Seminars

In the winter of 2022, Juliana cold-emailed Toni Basil’s agent, hoping to reach Basil and ask some questions about a performance of "LA Street Dance" at the Kitchen in SoHo. How did lockers, poppers, and early voguers end up at an experimental venue in New York? Basil called, and the two began an ongoing conversation that culminated in Basil’s oral history at the NYPL Jerome Robbins Dance Division, recorded during the summer of 2023 with the help of Cassie Mey and Joshua Persaud. This conversation will highlight the range of Basil's influences and experiences, revealing the interchange between avant-garde and popular, concert and commercial in the history of 20th century American dance.

Designated an "irreplaceable national dance treasure" by the Dance Heritage Coalition, Eye on Dance is an invaluable source for scholars, arts professionals, and members of the general public. Over forty percent of the Eye on Dance Archive comprises footage of artists-of-color and artists with AIDS not duplicated elsewhere, making it a major historical, cultural, and educational resource. In some instances, Eye on Dance footage is the only existing video documentation of key dance figures. For this program, Ipiotis will introduce and screen clips of artists who helped form America's dance DNA, from Katherine Dunham to Alvin AIley, Hanya Holm, Paul Taylor, Violette Verdy, Edward Villella, Yvonne Rainer, Sara Rudner, Millicent Hodson, "Wiggles", laVaughan Robinson, Joan Myers Brown, Arthur Mitchell, Alicia Alonso, Alwin Nikolais, Merce Cunningham, and others.

A principal dancer at Dance Theatre of Harlem, Scottish Ballet and San Francisco Ballet, and Artistic Director of American Festival Ballet in Boise, Idaho, Paul Russell blazed trails few think about today, perhaps because few were watching for the milestones. He was likely the first Black dancer to play Siegfried in the full-length Swan Lake. And for two seasons before his death of AIDS in 1991, he was likely the first Black artistic director of a professional ballet company that he did not found or was not historically Black. Russell’s story consistently shows where he was able to fashion his identity out of his affinities. He fell in love with ballet and turned himself into a classical dancer of the first rank. There was an astonishing amount in his life he was able to effect through sheer willpower. In many ways his life was fashioned of dreams. It was also filled poignantly and frustratingly with things he could not change. Russell’s life is the story of a ballet dancer. And also, the story of a Black ballet dancer. And finally, the story of a Black gay man.

"'Sidetracked': Arlene Croce Before the New Yorker": Arlene Croce was nearly forty in 1973 when she began writing the new “Dancing” column for The New Yorker. In one of her rare published interviews, she describes being present at the premiere of the Balanchine-Stravinsky Agon and realizing that in some way, her “life’s work” was going to have to be deeply involved with what had happened that night. Then, she says, she became “sidetracked”: low-level jobs in publishing to support herself and “a few” movie reviews. The year was 1957, and Croce was two years out of college. “Arlene Croce Before The New Yorker” explores this little-known period of her life.

Drawing upon oral histories, fieldwork, and the discipline of religious studies, this article examines the enchantment of ecstatic dance in California. Contemporary ecstatic dance involves improvised movements to a live DJ who curates a dynamic soundscape of electronic music. For this study, enchantment refers to a feeling of wonder, awe, transcendence, or ultimacy that may resemble an encounter with the sacred, but is broader than the term religion. The first section incorporates insights from thinker Marcel Gauchet to understand and interpret the enchantment of ecstatic dance. Improvisational movement and music work synergistically to efface hierarchies, form fellowship, and experience transcendence. The second section considers the unsettling side of enchantment. Here I use Ecstatic Dance Oakland as a case study to reveal how enchantment may function to obscure accountability, thereby resembling a cult. This study aims to show both the overwhelmingly restorative and potentially harmful functions of ecstatic dancing bodies.

Throughout the twentieth century, dance teachers at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) championed an innovative, holistic pedagogy, recognizing dance’s longstanding history as a vehicle for celebration, resistance, and self-expression in African American life. Housed within physical education departments, these teachers presented dance as a “sport becoming an art,” with the capacity to stimulate students’ bodies and minds in tandem. They used movement to teach their students – primarily young Black women – that their bodies were beautiful and inherently imbued with creative capacity, generating a sense of social responsibility and cultural pride in African American heritage. Beyond campus, HBCU dance teachers led community-based dance workshops in their home cities and embarked on regional tours with extracurricular performance troupes; for those institutions based in the American South, these efforts contributed to desegregation efforts in the wake of Jim Crow. Focusing on programs led by Charles Williams of the Hampton Institute, Maryrose Reeves Allen of Howard University, Mabel Love of Fisk University, and Mozel Spriggs of Spelman College, this chapter reveals how HBCU dance programs have enabled generations of teachers, students, and audiences to think more profoundly about the body’s capacity for communication and self- expression, particularly during periods of heightened political stakes, social movements, and cultural revolution.

In the twentieth century, dancers were among the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of motion picture technology. They used small-gauge cameras as an aid in memorizing choreography and restoring forgotten pieces. They also recorded their daily lives. Filled with encounters with the cultural elite of their time, at home and abroad, this footage forms a spectacular visual record. An attuned sense of time and space, polished through dance training and practice, often translated into adept camerawork and editing in films by dancers. This talk focuses on 8mm films by Rudolf Nureyev, as well as a circle of his colleagues and friends, shot between the late 1950s and mid-1960s, to discuss private films as a rich yet understudied source of the history of dance.

This chapter broadly surveys two opposing aesthetic trends of the early twentieth century— expressionism and mechanicity—to suggest how each might come to inform the other, together underpinning a wide array of feminist responses to metropolitan modernity. Taking the choreography of Ruth Page as an early case study, Henry argues that dance modernism’s emphasis on the “kinesthetic” becomes a hinge-point for feminist artists across genres; this discourse finds its most complete and evocative portrayal, she suggests, in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s debut novel, There is Confusion (1924), which follows the trajectory of a Black ballerina in Harlem.