More than Meets the Eye: Towards Critical Institutional Research in Dance Studies

Abstract

This special issue returns to a set of themes explored in Dance Chronicle twenty years ago. “There is more to dance than meets the eye,” Sally Banes begins the introduction to a sequence of articles within a 2002 issue of the journal titled, “Where They Danced: Patrons, Institutions, Spaces,” featuring work by Banes, Lynn Garafola, Janice Ross, and Purnima Shah. Banes notes that this collection of articles explores what she calls “critical institutional studies,” or research that considers the institutions and patrons that form the conditions of possibility for concert dance. Banes cites the influence of institutional critique in the visual arts, the rise of museum studies, as well as “a long tradition of left-wing art criticism—especially Marxist criticism,” on emerging inquiries in dance studies. Two decades later, we pick up the questions that Banes poses and reflect on how dance studies has developed frameworks for analyzing the institutional contexts surrounding dance. I encountered this issue in 2018, prior to joining Dance Chronicle as an editor, when I was working on a literature review for an article I was writing about dance patronage and its connection to real estate development. I was drawn to Banes’s interdisciplinary connections and explicit invocation of Marxist analysis—a rare sight in a dance publication. When stepping into an editorial role following Joellen Meglin’s invitation, I decided to pick up particular threads within the journal that had been generative for me as a researcher. This special issue builds on recent scholarship in the field that has contributed critical accounts of the institutional structures and material relations that undergird dance practices. In addition to work within dance and performance studies, a rich set of inquires in other fields has developed sharp and illuminating accounts of institutions—their politics, dynamics, and functions. In the visual arts, critics and historians have debated the function and consequences of artworks that foreground their relationship to funders and presenting institutions. A number of groups within the cultural sector have taken up workers’ inquiry methodologies—a mode of studying organizations from the perspective of labor rather than management—providing insight into labor struggles within arts organizations. Marxists in both art history and literary studies have continued to hone and sharpen frameworks for understanding the political economic role of art and culture in a capitalist