Introduction to issue 47.2

This second issue of articles responding to our call for papers, Interrogating Histories and Historicizing Dance Studies, welcomes a reflection on Dance Chronicle’s own history. Co-founded by Jack Anderson and George Dorris in 1977, Dance Chronicle was created as a publication that emphasized historical research with, for, and in dance. I spoke with George in August of 2023 about his life with Jack and the journal. George shared a bit about the journal’s inception:

In the middle of 1976, after two issues of Dance Perspectives, [dance historian] Selma Jeanne Cohen said, “That's it.” The subscription was, of course, for four issues. What were they going to do? Mary Ann Liebert [who worked for publisher Marcel Dekker Inc.] said, “I want to start a new journal.” To my astonishment, she asked Jack and me to do it. Selma Jeanne was in support, and behind us. She had some material for future issues, which she turned over to us. She made sure people knew that she was with us, supporting us. We looked around and we managed to pull together a small team. Shields Remine, who lived only a few blocks from me, joined our team. It really was a neighborhood kind of thing. The people at Dekker were very friendly. Jack and I went hand in hand to the Library-Museum of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and made an appointment with Miss Genevieve Oswald [founder/director of the Dance Collection at NYPL]. We said, “We want to start a new journal, and can we have your support?” She said, “Yes.” This is our first issue [George holds up a journal with a burgundy cover with the same “DC” in Feuillet notation used to this day]. The design came from the collection of Parmenia Migel Ekstrom, who gave some courses in design that Mary Ann was taking. One of the great moments in the history of the journal was when our friend, Ingrid Brainard, picked up the issue and started dancing the notation…

For four and a half decades, Dance Chronicle has illuminated the spaces between steps and words, between history and theory, between cultures and dancing. In the next issue, 47.3, we will share the entire interview with George Dorris, as well as reflections on the legacy of co-founder Jack Anderson. As co-editors, we are honored to be part of this lineage of people who are invested in dancing and its circulations. To further the journal’s ongoing support of dance communities, the editors—Rainy Demerson, Elizabeth Bergman, Mara Mandradjieff, Michelle LaVigne, and Kate Mattingly are excited to announce the Dance Chronicle Book Review Award, which recognizes the intellectual labor of book review authors and comes with a $250 honorarium.

Book reviews often go unacknowledged professionally and remain uncompensated; we believe this is a disservice, since reviewing new scholarship and placing it within and beyond existing frameworks shapes and shifts dance studies as a field. In September 2023, Carolyn Eastman wrote “In Defense of the Beleaguered Academic Book Review”:

…many successful scholars avoid this kind of work precisely because it is devalued, shunting the labor onto others. When universities discredit the writing of reviews, academics striving to climb the ladder absorb the message that reviews are a sucker’s game and refuse to write them. They know that spending the time reading a new book and writing a review takes us away from the forms of writing that our universities do acknowledge as scholarship. Those same scholars, however, expect that their own books will get reviewed, and they express disappointment and exasperation when reviews are slow to appear.¹

Too often the labor of book reviewing falls to scholars who already exceed service expectations—predominantly women and female-identifying pre-tenure faculty—and cuts into time that could be dedicated to researching and publishing.² We had discussed the idea of a Book Review Award prior to the publication of Eastman’s article, and her writing further supported the reasons we discussed.

In this spirit,we would like to thank all of the authors who contributed book reviews to Dance Chronicle this past year and congratulate our 2023 (issues 46.1, 46.2, 46.3) Dance Chronicle Book Review Award recipients:

• Omar Ricks, “Conjuring Lines of Flight in a World of Black Social Death,” in issue 46.1, a review of fahima ife’s Maroon Choreography (Duke University Press)

• Mitsu Salmon, “Encounters, exchanges, and ruptures: an exhibition catalog of global artists” in issue 46.1, a review of Global Groove: Art, Dance, Performance & Protest (Museum Folkwang Essen)

• Kristin Marrs, “Journeying Toward Center with the late Nancy Topf,” in issue 46.2, a review of A Guide to a Somatic Movement Practice: The Anatomy of Center by Nancy Topf, with Hetty King (University Press of Florida)

• Priya Vashist, “Visibility and Values: a compelling analysis of dancing and why it matters,” in issue 46.3, a review of Usha Iyer’s Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Oxford University Press)

These four reviews afforded us opportunities to consider the potentialities of generous thinking and dance research, to witness the poetry of scholarly writing, and to savor the theories of authors and practitioners. In choosing these pieces, we additionally considered the following criteria that will guide us in the future as well: 1. The review goes beyond summary of the book to offer a stand-alone analysis of the affordances, significance, and/or distinctiveness of the author’s approach, research, and writing. 2. Special consideration is given to reviews of books that focus on dance history/theory and embodied practices. 3. Special attention is given to reviewers who are not affiliated with a university and/or whose work is underrecognized in dance scholarship.

In this issue we also share four research articles selected from submissions to our Special Issue, Interrogating Histories and Historicizing Dance Studies. Each one takes seriously our call to attend to sources and methodologies. Margaret Morrison traces the significant contributions of Ann Kilkelly and Mary Neth, and their research project from 1999 through 2005, titled Tapping the Margins. Morrison’s article not only describes the project’s materials, which will be accessible at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and which include notes for a never-completed book, archival video footage of dancers, film analyses, oral histories, plus stage and film production records, but also examines Kilkelly’s feminist, personal, and embodied explorations of tap dance history.

Priya Venkat Raman attends to the writing of dance critics who reviewed performances by Uday Shankar and Ram Gopal from the 1930s to the 1950s, and her article contributes to current methods for decolonizing dance criticism. Introducing the concept of the “post-performance performative,” Raman shows how criticism can reactivate a spectator’s felt or sensorial experience, as well as how critics framed idealized notions for transnational Indian danced embodiments, plus representations of nationhood and international relationships.

Zeynep Günsür Yüceil and Özlem Hemiş bring a unique approach to documenting an ensemble’s performance history: Yüceil is a founding member and performer with the Hareket Atölyesi Topluluğu (Movement Atelier Company), while Hemiş is a critic and colleague who has seen all of the company's performances since its inception in 1999. By combining “inside” and “outside” perspectives, the authors reveal a confluence of events and investments that shaped the evolution of Hareket Atölyesi Topluluğu in Turkey. Using the concepts of chora, which refers to a formless interval, and of barzakh, which describes an in-between space, the authors explore how these cultural conceptions of space inform artistic processes and resist hegemonic narratives.

Arianne MacBean’s article, “Ariadne’s Thread: A Depth Psychology Exploration of Liminal Immanence in Dance/Movement,” offers a response to the questions posed in the call for papers for Interrogating Histories and Historicizing Dance Studies: what kinds of historical analyses do dance historians take up and why? MacBean’s research weaves a thread through performances by Martha Graham and Jeanine Durning that compellingly shows how “a depth psychology perspective, based on Carl Jung’s theories, brings unconscious material to consciousness through analysis of image and symbol and might be a generative framework for analyzing dance and choreography as they connect to theories of individuation and anima/animus.”

We look forward to learning from readers how these awards, articles, reviews, and research approaches animate your conversations about histories, historiography, and dancing.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Carolyn Eastman, “In Defense of the Beleaguered Academic Book Review,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 21, 2023, https://www.chronicle.com/article/in-defense-of-the-beleaguered-academic-book-review.

2 Colleen Flaherty, “Relying on Women, Not Rewarding Them,” Inside Higher Ed, April 11, 2017, ttps://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/12/study-finds-female-professors-outperform-men-service-their-possible-professional; Marwa Shalaby, Nermin Allam, Gail Buttorff, “Gender, COVID and Faculty Service, Inside Higher Ed, September 17, 2020, https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/12/18/increasingly-disproportionate-service-burden-female-faculty-bear-will-have; Commission on the Status of Women, “The Great Gendered Divide in Faculty Service,” University of Arizona, https://csw.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/data/Faculty%20Service%20infographic.pdf.