Dance may appear at first glance to be a cultural practice whose study would be by definition “cultural”. In fact, it can be examined by a variety of perspectives, each of them applying its own methodologies to a selected group of source material. As a consequence, we could (and do) have different styles of dance history: one centred on aesthetics and techniques, focussing on the varying dance forms that have been practiced throughout the centuries and the way we can reconstruct how they were performed; in turn, the physicality of the dancing body can offer itself to a kinesic analysis, or be taken into consideration within a study of physical education, not excluding the interaction with notions and practices of health and medicine; furthermore, economic, social and political contexts and uses will help highlighting how dance has functioned either or both as a dependent variable, affected by and reflecting all of those circumstances, or by itself operated as an effective agent that could challenge as well as confirm a status quo. What is, then, the specificity of a cultural approach?

The notion of culture that is in question in cultural history as it is conceived and practiced today is not the traditional Culture, meaning philosophy, literature and the arts, even if a more democratic perspective could socially double the above elitist definition with some mirroring and adaptation they may be witnessed among the working classes – ballads, handicrafts and such. It is, rather, the anthropological understanding of culture as all that can be learned and preserved by transmission within a given community, on the dual – and entangled – level of beliefs and practices. The definitory emphasis on transmission has frequently led to the perception of traditional cultures as being typically conservative; however, attentive analysis of specific contexts reveals that repetition is never identical and innovation takes place continuously and is highly appreciated, if not explicitly required.   Cultural history on the other hand is a more specific form of practice or at least it can be intended to be. As a quasi-synonym of historical anthropology (some national traditions prefer one denomination or the other, and of course there are nuances both within and between  academic schools), over the past half century, with predictable variations and oscillations, it has been viewed in particular as the study of the past that places  a central role in how women and men from the examined places and times understood the world and themselves and acted accordingly, charging human and natural realities and events alike with their own meanings. As a result, historians in recent generations have focused less on the technical reconstruction of events and more on what they meant for agents and witnesses. Also, on how everything felt. Affects, feelings and emotions (the segmentation, understanding and evaluation of human experience has itself, of course, also varied through time and cultures) are another major, exciting recent frontier of scholarly analysis that until very recently would have been regarded as either frivolous or beyond the historian’s reach; a huge body of current research testifies that this does not appear to be the case.

And what about dance, in all this? Let us begin from the last point – feelings. The late Renaissance codification of Western iconographic paradigms, which systematises in writing cultural associations that had been around for much longer, testifies that dance is considered as the typical manifestation of joy: merriness incarnate (Arcangeli 2017). Needless to say, this connection would not have been universally perceived and judged positively: a theological tradition dating back from the Church Fathers included an “unfit, foolish delight” (inepta letitia) among the “daughters of gluttony”, a vice strictly connected with the lack of control in satisfying the pleasures of the lower body (Arcangeli 2000, pp. 218-23). In general, cultural associations of dance are determined by the concept and practice of dance that a given community of interpretation adopts and develops (see Dance and Rites), as well as on the framework – both in terms of mental maps and of surrounding and connected social habits – within which it is set and with which it interacts. These include an aesthetic evaluation and educational appreciation, the judgment on its propriety in specific times and spaces and for particular groups of people, as well as the whole spectrum of possibilities opposing, or combining, emphasis on community versus professionalism, and consequently performance versus spectacle (see Dance and Rites).

References:

Alessandro Arcangeli, Davide o Salomè? Il dibattito europeo sulla danza nella prima età moderna (Treviso-Rome: Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche-Viella, 2000)

Alessandro Arcangeli, “Dance and Feelings in Early Modern European Discourses” (2017), blog entry in https://historiesofemotion.com/2017/07/28/dance-and-feelings-in-early-modern-european-discourses/

Alessandro Arcangeli and Licia Buttà, “Research Perspectives on the Cultural and Visual History of Dance in the Middle Ages and Beyond”, Mantichora 10, 2020, pp. 13-17

Further reading (on cultural history in general):

Alessandro Arcangeli, Cultural History: A Concise Introduction (London: Routledge, 2012)

Alessandro Arcangeli, Jörg Rogge and Hannu Salmi (eds), The Routledge Companion to Cultural History in the Western World (London: Routledge, 2020)