Dance Images in Temples of Mainland Southeast Asia ... - Repository

This study argues that the dance images in the temples of mainland Southeast Asia reveal
more information about dance, its history, its forms, and its role in culture, if they are
examined as an integral part of the iconographical programmes of sacred buildings than they
would do if observed only as separate images isolated from the architectural and consequently
ideological context in which they were originally created. A crucial reason for this is the fact
that Hindu Buddhist temples and other sacred structures were built to refl ect the structure of
Indian-originating cosmology discussed in detail below. Thus the building became an image
of the cosmos with its inhabitants and with even ethical connotations.
1.1 Dance Iconography: Systematic Study of Dance Images
The approach applied by the present study is dance iconography, which indicates “systematic
study of one or more visual sources associated with dance” (Smith 1999, 113). It was formulated
in the 1990s. One of its pioneers is the ethnomusicologist Tilman Seebass, who was already
familiar with the use of music-related visual art works as source material for musicological
research. In his article “Iconography and Dance Research” (1991) he expressed his surprise
when he realised that he could not fi nd much, if any, research that refl ected a serious and
systematic approach to the visual resources of dance.
In his article “Dance Iconography: Traditions, Techniques, and Trends”, however,
A. William Smith gives an interesting account of earlier western, image-based dance
compilations and studies (1999, 113–117). It includes a vast amount of material starting from
a 16 th century dance manual to a later archaeological publication on Greek vases with dance
themes. By the turn of the 19 th and the 20 th centuries, when the printing of photographs was
already possible, dance-related catalogues, such as collections of female dancers and various
versions of Salome’s dance were also published. Round about from the 1970s onward several
dance studies were aiming to analyse visual sources in various ways, some by then indicating
the dance iconographical approach, although it was only in the early 1990s that the very term
and method of dance iconography were established.
“Iconography” 3 as an analysis method of visual sources was fi rst formulated by the art
historian Erwin Panofsky in his essay “Iconography and Iconology: an Introduction to the
Study of Renaissance Art” (1939). According to him the iconographical approach involves
three successive steps of research. The fi rst one (i) describes the main elements and subject
matter of a picture. By the second step (ii) the focus is on the narrative story that is depicted
and on its meaning. By the third step, called by Panofsky “iconology”, (iii) the picture is
interpreted as symptomatic of a given culture through the knowledge of comparative material
and art-historical analyses. That is why sometimes the term “dance iconology” has also been
used for the systematic study of dance images. It has been, however, established (Seebass 1991;
Heck 1999) that a suitable term for it is “dance iconography”, since the terms “iconography”
and “iconology” are practically interchangeable.
A dance image is a pictorial or sculptural representation of a dancer, dancers or, simply, an
act of dancing. It is a combination of two, by their very nature, completely different kinds of art
forms 4 . Dance is a corporal, temporal and kinetic form of art, whereas traditional craftsmen or
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