Dance on Its Own Terms
Histories and Methodologies
Edited by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot
Author Information
Melanie Bales is Professor of Dance at The Ohio State University and author of The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training (2007).
Karen Eliot is also Professor of Dance at The Ohio State University and author of Dancing Lives: Five Female Dancers from the Ballet d'Action to Merce Cunningham (2007).
Contributors:
Melanie Bales is a Professor in the Department of Dance at The Ohio State University where she teaches courses in dance technique, dance history, and Laban Studies, and is active as a choreographer. A former professional dancer of both ballet and modern dance, she has also performed solos from the repertories of artists including Daniel Nagrin, Catherine Turocy, Tere O'Connor and Iréne Hultman. She received her BA in German from Carleton College and an MFA in Dance from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and was certified as a Movement Analyst through the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. Her book, The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training (University of Illinois Press), co-authored with Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, dealt with approaches and attitudes towards technique training since the Judson era.
Harmony Bench is Assistant Professor of Dance at The Ohio State University, where she teaches in the areas of Dance, Media, and Performance Studies. She completed her PhD in Culture and Performance at UCLA, and holds additional degrees in Performance Studies, Women's Studies, and Ballet. Her current research focuses on mobile media, social media, and videogames as sites for choreographic inquiry and analysis, and their collective impact on movement, gesture, and cultural belonging. Bench's writing can be found in Dance Research Journal, The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Participations, and The International Journal of Screendance. She is currently working on a book that addresses dance onscreen and the politics of mediality.
Betsy Cooper teaches at the University of Washington where she serves as Director of the Dance Program and Interim Divisional Dean of Arts. She has published articles about the WPA Federal Dance Project in Theatre Research International, Dance Research Journal and The International Dictionary of Modern Dance. She is on the editorial review board of the Journal for Dance Education, where she has contributed articles on engaged learning and writing practices. Cooper remains active creatively as a choreographer and principal dancer with Seattle Dance Project. She holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Washington and a BA in Archeological Studies from Yale University. Cooper is a recipient of a 2004 Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Washington.
Ann Dils directs the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she is a professor of Dance. Her recent writing appears in the journal Screendance, as part of the Dance Heritage Coalition's 100 American Dance Treasures digital project, and in the edited collection Revisiting Impulse: A Contemporary Look at Writings on Dance 1950-1970. She received the Dixie Durr Award for Outstanding Service to Dance Research from the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) in 2010 and is a former editor of Dance Research Journal and a past president of CORD. She co-directs Accelerated Motion: Towards a New Dance Literacy, a National Endowment for the Arts-funded digital collection of materials about dance.
Karen Eliot danced in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. She is now a Professor in the Department of Dance at The Ohio State University. Her book Dancing Lives: Five Female Dancers from the Ballet d'Action to Merce Cunningham (University of Illinois Press) was published in 2007. Her current research is on the British ballet during the Second World War and has been supported by an OSU Arts and Humanities Seed Grant, College of the Arts Research Grants, and a Coca Cola Critical Difference for Women Grant. In 2010 she was awarded the Howard D. Rothschild Fellowship in Dance at Harvard's Houghton Library for research on choreographer Mona Inglesby and the International Ballet. She serves on the advisory board of Dance Chronicle. Her articles appear in: Dance Chronicle; Dance Gazette; The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Book Reviews Online; and Dance Research Journal.
M. Candace Feck teaches courses in contemporary dance and theatre history, theory and criticism at The Ohio State University. She holds a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Webster College in St. Louis, MO, an MA in Dance and a PhD in Art Education from The Ohio State University. Her essays, criticism and pedagogical research have been published on the CD-ROMs Victoria Uri: Choreographer and Videographer, for which she received an award from the National Dance Association in 2000 and Prey: An Innovation in Dance Documentation by Valarie Mockabee Williams; Dance Research Journal, The Teaching Artist Journal, the proceedings of CORD and SDHS, in Terry Barrett's Interpreting Art: Responding to Visual Culture, and on the website Accelerated Motion: Towards a New Dance Literacy in America, hosted by Wesleyan University Press. She is currently at work on a book about choreographer Elizabeth Streb.
Deborah Friedes Galili received her BA in dance history from Brown University and her MFA in dance from The Ohio State University. She began researching Israeli contemporary dance on a Fulbright grant in 2007-2008. Besides founding danceinisrael.com, she has covered Israel's dance scene for publications including Dance Magazine and The Jerusalem Post. Galili teaches dance history for Dance Jerusalem, a study-abroad program initiated by the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and Hebrew University's Rothberg International School. From 2011-2012, she studied to become a teacher of Gaga, Ohad Naharin's movement language, in the training program's inaugural class. She is the author of Contemporary Dance in Israel, published in 2012 by Asociación Cultural Danza Getxo.
Carrie Gaiser Casey is a lecturer at St. Mary's College of California in the LEAP (Liberal Education for Arts Professionals) program. She is a guest lecturer for the San Francisco Ballet and also serves on the board of the Museum of Performance and Design. She completed her PhD in Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 2009 with a dissertation on women in early twentieth century American ballet. Prior to her academic career, she danced professionally with the Fort Worth Dallas Ballet and was a full scholarship student at the Kirov Academy in Washington, DC. Current publications include articles in Theatre Journal and Dance Chronicle.
Hannah Kosstrin is Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance and Humanities at Reed College, where she teaches courses in dance studies, Labanotation, contemporary technique, and introductory humanities. Situated at the intersection of dance, Jewish, and gender studies, she researches Jewishness and gender in Anna Sokolow's choreography from the 1930s-1960s. She has recently directed a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities to make a mobile dance notation app. Her publications appear in Art Criticism and The International Journal of Screendance. Kosstrin holds a Ph.D. in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University with a minor in women's history.
Sheila Marion is retired from the Department of Dance at The Ohio State University. She served as the Director of The Dance Notation Bureau for Education and Research at OSU from 1995-2011. Prior to OSU, she taught at Arizona State University. Marion received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. She has Masters and Bachelors degrees in Dance from UCLA.
Geraldine Morris is a former Royal Ballet dancer and now Senior Lecturer at Roehampton University London. Together with Stephanie Jordan, she produced a DVD: Ashton to Stravinsky: A Study of Four Ballets. She has also published substantial articles in Dance Research, Research in Dance Education and Dance Chronicle and her forthcoming book Frederick Ashton's Ballets: Style, Performance, Choreography is due to be published in 2012. As a dancer she worked with Ninette de Valois, Frederick Ashton, Bronislava Nijinska and Kenneth MacMillan amongst others and, alongside the work of Ashton, she is particularly interested in exploring the ways in which philosophic thinking can be applied to dance.
Rachael Riggs Leyva is a dance director, notator, scholar, and teacher. She earned her M.F.A. in Dance Directing from The Ohio State University and is working toward her Ph.D. in Dance and Literacy Studies. Her Labanotation score of a duet from Trisha Brown's M.O., the first dance notation score of Brown's choreography, explored the documentation movement intention and release technique. As an Archive Fellow with the Dance Heritage Coalition, Riggs Leyva worked with the Bebe Miller Company archive housed at The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, and experimented with in an "archivist in the studio" role during the company's 2011 residency at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.
Rebecca Schwartz-Bishir is a specialist in the relationship of music and movement in nineteenth-and twentieth-century ballet with a Ph.D. in historical musicology from the University of Michigan. In addition to her research and her ballet and tango dancing, she is a freelance editor and an academic writing, dissertation, and tenure coach. Among her publications are the entry on dance critic Sarah Kaufman and fifteen other biographies in the Grove Dictionary of American Music, Second Edition; "Aleksandr Nevskiy: Prokofiev's Successful Compromise with Socialist Realism," in Composing for the Screen in Germany and the USSR; and the Academicladder.com newsletters "A Christmas Carol for Academics: Lost your Way? 9 Steps for Finding Your Light" and "Stay out of the Comparison Gutter."
Catherine Turocy is a leading choreographer/reconstructor and stage director of 18th century opera-ballet, she has been decorated by the French Republic as a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters and has received numerous awards for her work including the Bessie Award. As a founding member of the Society for Dance History Scholars, Turocy lectures on historical performance practices and her papers have been published by the society, many translated into French, German, Japanese and Korean. An accomplished performer in her own right, she has been given a chapter in Janet Roseman's book, Dance Masters: Interviews with Legends of Dance published by Routledge. She began her historical studies at Ohio State University with Dr. Shirley Wynne.
Victoria Watts works as Head of International and Professional Development at the Royal Academy of Dance where she also leads the Master of Teaching (Dance) and takes responsibility for the development and supervision of practice-based graduate research in dance teaching. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University, an MFA in Dance (with a concentration in Multimedia Technology) from The Ohio State University and a BA (Hons) Dance in Society from the University of Surrey, along with advanced certifications in Benesh Movement Notation and Labanotation. She is a former recipient of the Selma Jeanne Cohen Award from the Society of Dance History Scholars and of a Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship in the area of Visual Culture from the Social Science Research Council funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is currently serving as Chair of the British Fulbright Scholars Association in the UK.
Jessica Zeller is an Assistant Professor of Dance at Texas Christian University. She holds a Ph.D. in Dance Studies and an M.F.A. in Dance from The Ohio State University, where she completed her doctoral dissertation, "Shapes of American Ballet: Classical Traditions, Teachers, and Training in New York City, 1909-1934," in 2012. As a dancer, she studied with Maggie Black, Rochelle Zide-Booth, and Jan Hanniford Goetz; her article on Black's teaching and pedagogical lineage appeared in Dance Chronicle in 2009. Zeller's research examines the development and genealogy of nineteenth and twentieth century ballet pedagogy, and it explores the integration of progressive pedagogical approaches into modern day ballet classes.
