Dance In America Research Articles

Gender and success in the American dance world

This article will explore the relationship of gender to funding for dance in the United States. Historically a female field in this country, since the 1960s, dance in America has turned to men for its leadership. At about the same time, in 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts was founded — the first government agency organized to “encourage and support American art and artists.” Until that year, the arts in the United States had relied almost exclusively on priviate patronage for support. Over the years, the Endowment has taken an authoritative role in arts giving, seeking to influence funding from corporations and individual sources and, in effect, giving artists an imprimatur when they are selected for NEA awards. Research will focus on the U.S. government funding process, describing the hierarchy of federal, state, and local agencies, and giving special attention to NEA policies because of their impact on all other sources of funding. For purposes of clarity, the article will concentrate on grants given to individual artists; the make-up of selection panels will be examined along with the success rate of both men and women applicants. In addition, current gender ratios within various areas of American dance will be described in order to assess the relationship of gender to artistic, economic, and administrative leadership within the profession.

She Saw America Dancing

She Saw America Dancing

Video-Preservation of Dance

two decades. Few of us, no doubt, have not had the opportunity to see Baryshnikov's Nutcracker at Christmastime, Dance in America on public television, or the performance of Alvin Ailey's American Dance Theater that was part of the Clinton inauguration festivities. Certainly one effect of advances in video technology is the new accessibility of dance for those who would otherwise not have had the opportunity or made the effort to attend a professional or professional-quality performance. Television now makes dance readily available. Tickets to a Baryshnikov performance-especially when he dances a popular ballet role-may be very difficult to acquire, in terms of both availability and price; Alvin Ailey may not visit your town. But through the telecasting of videorecorded dance performances one now has the opportunity to see dances, dancers, and companies that one might otherwise miss. This is perhaps the most important effect video has had on dance and is the phenomenon that leads us to inquire further into its ramifications. This article will explore some of the questions raised in videorecording and videopreserving dance. The first point, the briefer, has to do with an apparent difficulty with videorecorded dance; this is the aesthetic effect. The second, however, deals with a more intricate and deeper question: how will videopreserved dance affect the very elastic history of dance? Will the videopreservation of dance affect the way dance is taught, passed down from choreographer to dancer and from dancer to dancer? This is the continuity effect of video-preserved dance, of the preservation of a choreographer's product for future dancers.

Gamelan Semar Pegulingan Saih Pitu: The Heavenly Orchestra of Bali

Simon. 1993a. Interview with Simon Shaheen, conducted by Josh Kantro, Martin Koenig and Ethel Raim, in New Routes: Traditional Music and Dance in America (The Newsletter of the Ethnic Folk Arts Center), Spring, 1994:6-8. . 1993b. Personal communication with the author, November, 1993. . 1990. Simon Shaheen: The Music ofMohammadAbdel Wahab, CD produced by Bill Laswell and Simon Axiom/Mango/Island Records 539-865-2.

What Has Become of Postmodern Dance? Answers and Other Questions by Marcia B. Siegel, Anna Halprin, Janice Ross, Cynthia J. Novack, Deborah Hay, Sally Banes, Senta Driver, Roger Copeland, and Susan L. Foster

Ed. Note: In the I960S, the emergence of dance triggered a whirlwind of questions, is it prominent among them. The new dance prevailed, however, and set the agenda for the '70s and early '8os. But at that point, tanztheater, Reagan, and megamarketing intervened, and dance in America underwent significant changes. The aesthetic was diffused and, in some cases, willfully transgressed. Some of the most satisfying dance today has more in common with Doris Humphrey than Yvonne Rainer. The well-choreographed dance and premeditated meaning has made a comeback. And at the other end of the spectrum, personal narrative and ritual are providing alternative bases for dance making. What has become of dance? We asked a variety of choreographers, critics, and historians to tackle the question. Their answers suggest that the discussion is still very much an open one, filled with caveats and parenthetical qualifications. Even the terminology is still being debated. The meaning of postmodern (and modern, concomitantly) varies profoundly between and even within disciplines, denoting cultural, stylistic, or historical distinctions. In dance studies, the term postmodern originated as an historical category. Decades later, much of the vigorousness of the discourse results from the effort to reconcile that use of the word with the very different paradigms informing the concept in art, architecture, and cultural theory. One of the reasons that this effort remains so problematic is the traditional model of dance history, rather than dance studies. Up until recently, the

Dance and the New York Times Index

New York City is the geographic center for dance in America, and the New York Times is “newspaper of record” for the city. It might be assumed, then, that a researcher looking for historical information about dance in America would find a great deal of it by consulting the New York Times Index. That, at least, is what I thought before beginning to gather documents for a dance bibliography for users of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. Yet a few random dips into volumes of the NYT Index yielded confusing and (for my purposes) unuseable citations. I therefore decided to set my bibliography aside for a time and instead conduct a search through the entire NYT Index, tracing its treatment of articles on dance, from the first long-hand edition of 1851 up to the present. This is an examination not of the New York Times' coverage of dance but of the NYT Index's useability as a reference tool for dance researchers.

Modern Dance in America: The Bennington Years by Sali Ann Kriegsman. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1981. 357 pp. 101 photographs, 11 drawings, 16 program/announcement reproductions, 3 appendices, 2 indices. Hardback, $85.00.

Modern Dance in America: The Bennington Years by Sali Ann Kriegsman. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1981. 357 pp. 101 photographs, 11 drawings, 16 program/announcement reproductions, 3 appendices, 2 indices. Hardback, $85.00.

Bennington through a prism

Modern Dance in America: The Bennington Years. By Sali Ann Kriegsman. Illustrated. 357 pp. Boston: G. K. Hall and Company, 1981. $85.

Irene and Vernon Castle Their Contribution to Social Dance in America

Irene and Vernon Castle Their Contribution to Social Dance in America

Making modern dance

Prime Movers: The Makers of Modern Dance in America. By Joseph H. Mazo. Illustrated, 322 pp. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1977. $12.50. Lester Horton: Modern Dance Pioneer. By Larry Warren. Illustrated, 265 pp. New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc. $12.75. Soaring: The Diary and Letters of a Denishawn Dancer in the Far East, 1925–1926. By Jane Sherman. Illustrated, 278 pp. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1976. $14.95.

The 1928–29 Dance Season in New York

Abstract After consideration of a description of the 1928–29 concert dance season in New York City, the following can be inferred, (a) The quantity of dance performances became significant. (b) The recital became a common occurrence, (c) Dance critics began to have influence, (d) There was an unusually large variety of excellent dancers performing and an unusual number of types of dancing represented, (f) Ballet was merely “popular” and the romantic dance was being displaced by the modern movement. By extension, it can be said that the 1928–29 concert dance season was a turning point in the history of dance in America.

“I See America Dancing”: Poetic Expressions by High School Boys

“I See America Dancing”: Poetic Expressions by High School Boys

A Survey of the Social Dance in America

A Survey of the Social Dance in America