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The internationally recognised Centre for Dance Research (CDR) is a meeting ground for scholars and students from all over the world, and an umbrella for a wide range of research projects in historical, analytical, anthropological and cultural studies and professional choreography. Research Professor Stephanie Jordan has been Director of the CDR since its inception.The 2008 national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) rated Roehampton number one in the UK for its dance research. Acclaiming 55 % of its work in dance as ‘world-leading’, grades also indicate that this represents the fifth highest concentration of world-class activity of any department in the country in any subject, higher than can be found in most of the old as well as other new universities. This is also the best record in any RAE for dance.

Recent research outcomes include four monographs:

• The Cecchetti Legacy (2007), by Toby Bennett and Ann Hutchinson Guest
• Stravinsky Dances: Re-Visions across a Century (2007), by Stephanie Jordan
• Dancing in Utopia: Dartington Hall and its Dancers (2007), by Larraine Nicholas
• ReConstructing Dance and RePresenting Dance: Exploring the Dance/Archaeology Conjunction (2007), by Alessandra Lopez y Royo.

We have also produced edited books, including:

• Anthropologie de la danse: Genèse et construction d’une discipline (2005), edited by Andrée Grau and Georgiana Wierre-Gore
• Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904-1986): A Visionary Architect of Indian Culture and the Performing Arts (2005), edited by Avanthi Meduri.

Jordan and Nicholas have also compiled the internet database Stravinsky the Global Dancer: A Chronology of Choreography to the Music of Igor Stravinsky (2003). In addition the CDR runs seminars and international conferences: on the work of Sir Frederick Ashton, a collaboration with the Royal Ballet (1994), the politics of dance preservation (1997), Baroque dance (2001), practice as research (2003 and 2006), and music and dance (‘Sound Moves’), in collaboration with Princeton University and the Society for Dance Research (2005).

The Arts and Humanities Research Council has been a source of many grants, both large and small, to the CDR. We have, for instance, been part of the AHRC Centre for Cross-Cultural Music and Dance Performance (2002-7), a collaboration between the School of African and Oriental Studies at the University of London (SOAS), University of Surrey and Roehampton. The purpose of this Centre was to research sound and movement performance, particularly within Asian and African artistic practice, and methods of analysis in theatre and dance research. Our work has also attracted external funding from the Arts Council, Leverhulme Trust, British Academy, Radcliffe Trust, George Balanchine Foundation in New York, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Islander Studies, and a Harvard University Fellowship.

The CDR includes four Readers, Grau, Meduri, Lopez y Royo and Carol Brown. With a well-established, international reputation as a choreographer and scholar, Brown leads developments in practice as research. The CDR also embraces a number of Research Fellows. In the recent past, the eminent choreographers Siobhan Davies and Ashley Page have been Senior Research Fellows. Brown was our first AHRC Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts before joining the Dance staff. Ann Hutchinson Guest, the internationally recognised authority on Labanotation is a Senior Research Fellow: she has been a Guggenheim Fellow (1998-99) and winner of the 1997 CORD Award for Outstanding Contribution to Dance Research. Other current Research Fellows are Lesley-Anne Sayers, specialist in 20th-century Russian and British ballet scenography, and Kimiko Okamoto, the baroque dance and music scholar.

Staff biographies can be reached via the Members page.