Lynn Matluck Brooks

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

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.

Language and Dance: Intersection and Divergence

Movement language and verbal language are certainly different in nature: one uses body-action exclusively, the other uses words. But they also share a fundamental objective: to communicate. How are these languages distinct? Where do they overlap, intersect, even animate one another? As the stuff of art forms, movement is closely allied with dance, while words become the medium of literature. In this special issue of Dance Chronicle, we explore the interplays, overlaps, distinctions, and conundra that arise when these two forms of language, of art, are considered together. Many dancers and others often think of dance as a language, or at least as analogous to one. The following examples highlight language-based references to dance: Ballet’s steps are often called a vocabulary and are even explicated in a range of dictionaries, glossaries, and ABC books that explain the steps (like words or letters of an alphabet) that comprise it.1 Choreographer Ohad Naharin calls his Gaga technique a “movement language” that offers “a new way of gaining knowledge and self-awareness through your body.”2 Similarly, William Forsythe employs “universal writing” as a body “technology” in creating dances.3 A series of talks at London’s Sadler’s Wells is called “body: language talks” and addresses the body’s “central position as a memory bank of human knowledge.”4 Tap dancer and teacher Dianne Walker remarks, “I equate the 32-bar chorus to the paragraph. In Tap, we have sentences and there is structure in the paragraph: all sentences begin with a capital letter; there are commas, exclamations.”5 Dance composition texts, among other sources, often speak of the dance phrase as a sequence

In Memoriam: Barbara Palfy 1936–2014

It is with deep sadness that we write to memorialize Barbara Palfy, dance editor, writer, historian, and friend. Barbara was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 8, 1936, and died on July 26, 2014. After graduating from Washington University she moved to New York, took classes at the New Dance Group studio, and, in 1971, relocated to New Jersey. She studied library science and worked for the New York Public Library’s Dance Division until her daughter, Jana, was born. Then, she turned her attention to copyediting and proofreading of dance books and journals. Among the mainstays of the dance world for which she worked are Princeton Book Company, the International Encyclopedia of Dance, Ballet Review, and Dance Chronicle. But Barbara did far more than “work for” anyone—she passionately befriended dancers and writers, guided us, found connections for us, cheered us on, shared her wisdom on everything from life to line edits, from friendship to formatting, from art to apostrophes. Barbara knew languages (Greek, French, German, Yiddish—what else?), music (she was a serious piano student and devoted concert-goer), and so much else that crossed her desk. Barbara was particularly dear to us at Dance Chronicle because of her longtime support as associate editor of the journal. Barbara read copy, proofed issues, suggested reviewers, found contacts, commented on articles, listened to our concerns and questions, offered advice, relished good writing, made troubled writing better, knew more about dance history than seemed fathomable—the list of her gifts to us goes on. A few friends have written comments on Barbara that we are glad to share with the many readers who cherished her as a colleague.

Peregrinations of an Editor

An interesting conundrum about word usage has recently been brought to our attention. One of our readers questioned the use of the word “enormity” in Clare Croft’s article “Feminist Dance Criticism and Ballet,” published in the special issue of Dance Chronicle, Dance Critics and Criticism.1 Here is the sentence in question: “To be fair, all artists associated with NYCB—including artistic director Peter Martins, choreographers commissioned by the company, and dancers—reckon with the enormity of Balanchine’s legacy” (emphasis our own).2 It would be hard to mistake the author’s meaning, as Croft goes on in the very next sentence to quote from Ann Daly: “‘During his life Balanchine was enveloped by a mythology that ascribed to him near-mystical inspiration, and now, . . . after his death, Balanchine’s legacy is generally considered sacrosanct.’”3 Perhaps this is why two external reviewers, two editors, one copyeditor, and three proofreaders all missed the ambiguity. (Of course, we cannot help but think, if our dear colleague and associate editor Barbara Palfy were alive, she would have pointed it out to us. We relied on her wisdom, experience, and, well, recondite knowledge to keep us honest many times.) Meanwhile, the author maintained that her use of “enormity” in this context was not incorrect. Who was right? We did a little research of our own, first by consulting the fifth volume of The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.). In this source, we found that the only definition of “enormity” not considered obsolete is as follows: “Deviation from moral or legal rectitude. In later use influenced by ENORMOUS 3: Extreme or monstrous wickedness.” So we trudged over to the third definition of the adjective in the same dictionary and saw what might seem to lend credence to a common-sense definition of the noun: “Excessive or extraordinary in size, magnitude, or intensity; huge, vast, immense.” Not so fast. Returning to the entry for “enormity,” a little further down, we discovered that OED considers the third definition (“Excess in magnitude; hugeness, vastness”) obsolete. While one might locate recent examples of “enormity” used in this manner, says OED, “the use is now regarded as incorrect.”4 By the way, OED online says the same thing.5 Thinking that a difference between English and American usage might exist, we consulted The New Oxford American Dictionary.6 This dictionary

The Nature of the Beast: Dance Critics and Criticism

With the passing of Horst Koegler in 2012, George Jackson suggested that we publish a tribute to Horst, and he brought to our attention an autobiographical essay that the German dance critic had written about his beginnings as a ballet critic in Berlin during the postwar years. Ilona Landgraf translated the piece into English, and we realized that we had a little gem in our hands.1 That gave us the idea that we might be missing a terribly important aspect of dance history: biographical and historical perspectives on the lives of dance critics, as given in their own words. While critics often leave a plentiful record of their thoughts about dance, they rarely turn their opera house binoculars, so to speak, to focus on themselves. Thus, for this special issue on the theme of dance critics and dance criticism, we decided that it was crucial to hear from the critics themselves about the nature of the beast. We conceived the format of a “virtual panel of dance critics” and posed a series of questions: