Ann Daly

Unlimited Partnership: Dance and Feminist Analysis

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 cultures most potent symbols of femininity, western theatrical dance provides feminist analysis with its potentially richest material.

Gender Issues in Dance History Pedagogy

Abstract Dance movement that emerges from womens experiences helps destroy assumptions and social constraints imposed on how we value our bodies and how we use them to create and communicate

Feminist Theory across the Millennial Divide

Every so often I receive a request to anthologize my 1987 article, “The Balanchine Woman: Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers” (Daly 1987), in which I used the feminist theory of the male gaze to analyze a prototypical pas de deux. So far, I have declined each one, or proposed that the article be published in tandem with “Dance History and Feminist Theory: Reconsidering Isadora Duncan and the Male Gaze,” a 1992 essay that critiqued the very theory that had enabled the earlier work (Daly 1992). While I am grateful that “Hummingbirds” made a meaningful contribution to our understanding of how feminist theory could be a useful framework for dance scholarship, I also appreciate that both feminist theory and dance studies have come a long, long way since the groundbreaking paradigm of the male gaze. When I wrote “Hummingbirds,” feminist theory was the most creative, rigorous, and productive discourse around. It articulated what had emerged as the fundamental issue of twentieth-century arts and humanities: representation. Feminist theory infused dance studies with a fresh, compelling set of questions that were quickly taken up, especially by younger scholars, critics, and artists. We were challenged to shift our angle of vision and expand the field of our vision. As a result, our critical acuity was honed, the dancing we chose to study became more inclusive, dialogue was opened with other disciplines, and dance literature as a whole grew more incisive, complex, and engaged. But no question, framework, or theory ever remains fixed. I began to question the theory of the male gaze almost as soon as “Hummingbirds” was published. When I attempted to adapt the model to my historical research on Isadora Duncan, I bumped up against its limits, which led me to other theories and more questions. It also led me to critique the then flourishing “success-or-failure” brand of feminist criticism, whose brittle, reductive analyses were not only unconvincing scholarship but problematic politics as well. So I wrote “Dance History and Feminist Theory” as a companion piece to “Hummingbirds.”

Writing in the Dark, Dancing in the New Yorker: An Arlene Croce Reader@@@Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture

For twenty-five years, Arlene Croce was The New Yorkers dance critic, a post the magazine created expressly for her. Her entertaining, forthright, passionate reviews and essays revealed the logic and history of ballet, modern dance, and their postmodern variants to a generation of theatergoers. This volume contains her most significant and provocative pieces - over a fourth of which never appeared in book form - covering classical ballets, the rise of George Balanchine, the careers of Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris, and Merce Cunningham, and the controversies surrounding many of the twentieth centurys great dance companies.

Carolee Schneemann: A Life Drawing

More than visual art, this choreographed sequence in time and space made from Schneemanns childhood drawings is conceived and designed as gestural performance.

Body Art/Performing the Subject (review)

Amelia Jones’s volume is part of a recent resurgence of interest by art historians in the genre of performance, which she articulates as “body art.” The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s ambitious exhibit and catalog, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, – (Shimmel ) took an historical narrative approach. Jones’s book, along with the likes of Kathy O’Dell’s Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the s () and Jane Blocker’s Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Peformativity, and Exile () as well as yet unpublished research by a new generation of feminist art historians, reflect more theoretical and political goals, oftentimes aiming at the recuperation of early feminist performance artists who were dismissed as “essentialist” during the heyday of deconstructivist feminist theory in the s. Jones identifies her work as “phenomenologically inflected feminist poststructuralism” (), relying heavily on Judith Butler and Maurice-Merleau Ponty, with strategic pinch-hitting by Jacques Lacan and Simone de Beauvoir. Accordingly, she refuses to privilege live performance as an “originary” moment over (art) objects of documentation. Instead, performance is an act of reiteration, which opens out for her utopian postmodern vision the theoretical possibilities for a new production of subjectivity. And the stakes are not inconsequential: