Joellen A. Meglin

Where Are All the Women Choreographers in Ballet

And women artistic directors, we might add. Balanchine’s words ∗ remind us that women fill the rank and file of ballet companies, and their technique and expressivity have contributed greatly to ballet’s historical development. But have women achieved status equal to that of men, who, overwhelmingly, hold positions of artistic or administrative leadership? In the United States at least, the more prominent the ballet company and the greater its budget, the less likely it is to be run by a woman. Was this always so? Why is it so now? What is the status of women in ballet companies across the globe? A cursory search, using the terms “women,” “artistic directors,” and “ballet,” in the International Index for the Performing Arts database yields 104 articles, but few of these discuss women artistic directors in dance, while several talk about male directors strengthening the ensemble work of the women in the corps de ballet. One article in Dance Magazine considers the leadership style of five women who direct major dance companies: Karen Kain, artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada (outside the United States, we point out); Stoner Winslett, founding artistic director of the Richmond Ballet; Brenda Way, founder of the Oberlin Dance Collective; Liz Lerman, founding artistic director of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange; and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, founder of Urban Bush Women.1 But the last three companies are contemporary (modern or postmodern) dance companies, rather than ballet companies, and one might reasonably ask how major is the Richmond Ballet outside Virginia. Another article, in Dance Teacher Now, in a regular column on regional dance, focuses on the contributions of two visionary ballet directors, Josephine Schwarz and Evelyn LeMone.2 Schwarz (“Miss Jo”) founded the Dayton Ballet Company, instigated the choreographic conferences of the regional ballet movement in the 1960s, and, as an activist on the dance panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, won funding for regional dance. LeMone founded the Pasadena Dance Theatre, an honor company

Music and Dance: Conversations and Codes

Why have dancers been drawn to Cowell’s music? Basically, I suspect that the American dancer felt that Cowell was one of them. He, too, was an explorer of new resources. He was always searching for new approaches to his medium, always inventing sounds that challenged and stirred the imagination of the dancer. His music reverberated, suspended itself, cut capers, was thoughtful—and never overcame the dancers with pretentious complexities.1

Today’s Dances Tomorrow: Preserving Dance in Diaspora

In our first issue of Dance Chronicle this year, volume 34, number 1, we presented a first set of articles addressing a theme we had disseminated in a call for papers last year: “Preserving Dance as a Living Legacy.” In that issue, we published varied perspectives on issues surrounding recreation of concert dance, memory of dances experienced in the past and across cultures, as well as attempts by choreographers and institutions to preserve theatrical dance works. Whether focusing on Rudolf Laban’s chamber works of the 1920s, Serge Diaghilev’s mounting of Sergei Prokofiev’s Le Pas d’Acier on the Ballets Russes in 1927, Kazuo Ohno’s Admiring La Argentina, or the arrangements a number of Canadian choreographers have made for preservation of their artistic legacies, apprehending the aesthetic intent, cultural knowledge, multifaceted production elements, integration of mediums, and depth of performance practices takes time, wisdom, and resources. In this issue, volume 34, number 3, we continue our focus on “Preserving Dance,” exploring new directions in the critically important matter of sustaining the cultural legacy of our dancing forebears, colleagues, communities, and students—the up-and-coming dancers of tomorrow. Some artists are concerned now with sustaining the nature of a community’s expression in movement, what Ruth Eshel calls the “DNA” of a people’s dance language. In her article, “A Creative Process in Ethiopian-Israeli Dance: Eskesta Dance Theater and Beta Dance Troupe,” Eshel explains the particular circumstances leading to the immigration of a large population of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, the challenges of this group to both sustain its traditions and to integrate into contemporary Western society, and her role in nurturing a choreographic version of this delicate balancing act. What kinds of works can best represent these dancers, the

Behind the Veil of Translucence: An Intertextual Reading of the Ballet Fantastique in France, 1831–1841. Part One. Ancestors of the Sylphide in the Conte Fantastique

I think of performing this research on the ballet fantastique as something like holding a séance: I press the spirits of the past to come to life, to appear before us as they really were, to speak to us. I want to communicate with the dead, but it is definitely an act for the living. It is a moment of retrospective reckoning: a relay of curative ideas from the vantage point of the present. I am primed as the medium, steeped in occult Romantic literature. You, the readers, are my guests sitting around the table, perhaps curious, critical, skeptical. I use the metaphor of the séance for this particular research study not only because it was a cultural practice of the period I am studying, and because I have come to believe that Romanticism itself was a kind of cultural communing with the spirits of the past by people left with its residue in the present, but also because writing this history seems to

Kinetic, Kinesthetic, and Modern: Dance and the Visual Arts

Recently, I had occasion to research Martha Graham’s costume design for what dance critic and philosopher George Beiswanger called “the goat creature” in her solo Satyric Festival Song (1932). Graham herself noted that the dance had “the irreverent bold charm of a satyr’s laugh. It mocks pomposity like a clown, poking fun with rude gestures and attitudes.” A full-length, tubular dress with loud horizontal stripes highlighted the character’s unpredictable, angular outward thrusts and bolts—movements that erupted like visual hee-haws. One can find these texts and photographic images of Graham, in costume, performing the dance in the 1941 edition of Barbara Morgan’s Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs. Exploring the volume, I was surprised to discover that, in the early years of her choreographic career, Graham proved to be an impressive costume designer. Because Graham wrote the program notes for the volume, one may infer that she had a lot of control over how to credit the dances. The notes clearly credit Graham for the “choreography and costume” or “choreography and costumes” for Lamentation (1930), Harlequinade (1930), Primitive Canticles (1931), Primitive Mysteries (1931), Satyric Festival Song (1932), Ekstasis (1933), Sarabande (1934), Celebration (1934), Frontier (1935), and Imperial Gesture (1935)—ten of the sixteen dances represented. Had she not been a genius as a choreographer, she certainly could have had a brilliant career as a costume designer. Graham was not the only one who designed her own costumes. Austrian Expressionist dancer Harald Kreutzberg began his professional life as a fashion designer and went on to invent most of his own costumes. Who can forget, after seeing images of them, the rope noose wrapped around his calf in photographic images of Hangman’s Dance on the Grave of His Victim (Figure 1); or the full body robe, a corner of which at times served to mop his brow, in Piet a; or the string line drawing on his jacket in Three Hungarian Dances? Better still, the Futuristic bands strapped around the bodies in his duet with Ruth Page, Bacchanale? Many more examples of “double threat” choreographers of movement/ designers of plastic materials exist. Who could ignore Alwin Nikolais or,

Ballet in America: A Revisionist Tale

In Making Ballet American: Modernism Before and Beyond Balanchine, Andrea Harris opens with a bold assertion: “The enduring power of the Balanchine myth”—that George Balanchine is pretty much the beginning, middle, and end of any story about ballet in America—proceeds largely from lacunae in critical scholarly inquiry (p. 3). More provocative yet is Harris’s immediate remedy: deconstruction of the Balanchine metanarrative itself. Who constructed this myth, how did they do it, and to what purposes? But Harris’s counter-narrative is more than a historical whodunit—though she does not shy away from naming the reputation makers and breakers. In the end, it is discourse analysis that commands center stage in this play, like a mise-en-sc ene that vividly captures the milieu, sets the tone, and illuminates the subject matter. The discourses at stake center on questions of the role of art in society—in particular, modern art in relation to American and European society during a century that witnessed enormous change, crisis, and cataclysm. With the dawn of the twentieth century, new technologies facilitated the development of mass production and mass media, heightening fears of “massification,” according to the author’s argument. Such homogenizing of human interiority in terms of thought processes, desires, and feelings left humans open to manipulation and external control. The manipulation could be economic, creating consumers co-dependent on capitalism, or political, programming unthinking masses. Worst still, massification led to mediocrity, uniformity, and insipidity. (Think of Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street.) Cultural critics, intellectuals, and artists railed against massification as a threat to individual autonomy and will. Therein lay the impetus for the expatriate movement of the 1920s, which sought refuge abroad from the crassness of American capitalism. Harris effectively weaves this theme of massification—a resonant one—throughout the book. (One has only to think of the depiction of the cyborg—half machine, half human, robotic, hypnotized by a perpetrator—in German Expressionist films of the 1920s to realize its explanatory power.) The premise that twentieth-century aesthetic modernism in America took massification as its foil and antagonist is a provocative one. And modernism will fair well as the protagonist. In the first discourse chapter, Harris focuses on the debate between Lincoln Kirstein, the great ballet apologist, and John Martin, the New York Times dance and theater critic who nurtured the American modern dance movement in its infancy. The former, guided by leftist sympathies and the spirit of internationalism in the worker’s movement and the cultural

Kinetic, Mobile, and Modern: Dance and the Visual Arts

When American Ballet Theatre premiered in America Alexei Ratmansky’s two-act re-creation of Le Coq d’or (The Golden Cockerel) on June 6, 2016, New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay pronounced Richard Hudson’s evocation of Natalia Goncharova’s stunning sets and costume designs for the ballet (1914, 1937) the chief marvel of the evening. Paul Stiga, a well-known design collector, traveled from Boston specifically to see the execution of those designs. And I, too, felt bowled over by them. Not that the other elements of the production were to be sneezed at. Le Coq began life as an opera composed by the great orchestrator Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, based on a libretto adapted from Aleksandr Pushkin’s verse version of stories from Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra. Produced as an opera-ballet by Sergei Diaghilev, with choreography by Michel Fokine, it played in Paris in 1914. The Original Ballet Russe performed (and recorded) a one-act ballet adaptation by Fokine in 1937. Le Coq now unfolded in choreographic phrases of unexpected rhythm and caesura, spatial range, and gestural intricacy. ABT’s dancers moved with speed, attack, poetic inflection, and precision. Nonetheless, designs that construct a world, indulge the viewer in a suspension of disbelief, tantalize the eye and transport the imagination to mystic realms, and, crucially, stimulate not only spectators, but also those intimately involved in the process of creation—librettist, composer, choreographer, and dancers alike—deserve the acclaim they receive. Such designs linger in the memory and suffuse the experience of total art toward which ballet, at its grandest, aspires. They also leave some of the most important relics and material traces of the conception and aesthetic style of a ballet. Goncharova would go on to design Les Noces (1923) and Les Contes de F ees (1925) for Diaghilev, and she was, of course, not the only cutting-edge avant-garde artist he drew into the inner circle of the Ballets Russes in Paris in the 1910s and 1920s. Others included Andr e Derain, Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Georges Braque, Joan Mir o, Naum Gabo, Anton Pevsner, Georgi Yakoulov, Pavel Tchelitchew, Giorgio de Chirico, and Georges Rouault. Indeed, one could

Founding Editors' Awards Honoring Barbara Palfy in 2015

With this issue we are delighted to announce the results of the first biennial competition for the Founding Editors’ Awards, sponsored by Dance Chronicle and Taylor & Francis. The journal’s editors and advisory board inaugurated the awards in 2015 for the purpose of encouraging the highest quality scholarship in dance history research among scholars at the early phase of their careers. The board voted to honor, for the year 2015, dance archivist, editor, and scholar, Barbara Palfy, who passed away in 2014. It is a fitting tribute to one whose skill and generosity as a mentor were legendary. Barbara Palfy (1936–2014) was Dance Chronicle’s longtime associate editor, who worked with the journal’s founding editors, Jack Anderson and George Dorris, and subsequent editors Lynn Brooks and Joellen A. Meglin, over the course of thirtyseven years. A student of both dance and library science, Barbara worked for the New York Public Library’s Dance Division before turning her attention to editing for many dance publishers and publications, including Princeton Book Company, the International Encyclopedia of Dance, Ballet Review, and Dance Chronicle. As George Dorris notes, reflecting on Barbara’s contributions to the journal, “She brought not only her keen eye, but humor, patience, generosity, an abiding love of the arts—literature and music as well as dance—and a desire to encourage the young scholars who were beginning to transform our discipline. Above all, she was a wonderful, loving friend. No wonder she is so greatly missed.” Barbara’s dedication to mentoring young scholars makes this award, in her name, particularly appropriate. We are deeply grateful to the panel of distinguished scholars from Dance Chronicle’s advisory board who adjudicated the manuscripts submitted for award consideration: Drs. Pallabi Chakravorty, Judith Chazin Bennahum, Jane Desmond, Karen Eliot, Judith Lynne Hanna, and Debra Sowell. Not only did the adjudicators select the award winners, but they also provided detailed feedback to each applicant in a blind peer-review process. Their goal was to illuminate the next steps in deepening the research, and sharpening its rigor, for each young scholar. The commitment and keen critical sense they brought to the process were exemplary. We think the results of the process have been gratifying for applicants, adjudicators, and editors alike. The four essays selected as prizewinners demonstrate diverse subject matter and breadth of interdisciplinary research methodologies. Subject matter ranges from questions of negative and positive freedom in the disciplinary regimen of the Graham technique, to Martha Graham’s first tour of European

Embodied Texts, Textual Choreographies

In one English translation of Federico Garc ıa Lorca’s poem “Castanet,” the word “Castanet” appears three times, each—a complete invocation in itself—followed by a period. Then the line “Sonorous black beetle” caps the stanza, shifting the metrical feet from anapest to dactyl (from a light-light-strong stress to a strong-lightlight one). One cannot help but imagine the dancer’s hands dialoguing with one another: three rolls of the right hand succeeded by alternating strikes (golpes) of the left-right-left, right-left-right hands. The poetic rhythm of the words imitates the physical rhythm of the instrument as the dancer trills and clacks it. In the next stanza, Lorca matches his vivid image of the black beetle with another: the dancer who plays the castanet “in the spider of a hand.” This poem, rich in imagery—aural, visual, and kinesthetic (how else could we fully appreciate the quick and dexterous movements of the spiderlike hand?)— offers a glimpse of what connects dance and literature so intimately. At the most basic level, these two mediums parallel one another in the sense of temporality that they communicate. They do so through rhythm, tempo, flow, and larger structure or sequencing of actions, events, moods, or ideas. At a subtler level, both literature and choreography imagine being in a body oriented and moving in space. When the poet directly addresses the Castanet—“you ruffle the hot air”—the wooden instrument acts as a synecdoche for the dancer. Without a dancer, there would be no vibrations of air to disturb the space, no movements of the hands to play the castanets, and no displacements of the ruffled train of the dancer’s dress with the fling of a foot to clinch the rhythm. In a 1972 issue of Dance Perspectives, titled The Dance, The Dancer, and the Poem: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Dance Poems, poet and dance critic Jack Anderson proposed that the more these two mediums absorbed of each other’s attributes, the better the aesthetic results. In other words, Anderson particularly values poetry that gestures toward the concrete, physical, and embodied; and dancing that aspires to metaphysical planes.

The Body in the Intertext: Modernism's Unruly Interiors

A colleague in music theory once suggested to me that a work of choreography created in relation to a music composition might actually function as one form of theoretical analysis of the music score. Extrapolating this idea to the intertextual domain of dance and literature, one might propose that a choreographic rendering of a literary text offers one means of theorizing or analyzing it. As a mode of creative inquiry, “theorizing” literary texts through embodied analysis has only been outstripped, perhaps, by theorizing music compositions through such methods. As a heuristic paradigm focusing on how dance has been born out of textual material, it has come into its time. Susan Jones’s Literature, Modernism, and Dance builds on this paradigm and others as she explores the reciprocal relationships that developed between literature and dance in the first half of the twentieth century. The book is the culmination of years of observing and pondering the “affinities,” “convergences,” cross-influences, dialogues, and surprising connections between two disciplines, each of which the author has studied assiduously as scholar of literature and former ballet dancer. The result is, quite simply, a tour de force. Jones spins out an interconnecting web of studies that examines not only embodiments of texts and theories, as dancers play out the discourses, concerns, and fascinations of modernism; but also writers’ glimpses of dance as a potential vehicle for modernist aesthetics and, what is more, their adaptation of its choreographic techniques to literary practices that inscribe the body’s movements through time and space in their novels, short stories, plays, and poetry. While none of these theoretical frameworks of analysis is new in and of itself, their combined force in one overarching study of modernism is. Jones’s students at St. Hilda’s College undoubtedly benefit enormously from the interdisciplinary nature of this course of study. So, too, does the field of dance studies, from being taken as serious academic discourse and mode of inquiry; and the field of literary studies, from obtaining a rich and lively mode of parsing texts—one that sets cerebral, disembodied voices from the past moving trippingly down academe’s hallowed halls. Claiming that an unprecedented and reciprocal dialogue existed between literature and dance during the period of modernism (defined loosely by its aesthetic preoccupations), Jones presents her close analyses in a topical format, with each topic parsing a particular hallmark of modernism. The themes she touches upon include modernism’s deep skepticism about (spoken/written) language and growing fascination with the expressive potential of the body; its fastening on rhythm as the root of all the arts; its turn toward interiority (and feminist voices); its reinvention of the primitive and ritualistic; its valuing