DANSOX Autumn 2023 season: Four events in the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building (JdP), St Hilda’s College Oxford, featuring Professor Stephanie Jordan lecture ‘Serial Stravinsky Dances: Choreomusical Discoveries with Balanchine’, new film of MacMillan’s ‘Sea of Troubles’, ‘Homage to Nijinska’, with Avatâra Ayuso & Dame Monica Mason, and ‘On Bella Lewitzky’, Yolande Yorke-Edgell and dancers with John Pennington – Maggie Watson reports

The DANSOX Autumn 2023 season looks both forward and backwards, exploring ways in which scholarly investigation and practitioners’ bodily memories can enable today’s dancers and audiences to rediscover the life and meaning of 20th century dances in new cultural contexts.

Professor Stephanie Jordan’s lecture ‘Serial Stravinsky Dances: Choreomusical Discoveries with Balanchine’ (10 October 2023), drew upon her analytical film project with New York City Ballet (NYCB) dancers, ‘Music Dances; Balanchine Choreographs Stravinsky’ (2002). Jordan started working on Agon (1957) in 1993, and her presentation showed how musical analysis, allied with meticulous attention to detail, clarifies the structural patterns within the dancing. Clapping and counting, she explained how the dance moves around and within the music, criss-crossing it in a dynamic interaction, finding the pulse in moments of silence and making the musical score visible. Snatches of film contrasted performances by Wendy Whelan and Violette Verdy, and showed how the dance had changed over time; Jordan singled out a particular plié in second position on pointe, and noted that there is a lot of room in Balanchine to do things in different ways. Richard Alston, speaking from the floor, described watching NYCB performances during Balanchine’s life time, and reminisced about dancers such as Allegra Kent, who seemed to inhabit the music without recourse to counting, and Suzanne Farrell, who was always taking risks and pushed her balance to extremes.

 

The Dark Side of Ballet Schools – BBC1 Panorama 8.00pm Monday 11th September 2023 – Susie Crow reflects

I watched the short Panorama documentary The Dark Side of Ballet Schools with great sadness. It outlined stories of body shaming and harsh behaviour by teachers towards a number of talented teenage students during their studies in recent years as pupils of top British vocational ballet schools, the Royal Ballet School and Elmhurst Ballet School. Reaction to negative comments and coded remarks from teachers implying criticism of their developing bodies, plus the message given by the apparent rewarding of weight loss, had triggered depression and feelings of inadequacy, and for some eating disorders, which in one of the cases led to hospitalization; one young man rejected early because his physique did not meet his school’s aesthetic standards, had struggled to continue a dancing career and ultimately committed suicide. The programme highlighted the importance put by these establishments on ballet dancers (especially female but also male) being thin; with one teacher telling a group of girls on their graduation that they would all need to lose weight if they were to get jobs as ballet dancers. Legal action against her school is being taken by one dancer.

 

Jennifer Homans on 20th-century choreographer George Balanchine, in conversation with Dame Hermione Lee; Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s College. A joint DANSOX and Oxford Centre for Life-Writing event, 24th November, 2022 – Maggie Watson reports

On Thursday 24th November, DANSOX and the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing presented a joint event in the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s College, Oxford. DANSOX director Professor emeritus Sue Jones introduced the Centre’s founder, Dame Hermione Lee, who interviewed writer, academic, and former dancer Jennifer Homans about her biography Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century.

Homans had spent ten years working on the book: in 2017 at the Dancing Lives conference at Wolfson College, Oxford, she spoke of her quest to explore Balanchine’s work with a view revealing the man himself through the dances that he created. Five years on, this was an opportunity to discover more about that process and about how Homans had addressed the problems that she had encountered.

 

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

 

Unfolding Gesture: Movement, Inscription, Music: DANSOX Summer School 2021. 10, 11 &12 July 2021 at St Hilda’s College, Oxford – Maggie Watson reports

The third annual DANSOX summer school was a scholarly investigation into the relationship between dance and inscription.  It treated both concepts in the broadest sense: ‘dance’ encompassed Western movement styles ranging from the Baroque to the contemporary; ‘inscription’ embraced not only the written word and notation, but also the traces preserved in art, photography, film and the dancing body itself.  The format was hybrid, with a small socially distanced audience present in the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, and a recorded live stream for external participants.

Alastair Macaulay’s opening lecture looked at literary sources of inspiration for dance and the role of notation in protecting, preserving, and challenging our perceptions of works.  Macaulay’s wide ranging discussion, liberally illustrated with film clips and photographs, raised themes developed in the subsequent lectures and dance workshops.  He noted the subtle ways in which choreographers such as Merce Cunningham have drawn on a literary sources, and cited Pam Tanowitz’ interweaving of dance, music and poetry in her Four Quartets.  Macaulay also discussed the ways in which dances change over time; the problems and inadequacies of recordings; the significance of context, and the readability or otherwise of notation, whether that of Vladimir Stepanov or Vaslav Nijinsky.

 

Ballet in the Cold War: a Soviet-American Exchange, by Anne Searcy – Maggie Watson reviews

Anne Searcy’s scholarly and highly readable book examines the impact of US – Soviet cultural exchanges during the Cold War through the lens of the Bolshoi Ballet’s 1959 and 1962 tours of the USA, and the tours by American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet of the Soviet Union in 1960 and 1962 respectively.  Searcy draws on an impressive array of Russian and English archival resources and contemporaneous reviews to reconstruct and understand the way in which these companies, their works, and their performances were received by audiences at the time.  She offers new material and a new view point focussed on the reception of the dance, rather than its presentation.

 

Catherine Littlefield: a Life in Dance, by Sharon Skeel – Maggie Watson reviews

Sharon Skeel’s biography of Catherine Littlefield underlines the fragility and ephemeral nature of dance careers, schools and companies. During the course of her short life, Littlefield, building on work begun by her mother, became Philadelphia’s foremost ballerina, teacher and choreographer. She headed up her own ballet company, the Philadelphia Ballet, which toured widely in North America and even to Paris, Brussels and London, and her school provided several dancers for Balanchine’s inaugural class at School of American Ballet. Since she died aged 46 in 1951, her contribution to the development of ballet in the United States has largely faded from memory.

 

Performing Epic or Telling Tales by Fiona Macintosh and Justine McConnell (OUP, 2020) – Maggie Watson reviews

Performing Epic or Telling Tales is a monograph companion to the edited volume Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century (OUP, 2018). The monograph offers authors Fiona Macintosh and Justine McConnell an opportunity to investigate and seek to account for the increased popularity of story-telling and narrative in live theatre since the turn of the twenty-first century. It is not a book about dance, but the earlier edited volume contained contributions by dance scholars, and this monograph includes a chapter on ‘Telling Tales with the Body’.

Macintosh and McConnell start from the premise that twentieth-century theatre saw an anti-narrative turn (seen, for example, in the work of Samuel Beckett), and they seek to chart and hypothesise reasons for the subsequent (re-)turn to narrative that they perceive in theatrical works, including dances, since the millennium. In their Preface, they propose that this twenty-first century ‘narrative’/storytelling (re-)turn is often a turn to Graeco-Roman epic. However, their definition of ‘epic’ in the context of performance extends beyond ancient Greece and Rome, embracing other cultures and story-telling traditions, and oral modes of creating, improvising and performing, as they reflect on the ways in which epic can cast an alternative gaze upon contemporary society.

 

Alastair Macaulay lecture on George Balanchine, DANSOX event at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, 5th March 2020 – Maggie Watson reports

Alastair Macaulay’s lecture on George Balanchine developed ideas about the role of women in Balanchine’s work, which were raised last year at the 2019 DANSOX Summer School at St Hilda’s.  Macaulay provocatively proposed that ballet is unlike the other arts in that it is by its very nature sexist, being predicated on the bodies of men and women.  He further suggested, that sexism and the idealisation of women are intrinsic to Balanchine’s supported adagios, in which women, supported by men, become works of perfect geometry.  In short, Balanchine recognised and exploited the allegorical qualities that Western society has imposed upon the female body for centuries, and elevated women through objectification.

Trained in St Petersburg, Balanchine’s work both embodied and extended the Russian danse d’école of the early twentieth century.  Drawing on musical scores intended for the concert hall as well as those composed for ballet, he pushed ballet technique to new levels, embracing speed, extreme extensions, and daring off-centre balances.  He created a dance style perceived as typically American, yet he retained the chivalry, hierarchy, ceremony, symmetry and harmony derived from his St Petersburg schooling.

 

George Balanchine: DANSOX Guest Lecture by Alastair Macaulay, Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, 5th March 2020

Following his rich contributions at the 2019 DANSOX Summer School, Dance Scholarship Oxford has scheduled another opportunity for Oxford dance enthusiasts to hear the immensely knowledgeable Alastair Macaulay, former Chief Dance Critic of The New York Times, in a guest lecture on the great twentieth-century choreographer, George Balanchine.

Date:  Thursday 5th March 17:30 – 19:00

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

The event is free and open to all and will be followed by a drinks reception. Registration required on Eventbrite here