Programs

2008
"Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Carving out space for Chinese modern dance in an interconnected world"
Alison M. Friedman (Fulbrighter to China in 2002)- bio
General Manager
Parnassus Productions, Inc.
View Presentation: [PowerPoint]

2007
"Sacred Dance and Secular Law in Bali"
Ron Jenkins (Fulbrighter to Indonesia in 2007)- bio
Professor
Theatre Department
Wesleyan University
Read Presentation: [PDF] [Word]

2006
"Where My Dancing Had Saved Me from Disgrace"
Barbara Browning (Fulbrighter to Brazil in 1983) - bio
Associate Professor
Department of Performance Studies
Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
Read Presentation: [PDF] [Word]

2005
"Moving Inside and Outside the Box: Thoughts on the Graphic Notation of Baroque Dances for the Ballroom"
Richard Semmens - bio
Dance Historian and Choreographer
Associate Professor of Music History
Don Wright Faculty of Music
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada
Read Press Release: [PDF] [HTML]
Read Presentation: [PDF] [Word]

2004
"Reconstructing Jeux, Nijinsky's Bloomsbury Ballet"
Millicent Hodson - bio
Dance Historian and Choreographer
Ballets Old & New
London, United Kingdom
Read Press Release: [PDF] [HTML]
Read Summary of Presentation:[PDF]

2003
"Transylvanian Dancing in the Final Hour"
Wayne B. Kraft (Fulbrighter to Hungary in 1986) - bio
Professor of German
Eastern Washington University
Cheney, Wash.
Read Presentation: [PDF] [Word]

2002
"Dancing with the Wheel of Ever Returning: A Theatrical Adventure with Australian Aborigines and Native Americans"
Gretchen Ward Warren (Fulbrighter to Australia in 1997) - bio
Professor
School of Theater and Dance
University of South Florida
Tampa, Fla.

2001
"Unspoken Knowledges"
Robin Marshall Grove - bio
Senior Lecturer
Department of English with Cultural Studies
University of Melbourne, Australia

2000
"Expression in Dance"
Leslie Friedman (Fulbrighter to India in 1983) - bio
Artistic Director
The Lively Foundation
San Francisco, Calif.
Read Abstract: [PDF] [Word]

Biographies of Selma Jeanne Cohen Fund Lecturers

Alison M. Friedman (2008)
Alison Friedman, the 2008 Selma Jeanne Cohen Fund lecturer, was international director of the Beijing Modern Dance Company from 2005 until 2008 when she was hired by Oscar-winning composer Tan Dun to be general manager of his company Parnassus Productions. She came to Beijing in 2002 on a Fulbright fellowship to research the development of modern dance in China. In addition to lecturing on modern dance in China and abroad, she has conducted research for the Royal Netherlands Embassy and the Asian Cultural Council. Her writing has appeared in Dance Magazine (USA). She has worked as consultant for the U.S. Embassy in China, for Columbia University, and for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, among other organizations. She has produced international performance festivals in Beijing and was production coordinator for the John F. Kennedy Center 2005 Festival of China. As a performer and director, Ms. Friedman has collaborated with arts groups throughout China, including the Living Dance Studio and the National Theatre Company of China. She choreographed and directed a bilingual production of Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, which premiered in May 2005 at the China National Theatre East Pioneer Theatre. An accomplished tap dancer, she frequently teaches tap at the Beijing Dance Academy and in Shanghai. Ms. Friedman graduated magna cum laude from Brown University, where she was elected into membership in Phi Beta Kappa. She studied Chinese literature and literary translation. Her senior thesis Across Borders: The Poetry of Xue Di will be published by Green Integer Press in the fall of 2008.
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Ron Jenkins (2007) Ron Jenkins, the 2007 Selma Jeanne Cohen Fund lecturer, has conducted fieldwork to investigate performance traditions in Indonesia, South Africa, Japan, and

Italy

. In addition to his 2007 Fulbright grant to Indonesia, his international research has been funded by fellowships from the Watson Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the Whiting Foundation, the Japan Society, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is the author of several books, including Artful Laughter, a study of the Nobel Laureate and Italian playwright Dario Fo. Dr. Jenkins has also translated and directed many of Fo?s plays for production in theaters that include the American Repertory Theater, the Yale Repertory Theater, and the Provincetown Playhouse in New York. Recently, he collaborated with dancers and musicians from the Indonesian Consulate in New York on staging a version of Shakespeare?s Tempest set in Bali which was performed at the La Mama Theater in New York. He is the co-director of a translation project at the University of the Arts in Denpasar which will publish a series of Indonesian plays in translation. The first book in the series, The Invisible Mirror, will be launched in Indonesia. Currently a professor of theater at Wesleyan University, Dr. Jenkins holds an interdisciplinary doctorate from Harvard University and a master?s degree in buffonery from the Ringling Brothers college for clowns.

Barbara Browning (2006)
Barbara Browning, the 2006 Selma Jeanne Cohen Fund lecturer, is associate professor of performance studies at New York University. She previously chaired the Performance Studies Department. She received her bachelor?s, master?s and doctoral degrees in comparative literature from Yale University. In 1983 she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship for the study of popular literature in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Also trained as a dancer, Dr. Browning published her first book, Samba: Resistance in Motion, winner of the de la Torre Bueno Prize for an outstanding work of dance scholarship, in 1995. She went on to write Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture, which was published in 1998. Her articles have appeared in anthologies, as well as such publications as Dance Research Journal, TDR, Dance Chronicle, and Women & Performance. She serves on the boards of directors of both the Congress of Research on Dance and the Society of Dance History Scholars. Dr. Browning is also a member of the editorial board of Women & Performance and the advisory board of DRJ. Her practical training in Brazilian dance was greatly amplified during her Fulbright year in Bahia and led to her further study, instruction, and performance of Brazilian dance in Brazil, the United States, and Europe. She performed for several years with both the Loremil Machado Afro-Brazilian Dance Company and Silvana Magda?s Viva Bahia. While no longer performing professionally, she continues to merge practical engagement of body practices with her scholarly work, which broadly addresses performance and politics in the African diaspora.

Richard Semmens (2005)
Richard Semmens, the 2005 Selma Jeanne Cohen Fund lecturer, received his doctorate from Stanford University, where he studied musicology, recorder, and baroque dance. He received his bachelor?s and master?s degrees in music from the University of British Columbia. Since 1979 he has taught music history and early music performance at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. He has published widely on the theory and practice of baroque music and dance. Dr. Semmens serves on the editorial board of the Canadian University Music Review. His work focuses on the history, theory, and practice of baroque music and dance, with a particular emphasis on France and England. He has also published in the areas of late 17th and early 18th century acoustical theory, Mozart?s chamber music for winds, and the 15th century Burgundian ?chanson.? Most recently, his book The bals publics at the Paris Opera in the Eighteenth Century, was published by Pendragon Press in Fall 2004. Dr. Semmens plays baroque recorder and performs baroque dances. In both areas, he has presented a variety of recitals, lecture-demonstrations, clinics, and workshops.

Millicent Hodson (2004)
Millicent Hodson, choreographer and dance historian, did a doctoral degree in the arts of spectacle at the University of California, Berkeley (1985). She works with Kenneth Archer, scenic consultant, who did his doctoral degree in art history at Essex University (1988). Through their partnership, Ballets Old & New, they reconstruct modern masterpieces and create new works. Their productions have been performed by the Royal Ballet, London; Kirov Ballet, St. Petersburg; Paris Opera Ballet; Rome Opera Ballet; La Scala Ballet, Milan; Finnish National Ballet; Royal Swedish Ballet; Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo; Les Grands Ballets Canadiens; and other companies. Best known for their reconstruction of Vaslav Nijinsky's Rite of Spring, which premiered with the Joffrey Ballet in the United States. (1987) and was featured in a WNET/BBC documentary, the couple, who are called "the dance detectives," have also reconstructed two other ballets by Nijinsky, four by George Balanchine, and four by Jean Borlin. Their creations, which often derive from their training in the martial arts and fascination with ritual dance, include Medea and her Children (1991), Ariadne and the Minotaur (1992), and Clytemnestra (1995), based on Greek myth, and Polarities (2000), based on Taoist movement meditation. Recently they created Theogonies, Dances to the Sculptures of George Kyriacou, choreographed and performed by Ms. Hodson with weapons crafted by Kyriacou and directed by Mr. Archer. Ms. Hodson and Mr. Archer give lectures and master classes worldwide, frequently appear on public media, and write extensively on their work. An award-winning film, 4 Emperors & 1 Nightingale (2002), was made by Dutch TV about their reconstruction through drawings. Many have appeared in dance magazines as well as in her reconstruction books, Nijinsky's Crime Against Grace: Le Sacre du Printemps (1996) and Nijinsky's Bloomsbury Ballet, Jeux (2005). She has exhibited in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, and shows regularly at Gallery K in London.

Wayne B. Kraft (2003)
Wayne B. Kraft is Professor of German at Eastern Washington University in Cheney. He received his Ph.D. in medieval German literature in 1978 from the University of Illinois -Champaign-Urbana under James W. Marchand. Gordon Ekvall Tracie introduced him to Scandinavian dancing in 1979. He became hooked on Hungarian dancing in 1982 and, subsequently, at an improbable age, took most of the classes for a dance major at his home university, including four years of ballet with Leonard O. Fowler. He began to learn Hungarian under a Fulbright grant in 1985. In 1986-87, he held a Fulbright research grant for the study of Hungarian dance in the Gutenberg (now V?lasz?t) Ensemble in Budapest with L?szl? Di?szegi and ?gnes Gaug. Mr. Kraft and his wife, Ildik? Kalap?cs, founded the Erd?ly Ensemble in Spokane , Washington , in 1988. In 1989, he participated in an NEH Seminar on "The Oral Tradition in Literature" with John Miles Foley at University of Missouri-Columbia. Over the years, Mr. Kraft received much stimulus and encouragement at his home university from colleagues, Dick G. Winchell and Larry Kiser. Mr. Kraft has published on improvisation in Hungarian dancing as an analogue to oral verse composition and has conducted workshops on social dancing as an element of human identity. He and his wife have made video field recordings to document and to assess the status of cultural traditions in several Transylvanian villages of Romania on visits in 1993, 1995, and 2000.

Gretchen Ward Warren (2002)
Gretchen Ward Warren is professor in the School of Theater and Dance at the University of South Florida in Tampa. In 1997 she received a Fulbright senior scholar award to Australia. While "down under," she taught classical ballet in several tertiary institutions including the Queensland University of Technology, the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, and the Australian Ballet School, and conducted research on Aboriginal dance. Ms. Warren, a former soloist with Pennsylvania Ballet and ballet mistress of ABT II, has written two best-selling books, Classical Ballet Technique and The Art of Teaching Ballet, and has written for Dance magazine, Dance Teacher Now, Pointe magazine and the St. Petersburg Times. Ms. Warren is also a member of United Scenic Artists and has designed costumes for numerous dance companies, including American Ballet Theatre and The Joffrey Ballet. She serves as a site visitor/assessor for the Dance Heritage Division of the Canada Arts Council. In the early 1990s, Ms. Warren was arts commentator for the NPR-affiliate radio station WUSF-FM in Tampa.

Robin Grove (2001)
Originally trained as a musician, Robin Grove became at 15 the youngest recipient of the Australian Broadcasting Commission's orchestral-composition prize. He studied philosophy and literature at the University of Melbourne, where he has taught in the Department of English since 1964. He chairs the university's Theatre Board and in 1996 received the inaugural Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching. Trained as a dancer in Australia and England, he choreographed six ballets for Ballet Victoria between 1963 and 1969. Prof. Grove was dance reviewer for the national paper, The Australian, from 1985 to 1993, then for the prestigious Melbourne paper, The Age, for another five years, while also performing and promoting music in traditionally under-valued suburbs of the city. For 40 years he has been closely connected with The Critical Review, Australia's longest-running literary-critical journal and has served as its co-editor since 1997. Prof. Grove is a founding member of the Australia New Zealand Dance Research Society and of the editorial board of Brolga: An Australian Journal about Dance. He has published books on the early poetry of T.S. Eliot and on Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. In 1998, with colleagues from the Victorian College of the Arts and the University of Western Sydney, Prof. Grove attracted from the Australian Research Council the largest grant ever awarded for performing arts research in Australia for the project, "Unspoken Knowledges," the subject of his 2001 Selma Jeanne Cohen Fund lecture.

Leslie Friedman (2000)
Dancer and choreographer Leslie Friedman is artistic director of The Lively Foundation in San Francisco. Dr. Friedman lectured and performed in India as a Fulbright scholar from 1983 to 1984. She has also performed, taught, and choreographed works throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Dr. Friedman was the first U.S. dancer-choreographer to perform for a Russian audience in Moscow and Leningrad after a 14-year break in cultural relations. She was also the first U.S. dancer to perform at Cairo's El Ghoumeria Opera House, the first to teach at China's three ballet schools, and the first to perform and choreograph for Romania's national dance company in Bucharest. Dr. Friedman has taught history at Case Western Reserve University and Vassar College and dance at Foothill College and California State University, Fresno. Her published essays include "Martha Graham as Teacher" and "Preserve: The Movement to Establish Archives of the Performing Arts" Dr. Friedman received her Ph.D. in modern British history from Stanford University and was a Leverhulme fellow in British history at the University of London.