In this series of qualitative case studies, I study current conceptions of “dance literacy,” and explore dance literacy as contextualized within various studio practices. Literacy has traditionally meant reading and writing alphabetic texts, but more recently has stood in for knowledge about a particular field or meaning-making processes. I ask “how are dancers literate” across several different kinds of studio activities (teaching and learning technique, making choreographic work, re-staging repertory, documenting artistic process) and how these dance literacies contribute to creating dance specific knowledge. I examine dance literacy in three areas: reading, writing, and uses of written scripts. Through multimodality — visual, kinesthetic, aural/oral, tactile, verbal/linguistic, alphabetic/textual modes of communication — dancers process sensate information about what they see, feel, hear, and sense. I also examine how dancers produce notational and alphabetic residual texts in support of their movement texts.
I explore both dance literacy and interactions between dance and literacy. Dance literacy scholarship has typically fallen on two sides of a literacy/orality binary, defining dance literacy either as multimodal processes of dance-making or the use of and fluency in written dance notation systems. Rarely have dancers or dance scholars considered these two seemingly opposing definitions in relation to one another. By drawing connections between traditionally defined literacies and multimodal literacies to examine how they produce dance-specific knowledge and affect meaning-making in the studio, I problematize the conception of dance as an “oral-only” enterprise and reveal an oral-literate continuum that subverts the literacy/orality divide.