Dance research has grown tremendously in recent years. In striving to develop significant methodologies and approaches individual researchers have turned to other disciplines to explore their modes of inquiry. Dance researchers have become immersed in the theories and ways of such areas as biography, deconstructionism, ethnography, feminism, linguistics, phenomenology, and semiotics, and have applied the approaches they found to dance research.

In June, 1989, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro hosted and cosponsored a Congress on Research in Dance regional conference titled Modes of Inquiry: Critical Issues in Dance Scholarship. The preliminary call for papers stated:

Among all the arts in western culture, dance may have the most to gain from feminist analysis. Certainly the two are highly compatible. Dance is an art form of the body, and the body is where gender distinctions are generally understood to originate. The inquiries that feminist analysis makes into the ways that the body is shaped and comes to have meaning are directly and immediately applicable to the study of dance, which is, after all, a kind of living laboratory for the study of the body—its training, its stories, its way of being and being seen in the world. As a traditionally female-populated (but not necessarily female-dominated) field that perpetuates some of our culture's most potent symbols of femininity, western theatrical dance provides feminist analysis with its potentially richest material.

The strength of ethnography and ethnographic criticism is their focus on detail, their enduring respect for context in the making of any generalization, and their full recognition of persistent ambiguity and multiple possibilities in any situation. (Marcus and Fischer 1986:159)

Movement as Cultural Knowledge: The term “ethnography” literally means “portrait of a people.” Perhaps “portrait” is too thin and two-dimensional a metaphor to represent the goal of ethnography, for an ethnographer seeks not only to describe but to understand what constitutes a people's cultural knowledge. Cultural knowledge includes, in anthropologist Clifford Geertz's words, “a people's ethos—the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood—and their world view—the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order” (1973:89). The ethnographer wants to know nothing less than how a given group of people find or, more accurately, make meaning.

To examine dance from an ethnographic perspective, then, is to focus on dance as a kind of cultural knowledge. Dance ethnography depends upon the postulate that cultural knowledge is embodied in movement, especially the highly stylized and codified movement we call dance. This statement implies that the knowledge involved in dancing is not just somatic, but mental and emotional as well, encompassing cultural history, beliefs, values, and feelings. If movement encodes cultural knowledge then, for example, ballet can be examined for the messages it embodies about enduring gender conventions derived from the court society of Renaissance Europe and performance art can be examined as a response to the demands of survival in urban America.

When phenomenology is true to its intent, it never knows where it is going. This is because it is present-centered in its descriptive aims, accounts for temporal change, and does not have appropriate and inappropriate topics. It might move from Zen to dance to baseball to washing dishes, and even isolate a purity of attention that under certain circumstances connects them all. Phenomenology develops unpredictably, according to the contents of consciousness. This is its first level of method. Its second level develops philosophical perspectives from the seed of consciousness. It holds that “philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being”. Here I will discuss phenomenology as a way of describing and defining dance, shifting between the experience of the dancer and that of the audience.

Experiential Truth: Phenomenology depends on immediate experience, but includes more. It hopes to arrive at meaning, perspectives on the phenomena of experience (dance in this case) which can be communicated. It is not devoid of past and future, since both are lived as part of the present. Present time takes its meaning in part from past and future. Heidegger described time as belonging to the totality of being, as “the horizon of being.” He chose the vulnerable image of falling to describe the lived dimension of present time. Falling is both a movement and a symbol of our existential mode of being-in-the-world.

Fostered to celebrate lives of saints, apostles, or other biblical characters, liturgical drama was popular throughout Europe at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. In Italy, these religious dramas were called sacre rappresentazioni; in England, miracles; in France, mystères; and in German, Fastnachtspiele. Sizeable collections from diverse countries, such as the English Coventry mysteries written mostly in 1468, are available for study in modern editions. These dramas were often performed at various cities during civic holidays. For instance, on the birthday of John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence, sacre rappresentazioni celebrating events of his life were performed at designated places in the city. The religious dramas were also performed during state or private festivities, such as visits of important clergy or rulers, or wedding celebrations. Productions of these dramas were often staged during the carnival season. Sometimes they were performed by confraternities at specific churches that wanted to celebrate their patron saints, or by guilds. Sometimes these dramas were performed at a single area and other times they were simultaneously staged, and then performed as a cycle. They could be performed on the ground, on raised stages, or on pageant wagons. The form generally has a strict rhyme scheme, and earlier dramas contain fewer stage directions than later ones.

Cultural arts institutions have played a significant role in the life of Black Philadelphians since the 1920s. Such organizations as the Philadelphia Concert Orchestra, Dra Mu Opera Company, and Heritage House (Visual and Performing Arts Center) were efforts to preserve and promote the traditions of African American culture. (“Black” and “African American” will be used interchangeably here.) Dance schools have traditionally received ardent support from the community and were established because of limited opportunities for Black youth to study dance in Philadelphia.

Marion Cuyjet's Judimar School, the Sydney (King) School of Dance, Arthur Hall's Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center, and Joan Myers Brown's Philadelphia School of Dance Arts were key institutions that created a vital training environment for dancers, dance educators, and dance companies that emerged between the late 1940s and early 1970s. Cuyjet and King studied with dance pioneer Essie Marie Dorsey in the late 1930s. Hall and Brown were students of Cuyjet and King and established themselves as third generation leaders who created dance companies as well as schools.