During the 1990s, perhaps as part of several strategies aimed at slowing down the boom of the 1980s, a discursivation of the body and its activity took place in the field of dance in analogy to speech acts. This analogy was much needed to help dance become more intellectual and self-reflexive, but it also made it difficult to think about bodies outside the cultural and ideological grids capturing them. Two further assumptions go hand in hand with this approach: first, that all bodily movements write from the perspective of those performing them; and second, that these movements be read from the perspective of those observing or even performing them. What can a body do? In short, the answer to this famous Spinozian question with regard to a body being understood in terms of language is that it can parody the grid, subvert the discourses, and write singularily. In the 1990s, therefore, the body often moved through already codified spaces of culture and ideology, but it rarely constru...

This chapter stages a conversation about the development of choreographic analysis as a methodology, since Susan Leigh Foster’s 1986 book, Reading Dancing. Through her analyses, Foster offers a way of examining not only how dances are made and what they mean, but also how dances make meaning. In our article, we discuss our distinct uses of choreographic analysis, outline its affordances and limitations, and ponder the ways that decolonial approaches have pushed our teaching and application of the method.

These two books were Sparshott's "first steps to a philosophical consideration of the dance," but they most certainly were not the first attention paid to the art form by serious philosophers. The first book focuses on the nature of dance, its unusual char- acteristics, and how it might be understood philosophically. Sparshott avoids proposing his own "definition" of dance, but painstakingly ex- plores definitions offered by others. Using standard analytical tech- niques, he compares dance with other human phenomena, in both the arts and the broader culture, and he considers perennial issues such as "meaning" and "expression." The second volume classifies various kinds of dance, further elucidating characteristics of the art form. He re- examines properties such as expression and rhythm and continues com- parisons with related fields (music, language, and theatre). He con- cludes with new considerations (for him) of values in dance, the training of dancers, choreography, and notation.