About

Formerly Head of the Department of Dance (1992-2000) and Director of the Centre for Dance Research, Stephanie Jordan is currently Research Professor in Dance. 

With a background as dancer, musician and dance critic, her academic career led her to publish and present at conferences internationally and, during the last fifteen years, she has toured widely to Australia, South Africa, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Russia, North America, and throughout Europe. Stephanie has written three books: Striding Out: Aspects of Contemporary and New Dance in Britain(1992), Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet (2000) and Stravinsky Dances: Re-Visions across a Century (2007), all published by Dance Books. For Moving Music, she was awarded the 2001 Special Citation of the Dance Perspectives Foundation, New York, the major annual dance book award. In 2010, Stephanie was honoured with the award for Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance from the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD, USA). In the 2001 UK Research Assessment Exercise, it was her field of Music and Dance that was specially commended, equivalent to the top rating of 5*, the highest award for Dance. In the 2008 RAE, her field was similarly commended, alongside other work of the Centre for Dance Research. Stephanie has also edited Parallel Lines: Media Representations of Dance (with Dave Allen, 1993), Following Sir Fred’s Steps: Ashton’s Legacy (1996), Europe Dancing: Perspectives on Theatre Dance and Cultural Identity (with Andrée Grau, 2000) and Preservation Politics: Dance Revived, Reconstructed, Remade (2000). In 2002, her edited collection of writings by the Russian choreographer Fedor Lopukhov was published in the American series Studies in Dance History. 

Stephanie’s work on Stravinsky and dance began when she was commissioned by the George Balanchine Foundation, New York as project director for the analytical video Music Dances: Balanchine Choreographs Stravinsky (2002), working with dancers from New York City Ballet. Later, she compiled with Larraine Nicholas the database Stravinsky the Global Dancer: A Chronology of Choreography to the Music of Igor Stravinsky (2003). This was the foundation for Stravinsky Dances, which encompasses contemporary dance and radical, conceptual work of the twenty-first century as well as ballet. For her work in music and dance, Stephanie has received grants from the Radcliffe Trust, British Academy, the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland (for work in its Stravinsky archive), and Harvard University’s John M. Ward Fellowship in Dance and Music for the Theatre (2001-2002). Grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Board/Council have supported the Stravinsky database and a second analytical DVD/video in collaboration with Geraldine Morris and The Royal Ballet entitled Ashton to Stravinsky (2004). Stephanie’s most recent grant was a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to support research for her current project, a book on Mark Morris and music.

For the 2004-5 season, Stephanie curated ‘The Ashton Exchange’, the first academic series in dance to be held at the Royal Opera House. Since 2007, she has written programme notes regularly for The Royal Ballet. 

Stephanie’s main teaching at Roehampton lies in the area of research student supervision, but she also contributes to history and analysis courses in the MA dance programmes. A variety of committee and consultancy work has included the following: membership of the Arts Council Dance Panel, the judging panel for the Prudential Awards for the Arts, the Arts and Humanities Research Board Postgraduate Panel, Research Assessment Exercise panels in 2001 and 2008, editorial boards of Studies in Dance History and Dance Research, and membership of the Executive Committee of the Society for Dance Research. Stephanie has also contributed as a speaker and consultant to numerous television and radio programmes, including the 2002 BBC documentary on The Rite of Spring and broadcast of the Royal Ballet in Firebird and Les Noces.