Outline

date	February 15, 2011
Venue	Waseda University Campus, Building 26, Lecture Room 302
Organizer
outline	The Dance Research Course welcomed as lecturer Susan Manning (professor at Northwestern University), who is known for her work on Mary Wigman, the founder of German expressionist dance, but who in recent years has been pursuing studies that examine dance history from the political perspectives of gender, ethnicity and race. She gave two lectures on the present state of dance studies in the US.

Details

Professor Manning began by stating that the term “dance studies” has two meanings, one broad and one narrow, and that she would focus on dance studies in the narrow sense as the study of the cultural, historical and theoretical aspects of dance performances. She outlined the development of dance studies in the US in terms of setting up a system, beginning with the founding of academic societies, and developing a methodology, and referred to the political impact of support for dance by the US government. Dance studies first developed outside universities as the result of activities such as the reconstruction of lost works by dance troupes and the collection of materials by libraries together with the support given by highly knowledgeable critics who emerged in response to the sudden rise in America of new dance by Balanchine and Graham. Studies in academia came to be systematically established in the 1970s: the existence of academic societies, publication of research in academic journals, and on occasion the awarding of prizes all came to be accepted as completely natural and to be expected. From the 1980s on, with the shift from modern dance to post-modern dance, post-structuralism became widely accepted in academia and opened new possibilities for dance studies. Finally, citing concrete examples, she concluded with the view that an interdisciplinary methodology will be increasingly needed for dance studies from now on. The commentator, SUZUKI Sho, summed up the state of dance in Japan, and in the question-and-answer period, views were exchanged about what dance studies should be. The lecture was a huge stimulus to the development of dance studies in Japan.