Inaugural conferences

Dance and the Olympic Games, an unfinished symphony
Thierry Terret

The provisional title of my talk is “Dance and the Olympic Games, an unfinished symphony”. I intend to show that despite the real efforts made by Pierre de Coubertin and the Olympic institution to combine the arts and sports, dance remains a notable exception. It has been a forgotten art in the Olympics for half a century, and then was long pushed back to the periphery of the Games, as the very idea of a dance competition is unthinkable or brushed aside by people promoting Olympic Games.

Thierry Terret is an academic, and he was rector and chancellor of the Reunion academy (2013), then of the Rennes academy (2016), and he was a ministry-appointed delegate for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (2018-2022). He is now vice-rector of French Polynesia. Terret is a sports historian who wrote about 75 books on that topic, and he is the author of a Que-sais-je? Volume which was reprinted 6 times, as well as the books Éducation physique, sports et arts, XIXe-XXe siècles and Une histoire du sport féminin co-edited with Pierre Arnaud, the 4 seminal books Sport et genre, and, more recently, a series of 5 books entitled Balades olympiques, which interrogate the history of the Olympic Games from political, economic, media as well as sports and educational perspectives.

Game On! The Contested Values of Dance Competition Across Street, Stage and Screen
Sherril Dodds

Across theatrical forms, screen imagery, and vernacular sites, competition shapes how and why bodies move. As a social construct, competition operates as both contest and commerce, and dance has fully engaged with its tenets of grit, discipline, and desire for superiority. In this presentation, I offer a broad overview of the interactions between dance and competition, before turning to the hip-hop idiom of breaking (also known as breakdancing or b-boying), the foundations of which are steeped in contest. I track the multifarious ways in which breaking wrestles with competition beginning with its historical roots in the Bronx, NYC, as a dance of the African diaspora. I follow its representation as a battle practice and pedagogic tool in Hollywood film, and the values it engenders in community-based jams of Philadelphia, USA. I then move on to speculate how those values might be modified as breaking enters the pinnacle of international sporting competition with its debut in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, along with its rapid circulation through social media. Employing over a decade of ethnographic research within the Philadelphia breaking scene, and in conversation with dance and hip-hop studies, I consider what is lost and gained across these contests and who ultimately wins.

Dr. Sherril Dodds is a Professor of Dance at Temple University. Her books include Dance on Screen (2001), Dancing on the Canon (2011), Bodies of Sound (2014), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition (2019), The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies (2019), and Facial Choreographies: Performing the Face in Popular Dance (2023). She has been a visiting scholar at Trondheim University in Norway, Griffith University in Australia, Stanford University in the USA, and Université Clermont Auvergne in France. She was awarded the 2015 Gertrude Lippincott prize for her article, “The Choreographic Interface: Dancing Facial Expression in Hip Hop and Neo-burlesque Striptease.” She is an active b-girl in the Philadelphia breaking scene.