Drawing principally from archival material, published primary source documentation and oral history interviews, this article outlines how Franziska Boas, a dance teacher in the United States whose career spanned 1933 to 1965, implemented holistic ideas about dancer training before somatic
philosophies were widely accepted in dance. A student of Bird Larson and Hanya Holm, Boas taught ‘creative dance’, an approach to movement intended to assist each student in developing her or his own kinetic creativity. To achieve this goal, Boas believed that students first needed
to understand human anatomy and movement fundamentals. She was committed to the idea that structured improvisations were the best way to teach technique. She valued individuality more than the achievement of technical feats and the emulation of a set movement syllabus. Boas is positioned here
as interesting case study who, because of her pedagogical practices, illuminate our understanding of how dance and somatics developed in tandem in a variety of environments within an American liberal arts education system, including at the Boas School of Dance, her privately owned studio in
New York; and the formal educational setting she encountered as a professor in the Dance and Physical Education Department at Shorter College in the southern town of Rome, Georgia
In 1927, sixty-five chapters of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE) staged Amy Sternberg’s Historical Pageant in Toronto to celebrate Canada’s Diamond Jubilee. Accessing primary source documentation, this article argues that Sternberg’s production constructed and conveyed IODE ideology by placing female agency in the service of liberal imperialism. Specifically, the female allegorical and historical characters in the pageant provide an index of values that emphasized the role of women in creating a strong Canada closely aligned with a venerated British Empire. Beyond the script and the stage, the program for the production and press clippings suggest that the IODE used Historical Pageant to promote itself as a modern organization in which female leadership fostered civically engaged action while simultaneously and subtly re-inscribing the traditional hierarchical social structure of the British Empire within Canada. In these ways, Historical Pageant reminds historians of the necessity to consider how theatre has been used by Canadian women to assert their political views publicly even when those views espouse ideology that is no longer acceptable.
This article considers the role of music within the context of the Montréal automatists by addressing the choreographic works created by Jeanne Renaud and Françoise Sullivan during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In so doing, it becomes clear that the dance activities of these two choreographers often paralleled contemporaneous experiments in music. Renaud and Sullivan’s collaborations with Pierre Mercure were particularly successful and ultimately demonstrate that music was a significant part of the Automatists’ history, even though Mercure was not a signatory to the Automatist manifesto, Refus Global.Cet article évalue le rôle de la musique dans le contexte des automatistes de Montréal en se penchant sur les oeuvres chorégraphiques créées par Jeanne Renaud et Françoise Sullivan au cours de la fin des années 1940 et du début des années 1950. Il apparaît dès lors que les activités autour de la danse de ces deux chorégraphes évoluent souvent en parallèle avec des expériences contemporaines en musique. Les collaborations de Renaud et Sullivan avec Pierre Mercure étaient particulièrement réussies, et démontrent en fin de compte que la musique constituait une partie importante de l’histoire des automatistes, même si Mercure n’était pas signataire du manifeste automatiste, le Refus global
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