Dance as a discipline is marginalised in academic discourse as an ephemeral, performance-focused subject, its power articulated through the body. In UK schools it

is a physical subject with an aesthetic gloss, languishing at the bottom of the academic hierarchy, conceptualised as art but located within physical education in the national curriculum (Downing et al, 2003; Brehoney, 2005). Placing additional emphasis on performance at A level also undermines the development of dance studies more widely within a subject hierarchy that places literacy, rather than embodiment, as a key factor of high-status knowledge.

Beyond the confines of the dance curriculum, these changes illuminate Foucault’s assertions that power and knowledge are interconnected and that power produces knowledge (1979, 1980b). He outlined three core processes for exerting disciplinary power: observation, examination and normalising judgement. Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison with cells constructed around a central tower, demonstrates how discipline and control can be transferred to the prisoners themselves. The inmates are always potentially visible to the guards and so must behave at all times as if they are being watched. They are their own guards, controlled by the gaze: ‘Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be minimal cost’ (Foucault, 1980b, p. 155). Foucault’s second disciplinary technology, normalisation, is the way in which behaviour can be aligned with society’s standards, to correct what is seen as deviant. The third,

examination, is the combination of the other two and exemplifies ‘power/knowledge’ as it both establishes the truth and controls behaviour. This article illustrates how these processes work in the context of dance in education. Taking into account Foucault’s suggestion that the traditional way of describing power in negative terms as something that ‘excludes’ or ‘represses’ should stop, that it is the productive aspect of power that creates reality, the article explores how dance in education

might be seen as both literate and a physical activity suitable for anyone, and thus to have more power in the twenty-first-century curriculum.

Yet dance is more than just performance: to dismiss it as purely bodies in action is to ignore not only the language of its own structural conventions but also the language in which it might be recorded. Currently there is little indication in school that dance, like music, has its own complex systems of notation. The current discourse of dance in education has normalised it as an illiterate art form and the removal of the notation component at A level has entrenched that perception. Furthermore, the idea that dance studies is solely about ‘beautiful bodies in motion’, the exclusive pursuit of slender, flexible females, is an unhelpful blueprint at a time when there is a need to

encourage more physical activity to combat rising levels of childhood obesity. So if students are not to self-exclude from dance whether on grounds of perceived body type, gender or lack of academic currency, then there needs to be a more inclusive, valued and thus more powerful form of the subject in the curriculum.

Dance in the Curriculum: an overview

Dance developed as a part of public education in the UK during the 1880s when Swedish educator Martina Bergman Osterberg brought Ling’s physical education ideas to London. Physical training

was introduced in 1909 into what were then called elementary schools to improve fi