Sally Banes on Women and Dance, October 22

"Defying the Gaze: Dancing Women Negotiate Agency"

- SALLY BANES

Arts critic and writer Sally Banes, the author of numerous books and articles in the areas of dance criticism and history, theatre, film, and performance art, will deliver a lecture titled "Defying the Gaze: Dancing Women Negotiate Agency," Friday, October 22, at 3 pm in Gamble Auditorium. The event, which is being sponsored by the Five College dance department and the Mount Holyoke dance department, is being produced as part of the College's semester-long arts focus across departments, "Women and Power."

Banes, the Marian Hannah Winter Professor of Theatre and Dance Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (where from 1992 to 1996 she was chair of the dance program), is the author of Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body; Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance; and Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater 1962 - 1964. She was formerly a senior critic at Dance Magazine, dance editor at the Soho Weekly News, dance and performance art critic for the Village Voice, and the editor of Dance Research Journal. Banes's most recent books, published last year, are Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage and Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York 1976 - 85. She is the immediate past president of the Society of Dance History Scholars.

"Sally Banes is recognized as an expert on the current dance scene and the new trends that are continually appearing in the art," says Charles Flachs, assistant professor of dance. "She is one of the few people who, by studying the politics, theory, and techniques of dance, is able to distill and make sense of the power and force this present generation of dancers and choreographers exerts on society."