The Dancer from the Music: Men, Modern Dance, and Choreomusicalities on the U.S. Stage, 1910-2010
507 West 113th Street, Apt. 51 New York, NY 10025
Karen Henson, Lynn Garafola, Lydia Goehr, Ellie Hisama
This first full-length study of the use of music in American modern dance examines the choreography of three men—Ted Shawn, Merce Cunningham, and Mark Morris—for whom choreomusicality, or the relationship between music and dance, was especially vital. It revises long-standing views of their work and music’s place in it through choreomusical analysis and archival research, and demonstrates how their choreomusicalities reflected and refracted their masculinities and homosexualities. "How can we tell the dancer from the music?" My answers address dance history's neglect of classical music's import in American modern dance and musicology's indifference to embodied uses of absolute music.
Music Humanities: Masterpieces of Western Music Dance to the Music: Choreomusicalities on the New York Stage The American Musical (T.A.)
"Absolutely Unmanly: The Music Visualizations of Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers," Society of Dance History Scholars 34th Annual International Conference, Toronto, June 2011; Joint Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Congress on Research in Dance, Philadelphia, November 2011 “Serenade to ‘Somewhere’: West Side Story’s ‘Love Ballet’ and Pre-Stonewall Structures of Feeling,” “Song and Dance” conference, Harvard University, February 2010 “Choreomusical Relationships in Merce Cunningham’s Second Hand and the Aesthetic of Indifference.” 75th Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Philadelphia, November 2009; Society of Dance History Scholars 32nd Annual International Conference, Stanford, June 2009
Selma Jeanne Cohen Award (Society of Dance History Scholars, 2011); Beinecke Scholarship (2005-2010 tenure named in 2004); Avenir Research Grant (Arnold Schoenberg Center, Vienna, 2004)