A Set of Questions for a Field in Motion: Susan Leigh Foster’s “Choreographies of Protest” and Dance Studies in Theatre Journal

Abstract: In her landmark essay “Choreographies of Protest,” Susan Leigh Foster articulated the central concerns of the (at the time) developing field of dance studies. Foster’s following analysis, embedded in her argument about the compositional elements of social action, advanced core dance studies methodologies. On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Theatre Journal , this essay revisits “Choreographies of Protest,” published in the October 2003 issue, and considers its significance to the fields of theatre, performance, and dance studies. Foster’s famous guiding questions that appeared in this essay, and which foregrounded real-world actions of the body, served to define the methodological approach and possibility of dance studies as a field, both concretizing the queries that previous scholarship had addressed and proposing what might be examined in years to come. In so doing, these seemingly straightforward queries, and the answers they elicit, begin to argue for dance studies as an essential discipline to the humanities, a way of understanding both human experience and human relations.