Dance

Though their methods, goals, and objects of inquiry differ, both aesthetic criticism and anthropology deal at some level with the fundamental question: What is being communicated, to whom, and how? This disciplinary imperative takes the human body as an agent of communication in an interpretive community or as an embodied subject acted upon by social forces. The psychological experience of dancing is generally irrelevant to aesthetic criticism's analysis of dance as a visible medium and tangential to research grounded in kinesthetics or linguistics (though audience response can be analyzed). Beyond Romanticism and notions of the sublime in art in the Western philosophical tradition, phenomenology has offered the most appropriate frame for the ephemeral qualities of human movement, as Maxine Sheets-Johnstone demonstrated in 1966. First-person descriptions of movement as a conduit for spiritual or metaphysical experience are, however, not easily adapted to Western modes of thinking and analysis, even in studies of mainstream liturgical dance.

Paranormal experiences, dissociational states, expressions of deep inner feelings, mystical experiences, and intense emotion generated by participating in a dance are usually associated with non-Western, nonindustrial, or indigenous cultures. Movement practices that produce such experiences are identified by terms such as shamanic dancing, trance dancing, exorcism, healing dance, voodoo, spirit possession, and ritual dance. In the Western stage dance tradition, such states may be represented in artistic performance, as with the expressionist choreography of Mary Wigman (1886–1973). Numerous dance forms in Western popular culture, for example Gabrielle Roth's "Ecstatic Dance," the appropriation of African dances as "healing dance," and so-called "spiritual belly dance" do emphasize altered states of consciousness and/or physical healing. Such practices—especially those that identify with practices of nonindustrial or non-Western cultures in their costuming, symbols, stories, and idioms—offer rich sources for cultural analyses. Though some work has been done to integrate experiences of altered states of consciousness into scholarly discourse, this area requires attention.

As suggested by the example of how the ancient Greek Poetics and Sanskrit Natyasastra frame dance, understandings of human movement are not uniform across cultures. In the early twenty-first century, collaboration among researchers from different intellectual traditions reveals differences in research methods, modes of interpretation, analytical vocabularies, descriptive categories, and goals in dance research. International conferences such as the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) and the World Dance Association (WDA) insure that ongoing research will reflect a diversity of intellectual as well as movement systems.