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The critical and the appreciative attitudes to dance in education

This paper was presented to the VII Commonwealth and International Conference on Sport, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance in Brisbane in 1982 (1200 delegates) and was subsequently published in Volume 1 (Dance) of the Conference Proceedings by the Department of Human Movement Studies, University of Queensland Australia. The Conference (which preceded the ‘82 Commonwealth Games) addressed a wide range of topics, published in seven volumes. The dance volume covered scientifc aspects of dance, dance, styles, notation, computer, choreography, historical, educational, social, philosophical, community, theatre and therapeutic aspects of dance Conference. Faculty consisted of speakers world‐wide and included a number of contributors from the UK, including Gordon Curl and Professor David Best, both addressing philosophical issues. The critical and appreciative attitudes to the arts are seen to be logically and psychologically incompatible – the critical attitude assumes a detached impersonal approach whilst the appreciative requires an intimate and involved relationship with works of art. In so far as dance teachers are both ‘critics’ and ‘appreciators’ they share the dilemma which has plagued philosophical aesthetics since the time of Kant. The academic pressures to which the arts in education have been subjected are to be resisted in so far as they detract and diminish aesthetic experience. A more moderate critical approach is to be found in aesthetic perception theory but its restriction of the aesthetic to the discrimination of perceived qualities in the dance does not satisfy the appreciative approach. Central to the appreciative approach is imaginative involvement; this, in terms of dance, brings into play empathic, animistic, participatory, identificatory and other forms of imagination, the spectator becomes implicated imaginatively in the dance. The sceptical intellect derides the appreciative approach for its subjectivity but this is countered by the claim that imaginative thought can be developed into commentary, thus coupling the critical and the appreciative in an alliance beneficial to dance education.