Taking the perspective of both dancer and critic, Erin Brannigan examines the increasing
disciplinarity of contemporary Australian dance practice and discusses local developments
in the context of global trends and their history. Such regulation is incongruous, she claims,
in the face of the extraordinary cross-media diversity displayed by the leading
choreographers abroad. The place of dance as a discrete discipline in both education and
public performance has been hard won, she says, but now the accelerating move towards …

–the removal of elements and concerns extraneous to “movement”–because so-called pure
dance artists such as Merce Cunningham also had visual artists and composers contribute
to their performances. She proposes instead that it is not a primary emphasis on manifest
movement that defines the “discipline” of dance but that a work or practice is based in a
developed “somatic intelligence", which might appear in many forms. I take Brannigan here
to be making the important point that the question of whether a work or performance is …