Dance

The philosophical aesthetics of dance may be roughly characterized in three parts, each concerned centrally with dance as an art form; or with dances that are artworks. First, many issues are shared with philosophical aesthetics in general: for instance, concern over the role of the intentions of the artist for understanding his/her artworks recurs vis-à-vis choreographers – if with a characteristic dance “twist.” Equally, commitments in general aesthetics will typically be replicated in dance aesthetics: for example, if one asserted the historical character of art (McFee 2011b: 119-45), a similar assertion for dance would be expected. However, attention to dance as an art imports a contrast between the interest,

appreciation, judgment, etc., appropriate to art and the interest, appreciation, judgment, etc., appropriate to the other things in which aesthetic interest is taken (natural beauty, fountains and firework displays, wallpaper, gymnastics) – a contrast between the artistic and the aesthetic (McFee 1992: 38-44; McFee 2011a: 14-20). Then artworks are appropriately perceived under artistic concepts, and misperceived if regarded as (merely) aesthetic – such that a term (say, “gaudy”) applying on both sides of this contrast amounts to something different in the two cases. In its second part, dance aesthetics shares issues with other performing arts (Thom

1993), whatever nuances dance introduces: the elaborated discussion of music provides the most fully articulated model in the literature – dance is a “Jenny-come-lately” to the aesthetic feast, trying to find its own elbow room. Third, dance aesthetics has its own characteristic issues, although (as above)

understanding them typically draws on discussions elsewhere in aesthetics, or perhaps in philosophy. The aesthetics of music is a prime source here, connecting the second and third aspects of the aesthetics of dance – those discussed here. Many concerns derive from the nature of dance, or from what dances are. Like

music, dance typically exists “at a perpetual vanishing point” (in Marcia Siegel’s evocative expression; 1972: 1): the artworks are encountered only in the evanescence of performances (Croce 1982: 28-29; McFee 2011a: 263-66). But, unlike music, dance is essentially physical: confronting a dance is, minimally, confronting an assemblage of moving bodies – at least in typical cases. Not merely were dance works only concrete in the moment of performance but, since few dances of the past were either notated or recorded on film/video, they could be lost when the dancers who performed them left the company. As Agnes de Mille urges: “If a dancer leaves a group,

not only are his trained body and talent lost, but the knowledge and memory of the work itself. The masterpiece is ravaged: it goes with him” (1991: 330). Dance notation (for most philosophers, first seen in Goodman 1968: 125) unites these concerns. Again, discussion of dance assumes positions in general aesthetics: say, the plausibility of Nelson Goodman’s constraints on notationality (Goodman 1968: 129-54). Further, acknowledging the essentially interpretative nature of such dance notation reintroduces the contrast, fundamental to any discussion of performing art, between critics’ interpretation and performers’ interpretation (McFee 1992: 103-4). Since the concern here is centrally with the discussion of dance works that are art,

the (possible?) connection of artistic value to educational value, as well as the history of dance studies within aesthetics, prompts an interest in the place or role of dance in education.