About
Background as Scholar and Teacher
I am a dance historian, contributing to BA, taught postgraduate and
research degree programmes. My doctoral thesis, completed at Roehampton
in 1999, explored the cultural and historical context of British
choreography in the years 1945-55. Since then, I have presented
conference papers internationally, diversifying in periods and genres
while maintaining an academic curiosity in relation to economic,
political and structural relationships within theatre dance. From the
nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, such issues are central to
understanding the artistic development of dance in the theatre.
The post World War II Cold War period is one such fruitful area. I
published 'Fellow Travellers: Dance and British Cold War Politics in the
Early 1950s,' (Dance Research, 19, no. 2, Winter 2001) and contributed a chapter on British modern dance of the 1940s/1950s to Re-Thinking Dance History
(Alexandra Carter, ed.) published by Routledge in 2004. Dance in its
political and social contexts, from the nineteenth century onwards, is a
central theme of my courses taught at BA and MA level, especially the
MA module ‘Dance and the Politics of Identity’.
Research Projects Undertaken
Main Projects
For a number of years I have researched the ‘utopian’ dance of Dartington Hall in Devon. Published in 2007, Dancing in Utopia: Dartington Hall and its Dancers
(book, pp. 274) is an in-depth study of the phenomenon from the 1920s
onwards, expanding into the more widespread changes in British
contemporary dance as art, education and community involvement over the
twentieth century.
My current research is working towards another book, Mar[king] Time, fusing the triad of time, dance and history, with case studies drawn across the centuries from nineteenth to twenty-first.
Research Students
My past and current research students have worked in the areas of
dance history, dance analysis and national identity in various genres of
ballet and contemporary dance.
My body as a dance teacher has
been formed by ballet and modern (Graham) dance techniques but as I
currently dance in middle age, I confine myself to performance practice
as a relaxation only, but one that informs me historically, performing
‘early dance’ with Consort de Danse Baroque.