Redefining Community Dance: A Systematic Review and Dual-Perspective Analysis of Rhetoric and Reality Intersections (2000–2026)

This systematic review adopted a dual-perspective approach to examine how community dance is conceptualized and operationalized in the literature published between 2000 and 2026. The review was reported in accordance with PRISMA 2020, with eligibility and search concepts informed by SPIDER. Searches of five bibliographic databases and Google Scholar produced 423 records, of which 30 peer-reviewed articles were included in a thematic and cross-cutting narrative synthesis. Explicit accounts framed community dance through macro-level aspirations toward cultural democracy, equity, social connection, and eco-social sustainability. Implicit operational accounts emphasized micro-level relational, embodied, and pedagogical processes through which these commitments may be pursued, including process-led participation, de-centering of authority, challenges to normative body ideals, non-clinical well-being, and, in a smaller subset, trauma-informed principles. The realization of democratic and inclusive aspirations varied by context, facilitation, participant experience, and institutional conditions. Across both strands, the lived body occurred as an interpretive link between embodied knowledge, participation, and psychosocial well-being. Community dance is provisionally conceptualized as an anti-elitist, leisure-based, process-led participatory practice that seeks to create democratic spaces where diverse bodies share creative agency and relational justice may be pursued in practice. This definition aims to clarify the field’s conceptual identity, offering a cohesive epistemological foundation for future research, policy, and pedagogy.