Appreciating Dance: A Guide to the World's Liveliest Art

by Editors of Dance Horizons, Harriet Lihs

Appreciating Dance is a thorough and accurate history of various forms of dance, analyzing everything from social dance, and ballet to modern dance, tap, jazz, theatrical dance and contemporary dance. In it readers will a brief biography of notable dancers and choreographers; information needed to expand the enjoyment of performance; the intersection of dance and religion; the history of dance through the beginning of the 21st century; and budding dance trends. Every chapter in this fifth edition has been updated and revised with new information, including suggestions for YouTube viewing at the end of each chapter.

241 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 1, 2020

Reviews

[Fariha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Given the book's tagline ("A Guide to the World's Liveliest Art"), I was surprised by the extremely myopic point-of-view of its authors. The scope was very America-focused. Research and writing on other world dances were extremely poor. For instance, it mentions Indonesian dances only in the context of dance in the Muslim world, without even referencing the rich Javanese and Balinese dance cultures. Entire chapters are dedicated to ballet and modern dance, none to the other beautiful classical dance forms all across the world.

The tone was also very ethnocentric and borderline racist. Repeated use of the world "Oriental" to describe anything non-Western, even though it is widely known that this is no longer an acceptable way to describe other cultures. I was also surprised at the importance given to minstrel shows, without highlighting its racist legacy and humiliation of the black community. I also spotted the word "blacks" to describe black people.

To top it off, the writing is very bad, similar to that of a high school student using passive voice and other meaningless fillers to increase word count.

Hope these issues can be addressed in the next edition, otherwise it will continue to be an embarrassing piece of work. Either represent yourself as a book on American dance culture, or put some effort into researching all the beautiful dance forms out there. Fix the racist language. And please hire a proper editor.