What can dance images tell us about dance, of the past and of the present? Visual sources for dance include representations of dance through a variety of media, including still and moving images, and for a variety of purposes, from art making to advertising to documentation. In my archaeochoreological endeavours I have worked with different kinds of dance images, such as the dance reliefs of the 9th century Prambanan site in Central Java as well as old photographs taken in the 1920s of young Balinese dancers and publicity material relating to contemporary dance performances in UK and other countries. Here I would like to address the issue of methodologies for the study of dance images and I invite anyone involved in parallel research to respond. I say 'methodologies' because it seems clear that one needs to develop a multiplicity of context-sensitive approaches and methods, as varied as the diverse dance material one studies. A term often used for the study of dance images is 'dance iconography'. Coming out of the study of iconography in art history, dance iconography has been defined as the study of the pictorial documentation of dance and simultaneously, of the vision of the artist. However, dance images are not confined to artistic representations, therefore to talk only of a dance iconography seems to imply that only certain types of images should be considered.

Below is the introductory chapter from my book Prambanan: sculpture and dance in ancient Java. A study in dance iconography (Bangkok: White Lotus1997). This was my first attempt t o come to grips with the study of dance images. I began to have reservations about the term 'dance iconography' only at a later stage. When I engaged in research at Prambanan, all the models available to me were from art history and there was indeed very scarce material.

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The book was published, under my earlier name Alessandra Iyer in 1997 by White Lotus, Bangkok. It is based on my doctoral research and on material gathered through fieldtrips in the early 1990s. I have written a new introductory chapter, as my position has changed with regard to some of the issues I discuss in the book. This new introduction, attached below, will help the reader to put the work in context and in conversation with other similar works. Prambanan was an attempt at practising archaeochoreology at a time when such a discipline hardly existed.

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I have also written an ebook on archaeochoreology entitled ReConstructing and RePresenting dance: Exploring the dance/archaeology conjunction, thus these concerns have been addressed in the light of more recent research and newer developments in the field. Meanwhile the two introductions to Prambanan... might constitute a useful starting point for stimulating a discussion.

Prambanan: sculpture and dance in ancient Java. A study in dance iconography can be obtained from Amazon and White Lotus