Pages From One Life: Reflections on the Body of Work of Selma Jeanne Cohen

Abstract

I first met Selma Jeanne Cohen on the page, in the early 1970s, as a reader of her unique anthology The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief. This ingenious volume, containing autobiographical essays by José Limón, Anna Sokolow, Erick Hawkins, Donald McKayle, Alwin Nikolais, Pauline Koner, and Paul Taylor, aims to show the variety of approaches to modern dance in the wake of Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, and it does so, brilliantly; the essays concentrate on issues of choreography, performance, and aesthetics, and while the writers' voices are quite varied, their tone is consistently, and happily, focused and plainspeaking. Ultimately, of course, the triumph is Selma Jeanne's. As the editor, she reined in these diverse temperaments by asking each of them to address two questions: What are your general thoughts about modern dance? What would you do, given infinite resources, if you were commissioned to make a dance on the theme of the Prodigal Son? A canny choice, since the subject, more or less identified with George Balanchine's ballet, is both unexpected and non-competitive for a modern-dance choreographer. One might think that Selma Jeanne's unprecedented use of a common intellectual and imaginative focus for a book of dancer autobiographies to produce intellectually and imaginatively satisfying statements might have set a model for similar volumes. However, the only interviewer, at least to my knowledge, to adopt such a technique was Solomon Volkov, who, for his 1992 Balanchine's Tschaikovsky, teased his reluctant interviewee into speaking publicly and provocatively on many aspects of ballet, for an audience of all ages, on the premise that he would be discussing the music of Tschaikovsky for children.