The untimely death of Lesley-Anne Sayers has deprived the academic worlds of dance, scenography, and the visual arts of one of its most vibrant scholars. While a Research Fellow in Dance at Roehampton University, her substantial Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded project with Princeton University to recreate Diaghilev's innovative ballet Le Pas d’Acier (1925) with Millicent Hodson was founded on her recreation of the model of Yakoulov's spectacular stage designs. This set her on a dedicated, imaginative, and highly innovative program of investigating the principles of reworking the choreographic heritage of ballets for contemporary dance theatre from the perspective of their scenography.
As a regular contributor to the Open University and at the University of Gloucester she was able to share her passion for the visual image. It was that passion that enabled her to devise the documentary DVD with Princeton's Simon Morrison on the recreation of Le Pas d’Acier. From 2006 her research was centred at Trinity Laban, the UK's leading conservatory for music and dance, where she taught dance criticism and contributed to the Research Department. Intrigued by the contrast of Diagilev's Paris and Laban's Berlin, she co-directed the international conference Then and Now celebrating fifty years of development, since his death in 1958, of Rudolf Laban's work, and directed the documentary Die Grünen Clowns, 1928 to Green Clowns, 2008 on the recreation of Laban's satire of Weimar culture, researched by Valerie Preston-Dunlop and mounted by Alison-Curtis Jones on Trinity Laban's dancers.
Throughout her short but packed career her pursuit of the role of language in the arts was recognized through her invitation to contribute essays to Neil Edmunds's Soviet Society and Music under Lenin and Stalin, Stephanie Jordan's Preservation Politics, Martha Bremser's Fifty Contemporary Choreographers, and Helen Thomas's Dance in the City as well as book reviews in Dance Now, Gender and History, and Dance Theatre Journal. In the last weeks before her death she developed a new masters module for Trinity Laban—Writing the Body: Text as Interface: “an exploration of what it might mean for writing to be a porous, informed, and reflective interface between performance and text.”
Her capacity to engage colleagues in imaginative collaboration had set her on her last project with composer Michael Berkeley and choreographer Melanie Clarke to rework the lost Massine/Nabokov/Tchelitchew ballet, Ode (1928). She was immersed in a dialogue between the avant-garde aesthetic of the Ballets Russes and the contemporary values and postmodern practices of 2010 when her unexpected death took her from us.
Lesley-Anne is survived by her husband and collaborator, Peter Sayers, and teenage sons, Samuel and Louis. Her loss is profound on both a personal and professional level.
Valerie Preston-Dunlop