Competition Dance: Redefining Dance in the United States

One of the most prevalent forms of dance training for young dancers in the United States, competitive dance has a significant role in the production of dance. This dissertation examines the multiple and various structures that construct this site of dance. Initially this project locates corporate competition dance within other familiar practices that characterize American culture while also considering the unique rules and regulations that frame dance within this context. In this project I call for an understanding of the distinct characteristics of the competition body that make it similar to but still unlike any other dancing body currently housed in the archive of dance studies. In addition, the role of this body in popular culture is explored through its presentation on the reality show So You Think You Can Dance. In particular, I examine how the competition body, in contrast to the hip hop dancer, becomes racially marked and how the marking of both bodies results in a presentation of dance as spectacle. The final chapter of this dissertation draws upon the theories established in the three preceding chapters as I argue for the position of competition as a technology that enables and sustains hegemonic structures of the State. Through the inclusion of political theory and an understanding of how bodies work in relation to State structures I establish competition dance as a site that recreates the United State's practice of white nation building. This project is a cultural analysis of competition dance within the United States and the American culture. Merging dance studies with cultural and media studies as well as political theory, I look at what is produced and reproduced at the site competition through the dancing body as well as the aesthetic and practice of competition. With a distinct focus on the systems that construct and contribute to competition dance I seek to place this dance practice in relation to the many others that have been well articulated by scholarship. In doing so, I hope to foreground competitive dance within the production of dance in the United States, and globally, in the 21st century