I feel like I'm learning a lot but at the same time it is making me feel as if I knew very little before. My interest in dance is lifeling but my serious interest in watching and knowing dance is a relatively recent addition and now central strand to my life.
I'm hoping that improving my knowledge about the history of dance and learning how to understand its layers and meaning and codifications will give me a better appreciation when I see dance, give me some historical and cultural background to better understand what I see, and hopefully inform my reviews.
Alternatively, maybe I should just sit and watch and drink it in. I hope I never lose the ability and the desire to do that and that alone.
I'm choosing to develop my 'academic' knowledge of dance by following the two (admittedly very interlinked) threads that interest me most - homosexuality within the world of dance and the role of the male dancer.
The next book I have lined up is The Male Dancer: bodies, spectacle, sexualities by Ramsay Burt.
Then it may be time to tackle Richard Buckle's excellent and detailed biography of Diaghilev again.
