Thanks to all for your feedback.
Oh dear - I seem to have hit a nerve by using the word "naval-gazing". I did not mean to upset anyone. You are right Kate, with a background as an actual dancer, when I dip into the academic dance world and come across overweight Drama graduates describing themselves as "dance artists", my own nerves get irritated. As I said in my initial post, yes there does need to be an element of the Culture/Gender Studies etc., but it seems to me that sometimes there is so much focus on the wider context, that it is hard to see where dance comes into Dance Studies it at all.
At the de Valois conference in White Lodge a few years back, a young dance academic, who had clearly never danced professionally herself, gave a lecture about the "feminisation of ballet", and the "victimhood" of the female dancer. I was confused as to how anyone could have come up with such theories, none of which resonated with my own experience as a female ballet dancer. I shared my confusion with the person next to me, who completely agreed with me and used a word rather less polite than "naval-gazing" to describe the reflection and analysis we had to endure. The person sitting next to me was the Artistic Director of a major UK ballet company.
Anyway - I have had contact with a couple of lecturers in Roehampton and they seem very sane to me and thankfully very focused on dance. Indeed, one of them herself commented in a recent publication on how so many academics from non-Dance disciplines (from Sociology, Politics, even Geography) jumped on Dance as an area of research in the 1990s that "the dance baby got thrown out with the bathwater").
We were always taught at school that brevity is key so I will sign off now. Why be succint and say "naval-gazing" when one can "analyse, reflect and self-reflect on the naval" ? :-)
