data collection, documentation, interviewing, participant observation, and interpretation of data, these methods analyze how human movement relates to culture. Many studies analyze the function and meanings of dances or dancing in situated contexts. Others track changes in the performance and interpretation of dance styles such as the tango, rumba, samba, flamenco, and hula as they are transmitted across cultures, including in the inquiry of the mechanisms of transmission. Still other studies are concerned with visual and kinesthetic communication, or how dance communicates as a kind of language. Behaviors surrounding a dance performance, such as audience participation and dancers' preparation, may be as important as the performance itself. Religious beliefs, political restrictions, integration of dance with other performance forms, and vocabularies used by practitioners to describe movement are all significant to interpreting data gathered in fieldwork.