📚 Save Big on Books! Enjoy 10% off when you spend £100 and 20% off when you spend £200 (or the equivalent in supported currencies)—discount automatically applied when you add books to your cart before checkout!

🚨 Please be advised that, due to the holiday season, shipping delays may occur. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your understanding.

Copyright

Sarah Whatley

Published On

2025-10-24

Page Range

pp. 107–124

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

5. Dance Analysis

Chapter of: Performance Research Methods: Interdisciplinary Methods for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies(pp. 107–124)
Dance analysis is a method that encompasses a wide range of approaches that have developed over time to aid researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners to understand and appreciate dance. These approaches have continuously evolved to reflect advances in the discipline of dance, taking account of the influences of cultural perspectives and of developments in wider theoretical frameworks. Advances have also acknowledged the diversity of dance, which includes dance made for theatrical performance, dance as a social or cultural practice, and how dance has developed in new directions due to the impact of digital technologies. This continuing evolution of methods, which have often emerged concurrently rather than sequentially, has led to a rich and dynamic field of dance analysis. This chapter explores a range of approaches to demonstrate how they can be applied to dance in myriad forms, providing tools that can help to see dance ‘from the inside’ and support meaning making, whether the analysis is located in dance performed live, on screen, online, or in documented forms, such as images, scores, and notations.

Contributors

Sarah Whatley

(author)
Professor and Director of the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7455-0847

Sarah Whatley is Professor and Director of the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University, UK. Her research interests extend to dance and disability, dance and new technologies, intangible cultural heritage, dance archives, and somatic dance practice and pedagogy; she has published widely on these themes. Her research has been funded by the AHRC, UKRI, the European Commission, Leverhulme Trust and Wellcome Trust, and is often interdisciplinary, collaborating with artists, designers and researchers from other disciplines including law, anthropology, psychology, digital media and computing science. Her current projects explore the interface between dance, disability, prosthetics and robotics. She served as panel member for UoA D35/33 in REF 2014/2021, is a member of the AHRC peer review college and Chairs the AHRC-sponsored ‘Dance Research Matters’ campaign. She was founding Editor of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices and sits on the Editorial Boards of several other Journals.