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.

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