Best,
Jim Groom

Sorry about the formatting issue, I have corrected this. As for the abstract on the linking page, we would have to much text on that page, so we are only linking the title. Hope this helps.

Kate Elswit

Stanford University

At the risk of generalization, academic studies of dance spectatorship tend to be framed in two ways: either by critical theorization that is based on identity politics in which bodies materialize or counter socio-cultural constructions, or alternately with that politics resisted by the fuzzy term “kinesthesia,” which is meant to suggest that there is something particularly agentic about the embodied experience of executing or viewing movement. Kinesthetic aspects of dance have certainly been incorporated into socio-cultural analysis, but the capacity to affect is still usually aligned with dancey-ness, in part because dance’s push for academic legitimacy has forced it into a position of championing movement as uniquely authentic, borrowing strength since the late 1980s from what Helen Thomas has called “the body project.” However, if dance scholarship is always in the defensive position of justifying its effects through the generic understanding of bodies and movement as special, it risks essentializing the impact of that movement.

In this paper, I am interested in thinking about the affective states that dance practices may invoke, beyond the reductive alignment of physical movement with authentic expression, which sometimes follows on from the rhetoric of physical liberation that pervades twentieth-century modern dance in particular. Perhaps there are ways to allow for the subjective qualities often associated with kinesthesia, but without necessarily positing the experience of movement as a replacement for other relationships. This essay is structured around a particular segment from the television show So You Think You Can Dance, which alludes to a lot of crucial issues about the ways engagement with dance is both structured by the medium’s theatrical mechanisms, but also allows for moments of experience, because of rather than despite them. The segment is emblematic of the ways in which the SYTYCD series trains several key elements of affective dance spectatorship at the same time as the series calls attention to the theatricality of dance as a medium.

Kindly correct these, please
Thanks
Julie Okoh