A Book List for Sally Banes

For more than three decades, the dancer, choreographer, and scholar Sally Banes influenced and inspired performers and artists alike with her prolific writings on dance, ranging from the postmodern explorations of Judson Dance Theater to the beginnings of hip hop in 1980s New York City. In June 2020, Banes passed away from complications related to cancer.
The Jerome Robbins Dance Division will be hosting A Memorial-Celebration of Sally Banes, curated by Lynn Garafola, on Friday, February 26 from 2 PM - 6 PM Eastern Standard Time. We invite you to join us virtually in honoring her life and work by registering at Eventbrite.
To accompany the memorial, we’ve compiled a list of books—and one videorecording—either wholly by Banes or with significant contributions from her. Most are available to borrow via the the New York Public Library’s current Grab & Go service.
Books to Borrow
Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance
The first critical history of postmodern dance, Terpsichore in Sneakers provides in-depth coverage of choreographers including Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, Trisha Brown, Meredith Monk, David Gordon, Douglas Dunn, and Kenneth King, along with the dance group the Grand Union. By analyzing each choreographer’s works and stated motivations, Banes locates the postmodern dance movement in the choreographers’ questioning and reconception of modern dance rather than in any particular style.
Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964
This book provides a history of the Judson Dance Theater, from its inception as a workshop at Merce Cunningham’s studio to its formation as a distinct group at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, and discusses its status as an extension of the avant-garde movement of the 1960s. Using a range of materials including interviews, letters, films and dance reconstructions, Banes reveals both the successes and the struggles of the organization, as each member sought to explore and define their place in this new movement. The book provides a thorough understanding of this important collective of artists.
Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body
Banes continues to explore the impact of 1960s counterculture and the emergence of postmodernism in this in-depth study of the era-defining New York Greenwich Village art scene of 1963-1964. Arguing that it was a pivotal year that cemented seismic shifts until then merely percolating in art and experimental performance of the early '60s, Banes discusses contributions from young artists such as Andy Warhol, John Cage, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, and Sam Shepard, alongside the collective efforts of Judson Dance Theater.
Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism
This collection of Banes’s previously published work looks at postmodern and contemporary dance, with a focus on the evolution of dance writing itself. In addition to continuing her work on the Judson Dance Theater and postmodern dance, Banes ranges abroad, including a look at avant garde dance in 1920s Europe and the arrival of Black jazz dance in 1926 Moscow. She also expands her analysis at home to discuss hip hop dance under its then current name, breakdancing, as well as newly emergent Latinx choreographers, the 1930s Workers Dance League and widely known dance figures like Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, and Fred Astaire.
Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance
With an introductory essay by Sally Banes, this influential collection of materials by postmodern dance innovator Anna Halprin, edited by Rachel Kaplan, includes interviews, manifestos, and teaching materials describing Halprin's significant contributions to the dance field. Both Banes and Halprin shared a deep mutual connection to the Dance Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Halprin was once a student of Margaret H’Doubler and Banes later taught as a member of the faculty.
Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage
Dancing Women is a pathbreaking feminist survey of dance history examining choreographic representations of female gender identities from the nineteenth century to the postmodern period. Exploring the ways dance and its socio-cultural contexts co-construct feminine agency, sexuality, and meaning, Banes critically analyzes the figuration of women through images in the traditional dance canon and makes complex suggestions about approaches to gender in both historical dance scholarship and postmodern dance.
Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York, 1976-85
This book comprises a rich compilation of Sally Banes’ reviews and articles originally published in the Village Voice and Soho Weekly News from 1976-1985, detailing the vibrant New York performance scene of the '70s and '80s. Documenting the work of artists like Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, Joan Jonas, and Ping Chong and infamous performances by Anne Bogart, Karen Finley, Steve Buscemi, and Whoopie Goldberg, Banes’ lucid criticism testifies to the range, complexity, and productive aesthetic promiscuity of performance practice during this decade.
Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (ebook available HERE)
Dancing Many Drums, a collection of essays edited by Thomas F. De Frantz, examines the influence of African American music and dance on global as well as specifically American culture. Banes, along with John Szed, contributed a chapter on 1960s popular songs that provided dance instructions, arguing for their status as a kind of democratizing dance notation.
Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible
Banes contributed a chapter and edited this book with assistance from Andrea Harris. The essays offer additional perspectives and form a counterpoint to her first book, Terpsichore in Sneakers, by looking at dance in the 1960s beyond the ten white choreographers she covered in her earlier work. The essays gathered range from philosophical to personal, and include a foreword by Mikhail Baryshnikov, whose work with the White Oak Dance Project helped to revive interest in the era.
Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader
To this collection of essays edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere, Banes contributes a chapter covering developments in dance improvisation from the 1960s and 1970s, notably the Contact Improvisation movement and the dance group the Grand Union, to its resurgence in the late 1980s and 1990s. Banes describes how societal events like the AIDS crisis and economic pressures influenced the form to reflect “two seemingly contradictory facets: open-endedness and urgency.”
Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing
This volume, edited by Andrea Harris, gathers together a collection of more than thirty years of Banes’ writings and reviews, including her first published review and unpublished papers, demonstrating the breadth of her dance interests beyond the postmodern form she is best known for analyzing, and tracing the development of her thinking about the nature of dance as an art form. Essays by dance scholars Harris, Lynn Garafola, and Joan Acocella bring insight to Banes’ writings.
Additional Books/Videos in the Dance Division Research Collection
DanceFindings: Robert Ellis Dunn Videodance Installation
Robert Ellis Dunn, a choreographer and musician whose classes in dance improvisation and choreography formed part of the birth of the Judson Dance Theater—in addition to serving as Assistant Curator of the Dance Division from 1965-1972—was featured in a posthumous, multiscreen videodance installation at the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University in Milwaukee. The accompanying exhibition catalog, edited by Curtis L. Carter, includes an article by Banes on Dunn’s classes in the early 1960s.
Marmalade Me
This reissued and expanded collection of New York’s Village Voice dance criticism by Jill Johnston spans the years 1960-1969, when Johnston championed the Judson Dance Theater and began to engage with the performance-based art practices in downtown New York City. Deborah Jowitt and Sally Banes both contributed essays delineating the significance of Johnston’s work in defining the art of the 1960s.
The Senses in Performance
Banes and André Lepecki co-edited this anthology of eighteen essays by performing artists and scholars. The essays cover a wide range of performance topics including dance, theater, and opera, and make the case for the senses—taste, touch, smell, vision, hearing—as cultural constructs which can be subject to analysis. Banes co-wrote the introduction as well as contributing a chapter, “Olfactory Performances.”
The Last Conversation: Eisenstein's Carmen Ballet
Banes directed and reconstructed this 1947 short ballet, choreographed by Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein and based on the story of Carmen. Using extensive archival research and working with the ballet character dancers Galina Zakrutkina and James Sutton, Banes filmed two versions to help to create a complete picture of the work.
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