The Identity Crisis in Dance

TLDR

The identity of a dance performance is contested, with scholars debating whether it is defined by a stable choreography or other criteria, and the field lacks a clear standard for what must be preserved. The study argues that conventional criteria for dance identity are insufficient and seeks to clarify key properties that relate to the dance work. The authors analyze widely recognized examples from dancers, critics, and audiences as a reliable data set, acknowledging that it does not cover all experimental extremes. The abstract notes a question, though the details are omitted.

Abstract

ject to question. But another source of the problem is general unclarity about what it is essential to preserve. Specifically, what serves as an acceptable criterion of identity on the basis of which a performance can be said to be a performance of a given work? Although we do not intend to provide a definition of dance, we will pick out and elucidate some of its most important properties and their relation to the dance work. The examples we will use are generally recognized by dancers, critics, and audiences. They provide a reliable data base, though they do not exhaust the possibilities by introducing those cases on the extreme experimental fringe of the art form. One popular answer to the identity question is that the work is determined relative to a stable choreography or plan of movement, construed as the specification of a sequence of movements. The performance is the work made manifest. As we will argue, neither this approach nor the more sophisticated version of it offered by Nelson Goodman1 is an adequate criterion of identity