DANSOX presents Jennifer Homans & Dame Hermione Lee in conversation on ‘Mr B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century’, Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, 24th November 2022

DANSOX joins forces with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing to present two distinguished scholars in conversation, Jennifer Homans and Professor Dame Hermione Lee, launching Jennifer Homans’ important new biography, Mr B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century. An unmissable discussion of one of ballet’s most influential figures.

George Balanchine did for dance what Picasso did for painting: he changed the art and the way we see the human form. Homans follows Balanchine from his childhood in Tsarist St Petersburg, through the upheavals of the Russian Revolution, two World Wars, and the cultural Cold War, to New York, where he co-founded and ran the New York City Ballet.

• Jennifer Homans is the dance critic for the New Yorker. Her widely acclaimed Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet was a bestseller and named one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. Trained in dance at George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, she performed professionally with the Pacific Northwest Ballet. She earned her BA at Columbia University and her PhD in modern European history at New York University, where she is a Scholar in Residence and the Founding Director of the Center for Ballet and the Arts.
• Hermione Lee is a biographer and Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University.

Date: Thursday 24th November, 5.30pm

Venue: Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s College, Cowley Place, Oxford OX4 1DY

Followed by drinks reception; free and open to all.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/jennifer-homans-on-20th-century-choreographer-george-balanchine-tickets-440915097927

Find out more and purchase Jennifer Homans’ book here

Read Maggie Watson’s account for Oxford Dance Writers of the 2017 DANSOX and Oxford Centre for Life-Writing collaborative event which also featured Jennifer Homans here

 

DANSOX Day of Dance: Transnational Conversations, Jacqueline du Pré Music Building and Rooftop Suite, St Hilda’s College, Oxford, 10th June 2022 – Maggie Watson reports

DANSOX conferences at St Hilda’s College, Oxford are now a regular landmark in the UK dance research year.  DANSOX works in association with TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) and constitutes Oxford’s interface between dance practice and dance research; a space to investigate the ways in which practice constitutes research and, conversely, where research becomes practice.  Although Oxford University has neither a dance department nor dance studio, DANSOX plays a vital role at a time when other UK institutions and centres of academic excellence in dance and their collections are under threat.

The DANSOX 2022 Day of Dance: Transnational Conversations symposium was a collaboration with TORCH Humanities and Cultural Programme and the Network Britain and the Soviet Union: Cultural Encounters; the day interrogated the ways in which dance communicates across borders, cultures and generations through written records, images, recordings and bodily memory.  Open to all, and attended by an array of distinguished scholars, writers, and practitioners from major dance institutions, the day included performances, workshops, lectures, and experimental applications of virtual reality (VR) to performance.