Introduction D ance is virtually always music-and-dance, unavoidably interdisciplinary and ready for "marriage," or so the familiar metaphor tells us (Du Manoir 1664/1985; Humphrey 1959,164). Apart from a few notable exceptions from within modern dance-like the silent dances of the 1920s and 1930s or the flamboyant rejections of musical tyranny by Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainer from midcentury-the centrality of music within dance and the "musicality" of the dancer have long been considered unquestioned facts of life. Yet traditionally, there have been fundamental differences in practice and conceptual frameworks between these two art forms or (within the academy) "disciplines."Music has a history of being thought "alone" and uncontaminated by matter outside itself. Often, it needs no other partner. Then, in dance, the performer is central-as Yeats famously wrote: "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" 1-while in music, the score object, written by a composer, has been central and the performer, until quite recently, relatively marginalized. Today, it is timely to review the two disciplines, noting that they are becoming more mutually permeable, and in relation to their shared interdisciplinarity. Now, we might consider how music theory becomes dance theory and how dance and the body, using the principle of somatic engagement, can impact on musical experience and thinking about music. I will also suggest how intermedia theory becomes a theory of "choreomusical" interrelations. 2

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract