Royal Academy of Dance: Celebrating 100 Years – Maggie Watson reviews

The Royal Academy of Dance centenary book is beautifully presented; complete with a red satin page marker, burgundy end-papers, a centenary seal embossed in gold on the front cover, and the Academy’s Royal crest on the back.  Generously illustrated throughout, the photographs run through the text like a thread of gold.  There are wonderful images such as Adeline Genée in Robert Le Diable at the Empire Theatre in 1908; Phyllis Bedells teaching in the 1950s; Michael Somes jumping higher than the international high jumper Dorothy Tyler beside him, and Stanislas Idzikowski demonstrating an arabesque in class, wearing a three-piece suit and street shoes.

All pictures are carefully credited wherever possible, but curiously, the main body of the text is unattributed. Apart from Forewords by Darcey Bussell and Li Cunxin, the Introduction by Gerald Dowler, and a short article by Jane Pritchard on the RAD collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum, there are no named authors; only an editor, Johanna Stephenson.

 

Literature, Modernism, and Dance by Susan Jones

16th October saw the launch of a major new work of dance scholarship by Dr Susan Jones, Fellow and Tutor, St Hilda’s College, Oxford.  Susan Jones spent fifteen years as a soloist with the Scottish Ballet in Glasgow before becoming an academic. She now teaches English at Oxford, and has written on Joseph Conrad, modernism, and dance history and aesthetics.  Literature, Modernism, and Dance is published by Oxford University Press and is the first extended study of the relationship between dance and literary modernism; it opens up new ways of thinking about modernism by showing the dialogue between dance and literary aesthetics.  It recovers the importance of literature for modernist choreographers, and raises the importance of dance as site for literary scholarship.