Sally Banes 1950–2020

The passing in June 2020 of dance scholar, cultural historian, and critic Sally Banes marks the loss of one of the ignitors of a renewed understanding of dance studies that took place in the United States throughout the 1980s. Indeed, Banes was undoubtedly one of the pioneers in creating a new way of writing and of thinking about dance. Her approach—mixing an unparalleled eye for movement detail, a love for immersive and patient archival research, and an openness to theoretical analysis—has influenced generations of dance scholars since the publication of her groundbreaking and influential Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance, which she wrote between 1973 and 1978 and published in 1980. Terpsichore was the first in-depth, scholarly, and comprehensive account of the experiments by the extraordinary cohort of dancers and choreographers who collectively redefined the possibilities for dance as an artform in the early 1960s, the founders of what became known as the New York "downtown" dance scene: Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Judith Dunn, Robert Dunn, Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer, to mention a few. As a testimony to Banes's extraordinary intellectual energy and sheer passion for her subject matter, the writing of Terpsichore in Sneakers paralleled Banes's doctoral work under the direction of Michael Kirby in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. Banes defended her dissertation the same year that Terpsichore in Sneakers was published. And her dissertation was published in 1983 as yet another fundamental book on the same group of choreographers: Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964.

Figure 1.

Sally Banes dancing with Tony Silver, director of Style Wars, circa 1982. (Photo by Martha Cooper)

One expects books in dance studies to illuminate—culturally, aesthetically, historically, politically—the works they analyze and present to their readers. But, once in a while, some truly extraordinary dance books achieve something else: their analyses are so acute, the choice of materials so to the point, their insights so compelling and novel, that they become true revelations. They compellingly reveal for the first time the forces (historical, imaginative, political, affective) that shape what was apparently merely moving before our eyes. Those few groundbreaking books do not offer just well-articulated readings of dance and movement; they also help initiate new (dance) movements. For me, Terpsichore in Sneakers falls in this category—along with Susan Leigh Foster's Reading Dancing (1986); Randy Martin's Critical Moves (1998); and Brenda Dixon Gottschild's Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance (1996): all books that, by analyzing movement and dance, actually create the possibility of inventing more and new movements and dances.

I know for a fact that Terpsichore in Sneakers certainly did occasion new motions, even if those new motions I can give an account of happened in the improbable and definitely non-American context of Portugal in the 1980s. It was then and there that I first encountered Banes's Terpsichore in Sneakers, sometime in 1985 or 1986, when I was still living in Lisbon, just starting to become really involved in experimental dance (but not really interested yet in dance studies). It was my good friend Vera Mantero—at the time a dancer with the Gulbenkian Ballet and about to start her career as a choreographer—who one day showed me a copy of Banes's book. She'd borrowed it from a friend who had managed to somehow import it from the US. That one copy was a kind of treasure in those days. It most likely was one of the very few copies (if not the only copy) in the country. It circulated from hand to hand amongst the small experimental dance community in Lisbon. Reading its chapters, each organized around a specific choreographer (except the last chapter, which addresses the collective Grand Union), was to plunge into the unfolding of how new ideas for dance can be thematized in the context of their emergence. Banes's scholarly approach was to carefully listen to the artists, balance what they had to say by also directly invoking contemporary reviewers of...