This article is concerned with epistemological questions of dance, specifically, the nature of dance knowledge. The aim is to address the role of our bodily activity and the tactile-kinaesthetic sense in epistemology and to clarify the concept “bodily knowledge”—knowing in and through the body. I start with reflection on the standpoints of traditional epistemology and a feminist critique of it, then, extending the concern with epistemological inquiry of dance knowledge, explore Sondra Fraleigh's and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's notions of cognitive capacities of the moving body. Finally, setting out from the groundwork of Edmund Husserl's, Edith Stein's, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, I use some key concepts from Michael Polanyi's epistemology to describe the nature of bodily knowledge. The argument is that there is a distinction and a connection between “skill” and “knowledge” in respect to the body's movement. Gilbert Ryle's “know how” implies abilities ranging from bodily skills to abstract contemplative cases, but it cannot explain “know how” in the absence of skill. Thus, the rationale underlying this discussion can be put more clearly by asking why dance teachers are able to teach dance students movements they can no longer execute themselves.

When investigating the relationship between dance and political movements in the twentieth century a paradox emerges: How could modernist art coexist and indeed diri ve in companionship with totalitarian ideologies? Emphatic individualism has come to define the modern American age and the modern artist. Yet such autonomy stands in direct conflict witii the Fascist and Communist waves mat crashed over Europe and rolled tfirough Depression-era New York in the first half of the twentieth century. This paper traces a lineage of movement ideas that traveled to the United States from Germany during that time. I will briefly consider the chorie principle of the German dance pioneers and how ideas of monumental mass movement emigrated to and were assimilated into the dance world of 1930s New York. The coexistence of two trends, the mass dance and modern concert dance, offer a way to trace the dissemination of movement ideas that organized in tandem with emerging political movements on bom sides of me Atlantic. I will examine how die leftist New Dance Group grew out of me New York Wigman School under die direction of Hanya Holm. The Group used Holm's methods of movement improvisation to encourage amateur dance within the labor union revolution, while simultaneously supporting the development of professionals in die field. Over time, the Group had a lasting impact on American modern dance, encouraging collaboration among artists and racial equality for dancers.

When I was asked to organize a panel for the 2001 Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) conference in honor of my friend and colleague Deborah Jowitt, I thought of calling it “Life After Dance.” I was thinking about how research and writing can be a way for dancers to go on living in their profession when they're no longer actively dancing, as Deborah Jowitt has done. But I also see the products of dance research as giving life back to the profession. I wanted the session to approach research from different points of view. The four presenters I invited here are all friends of Deborah Jowitt; all of them are writers and teachers. Their papers revealed four very different personalities, actively engaged in interpreting dance as a presence in our lives.

I first met Edna Ocko in the early 1980s. She was my mother-in-law's best friend from college days, someone who wrote about dance in the 1930s and took a dim view of critics since. My husband was a little in awe of Edna, and the first time she came to the house, I was told to cook an extra pound of pasta because Edna was coming. To my amazement, she was almost as tiny as my grandmother. We had a lot of pasta left over.

Edna Ocko, or Edna Meyers, as we knew her, was a formidable woman. She had been a communist in the 1930s and remained at heart a member of the Party, bonded by decades of friendship to the comrades-in-arms of her youth. She was punchy and articulate, with strong opinions and political convictions that never wavered even when she was named as a communist by Jerome Robbins before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. She was also a first-rate dance critic who knew the difference between art and propaganda, could tell good choreography from bad, and wrote with verve. She was a crack editor, with a nose for a story, who understood intuitively how to balance different voices and views: unsurprisingly, her best days as a dance journalist coincided with the Popular Front, which embraced liberals and leftists alike. Finally, she was an intellectual, curious, well read, stimulated by ideas, who counted even balletomanes like Lincoln Kirstein among her colleagues.

Earlier this week I viewed the 1990 film Longtime Companion for the umpteenth time, watching with the kind of obsessive fascination one usually reserves for a slow-motion train wreck or for the video-loop collapse of two gigantic buildings in lower Manhattan: you know what's going to happen, and you're horrified, and yet you simply cannot turn your eyes away. Written by Craig Lucas, Longtime Companion was the first Hollywood film to deal with the AIDS epidemic in the United States and, predictably, it concerns itself almost exclusively with gay men of the sort who spend part of each summer at Fire Island and part of every day at the gym, mediated for middle America through the point of view of a straight woman: homosexual culture for the masses.

Journalism it's often remarked, is the first draft of history. In dance, reviews in mass media provide the bedrock for much historical research. The dance boom, which came along in the mid-1960s, led to a boomlet in opportunities for writers in New York City, chiefly in the Village Voice and the Soho Weekly News, weeklies that supported the work of Deborah Jowitt and Marcia Siegel, pioneering writers in the alternative press, and provided outlets for many other young critics.

The Dance Touring Program of the National Endowment for the Arts created a demand for writers across the country. With the end of the DTP in 1986, performances, and the need for reviewers, fell off outside New York. During the 1980s we lost several publications—Dance News and Ballet News, and even the Soho Weekly News—that had nurtured fledgling critics. Through the 1990s, space for dance in the Village Voice kept shrinking. There have been fewer opportunities for young writers to hone their skills in public. But around 1997, services by and for dancers began turning up on the burgeoning World Wide Web. Anyone with a search engine could find them. A parallel universe was born.

Space was always central to Merce's choreographic intention for the dance; there were twenty-one different spatial paths, which carried the dancers through the space, not just into it. He says the “summer” part of the title came later. Chance processes were used to determine entrances and exits, number of dancers onstage, who did what phrase when, and so forth. Merce had completed most of the time-consuming chance operations in New York, before rehearsals began in Connecticut. At Connecticut College we worked in a wonderful space— the enormous parlor/ballroom on the ground floor of a large, handsome stone dormitory. Tall windows opened onto an expanse of green lawn and vistas of lush and stately shade trees. It was a hot and humid summer, as summers in New London tended to be. A summer space.

The movement vocabulary is comprised of a variety of turns—slow turns, fast turns, jumping turns, turns ending in falls, and complex combinations of turns, as well as leaps, jumps, leg extensions, arabesques—a vocabulary far more balletic than had appeared in previous Cunningham group dances and yet, although the actual shapes and combinations of steps look deceptively like classical ballet, the abrupt changes in direction and speed, the rhythmic permutations unrelated to Morton Feldman's music, the devouring of space using walks, runs, skips, and leaps, and the surprising use of falls to the floor were not at all familiar to ballet dancers when they came to perform Summerspace. Nor were these ballet dancers attuned to the concept of “stillness.”

May O'Donnell—dancer, choreographer, and teacher—was born in 1906 in California. After discovering dance at the age of seventeen, she eventually performed with Estelle Reed, a San Francisco-based teacher and choreographer who had studied with Mary Wigman in Europe. Moving to New York in 1932, O'Donnell took classes at the Wigman studio run by Hanya Holm. She had never heard of Martha Graham, but following the suggestion of a fellow student, she showed up at Graham's Greenwich Village studio. Watching O'Donnell effortlessly execute deep pelvic contractions and spinal twists, Graham asked if she had ever studied the technique. O'Donnell replied no. After a short period of intensive study, she was taken into Graham's company. From 1932 to 1938, and later, from 1944 to 1950, her splendid presence lent itself unforgettably to Graham's work. A riveting performer whose dancing was once described by Ernestine Stodelle as “Amazonian,” O'Donnell originated roles such as the Pioneer Woman in Appalachian Spring, She of the Earth in Dark Meadow, The Chorus in Cave of the Heart, and The Attendant in Herodiade.

There is so much information available on flamenco in music books and magazines, on video and DVD inserts and film covers, compact disc jackets, and especially the Internet that it is difficult to determine what materials are worthwhile and reliable. In the world of flamenco, artists' and aficionados' opinions are inclined to be subjective. Given flamenco's exoticized nature juxtaposed with its current drive toward modernity, one wonders where the truth lies.

The biggest problem has been that Spanish and flamenco dance scholarship often contains questionable opinions and observations, as is the case in the book Flamenco, edited by Claus Schreiner, with contributions on Baile Flamenco by Schreiner and Marion Papenbrok (Schreiner 1990). There is some good material here on flamenco dancing, but it is tainted by a lack of understanding of flamenco dance history, for example, when Schreiner ponders “what is to be made of Carlos Saura's [films] Carmen [Piedra 1984/1986] or Blood Wedding? No matter how well Antonio Gades and his troupe dance in these films…they have little to do with true flamenco” (Schreiner 1990, 31).