Global Dance Histories and Contemporary Pedagogies: Alternative Routes

Abstract

When teaching dance history in the twenty-first century undergraduate classroom, how are dominant elisions within the Euro-American historical canon addressed? How might instructors integrate the choreographic voices, movement styles, and geographic regions that normative North American dance instruction—with its emphasis on ballet and modern dance, and (white) choreographers in the Global North—typically exclude? These questions frame Milestones in Dance History, edited by Dana Tai Soon Burgess, a textbook that insists on often-marginalized artistic lineages as essential to the dance historical field. Included within Routledge’s Milestones series, “a range of accessible textbooks, breaking down need-toknow moments in the social, political, cultural, and artistic development of foundational subject areas” (p. i), Milestones in Dance History provides a necessary response to ongoing critiques of university-level dance instruction in the United States. Eurocentric thinking, in addition to Euro-American dance styles, are dominant in post-secondary curricula, which obscures the multiplicity of global dance histories and their continued resonances. The book attempts to resolve these erasures by inviting students to, first, encounter dance practices that are typically excluded from canonical syllabi, and, second, interpret their respective histories as connected to each other, rather than geographically and culturally discrete. A “milestone” references moments of importance, denoting significant change or development. On a literal level, it evokes markings on a road or map, often indicating where progress has been made. Milestones in Dance History engages this concept as a primary structuring principle: each of the book’s ten chapters centers a milestone that “has shaped the different forms and genres of dance that we experience today” (p. xi). The chapters, which are “designed for weekly use” (p. i) in dance history courses, also cohere around the theme of “migration and political conflict” (p. x). Each author therefore prioritizes specific historical events, contextualizing their chosen