With this issue we are delighted to announce the results of the first biennial competition for the Founding Editors' Awards, sponsored by Dance Chronicle and Taylor & Francis. The journal's editors and advisory board inaugurated the awards in 2015 for the purpose of encouraging the highest quality scholarship in dance history research among scholars at the early phase of their careers. The board voted to honor, for the year 2015, dance archivist, editor, and scholar, Barbara Palfy, who passed away in 2014. It is a fitting tribute to one whose skill and generosity as a mentor were legendary.
Barbara Palfy (1936–2014) was Dance Chronicle's longtime associate editor, who worked with the journal's founding editors, Jack Anderson and George Dorris, and subsequent editors Lynn Brooks and Joellen A. Meglin, over the course of thirty-seven years. A student of both dance and library science, Barbara worked for the New York Public Library's Dance Division before turning her attention to editing for many dance publishers and publications, including Princeton Book Company, the International Encyclopedia of Dance, Ballet Review, and Dance Chronicle. As George Dorris notes, reflecting on Barbara's contributions to the journal, “She brought not only her keen eye, but humor, patience, generosity, an abiding love of the arts—literature and music as well as dance—and a desire to encourage the young scholars who were beginning to transform our discipline. Above all, she was a wonderful, loving friend. No wonder she is so greatly missed.”Footnote1 Barbara's dedication to mentoring young scholars makes this award, in her name, particularly appropriate.
We are deeply grateful to the panel of distinguished scholars from Dance Chronicle's advisory board who adjudicated the manuscripts submitted for award consideration: Drs. Pallabi Chakravorty, Judith Chazin Bennahum, Jane Desmond, Karen Eliot, Judith Lynne Hanna, and Debra Sowell. Not only did the adjudicators select the award winners, but they also provided detailed feedback to each applicant in a blind peer-review process. Their goal was to illuminate the next steps in deepening the research, and sharpening its rigor, for each young scholar. The commitment and keen critical sense they brought to the process were exemplary.
We think the results of the process have been gratifying for applicants, adjudicators, and editors alike. The four essays selected as prizewinners demonstrate diverse subject matter and breadth of interdisciplinary research methodologies. Subject matter ranges from questions of negative and positive freedom in the disciplinary regimen of the Graham technique, to Martha Graham's first tour of European nations behind the Iron Curtain; from changing understandings of the essence of ballet as dramatic expression or dance for dance's sake, to new methods and frameworks for dance reconstruction that move from restaging to re-generation. Methodologies run the gamut from multimodal inquiry (incorporating political theory, feminism, and oral history) to unflinching analysis of historical and critical texts; from interviews and field notes to critical and choreographic analysis. We hope that our readers will be as inspired as we are by the vigorous arguments, thorough documentation, and clarity of thinking in the selected essays.
We are also pleased with the diversity of disciplinary domains represented by the award winners and their diverse international profiles. Johanna Heil's essay “Exercises in Discipline and Freedom? The Graham Technique” wins the first-place award. Heil attained the Ph.D. in English and American Studies (2013) from the Philipps-Universität in Marburg, Germany, where she currently works as a faculty member. Olivia Sabee's essay “Théophile Gautier's Ballet d'Action: Rewriting Dance History through Criticism” wins one of two second-place awards. Sabee earned the Ph.D. in French studies from Johns Hopkins University (2015) in Baltimore, and now teaches as assistant professor of dance in the Department of Music and Dance at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Heather Young Reed's essay “Re-Generating Kinesthetic History: The Dynamics of Transmitting William Forsythe's One Flat Thing, Reproduced” ties with Sabee's for the second-place award. Young Reed was awarded the Ph.D. in dance studies (2015) at York University in Toronto, Canada, and now teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in dance at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom. Camelia Lenart wins third-place for “Dancing Art and Politics Behind the Iron Curtain: Martha Graham's 1962 Tours to Yugoslavia and Poland.” This essay springs from her award-winning dissertation research in cultural studies at the State University of New York at Albany, where she attained the Ph.D. (2014).
The qualitative comments of the adjudicators best express the points of excellence that served as the basis for their decisions. One adjudicator crystallizes the content of Heil's essay, noting that it “questions the concept of ‘freedom through discipline’ in the teaching and practice of the Graham technique both historically and in a contemporary feminist framework.” Another cites this article as “a lucid and skillful intertwining of theory and practice, using interviews to challenge our understanding of normative lore. The author is especially impressive in [her] ability to link theories of bodily materiality and subjectivity, expressive practice, and historical aesthetics into a larger picture. This combination has potentially far-reaching effects beyond the specific topic under investigation.” A third reviewer commends the essay as “both intellectually ambitious and [well] grounded. It deals with big issues without becoming lost in unsupported philosophical or theoretical jargon.” A fourth praises the breadth of the essay's implications and a fine “framing of the research questions within relevant theoretical paradigms. The interdisciplinary approach contextualizes dance broadly within multiple scholarly disciplines,” culminating in a “well-structured paper, cogently argued.”
Sabee's article, according to one adjudicator, is “a beautifully written, clearly argued essay that draws from literary criticism and historical methodologies. The author challenges received history and, by closely analyzing the dramatic practices of the nineteenth century, revises our thinking about the ballet d'action and the ways the terminology surrounding this practice has been subtly revised by Gautier and the arts for arts' sake adherents.” Another panelist remarks, “The paper is based on significant primary archival research. It generates new knowledge about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ballet history [and] contributes to the deepening of ballet scholarship. Difficult material [is] presented in an accessible and organized manner. This research is specifically of interest to scholars researching the relationship between dance criticism and dance history, drama/theater and choreography.” A third ranks the essay highly “because it combines intellectual and academic rigor with a great sensitivity to language. The author also demonstrates familiarity with a variety of important historical figures,” which broadens the essay's appeal. A fourth scholar assesses it as “a very well-argued essay, well-constructed and researched, with the important potential to help us restructure our dance historical narratives and conceptions of historical temporality in ballet's history.”
Young Reed's essay impresses one reviewer as “elegantly written, anchored in explorations of lived experience, and eloquent as well in its theoretical intervention.” This reader goes on to note, “This proposed rethinking could have wide implications for our theorizing the renewal of dances through ever-new dancing.” Another scholar remarks that this work “raises important questions regarding dance preservation and what constitutes a dance archive in the age of digital humanities and mechanical reproduction,” making it “topical and relevant” to dancers and researchers today. Young Reed's research addresses “the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to dance preservation and transmission,” arguing for “recreating a dance, rather than for … documenting a record of it.” This reader goes on to write that, by identifying ways “that notation and video limit the agency of the dancing body,” Young Reed articulates the work of “re-generation” as drawing on “an embodied experience that becomes embedded in the individual or collective memories of its participants.”
One reader of Lenart's essay encapsulates its content: “Martha Graham's 1962 State Department tour to Europe is examined in terms of the choices, logistics, and negotiations within the tense political context of the Cold War.” Lenart corrects published misinformation on the tour and its impact on the people and politics concerned. Another scholar notes that the work “brings to light and evokes the aura and political atmosphere of Martha's 1962 tour to Yugoslavia and Poland fraught with Cold War implications.” Furthermore, “It is judiciously documented with interviews, news articles and letters that vivify the moments” of deepest significance for dancers, viewers, and politicians. As this adjudicator notes, “This tour is relatively unknown and the author's enthusiastic coverage of these important performances offers another way of seeing the value of art that travels.”
We are deeply grateful to Taylor & Francis for their generosity, and especially to Managing Editor Sarah Sidoti, for her unswerving support in making these awards possible. We thank, as well, individual donors, including Dance Chronicle's editors and advisory board members, for their financial contributions and guidance in establishing the awards. In addition, we are grateful to Frankin & Marshall College for lending its budgetary agency.
We invite dance researchers at the early phase of their careers to consider submitting their work for adjudication in the next run, in 2017, of the Founding Editors' Awards. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to http://www.editorialmanager.com/dc/default.aspx by August 1, 2017. For the reader's convenience, we state the eligibility requirements below.
To be eligible for consideration the scholar must have received the Ph.D. between July 1, 2014 and July 1, 2017, and must submit a copy or scan of his/her diploma.
The scholar may have received his/her degree in the field of dance or any other field in the humanities.
The mode and methods of research should be those of dance history broadly defined to include theoretical, critical, and philosophical inquiry into dance as art or cultural practice as it exists in the present or has existed in the past anywhere in the world.
The topic of the essay must relate to dance (broadly defined as movement practice) in a significant way.
The submitted manuscript must be between 7,000 and 10,000 words in length (with the footnotes and endnotes included in the word count).
The manuscript must be written in the English language, although primary-source quotations in another language may (and should, if applicable) be given in footnotes.
The submission must be formatted according to Dance Chronicle's “Style Guidelines for Authors.” To be eligible for consideration, the writing in the manuscript must meet acceptable standards of good English.
Awardees must be willing to revise their essays as they work through the normal editorial process toward publication. Payment of the cash award will be made upon successful completion of the process.
An entirely new panel of distinguished scholars from among the members of Dance Chronicle's advisory board will be invited to review and adjudicate manuscripts for the 2017 competition, and the award-winning pieces will be published in 2018.
Note
Notes
1. George Dorris, remarks, in Lynn Matluck Brooks and Joellen A. Meglin, “In Memoriam: Barbara Palfy,” Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts, vol. 38, no. 1 (2015): 117.