Dance theory

Last updated

Dance theory is the philosophy underpinning contemporary dance, including formal ideologies, aesthetic concepts, and technical attributes. [1] It is a fairly new field of study, developing largely in the 20th century. It can be considered a branch of expression theory [2] and is closely related to music theory and specifically musicality. [3] While musicality deals with finding a particular matching pair of dance and music that fit each other in various respects, dance theory is a broad term encompassing the origins, styles, genre, footwork and artistic expression of dance.

Three broad categories of dance theory, as you may find them described in universities or dance institutes, are philosophy (concerning the aesthetic meanings behind dance, or semiotics), choreology (movement analysis and description), sociology (regarding the role of dance in society and culture). [4]

Dance theory deals with anatomical movements (such as foot-work, etc.), as well as partner interactions, and their associations to each other and to music as art. It explores the communicative, physical, mental, emotional, and artistic aspects of dance as a medium of human expression and interaction. In doing so the various nuances between the dance genres and styles are analyzed with respect to their social settings and cultures.

As dance is a ubiquitous element of culture, dance theory attempts to determine the instinctual nature of dance, and what makes various movements appear natural or forced.

It is possible, through the writing and drawing of dances within a sphere, to understand that all dance is based on natural body movements, that is the moving of joints limbs and legs and fingers. Dance theory is based on these founding principles, that is the sphere and lines of the body, to derive, show and demonstrate how dance is done. This is achieved by showing which movements to do by and at what speed. It is hypothetically possible to draw and work out a dance by using sphere lines and arrows. Many dance books state how this is done.

See also

Related Research Articles

Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and the nature of taste and, in a broad sense, incorporates the philosophy of art. Aesthetics examines the philosophy of aesthetic value, which is determined by critical judgments of artistic taste; thus, the function of aesthetics is the "critical reflection on art, culture and nature".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dance</span> Art form consisting of movement of the body

Dance is an art form, consisting of sequences of body movements with aesthetic and often symbolic value, either improvised or purposefully selected. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoire of movements or by its historical period or place of origin. Dance is typically performed with musical accompaniment, and sometimes with the dancer simultaneously using a musical instrument themselves.

Jazz Dance is a performance dance and style that arose in the United States in the early 20th century. Jazz Dance may allude to vernacular Jazz, Broadway or dramatic Jazz. The two types expand on African American vernacular styles of dance that arose with Jazz Music. Vernacular dance refers to dance forms that emerge from everyday life and cultural practices of a specific community, often reflecting the social, cultural, and historical contexts of that community. In the context of African American culture, vernacular dance encompasses styles that developed organically within African American communities, influenced by African traditions, European dance forms, and the unique experiences of African Americans in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Postmodernism</span> Artistic, cultural, and theoretical movement

Postmodernism is a term used to refer to a variety of artistic, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism. They have in common the conviction that it is no longer possible to rely upon previous ways of depicting the world. Still, there is disagreement among experts about its more precise meaning even within narrow contexts.

Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture, including certain fundamental questions asked by humans. During the Renaissance, the term "humanities" referred to the study of classical literature and language, as opposed to the study of religion, or "divinity". The study of the humanities was a key part of the secular curriculum in universities at the time. Today, the humanities are more frequently defined as any fields of study outside of natural sciences, social sciences, formal sciences, and applied sciences. They use methods that are primarily critical, speculative, or interpretative and have a significant historical element—as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethnomusicology</span> Study of the cultural aspects of music

Ethnomusicology is the multidisciplinary study of music in its cultural context, investigating social, cognitive, biological, comparative, and other dimensions involved other than sound. Ethnomusicologists study music as a reflection of culture and investigate the act of musicking through various immersive, observational, and analytical approaches drawn from other disciplines such as anthropology to understand a culture’s music. This discipline emerged from comparative musicology, initially focusing on non-Western music, but later expanded to embrace the study of any and all different kinds of music of the world. Ethnomusicology development resembled that of Anthropology very closely.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Japanese traditional dance</span> Traditional styles of Japanese dance

Japanese traditional dance describes a number of Japanese dance styles with a long history and prescribed method of performance. Some of the oldest forms of traditional Japanese dance may be among those transmitted through the kagura tradition, or folk dances relating to food producing activities such as planting rice and fishing, including rain dances. There are large number of these traditional dances, which are often subfixed -odori, -asobi, and -mai, and may be specific to a region or village. Mai and odori are the two main groups of Japanese dances, and the term buyō (舞踊) was coined in modern times as a general term for dance, by combining mai (舞) and odori (踊).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Postmodern art</span> Art movement

Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art and multimedia, particularly involving video are described as postmodern.

Breakcore is a style of electronic dance music that emerged from jungle, hardcore, and drum and bass in the mid-to-late 1990s. It is characterized by very complex and intricate breakbeats and a wide palette of sampling sources played at high tempos.

Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through the social, cultural, and political milieu of or relating to the arts and manners that a group favors. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) helped found cultural history as a discipline. Cultural history studies and interprets the record of human societies by denoting the various distinctive ways of living built up by a group of people under consideration. Cultural history involves the aggregate of past cultural activity, such as ceremony, class in practices, and the interaction with locales. It combines the approaches of anthropology and history to examine popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Contemporary dance</span> Genre of dance performance

Contemporary dance is a genre of dance performance that developed during the mid-twentieth century and has since grown to become one of the dominant genres for formally trained dancers throughout the world, with particularly strong popularity in the U.S. and Europe. Although originally informed by and borrowing from classical, modern, and jazz styles, it has come to incorporate elements from many styles of dance. According to the New Grove Musical Dictionary, contemporary dance evolved from the foundations of modern and postmodern dance, emphasizing innovation and a break from traditional forms. Due to its technical similarities, it is often perceived to be closely related to modern dance, ballet, and other classical concert dance styles. It is characterized by a blend of styles that often integrate elements of ballet, modern dance, and cultural or social dance forms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aesthetics of music</span> Branch of philosophy

Aesthetics of music is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of art, beauty and taste in music, and with the creation or appreciation of beauty in music. In the pre-modern tradition, the aesthetics of music or musical aesthetics explored the mathematical and cosmological dimensions of rhythmic and harmonic organization. In the eighteenth century, focus shifted to the experience of hearing music, and thus to questions about its beauty and human enjoyment of music. The origin of this philosophic shift is sometimes attributed to Baumgarten in the 18th century, followed by Kant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kuduro</span> Music genre from Angola

Kuduro is a type of music and dance from Angola. It is characterized as uptempo, energetic, and danceable. Kuduro was developed in Luanda, Angola, in the late 1980s. Producers sampled traditional carnival music like soca and zouk béton from the Caribbean to Angola, house and techno playing from Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dark culture</span> Subculture

Dark culture, also called dark alternative scene, is a mixture of thematically related subcultures including the goth and dark wave subculture, the dark neoclassical/dark ambient scene, parts of the post-industrial scene parts of neofolk and the early gothic metal scene. Dark culture's origin lies in followers of dark wave and independent music, but over the decades it has developed to a social network held together by a common concept of aesthetics, self-representation, and individualism. The musical preferences of the dark scene are characterized by a mix of styles ranging from gothic metal, to industrial dance music and dark ambient, to dark neoclassical, neo-medieval and dark folk music, to gothic rock, dark wave and post-punk, the darker ends of electropop.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Musical gesture</span>

In music, gesture is any movement, either physical (bodily) or mental (imaginary). As such "gesture" includes both categories of movements required to produce sound and categories of perceptual moves associated with those gestures. The concept of musical gestures has received much attention in various musicological disciplines in recent years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Modern dance</span> Genre of western concert or theatrical dance

Modern dance is a broad genre of western concert or theatrical dance which includes dance styles such as ballet, folk, ethnic, religious, and social dancing; and primarily arose out of Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was considered to have been developed as a rejection of, or rebellion against, classical ballet, and also a way to express social concerns like socioeconomic and cultural factors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Authenticity in art</span>

Authenticity in art is manifested in the different ways that a work of art, or an artistic performance, can be considered authentic. The initial distinction is between nominal authenticity and expressive authenticity. In the first sense, nominal authenticity is the correct identification of the author of a work of art; of how closely an actor or an actress interprets a role in a stageplay as written by the playwright; of how well a musician's performance of an artistic composition corresponds to the composer's intention; and how closely an objet d’art conforms to the artistic traditions of its genre. In the second sense, expressive authenticity is how much the work of art possesses inherent authority of and about its subject, and how much of the artist's intent is in the work of art.

Everyday Aesthetics is a recent subfield of philosophical aesthetics focusing on everyday events, settings and activities in which the faculty of sensibility is saliently at stake. Alexander Baumgarten established Aesthetics as a discipline and defined it as scientia cognitionis sensitivae, the science of sensory knowledge, in his foundational work Aesthetica (1750). This field has been dedicated since then to the clarification of fine arts, beauty and taste only marginally referring to the aesthetics in design, crafts, urban environments and social practice until the emergence of everyday aesthetics during the ‘90s. As other subfields like environmental aesthetics or the aesthetics of nature, everyday aesthetics also attempts to countervail aesthetics' almost exclusive focus on the philosophy of art.

A theory of art is intended to contrast with a definition of art. Traditionally, definitions are composed of necessary and sufficient conditions, and a single counterexample overthrows such a definition. Theorizing about art, on the other hand, is analogous to a theory of a natural phenomenon like gravity. In fact, the intent behind a theory of art is to treat art as a natural phenomenon that should be investigated like any other. The question of whether one can speak of a theory of art without employing a concept of art is also discussed below.

Ruth Katz is an Israeli musicologist, a pioneer of academic musicology in Israel, professor emerita at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has been a corresponding Member of the American Musicological Society since 2011. She was named laureate of the Israel State Prize in 2012.

References

  1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Course Description: Dance Theory and Composition, 2003.
  2. Milton H. Snoeyenbos and Carole A. Knapp, Dance Theory and Dance Education, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Jul., 1979), pp. 17-30.
  3. Nichelle, Musicality In Dance: What Is It? Can It Be Taught? March 29, 2010
  4. Contemporary-Dance.org Dance Theory