Homans’s diagnosis comes not only from years of watching, and reading and writing about, this most ephemeral art form—she is a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University—but also from having been a professional ballet dancer herself. Trained at the School of American Ballet, associated with the renowned New York City Ballet, she performed with sterling dance companies like San Francisco Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet. The passion she harbored for working in the studio eventually nudged her to ponder the genesis and meaning of this transformational art form, leading her from the stage and into the research library.
“Ballet, of course is not just the life of the body, but it also has a whole set of ideas and beliefs and feelings that over history have made it meaningful,” she told me in a recent interview. “Although they (professional dancing and academia) seem in some respects to be polar opposites, one is very physical, the other very cerebral, there is an interesting connection between them.” The loneliness of daily work and sweat at the barre is, it seems, akin to the hours of solitary reading, transcribing, and evaluating.
via A Chat With Jennifer Homans About Ballet’s Past and Future – Arts & Academe – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
UNCSA will be known as an “ArtSTEM” course. The course will be collaboratively taught by six different DLA faculty members, and led by Dr. Janna Levin, faculty member and ArtSTEM co-director. Collaborating faculty include: Joe Mills, Dean Wilcox, Rick Miller, Bob King, and Mike Wakeford. Below, see the course listing from the registration catalog. More on this soon!