INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF DANCE: Founding Editor: Selma Jeanne Cohen.<i> Oxford University Press</i> .<i> Six Volumes, 4,049 pp., $1,250</i>

With the long-awaited publication of the “International Encyclopedia of Dance,” the moving body is about to gain a new regard in American intellectual life. The importance of this dance encyclopedia is immeasurable. Its existence means that from now on, discussions about dance in America can proceed on a higher level. There is now a new standard of accuracy and intellectual rigor that adds permanence to the achievements of this evanescent art form. We have a fresh model of how nations, historical periods and civilizations have made dance an elemental factor in their identity and cultural cohesion.

The status of dance among not just the humanities but the fine arts as well has long been problematic. The aesthetician Francis Sparshott noted in 1988 that despite its historically accepted role in genteel education and its occasional ceremonial and ritualistic importance, dance has suffered. It has had no evident philosophical rationale and no documented intellectual history.

Contemporary dance theorist Susan Foster agrees that for a long time, dance has been regarded as little more than an outlet for intuitive or unconscious feelings, feelings inaccessible to verbal and intellectual expression. Dance was where the primal, emotional and libidinal dimensions of human experience were supposedly vented through physicality. Dance as such a naturalistic activity was not supposed to be suited to analysis.

The IED flies in the face of all these long-standing biases by boldly presenting dance as a rich and newly charted intellectual domain. This isn’t just the first comprehensive encyclopedia of dance, it is also the most ambitious bid to place dance at the center of the current humanistic dialogues about postmodernism, the break-up of the Western canon and cultural hierarchies ever attempted. Ecco homo: He dances.

The editorial tone of the volumes is aggressively postmodern, while their breadth is broadly pluralistic. They encompass ethnography, popular culture and the theatrical dance world with equal enthusiasm. The IED is the most ambitious and comprehensive dance encyclopedia ever attempted, and overall it is a brilliant success. In matters of scholarship, plurality and interpretation, it is superior to the scattering of dictionaries and mini-encyclopedias that previously represented sections of the dance field (primarily ballet).

The IED is also surprisingly easy to consult. Many entries reflect hybrid categories outside the traditional “great works” approach. For example, aerobic dance is included, as is aesthetics, which is broken down into separate essays for African, Asian, Islamic and Western dance aesthetics. Nearly 2,000 articles are signed and include valuable bibliographies, and it is highly visual, with more than 2,100 illustrations. Much of anything one would want to know about dance is contained in these six volumes.

Achievements like this are not without their own backstage stories. For more than a decade, the manuscripts of the IED drifted from publisher to publisher like a literary ship out of “Exodus,” without finding a safe harbor until nearly 20 years after the project had begun. In the two decades since the first international IED planning conference was held in New York, the project has passed through three publishers and scores of editing, rewriting and reediting rounds. Several contributors have died and others refused to continue to update their entries because they had become so skeptical that the IED would ever be published. It’s a saga that represents the coming of age simultaneously of American dance scholarship and of dance publishing. Both will be forever modified by its realization.

There are occasional disappointments, weaknesses that come from the failures of individual writers and less often from a lack of editorial effort and vision. Scholar Gunhild Overzaucher-Schuller’s dry entry on choreographer Bronislava Nijinska, for example, stops in 1964 with no mention of the Nijinska “rediscovery” by the Oakland Ballet in its revivals of Nijinska’s “Les Noces,” “Les Biches,” “Le Train bleu” and “Bolero.” This entry is followed immediately by Joan Acocella’s fluent and smartly interpretive entry on Nijinska’s brother, Vaslav Nijinsky. Acocella’s essay illuminates Nijinsky’s genius as a performer, his iconoclasm as a choreographer and his indelibility as a presence in 20th century dance. Consider the following as a sample of the IED’s finer writing and analysis:

“Nijinsky’s influence as a dancer was immediate and huge. That ballet, nearly extinguished artistically in Western Europe, was revived in this century is due to him and other great dancers of his generation, such as Anna Pavlova and [Tamara] Karsavina, as well as to Diaghilev. That male ballet, utterly extinguished, was also revived is due to him preeminently. Nijinsky was the first real ballet star of the male sex that Europe had seen since the retirement of Auguste Vestris nearly a century earlier. He initiated a renaissance.”

Here then is another important achievement of the IED: It sets a new standard for scholarly writing about dance when assimilative analysis and fluent prose commingle. One feels as if one were reading through the collected works of some of the 20th century’s finest dance essayists. Regrettably, however, the American writers are drawn predominantly from the East Coast, as is the entire IED editorial board. The result is an encyclopedia thin on information about important artists in the West like San Francisco choreographer Margaret Jenkins and the late Mills College dance educator Marian van Tuyl. As has customarily been the case of Americans’ histories of their own dancers, those west of the Hudson figure less prominently than they should. A disclaimer in the introduction warns that there are few biographical entries on contemporary performers because “most must await the judgment of history upon completion of their performing careers.” It’s a standard that seems to be applied unevenly.

The reasons for this are complex. Makers of dictionaries and encyclopedias generally have mixed motives. The IED editorial board, while commemorating the coming of age of dance as an intellectual and scholarly discipline, are also in the same breath swiftly defining what the academic and geographic contours of that discipline should be. The result is a new sensibility through which distinctions between high culture and popular culture collapse and the theatrical and ritualistic are represented equally.

The IED reinterprets dance as a cultural form in which the everyday experiences of women, children, slaves and other often neglected groups are expressed. Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s polemic on “African American Dance Traditions in the United States,” for example, views the hybrids of African and European dance as clandestine strategies for cultural survival, whose development paralleled American racial segregation.

So instead of conventional dance history, the IED attempts to present a restructured intellectual climate and an opening up of the dance canon. Even traditional entries on great dancers, choreographers and ballets are now shown to be shaped by complex cultural politics. For example, the entries for “Australia” and “Australian Aboriginal Dance,” which run 30 pages, exhaustively covers Australian ballet, modern dance, dance research and publication. It features extended essays on the aesthetic significance of Australian aboriginal dance, aborigines of Arnhem Land, Tiwi dance, aborigines of Cape York Peninsula, Warlpiri dance and Antakirinya dance. These later forms are explored with the same emphasis on context, style and significance as ballet and modern dance usually are.

For many of the important subjects, the selected authors are the world authorities on their topics. Arlene Croce’s 17-page essay on George Balanchine is meticulous, authoritative and expansive. Laura Shapiro’s entry on Twyla Tharp richly explores the nuances of her work, and conductor Richard Bonynge’s entry on Adolph Adam offers an important musical reassessment of this often maligned composer of romantic ballet scores. Contributors include not just dance historians and scholars of dance and theater arts but also anthropologists, art historians, musicologists, folklorists, philosophers and professionals in lighting, costume and scenic design.

The IED itself and many of its contributors are products of the explosion of academic interest in dance in the late 1970s, which has made dance history and theory a growth industry. In the last several decades, American dance scholarship has been the strongest in the world. Yet at the same time, the IED editorial board also seems mindful of the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s caution that “in our time history is that which transforms documents into monuments.” In the field of dance, the key documents are transitory--they are live performances--yet the historical impulse to monumentalize them, perhaps through scholarship, has been no less prevalent. The IED fights this tendency editorially with major entries on such topics as the physical and aesthetic aspects of turnout, Malcom McCormick’s lengthy essay on the “travesty” of males playing female dance roles and Mindy Aloff’s eloquent analysis of photography and dance. The result is an encyclopedia that creates an intellectual floor for the next generation of scholars.

Individual entries and groupings have significance here. A few pages into the first volume, for example, one discovers a fairly prosaic entry on the nation’s landmark classical company, American Ballet Theatre, which is followed by John A. Jackson’s contextually rich discussion of “American Bandstand,” seen as a social and racial barometer of middle America from the 1950s through the 1980s. The next entry is on the American Dance Festival, the leading summer workshop for American modern dancers from 1934 to the present day. This random triad delineates the kind of broadly different dance arenas which the IED encompasses. From the concert stage of the nation’s opera houses to dance on afternoon television to modern dancers on the grassy glades of Connecticut College for Women, it suggests that the new province of dance in the 20th century is wherever bodies launch into rhythmic motion.

The IED is a far cry from the tone of what was previously one of the leading dance source books, Horst Koegler’s 1972 “The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Ballet,” an adaptation of the German “Friedrichs Ballettlexikon Von A-Z.” However, as late as his 1982 edition, Koegler confided in the introduction: “Despite the repeated wish of my esteemed new American collaborator, Susan Au, I could not bring myself to include an entry on ‘Post-Modern Dance.’ ”

The IED, as the product of an American editorial board and 650 contributors, many of whom are young Americans or Britons, contains more entries on Europe and America’s postmoderns and their work than any other dance dictionary or encyclopedia yet published. It is equally rich in historical material. For some, like choreographer and dancer Liz Lerman, inclusion does more than assures them a place in posterity. More important, for this iconoclast, it also acknowledges her work and suggests a new broad regard for dance as a fugitive gesture for the most unlikely of populations: the aged and disabled. Cathryn Harding’s insightful profile thus establishes Lerman as part of a long line of modern dance humanists.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Socrates not only approved of dancing but made a careful study of it. In his zeal for grace and elegance, for harmonious movement and carriage of the body, Socrates ranked dance among the most important branches of learning. On the eve of the 21st century, at last, there is a document that makes it possible to legitimize that claim.