This article attempts to summarize leading ideas in dance research within the European scholarly tradition and to draw attention to similarities and differences between the anthropological and choreological approaches. Thereby, we hope to shed light on dance research in general and to outline possible directions for future studies.

As a companion piece to the previous article by Giurchescu and Torp, my focus here is to attempt to illuminate trends and approaches in dance research by American scholars. It will be seen that although the current generation of American dance ethnologists/anthropologists have their theoretical roots in American and British anthropology, the most widely-known American dance ethnologist, Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, was more closely aligned with European dance scholars of the 1930s and 1940s. At the risk of overstatement for the sake of discussion, I would characterize the focus of European dance researchers to be on the dance product and its authenticity, while the focus of American researchers is on what dance can tell us about society—or to simplify even further, choreological approaches vs contextual approaches.

Similar to the situation in many other cultures of Asia, in Japan dance and music have always been closely related. If one looks at the history of Japanese music, many genres of music such as gagaku and noh accompany dance. Research in dance, however, has not kept pace with research in music, and it is only recently that studies of dance began to be recognised as an academic discipline. The learned society for dance research, buyō gakkai was founded only in 1976, while the society for research in Asiatic music was established in 1936 and the musicological society of Japan in 1952. Many universities offer degrees (B.A., M.A., and Ph.D.) in musicology and ethnomusicology, but only a few universities, such as Ochanomizu University,2 offer degrees in dance or the study of dance. The faculties of education of some universities3 offer dance classes as a part of physical education.

1. A PERSONAL NOTE. While, during the last fifty years, the relation between music and the visual arts has become a not uncommon subject of scholarship, the same cannot be said of dance and the visual arts. A glance through the many volumes of Dance Chronicle yields almost no articles on the subject, and a publication like Dance history research: perspective from related arts and disciplines (1970)—surely a title which leads one to expect a discussion of dance iconography—does not contain anything related to the subject, not even in the contribution by the art historian: he does not mention dance with a word!

In northwest England, during the early nineteenth century, morris dancing was performed annually by young adult men in the context of a procession which called attention to the health, wealth, number, and strength of a community's menfolk. After the First World War, morris dancing could still be seen as a form of public display in the region, but it had also become the province of children of both sexes. This age and gender revision coincided with an apparent spread of morris dances within the area.

Folklore, that “good anglo-saxon compound” invented by William Thoms, has taken on many meanings since it first appeared in “The Atheneum” in 1846. In many countries throughout the world it is still used as a broad label for all those “manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc. of the olden time”, as originally suggested by Thoms (Dundes 1965). However, folklore is also used in another and more specific sense, namely for a certain kind of staged performance of folk music and folk dance, by people dressed in special types of folk costumes, accompanied by a selected number of tunes performed on a limited number of instruments. To such ‘folklore’ performances also belong symbols such as herding rods, spinning tools, old-style pottery, flags; as well as verbal statements about special features or the origin of the dances, the costumes and the music; and sometimes elaborated stories that place the whole activity in a historical and social framework.

Recent research in the anthropology of human movement shows that it is not at all uncommon for people to perform their history. Perform, not only in the sense of reciting epic poetry and myths, but by engaging in complex and elaborate structured movement that quite literally embodies their traditions. Kaeppler (in press), for example, has shown how Hawaiian history is performed through the intricate connections between sung poetry and actions of the hula tradition. Williams (1991) and Arnold (in prep.) have examined how the wallaby dance of the Wanam (an Australian Aboriginal group from the Cape York Peninsula) combines song and dance to re-enact myths which serve not only to confirm the details of Wanam history and identity, but also to renew the socio-religious world in which they live. Likewise, the Assiniboine people of Northern Montana, who are the subjects of this paper, use both speech and action to perform traditional stories which embody their history and world view. In this latter case, however, the action sign system1 used is a fully discursive sign language, rather than a non-discursive or non-propositional movement system of the kind usually, but not always adequately, referred to as “dance.”

The world-wide success and flexibility of computers as text editors encouraged dance scholars to strive to develop something similar for dance notation which would alleviate the burden of bad orthography, exhausting ink drawing and proof-reading for misspelled signs. Software for writing, editing, archiving and retrieving dance notation by computer became a fashionable project at universities in the late seventies and early eighties. Most of the experiments for computer applications in the field of dance notation were carried out in Labanotation and the machines used were mainly IBM and Macintosh personal computers with various peripheries.

Most of the published research in dance ethnology was conducted prior to the wide availability of personal computers.1 Research projects were usually realized within a framework of field work—data gathering by observing, participating in dance events, interviewing resource people, describing and/or recording dance movement; and analyzing data and movement behaviors. The results of such research was then put into manuscript form, which was generally typed by the researcher using a typewriter. Making use of a computer—as a tool to assist in storing research information, to sort and analyze field data, to produce illustrations and maps, or to notate dance movements—is all a relatively new approach for dance ethnologists.

In this article I will present how computers are used in dance research at Rådet for folkemusikk og folkedans, Sekretariatet (RffS) (The Centre of the Norwegian Council for Folk Music and Folk Dance) at the University of Trondheim. Recognizing that data technology is not an end in itself, our use of computers is focused on objectives of our institution.