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In late Victorian England, dance teachers lacked national representation and means of communication among themselves to address professional concerns. By 1930, at least ten professional associations had emerged in Britain, some of which, such as the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD), The British Association of Teachers and Dancing (BATD) and the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD), are still active today. Little has been written about the wider context of their foundation and of earlier initiatives to establish a professional body for dance pedagogy in England. A key figure in contemporaneous efforts to develop an infrastructure was Robert Morris Crompton (c.1845–1926), a London-based dancing master.
Choreographer, writer, and founder-editor of the first periodical devoted to dance in England (Dancing, 1891–1893), Robert Crompton finally succeeded in establishing a national organisation that was devoted to both social and stage dancing in 1904. As the first president of the ISTD, his visionary ideals of an annual technical congress, improvements in the status of the profession, and the future enhancement of dance as an art were placed on a firm institutional footing. Charlatan practitioners, declining standards in the ballroom, and unhelpful licensing laws, together with a scattered and highly individualised competitive profession, were challenges in the early 1890s that Crompton initially failed to overcome. Records of his dreams and anxieties in Dancing provide valuable insight into the problems that beset the teachers of the time. In tandem with other source material relating to the social context for dance of the period, consideration of the trials and aspirations that lay behind Crompton's campaign for a national professional association help to broaden understanding of the place of dance in late Victorian society in England.
This paper undertakes a critical re-examination of the ways in which dance-making relationships between the dancer and the choreographer in American modern dance have been conceptualised in dance discourses. The essay proposes that a defining aspect of modern dance practices (from the moment that, after Duncan and Fuller, it became a group as well as a solo form) was the dancing together of the choreographer and the dancer(s) as the central modeof dance creation and transmission. In dance discourses, however, this dancing relationship is frequently not acknowledged.
Texts by dance scholars Susan Leigh Foster, Amy Koritz and Randy Martin which draw on theoretical frameworks from outside dance are analysed in terms of the ways the theoretical frameworks that underpin them both make it possible to raise the question of the nature ofthe dance-making relationship while at the same time can also make the dancer's and the choreographer's dancing together invisible or unrepresentable. The analysis shows how scholarly discourses and the theoretical frameworks upon which they are built are already invested in regimes of intelligibility and visibility which have consequences for the representation of modern dance. This analysis forms the basis for proposing the need for a non-individualised, intersubjective and intercorporeal understanding of the dancer and the choreographer and their relationship in modern dance.
This article investigates Episodes (1959), which was a co-production by the New York City Ballet and the Martha Graham Dance Company. It assesses the immediate and longer-term impact of the work, both conceptually and choreographically, and the extent to which it can be considered 'a historic meeting of two dance worlds', as the New York Post claimed at the time. The article also explores the motivations of the three key figures involved – George Balanchine and Martha Graham as co-choreographers, and Lincoln Kirstein, General Director of NYCB – and the different working practices of the two companies. It draws upon dancers' accounts of the co-production, including Paul Taylor who performed in Balanchine's choreography, and extensive correspondence between Graham's company and NYCB.
Dance and music have several features in common – rhythm, metre, tempo, and the fact thatthey are structured in and through time – but they are also intrinsically different, they each 'mean' differently, making the task of talking about their interrelationship challenging. Perhaps, however, this combination of closeness and distance is what makes it possible to see dance as a metaphor for music, and vice versa. The closeness between the two announces a relationship, a connection that then extends beyond the natural affinity to embrace something more remote and surprising. In other words, linking two disparate entities in a way similar to metaphor highlights a clear point of contact between them, but it also invites us to consider additional connections – the ghostly resonances that become apparent through close study.
Through an analysis in which illustrations are drawn from Balanchine and Stravinsky's Agon (1957) and Mark Morris' Falling Down Stairs (1997) set to J. S. Bach's 3rd Suite for Cello, this article examines the use of metaphor in talking about our responses to dance and music, thus illuminating some of the potential for subtlety and depth in their relationship, and the corresponding insights into human experience that they may offer.
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