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Dancing (1993) and the Dilemma of Representing Dance on Television

This essay investigates the schism between the ambitious intentions behind the production of Dancing (1993, Thirteen/WNET) and the lukewarm reception of the television series. I focus on the problem of representing dance on television as a particular form of mass media that operates within certain conventions, which I conceptualize as a matrix with aesthetics versus anthropology operating along one dimension and entertainment versus education operating along the other. Although I defend the anthropological stance of Dancing, I also argue that the series inherited agendas from two different scholarly discourses—dance advocacy and cultural critique—resulting in a dual perspective that inevitably confused viewers with its incongruities.