Seminars

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.

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.

Rejecting a dismissive and caricatured approach to alternative spirituality, this article explores how contemporary ecstatic dance performs meaningful religious work. Spearheaded by Max Fathom in 2001, ecstatic dance involves intergenerational gatherings, self-improvised movements, and live DJs who curate dynamic soundscapes of electronic music. Expounding upon the insights of Samuel Tettner and Botond Vitos, I argue that, through improvisational movement, intersubjective encounters, and holistic healing, ecstatic dance functions as a vehicle of (re)enchantment for contemporary practitioners, regardless of their religious affiliation. Incorporating the interpretive frameworks of religious studies, dance studies, and phenomenology, this study reveals how ecstatic dance enables participants who inhabit an otherwise disillusioned and divisive world to experience communion and transcendence./ Kathryn Dickason

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.

"Ann Barzel: Chicago's Doyenne of Dance": This chapter explores the early life and work of Ann Barzel, the prolific dance writer, advocate, and educator based in Chicago. On the heels of her graduation from the University of Chicago in 1925, Barzel began her writing career, penning book reviews for the Chicago Evening Post. Simultaneously, she continued her dance training, secured a position as an elementary school teacher with Chicago Public Schools, maintained a regular teaching commitment at a Hebrew School, and saw nearly every dance performance that came to town. I look forward to feedback both on the content and approach of the chapter itself, as well as discussion of how to put Barzel’s work in conversation with the constellation of women who wove dance into the fabric of education in Chicago in the early twentieth century, including Neva Boyd, Katherine Dunham, Katherine Flowers, Mary Wood Hinman, Doris Humphrey, Edna McRae, and Ruth Page.

Feel the Floor: Restoring the Life and Legacy of Buddy Bradley: These are chapters from my biography of Buddy Bradley (1905-1972), the African- American choreographer and teacher who brought jazz dance to white stages on both sides of the Atlantic as well as to ballet via theatrical collaborations with George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, and Antony Tudor. Coaching Adele Astaire, Henry LeTang, Jessie Matthews, Jack Buchanan, Alicia Markova, U.S. Thompson, John Mills, and the daughters of Marie Rambert and liberally drawing inspiration from other dance mediums, Bradley focused closely on the marriage of movement, narrative, and music to increase the expressive possibility of jazz and tap. In doing so, he paved the way for Agnes de Mille and future choreographers. As the grandson of an enslaved man and growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, coming to New York during the Harlem Renaissance, working as a dance teacher and dance director on Broadway, then moving to England at age twenty-six to pursue a career that racism in the U.S. denied him, Bradley’s story offers a vital and specific lens on twentieth-century history.

In July 2024 I went to Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, on a trip organized by my current Congolese dance teacher, Andoche Loubaki. Andoche was busy producing a dance spectacle “Esprit,” with a group of over twenty Brazzaville artists. I was familiar with Congolese rhythms and dance moves and their many possibilities (Congolese dance teachers often improvise a choreography during class) and pleased to see them in Brazzaville. But I had no idea of the extent of the performance scene, based on traditional movement and rhythms, in Brazzaville. I saw much dance in different contexts from an informal group in the street to the National Ballet, but it was a festival with sixteen groups in competition that crystalized my understanding of the scene. There were three categories, drum dance, traditional dance (based on traditional movement, but with plenty of room for development), and the smallest, ballet, using the above, but in innovative ways that often sought to tell a story. “Esprit” falls into the latter category. Using video of dancing in Brazzaville in July, 2024, this session will introduce seminar participants to a vibrant and growing dance culture that draws upon traditional movement while also transforming it.

Catherine Devillier (1891-1959) was the Moscow Imperial Ballet’s first Black principal soloist as well as a choreographer, dance teacher, silent film star, and prominent queer person. Despite her talents and many activities in Russia, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, Devillier remains little known, and her contribution to the development of European ballet is all but forgotten by dance historians, including those with a focus on female, Black, and queer creators.

This paper will discuss work-in-progress from my book under contract with Bloomsbury, tentatively titled Martha Graham’s Greek Myth-Based Dances and her Collaboration with Isamu Noguchi. It will explore some of the challenges and opportunities for a Classics scholar writing about modern dance and art. It will argue that Noguchi’s contribution to Graham’s Greek myth-based dances is greater than has often been recognized and that an understanding of objects and how they act is essential to the meaning of and the interpretation of these woman-centered receptions of Greco-Roman antiquity.

The Joffrey Ballet company began as the improbable dream of two young men who grew up outside the world of the arts and determined to reshape ballet in the U.S. Alongside New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, the Joffrey eventually became part of a trio of New York-based ballet companies that shaped the art form in the U.S. But it was usually judged as third, and now nearly half of the company’s existence has been lived in Chicago where it moved in 1995 and became the city’s premier ballet company. This exhibition focuses on the Joffrey to reorient the story of ballet in the U.S. to incorporate the challenge that the company presented, asking who ballet was for (onstage and in the audience), what a troupe should perform, and how might a ballet company endure.

In this paper, the archival legacy of Merce Cunningham’s costumes will be examined for their uses of color, in particular, colored dyes. It will argue that colored dyes, both water-based and acetate, constitute a foundational layer of diversity in an otherwise standard “uniform” of unitards, leotards and tights; one informed by both Josef Alber’s color theory and contemporaneous technological innovations. In works from Minutiae to CWRDSPCR and Ocean, the color of costume modifies the tonality of the choreography and enumerates a distinctive aesthetics that is not without authorial, ideological, or poetic intent. The paper will also suggest that the materiality of color processes – the costs and labor of sourcing and using dyes – highlights the role of women in evolving the choreographic vision of the unitard in contradistinction to the much-celebrated role of Cunningham’s male design collaborators.

Stemming from dissertation work, this is a chapter draft from my upcoming book on Russian dancer-choreographer Adolph Bolm (1884-1951). It centers on Bolm’s time in Chicago in the 1920s, particularly his work for the Chicago Allied Arts, a short-lived performing arts enterprise he founded alongside Chicago composer John Alden Carpenter in 1924. For three years, the organization served as an incubator for experiments in dance and music, thereby serving as a nexus for modernism in the Midwest. Included are discussions of Bolm’s creative and professional partnership with Carpenter, his complex mentorship of the young ballerina Ruth Page, and how the dancer’s rhetoric aligned with Chicago’s infamous brand of boosterism. This work ultimately serves to recalibrate the dominant historical narrative of early American ballet. Additionally, I would like to set aside some time in the seminar to discuss the strategies a card-carrying musicologist might use to approach dance studies.

A Chorus Line cemented the changed role of the dance ensemble in Broadway musicals and had profound impacts not just on the creation and dramaturgy of musicals but also on their economics and their aesthetics, all of which came to bear on casting and the rise of the triple-threat performer as the new paradigm for Broadway performers. This chapter opens by historicizing the shifts from separate choruses of singers and dancers to ensembles full of triple-threats. It then details A Chorus Line’s origins and its treatment of identity. The show broke new ground in terms of representation since its text emerged from the dancers’ life stories. These life stories eventually had to be recast in other performers’ bodies, though. Much ink has been spilled on the show’s genesis and development in the first workshop process, but there has been less focus on keeping A Chorus Line going from 1975 to 1990 on Broadway and since then—and what this meant for Broadway writ large. Finally, this chapter argues that while A Chorus Line’s success was a love letter to Broadway dancers, it came with a cost: the musical that was supposed to individuate dancers ended up making them even more interchangeable than before.

This chapter from my forthcoming book explores how the Arts Council of Great Britain invested in dance immediately after the Second World War.

Ballet librettos are vital in understanding early Soviet cultural policies, as classical ballet became central as a tool of imperial propaganda and national resistance. In the context of Soviet Ukraine, the libretto became a method to present and rationalize Soviet policies on Ukrainian nationality and to control ballet’s official and indirect messages during the initial stages of production. This paper analyzes Ukrainian ballet librettos of the 1930s, exploring how they defined a cultural connection between the old Imperial and new Soviet ballet while extracting the cultural image of a Ukrainian nation and the significance of the Ukrainian dancing body. I offer a reading of librettos as archival and performative documents with narratives that openly and metaphorically highlight Ukraine and its communities as targets of imperial aggression. I trace these narratives in major nation-themed librettos and show that together they have come to shape both the ballet archive and repertoire. Serving both state and public, these archives were especially significant, functioning as a platform for both conformity and resistance.