Dance as Culture: Jonas and Sklar on Movement and Identity
This paper examines two foundational texts on dance and culture: Gerald Jonas's Dancing: The Pleasure, Power and Art of Movement (1992) and Deidre Sklar's Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance (2001). It summarizes and compares their key ideas, explores how each author frames the relationship between movement, cultural identity, and society, and analyzes their respective intentions. Jonas traces dance from prenatal quickening through its expression in civilizations ranging from Khmer Cambodia to ancient Greece, while Sklar offers five analytical premises for studying dance in a culturally sensitive way. Together, the two works present complementary frameworks for understanding dance as an embodied cultural language.
- Introduction: Dance as Life and Culture: Dance as universal cultural expression and communication
- Summary of Key Ideas: Jonas on dance history; Sklar's five cultural premises
- Interpretation of the Idea of Interrelatedness: Movement, culture, and society as inseparable phenomena
- The Authors' Intentions: What each author seeks to teach dance audiences
- Comparison and Contrast: Jonas's historical examples versus Sklar's analytical framework
- Their Connectedness: Complementary relationship between the two texts
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper moves systematically through summary, interpretation, authorial intent, comparison, and synthesis — a clear and logical analytical sequence that models good comparative essay structure.
- Direct quotations from primary sources are used judiciously to anchor claims, allowing the authors' own voices to support the analysis rather than merely being paraphrased.
- The paper maintains a balanced treatment of both sources throughout, giving equal analytical attention to Jonas and Sklar without privileging one over the other.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative source analysis: rather than discussing each text in isolation, it consistently pairs Jonas and Sklar within each section to highlight convergence and divergence. This technique — running two sources in parallel across multiple analytical lenses — is especially useful in literature reviews and comparative essays at the undergraduate level.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with an introduction that contextualizes both sources and establishes the central theme of dance as cultural expression. It then offers a summary of key ideas, followed by an interpretive section on interrelatedness. Two further sections analyze authorial intent and draw a formal comparison and contrast. A brief concluding section synthesizes the complementary relationship between the two works. The bibliography lists both primary sources in a consistent format.
Introduction: Dance as Life and Culture
Jonas (1992) points to the first signs of life as the quickening of an unborn person in the womb. From prenatal quickening, a person soon learns self-expression in different ways. One is in the form of a meaningful series of bodily activities or motions called dance. It has evolved into both a tradition and an unconscious external display of purpose, emotion, or message. Throughout history, it can be a form of wooing, entertainment, mourning, praying, healing, teaching, or communication. These expressions evolved into a people's culture upon which their society was built (Jonas). Sklar (2001), on the other hand, lists five premises for a culturally sensitive approach to, and an appreciation of, dance. He lists them as: a knowledge of movement as cultural in nature; as conceptual, emotional, and kinesthetic; as embedded in other kinds of cultural knowledge; as requiring a discernment beyond physical movement; and always as an immediate physical or sensate experience.
Dance, as an expressive form of communication and interrelation, has been used as part of a culture of a society (Jonas 1992, p. 12):
"Courting and courtly dances; wedding dances and funeral dances; dances of healing and dances of instruction; dances to arouse, amuse, or uplift onlookers; dances to usher in the seasons and dances that appeal directly to the gods; dances that tell stories and dances that seek to create a formal beauty that cannot be put into words."
The use of dance in expressing feelings and thoughts has become an unconscious mode of life itself and, hence, a culture upon which a society is built (Jonas 1992). He describes this with precision on page 12:
"So intensely personal is dance, so closely linked to cultural identity, that when people disagree about the meaning and value of specific dances, the resulting confusion may breed contempt, anger, even violence."
And again, on page 17, Jonas elaborates on dance and elevates it into an entirely new discipline with its own unique structure:
"All dance is charged with power. To explore the idioms and sources of this power, a relatively new field of scholarship called dance anthropology views dance in its social and cultural context. Encoded in the form, technique, and structure of every dance are meanings and values of importance to the dancers and to those who share their view of the world."
Sklar (2001) makes a parallel recognition of the value and place of dance in a people's culture and society. While concluding his study on a yearly religious fiesta in Las Cruces, New Mexico, he came up with five premises for an ethnographic perspective in analyzing movement:
"These premises ... are the essential theoretical parameters for considering movement or dance in cultural context" (p. 30).
On page 32, he further delineates that:
"one has to close one's eyes to look at movement, ignoring its visual effects and concentrating instead on feeling oneself to be in the other's body, moving."
Bibliography
Jonas, Gerald. Dancing: The Pleasure, Power and Art of Movement. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992.
Sklar, Deidre. Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance. North Carolina: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
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