Leask, Josephine (2025) New Dance Magazine's radical body of writing: intersections of feminist print culture and dance criticism. Doctoral thesis, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Abstract

The publication New Dance was created by X6, a London-based collective of dance artists in 1977. It ran to forty-four issues and included writing and criticism by dance practitioners. Members of the editorial collective developed a radical form of feminist analysis through this women-driven writing platform at the intersection of ecologies of feminist print culture and dance criticism. They did this through writing from their practice of experimental movement and choreography, the name of which was inspired by the title of the magazine. Practitioner-writers created a critical context for, and archive of, their practice as it developed in the UK, writing on and from the body. In so doing, they countered existing dance structures and the mainstream dance journalism.
In the thesis I conceptualise New Dance’s feminist content and criticism on dance as a ‘body of writing’. I argue that this critical site for experimental writing has been overlooked within scholarship on feminist histories and dance criticism. To frame the body of writing, I situate the magazine in affective contexts which include feminist print cultures such as Spare Rib, dance scholarship and performance criticism.
Through analysis of nine practitioner-writing examples, I demonstrate how the body of writing formed new perspectives on female minoritised bodies. Across the case studies I examine the critical content which appears in different magazine formats – features, letters, interviews and reviews. Collectively, the examples illustrate the emerging affective forms and modes of writing that expanded and complicated definitions of radicality as the editorial collective experimented with intersectional writing approaches. With its development of a critical practice for New Dance, I argue for the body of writing as a core contribution for future dance studies and analysis of critical culture.