Theater dance is an interdisciplinary form, and some of the most interesting advances in progressive and experimental dance work in recent years have been interdisciplinary in nature. Where Anglo-American dance scholarship is concerned, however, a “theoretical turn” that has led some dance scholars to develop interdisciplinary methodologies has proved highly controversial. Interdisciplinarity is in danger of becoming a specter haunting dance scholarship.

Dance has not been alone in finding this transition difficult. As art historian and cultural theorist Mieke Bal has recently noted, one challenge facing the academy today is to find “a theoretical link between linguistic, visual and aural domains that blend so consistently in contemporary culture but remain so insistently separated as fields of study in the academy” (Bal 1999a, 10). Where dance is concerned, corporeality needs to be added to Bal's list of domains. This essay explores some of the reasons underlying resistance among Anglo-American dance scholars to the use of interdisciplinary methodologies. By doing so it aims to give an account of the public space in which recent examples of theater dance from Europe and the United States map out complex webs of relationships between corporeal, linguistic, visual, and aural levels of signification.

For the past thirteen years, I have been traveling to the United States from my home country of Germany, first as a graduate student in California and later as a professor living in New York. Every time I pass through immigration, I am asked a series of questions regarding my final destination and my occupation. The latter always leads to some confusion, because when I am asked what I do, my accent seems to turn “dance history” into “dentistry.” Forced by phonetics to use the term “dance studies,” when confronted by the blank face of the customs officer, I inevitably embark on an explanation of what “dance studies” might be. Just in the moment when I finally see some comprehension of my profession lighting up the officer's face, the question is asked: “And we pay you to do this?”

I constantly find myself in the position of having to explain my work. Usually I avoid a long-winded, defensive justification by comparing dance studies to one of its neighboring disciplines: “It is like art history, just writing about dance instead of paintings.” That usually does the trick, but it leaves a foul taste in my mouth. I know that dance studies isn't like art history and I certainly don't want it to be.

While researching dance within the Occupied Palestinian Territories, comments made by the choreographers of local performance troupes resonated in my mind because they exemplify how foreign hegemony controls notions of modernity. The first was a lament: “But can't they understand that this is our contemporary dance?” It followed the rejection of the group's application to a European contemporary dance festival, on the basis that their dance production was not contemporary enough and that it would be better suited to a folkloric festival. For those engaged in creative innovation in dance, this rebuke can feel like being sent to a home for the elderly: packed off to a place where everybody dances in circles, reminiscing about the glorious golden past of their own particular civilization. The second comment cropped up in numerous conversations with local dance practitioners and audiences: “I don't like the modern dance.” This comment was generally directed at any foreign or local dance production that did not fit within nostalgically imagined impressions of dance in times gone by.

This article approaches the idea of interdisciplinarity as an aspect of the globalization of pedagogical practices through the teaching of kathak dance in France. Our study positions itself in a didactic research program that tackles the question of interdisciplinarity under the theoretical angle of joint action between teacher and students (Ranganathan 2004; Ranganathan and Petrefalvi 2007; Sensevy and Mercier 2007; Loquet, Roncin, and Roesslé 2007; Loquet 2007). In this program, “didactics” is defined as the science whose object of study covers educational, teaching, and training practices. Our contribution to this program concerns the field of knowledge related to the body, in particular in sports and artistic activities (Loquet 2006). The ambition of research in didactics currently taking place in France is to show that the teacher's action cannot be treated in a unilateral way, independent of the student's action, just as the interactions between teacher and student cannot be set apart from the objects of knowledge that unite them. In this model, we grant a central place to the concept of “milieu,” seen in a general way as the space where the teacher and the students interact.

In the mid-1990s several articles appeared in the dance literature calling for a greater alliance between dance scholarship and cultural studies. More recently, dance scholarship has come to be labeled “dance studies,” suggesting that such a link has occurred. Since interdisciplinarity is a key element of cultural studies, it is appropriate to investigate interdisciplinarity in dance studies by examining dance's relationship to cultural studies. This genealogical task, though, is not as straightforward as it might seem. Cultural studies' relationship to the disciplines has not been stable over its half-century of existence. Interdisciplinarity, tied so closely to cultural studies' idea of its own freedom and political mission, has proved difficult to hang onto—so difficult, in fact, that today some consider the field to be in crisis. To complicate matters further, dance and cultural studies developed along different paths; consequently, interdisciplinarity within dance studies is not always conceptualized in the way it is in cultural studies. Cultural studies was initially meant as a political and social intervention that purposefully avoided creating theories of its own, while dance research, long tied to the disciplines of history and anthropology, not only adopted many of the theories and methods of these fields but also developed theories and methods of its own as an aid in analyzing the human body in motion. Where and how, then, do dance and cultural studies meet on the grounds of interdisciplinarity? This is not an idle question; cultural studies has had a major impact on arts and humanities scholarship, and as cultural studies reaches a critical moment of reexamination, new questions arise as to the role of interdisciplinarity, both in cultural studies and in the fields it has so profoundly influenced.