Abstract
In the late 1960s, as an undergraduate student of dance at a women’s physical education college in northern England, I was already painfully aware of the extremely tenuous and marginal position held by the study of dance and dancing in the British educational system. There were no departments of dance in universities at that time, a state of affairs that sent a loud and clear message: the academic world completely devalued what I found most meaningful. Imaginative compositions of cultural and artistic value which structured the medium of body movement in space/time apparently did not count as ‘knowledge’ from the prevailing academic perspective. This dismal situation was not improved by many arts educators of the time, who frequently undermined their case for the educational value of the arts with spurious or muddled philosophical arguments.1 In the Western world (that is, western European and derived societies) it is widely assumed that what we call ‘the arts’ are merely for entertainment and enjoyment from which nothing of significance can be learned. The arts in general, and the dance in particular, are regarded as peripheral, expendable, and of no great importance in education as compared to, say, mathematics and the sciences (Best, 1992, p. xii).
Mind and action are revealed in an intimate embrace.
(Clark, 1997, p. 33)
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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Farnell, B. (1999). It Goes Without Saying — But Not Always. In: Buckland, T.J. (eds) Dance in the Field. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375291_12
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