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telling dance from drill
N. Bannister - L. Maners (landn@AZSTARNET.COM)
Wed, 14 Feb 1996 09:29:58 -0700
Various posters (Mike, Peter) have raised what used to be a really vexing
question to ethnochoreologists, that is, just what is dance? Trying to
distinguish between dance and drill brings it into focus, in some sense.
Most of us tend to see dance as "rhythmically patterned movements,over
time and space,recognized as dance (here's the emic bit) by its
participants". Although I've done drill and could easily analyze it in
the same terms in which I analyze a Bosnian folk dance, in the etic terms
above, nonetheless in Euro-American traditions, drill isn't recognized as
a dance form. (Hmm, I'm beginning to think that there's a really good
article here for the Dance Ethno. Journal!) We could easily bring the
same tools to examining drill as a form of dance,but etically, to most
of the ""native performers", it isn't dance. Best Regard, Lynn
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