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A Catalyst and Her Cat: Selma Jeanne Cohen and the Cultivation of American Dance ScholarshipBy Elizabeth ZimmerOf making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. ---Ecclesiastes 12:12Selma Jeanne Cohen was born in Chicago on September 18, 1920; this is her centennial year. For half a century, she pioneered serious dance scholarship in America, leaving a trail of monuments. Her books, her stewardship of the International Encyclopedia of Dance, and the 66 issues of her magazine, Dance Perspectives, are legendary. As the recipient of a Curator’s Fellowship at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, I spent half of 2019 reading her papers in the Dance Division. I got used to the weirdness of whipsawing back and forth across five decades, following her struggles between art and commerce, tracking the pleading, placating, and backstabbing among collaborators on her projects. She was simultaneously scholar, critic, teacher, entrepreneur, mother hen, spade-worker for college dance history programs, adjudicator, thesis advisor, fixer, and goad. She lived in Greenwich Village from the late ‘50s until her death in 2005. Selma Jeanne saved everything. She knew very early that she wanted to be a historian, a perception that shaped her filing habits. Luckily, she had the resources, including real estate and a succession of secretaries, to keep track of all the paper. She made multiple copies of many documents, and filed them in different places. Trained as a researcher at the University of Chicago, she won a fellowship, in 1961, to work in the NYPL Dance Collection, under curator Genevieve Oswald. She knew what she was doing, and who she was doing it for; periodically she dropped documents off at the Library. Her papers include handwritten letters she received from the 1940s onward, and carbon copies of her own letters, at first typed on onionskin paper, and later photocopied on recycled documents. There was no internet back then, and answering machines didn’t show up until the 1970s; her files contain postcards and air letters and telegrams and fliers and programs and menus and ticket stubs and memos from people who house-sat her apartment and thank-you notes for a multitude of gifts. She complained about the phone service and the mail; New York City endured postal disruptions and subway strikes and fires in telephone switching stations. Her community was international and multigenerational; people from all over, from high school students to artists and scholars, asked for advice, sent manuscripts, sought jobs. She was patient with them. She invited many of them over for cocktails and holiday dinners. I offer here a rough chronology of Selma Jeanne’s life, tricky to build since the contents of the archives are mostly in alphabetical order. Sometimes the alphabetizing is based on the letterheads on people’s stationery, rather than on their names. I decided, going in, to read everything. I also talked to people who knew her well. I knew her slightly; she was 25 years my senior, but actions she took in the ‘60s shaped my career in the ‘70s and after. We had similar instincts and similar communities; we were both passionate amateur dancers, students of literature, critical writers, and teachers of writing, but after the ‘60s she decided to concentrate her energies in dance history and scholarship, while I stayed with arts journalism. School Days Selma Jeanne was the only child of Frank A. Cohen and Minna Skud Cohen, who moved to Chicago from Muncie, Indiana early in the 20th century. Frank and his four siblings, shown in this photo in 1915—Frank on the far left--were the children of Moses and Sarah Cohen, immigrants from Poland and apparently the first Eastern European Jews in Muncie. They got on well and prospered. Frank Cohen followed his father into the scrap metal business; he also prospered. Selma Jeanne attended the private University of Chicago Lab School, graduating in 1937, when she was only 16. In this she followed her father’s youngest brother, Benjamin Victor Cohen, next to Frank in the photo. Her uncle Ben went to law school and became a noted figure in the Roosevelt Administration, an architect of the New Deal. He was her advisor and financial bulwark until his death in 1983. Both of them had broad cheeks and prominent chins; both were seriously nearsighted and very, very smart. (Two photos)(SJC and BVC)Selma Jeanne told critic Mindy Aloff, in an interview at a Philadelphia conference of the Dance Critics Association published, in an edited form, in Dance Chronicle in 2000, “When I got out of the University’s high school, each of the students was called into the Dean’s office and asked, ‘What do you want to be?’ I said, ‘I want to be a dance historian.’ ‘You want to be a what?’ was the reply. ‘There is no such thing.’” But Selma Jeanne was already on her path. She’d been taking ballet with Chicago teacher Edna McRae, who noticed that the petite young woman had no talent and channeled her toward the studio’s collection of dance books. Selma Jeanne borrowed them and read them all, and began to buy her own copies. After high school she went to Stephens College, in Columbia, Missouri, then a two-year college that attracted the daughters of wealthy Chicago families. She earned an Associate’s degree in 1939. On her transcript, her religious preference reads “Christian Science,” apparently a strategy that let Jews in Chicago fit more easily into the community surrounding them. She did well at Stephens, ranking in the 93rd percentile and earning honors in English, European History, Music Appreciation and American Literature. Then she returned to her parents’ apartment and the University of Chicago, where, she told Aloff, “I really wanted to be involved in dance, but … there weren’t any classes about dance in the humanities… a few courses in dance technique, but not about dance history or ideas about dance.” As a grad student and after, she served as an instructor in Humanities at the University, and edited the Carillon, a literary magazine. She studied English literature, writing a dissertation on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. She queried published authors on the process of writing historical fiction. In 1946, she moved to Los Angeles and taught English at U.C.L.A. until 1948. She also worked in the Hollywood studio of choreographer Eugene Loring, serving as a librarian and teacher and whetting her interest in dance notation. She began contributing to Dance Magazine around 1950, writing such articles as “Ballet, the Universal Language, and How It Grew.” Publisher Henry Holt turned down her proposal for a book on this subject. She contributed to Louis Horst’s Dance Observer beginning in 1953; later she wrote there, “We cannot develop researchers by wishing them into being. But, by introducing young people already interested in dance to their full and existing heritage, we can inspire the incentive for research. This, in itself, can do much to raise the status of dance as an art.”New YorkHer move to New York, in 1953, was underwritten by a $500 gift from her uncle Ben, identified by Washington Post columnist Joe Alsop as “the New Deal’s finest legal draftsman.” Selma Jeanne immersed herself in a field that most adults, especially male adults, had trouble taking seriously, but she had access to wise counsel from Uncle Ben, a revered figure in progressive Washington. She taught literature at Hunter College, and went to work at New York’s High School of Performing Arts, where her colleagues included Robert Joffrey and Lucas Hoving; among her students were Judith Chazin Bennahum, Bruce Marks, and Cora Cahan. In 1953 she took over the dance history class from Lillian Moore, a ballet dancer with a high school education who was one of the first American dance historians. They pioneered the strategy of teaching historical dance forms to students, who then performed them at annual concerts. She taught at Performing Arts until 1956. Ann Hutchinson, then a prime mover at the Dance Notation Bureau, hired Selma Jeanne to edit a book, her first publishing job in New York. She wrote for Dance Magazine about extraordinarily diverse subjects, including a two-parter in 1956 about the 17th-century British member of parliament and diarist Samuel Pepys and his adventures in dancing. (Pepys was celebrated in 2017 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music by choreographer Annie-B Parsons in a piece called 17c.) Selma Jeanne assisted critic John Martin at the New York Times from 1955 until 1958. Martin served the Times for 35 years, from 1927 until 1962, advancing the reputations of major American modern dancers. At the Times Selma Jeanne wrote dance reviews, covered society events, and prepared advance obituaries. She was assigned to go to churches and summarize the sermons, and became one of the first female critics on the paper. She also wrote about dance for many encyclopedias, and proposed to a publisher a book of dance biographies. (Photo: DANCE PERSPECTIVES Covers)In 1959 she helped found Dance Perspectives, which she later described as “critical and historical monographs…, the only periodical concerned with scholarly studies in the field of dance.” Inspired by predecessors like Lincoln Kirstein’s DANCE INDEX, her journal lasted until 1976, producing issues on American Ballet Theatre’s first twenty years; choreographers Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, and Lester Horton; and many other subjects. In the very first issue of Dance Perspectives, with Al Pischl as her co-founder and co-editor, she published Lincoln Kirstein’s essay called “What Ballet is About,” dedicated to W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. The magazine, its title page declared, was a place where “writers of specialized knowledge and perceptive opinions can publish essays of considerable length.” For $5 subscribers got four issues, 60 to 80 pages each. The rate increased slowly over the years. If you are not familiar with Dance Perspectives, request it in the third floor reading room of the Library of Performing Arts; some issues can actually be checked out on the second floor.(Photo: FAMED FOR DANCE)In 1960 the New York Public Library published a slim volume, reprinted from the Library’s Bulletin, titled Famed for Dance: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Theatrical Dancing in England, 1660-1740, composed of essays written by Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, Selma Jeanne, and Roger Lonsdale. In this book, Selma Jeanne shared her first significant dance research, turning up, according to former New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay, new information “on the British ballerina Hester Santlow, muse to John Weaver and much more. Truly original research in what was then terra incognita.” Next she spent a year working for the performing arts library, then located at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, assembling a bibliography of Italian ballet librettos. At that time the dance collection was headed by Genevieve Oswald, whose specialty was music; Selma Jeanne and Lillian Moore became invaluable advisors on dance matters. The three women became known as “the trinity,” or the three graces, or, as Selma Jeanne herself reported, the three musketeers. In 1961 she wrote to a friend, “I’ve been working on a big bibliography for Dance Magazine. We’re trying to get dancers interested in reading. Let’s hope it works.” Her mother, who graduated from the University of Chicago in 1919, the year before she married Frank Cohen, died in March of 1962, generating a cascade of sympathy notes. The archives reveal nothing about her father, but I found many handwritten letters from Uncle Ben, 25 years her senior and apparently her soulmate. Her cousin Bernard Freund, a lawyer from Muncie, Indiana, wrote to her, “Let Ben and me be ‘family’ for you in the years to come.” Her Aunt Bess wrote from Los Angeles, “I know you are very busy and interested in your work. You are used to living a life of your own and that is a good thing for you now. You will not be lonely.” Teaching in Connecticut and beyondIn 1963 Selma Jeanne began teaching at the Connecticut College summer school of dance in New London, Connecticut, also the site of the United States Coast Guard Academy. This association lasted nearly a decade. When she arrived in New London in 1964, she wrote to Mary Clarke, editor of London’s Dancing Times, that “the students are all very nice and interested and ignorant, so I feel needed.” That summer her colleague Doris Hering, a longtime fixture at Dance Magazine, wrote to Selma Jeanne, warning her to “Keep away from the submariners!” Her reply: “No time for submariners. I’m taking class with Yuriko. I don’t know if this means I’m terribly brave or terribly foolish.” The archive chronicles the progress of her various book projects, from concept to contract to finished volumes. Some proposals came to nothing. Mainstream publishers didn’t think there was an audience for dance books. Some of her ideas were picked up, but bounced around as editors lost their jobs and resurfaced elsewhere. She found a home at Wesleyan University Press, where her first major publication, The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief, became a surprise best-seller after it appeared in 1966.(photo: cover of MODERN DANCE)Originally a series for Dance Magazine, Seven Statements took years to come together. Choreographers she hoped to include, like Merce Cunningham and Helen Tamiris, dropped out, and new ones were added. The final roster featured José Limón, Anna Sokolow, Erick Hawkins, Donald McKayle, Alwin Nikolais, Pauline Koner, and Paul Taylor. They each earned $100 for contributing essays, and another $100 years later after the book sold 5000 copies. Selma Jeanne repurposed articles and issues of Dance Perspectives into books, served on panels and juries, and accepted temporary teaching gigs. A long piece she wrote in late 1960, “Avant-Garde Choreography,” for the journal Criticism at Detroit’s Wayne State University, garnered responses, both grateful and critical, from artists accustomed to being ignored. Deeply infatuated with the Royal Danish Ballet, Selma Jeanne worked for years to get August Bournonville’s My Theatre Life published in America, translated by a young student, Patricia McAndrew. To McAndrew she served as “fairy godmother,” cheerleader, agent, guidance counselor, catalyst, and host for a publication party when, after nearly a decade, the fat red volume appeared in 1979, published by Wesleyan.The fate of the arts in the United States began to change dramatically in the mid ‘60s, with the founding of the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. Selma Jeanne served on the endowment’s first dance panel, which let her learn and teach at a national level, befriend artists she admired, and understand the workings of government funding.In the 1960s she worked with the National Regional Ballet Association, traveling the country to adjudicate dance festivals involving professional and semi-professional performers and young students, dispensing sage advice on technique, repertory, and other aspects of developing companies. Meanwhile she continued editing stellar issues of Dance Perspectives. In 1965 she bought out her “inactive colleagues” at Dance Perspectives. That summer she’d planned a trip to Europe on an ocean liner, but John Martin, who’d been hired to teach a course in dance criticism at Connecticut, was suddenly invited to go on tour with the New York City Ballet, and jumped at the chance. Selma Jeanne replaced him, launching a program that lasted close to 50 years, as the American Dance Festival, in association with the Arts Endowment, continued to underwrite a gathering of critics to train with leaders in the field. Her files for those summers include directories of all the students and faculty at ADF, and a magazine of criticism written by her class. In addition to teaching writing, she was asked to review festival concerts for the New London Day, a situation she decided was unethical, as she was an employee of the festival. Lillian Moore became the director of the Joffrey Ballet’s apprentice program in 1966, and wrote to Selma Jeanne, “I do hope you will give the course on the writing of criticism, even though there are no jobs for your brilliant graduates.” But Selma Jeanne had a hunch that the incipient dance boom, fueled by funding from the arts endowment, would change that situation. In 1966 she began teaching at the University of California at Riverside, where a one-month lectureship launched a relationship that continued until 1989 and culminated in the establishment of a Ph.D. program in dance history, the first in the country. In November of 1967 Lillian Moore died of cancer, devastating Selma Jeanne, who called her “the first friend I had in New York. I miss her terribly, and we needed her so.” In the early ‘70s Selma Jeanne turned an issue of Dance Perspectives, featuring an autobiography of Doris Humphrey, into a book, completing the life story the choreographer left hanging when she died of cancer in 1958. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the project, allowing Selma Jeanne to give up teaching and freelance writing for a stretch, and take up an invitation to the MacDowell Colony to finish the manuscript. When Simon & Schuster turned it down, Doris Humphrey: An Artist First became another best seller for Wesleyan. (photo)This photo captures Gigi Oswald, Selma Jeanne in her publication party dress, and Charles Woodford, Humphrey’s son. Royalties from the project were shared, two-thirds to Selma Jeanne and one-third to Woodford, the custodian of Humphrey’s original material. One consequence of Selma Jeanne’s classes at the annual Critic’s Conference was that, when her books came out, she had a network of educated writers on newspapers across the country, ready to review them. Her files are stuffed with those reviews. Federal funds for WorkshopsThe University of Chicago gave her a professional achievement award in 1974. That year she began a project she’d planned for years, a dance history seminar sponsored by the University of Chicago Extension. In her funding proposal she wrote, “Because of the generally held but completely mistaken assumption that dance has no accessible history, no college or university in the United States has yet devised a curriculum for dance scholarship.” The program was hosted on the Hyde Park campus by Elvi Moore, a former ADF student of Selma Jeanne’s who was then the sole member of the University’s dance faculty, based, as were so many others, in the Physical Education Department. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the seminar ran for three summers, focusing in the first year on the Romantic ballet, in the second on Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and in the final year, 1976, on theatrical dancing in America before 1900, coinciding with the country’s bicentennial celebrations. The third-year group included Nancy Reynolds, a dance book editor who later played a major role in the production of the Encyclopedia, and who wrote the marvelous dance history No Fixed Points. Another student was Bill Bissell, an undergraduate at Fresno State who went on to become a program officer at Philadelphia’s Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Selma Jeanne not only taught these workshops, in conjunction with visiting faculty, but raised money—and donated her own—to provide scholarships. In the second year, she helped organize an exhibit about the other arts involved in Diaghilev’s productions, at a University gallery. The final report for the Humanities Endowment declared that the project placed “the history of dance against the backdrop of the culture in which it exists.” Bissell told me the seminar was “about ballet and modern dance being connected to the world.” In 1974, Linda Winer, a member of one of Selma Jeanne’s early critics’ workshops, wrote an article for the Chicago Tribune that began, “It’s one of life’s ridiculous truths that you cannot major in dance history in this country.” Copies of her story, which chronicled her visit to the seminar, appear in many folders in many boxes of Selma Jeanne’s archive. Winer, long the only female first-string theater critic in New York, resigned from Newsday in 2017, commenting that “criticism doesn’t get clicks.” The remarkable thing about Selma Jeanne’s career as a dance scholar is that for only one year, 1976 to 1977, did she hold a full-time academic job, as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Five College Dance Department in Massachusetts. One of her Smith students, Lesley Farlow, was the first woman in her family to go to college. She said of Selma Jeanne, “She did a mini-conference on virtuosity in the fall of ’77; I was her assistant, making phone calls. She was starting to think about the encyclopedia. I was interested in the questions she asked … about dance history, about virtuosity.” Farlow recently retired after a long career at Trinity College in Hartford. “I loved her book Dance as a Theatre Art,” she told me, “loved reading the words of the artists themselves, because they were articulate. I’ve used that book so students get a sense of what the artists were thinking about. Selma Jeanne was kind of eccentric: the words were squeezed out of her mouth, slow and deliberate; it encouraged me to be a bit more deliberate in what I was saying and thinking. She was always very patient. She considered us peers. She wanted me to feel that I had the tools and resources to participate in the field….[But] there was always a distance. She was the elder stateswoman.”Selma Jeanne accepted short-term offers to teach all over the continent, notably at York University in Toronto, which developed North America’s first M.A. program in dance history. York invited her to apply to be chair of its department, an offer she turned down. Instead of a full-time job, she juggled multiple part-time and temporary assignments and projects of her own devising. In a celebration on the occasion of Selma Jeanne’s 75th birthday in 1995, Judith Bennahum, who’d trained with her at the High School of the Performing Arts, quoted her as saying, “You must realize that this is guerilla warfare. You have to infiltrate other departments and colleges. Get them to believe you are as good as they are; you must know more and be better.” This language echoes the clarion calls of second-wave feminists and African Americans in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Dance had to do battle with the widespread belief that women in academe were not serious, that they were just out to catch husbands.Selma Jeanne Cohen was not out to catch a husband. She never married, and her files turn up no evidence of affairs of the heart. Early on, she apparently carried a torch for Eugene Loring, but he, like many men in the dance world, was gay. Selma Jeanne was interested in cooking, clothes, décor, even flower arranging, and had regular appointments to style her red hair, but mostly she worked. I’ve been tempted to characterize her as a kind of “dance nun,” but in fact she was the Mother Superior. She counseled people who wanted to study dance history but found no place to do it; she advised programs so students could have somewhere to go. She joined academic organizations, like the American Society of Aesthetics and the American Society for Theater Research, and wound up on their boards. She contributed annual bibliographies to several of them. She gave talks at their annual meetings; at one, in Detroit, she observed that “We’ve lost the habit of thinking about dance.” At Connecticut she taught another Selma, a young woman from Illinois who came to the American Dance Festival in 1963 and became Selma Jeanne’s “most cherished protogée”[sic]. Selma Landen Odom took an MA in theatre history at Tufts, because graduate work in dance history was still a distant dream, and wound up at York where she taught for decades before retiring in 2009. She was sure she got the job because Selma Jeanne recommended her. Their correspondence lasted decades, one Selma writing to another, heartwarming in the enthusiasm each had for the other. The American Dance Festival was where Selma Jeanne started building her community, her network of critics and scholars; she caught them young. To enter her writing class, her notes declare, “Serious interest and a respectable command of language are the only prerequisites.” Critic Marcia Siegel, who later taught these workshops on both coasts, witnessed a panel of dance writers one summer at ADF, and wrote to Festival director Charles Reinhart, in 1969, “We all know how badly dance needs intelligent coverage outside of New York. It seems to me eminently practical to make contact with people already employed as working reporters and critics and give them a basic familiarity with the field …If we can send half a dozen people per year back to their newspapers with the enthusiasm and sense of community that are so characteristic of dance, I think we’ll have won a major point.” I benefited directly from this strategy; in 1977 the Canada Council sent me from Vancouver to New London to study with Siegel, Deborah Jowitt, and a succession of guest critics. Like Lincoln Kirstein, Selma Jeanne was a person of independent means, which enabled her to travel, live well, and pick and choose her professional assignments, avoiding the drudgery of full-time academic work. But she took seriously grading papers and writing recommendations. Remember how you waived your right to see the letters your teachers and mentors sent to universities? Well, some of those letters are in her files. She pulled no punches. Writing even about her young favorites, she began with compliments, briskly listed her reservations, and proceeded to highly recommend. Her real talents were as writer, editor, and lobbyist for the art form that won her heart. She wrote for the Saturday Review and Kenyon Review. Dance Perspectives astounded its international readership, who thought it beautiful and intelligent. Her goal, she said, was to attract an audience to reading about dance. “We try,” she told one writer, “to take a very small subject and explore it in depth.” She started the magazine she wanted to work for, and supported it for years with her own funds.Each issue consisted of one 15- to 20,000-word piece, profusely illustrated and designed, mostly, by Karl Leabo, who also worked for Playbill. He donated his services to Dance Perspectives for years before he resigned, telling her, in 1969, that “we have jointly created the best dance magazine in the world. It’s not viable in the ordinary commercial sense.” At that point Selma Jeanne was facing more than $9000 in unpaid bills, much of that money Leabo had laid out for supplies, services and equipment. The writers received about $150 for their labors in 1971. Her 3000 readers were largely members of the dance audience. She wrote to a colleague, “Getting [the general public] interested in historical material is really a struggle. I have no intention of giving it up.” John Martin, after he retired from the Times, moved to California, but kept in touch, serving as a member of the Dance Perspectives editorial board. He wrote to Selma Jeanne in 1968, “To have upped the subscription list by 50 percent in three years is damn good for a highbrow sheet about a chichi subject such as high-kicking and all that jazz.”Word of her unique publication spread far and wide. Scholars, dancers, and members of the public sent in ideas or entire manuscripts. A whole folder in the archives consists of polite rejection letters; Selma Jeanne had clear standards and strategies. Queries that were totally inappropriate, and job applications from people who wanted to work with her, were treated with respect. She said she wanted articles that were “original and provocative as well as informative.” In 1974 she turned down a proposal about Twyla Tharp because, she said, “I don’t feel she has reached the stage where we can obtain a ‘perspective’ on her work. And this perspective is the guideline that we use to determine which contemporary figures merit an issue.” She rejected articles about black choreographers for similar reasons. By the mid ‘70s the magazine was paying writers $250 an issue. Her favorite among them, she said, was the one focusing on Erik Bruhn: “I’d ask one question and he’d talk for an hour.” It sold thousands of extra copies all over the world. In an oral history in the library, Selma Jeanne discussed Doris Humphrey with William Bales, who danced in Humphrey’s company. Referring to the quarterly appearance of Dance Perspectives, she observed that she had “four children a year . . . and I feel that way about every one of them.” Her speaking voice was low, languid, almost honeyed: a mid-westerner, not a harried New Yorker, though she learned our ways in her 55 years in the city, jumping from crisis to crisis. (Photo: DANCE AS A THEATRE ART)In the late 1960s she began compiling her textbook for dance history studies, Dance as a Theatre Art, which included primary sources from as far back as 1581 and as recently as Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, Alwin Nikolais, and Meredith Monk. When the book finally appeared in 1974, after inordinate delays, it revolutionized the teaching of dance history. Reviews were uniformly enthusiastic. She wanted to keep the volume cheap enough for students to afford, so she had to omit sections she cherished, like an essay by antic choreographer Jamie Cunningham, a startling favorite. She called him “very bright, very avant-garde, and very much in touch with the kids today.”Dance is an art of motion; film, and later video, were central to her teaching. One of her early writing workshops included a young professor of political science at the University of Rochester, John Mueller, who offered a dance history course using a lot of film. She made an exception in letting him in, since he was not a working journalist, but he went on to issue guides to dance on film and a book about Fred Astaire. By then Selma Jeanne had regular visits from an office assistant and a maid. In 1973 she turned the dance critics’ training course, by then supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, over to Deborah Jowitt of the Village Voice. Doing research in the Selma Jeanne Cohen papers is like eating fruitcake; amid stretches of ordinariness, wonderful nuggets pop up. Like the jumpy typeface of letters written by Paul Taylor on his manual typewriter. Like thank-you notes from Merce Cunningham, to whom Selma Jeanne apparently made regular donations. Like comments from young colleagues who sent her photos of their new babies. Like a letter from Tennessee Williams--and a letter from me, alphabetized under A for ArtsConnection, where I worked in the early 1980s. She became a sort of Miss Manners or Ann Landers of the dance world, handing out advice on an enormous range of subjects. She was a strategist, hooking people up with jobs, mentors, dissertation subjects, and often her spare room in Manhattan as a place of refuge to lay their weary heads. Susan Au, an early student who later collaborated with her on a book, called her the “Johnny Appleseed” of dance history. The archives contain “teaching materials” for her summer course: reviews by critics Edwin Denby, Doris Hering, Arlene Croce, and even James Waring. She encouraged young correspondents to practice all kinds of dance writing: criticism, of course, but also reporting, interviewing, features, and historical essays. Given the utter lack of educational options for dance historians, she urged them to come to New York City and major in journalism. In 1974, she was instrumental in starting the Dance Critics Association. Bill Littler, a Canadian music journalist who took her Connecticut class, became the founding chair of the organization. A highlight of the archive is her extensive correspondence with José Rollin de la Torre Bueno of Wesleyan University Press, the first publisher to develop a list of dance studies titles. She called him Bill. Selma Jeanne’s tasks included not only conceiving and assembling or writing her books, but also marketing them. In 1982 she sent a publisher a list of 181 colleges offering courses in dance history, theory, and appreciation. The total number of colleges with dance majors was 241, and with minors and non-degree courses, 320. That year she and several colleagues established, at the University of California, an intercampus MA in dance history. And she wrote a letter to the producer of NPR’s Sunday Show that demonstrates her rapier instincts: “I’m quite interested in serving on your advisory committee. After hearing all these conversations with stars, it would be good to listen to some real ideas about the arts.” She tried unsuccessfully to get Wesleyan to take over as publisher of Dance Perspectives, noting that “the trouble is my utter bewilderment with the business aspects of the magazine. I don’t understand anything connected with numbers or money, or the law, and I don’t want to have to try. But I must and I will.” Bill Bueno told her she was the power behind the throne at Wesleyan’s dance book list. Her correspondence with him spans close to 20 years, from the time of The Modern Dance to his death from lung cancer in 1980. Giving backIn 1973 Selma Jeanne engineered, and named after her friend, the de la Torre Bueno Prize for the best unpublished dance manuscript of the year, supporting it with funds from the Dance Perspectives Foundation . . . which is to say, initially with her own money. The first winner was her friend and colleague, Sister Mary Grace Swift of Loyola University in New Orleans, who co-taught with her the Chicago seminar on the Romantic ballet. Recipients of the Prize over the years have included Deborah Jowitt, Thomas DeFrantz, John Mueller, and practically every other smart dance-book author in the western world. Selma Jeanne held cocktail receptions in her living room honoring the winners, welcoming as many as 50 guests. The award is now administered by the Dance Studies Association, formed after the Society of Dance History Scholars and CORD merged in 2017. The Society of Dance History Scholars realized, in the 1990s, Selma Jeanne’s long-held dream of having dance represented in the American Council of Learned Societies. De Frantz wrote, about the impact of his 2005 award: “[It] acted as a validation for me; it affirmed that the choices I made to pursue African American performance as the heart and hearth of my academic work could be visible and celebrated…[It] told me, and the institutions I worked for… that it mattered to write about dance in a caring and careful manner.”At midlife, Selma Jeanne resolved to learn Russian, attended the language school at Middlebury College, and developed epistolary relationships with dance writers in the Soviet Union. (Photo of Russian birthday card)She sent them books (and issues of Dance Perspectives) that they could not get any other way, and they reciprocated, even sending her birthday cards. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, as the USSR was collapsing, she proposed that Dance Magazine publish articles from The Sovietskii Ballet, and vice versa. During her year in Massachusetts, she arranged to let Dance Perspectives go, a tragedy for dance scholarship, but quickly replaced by Dance Chronicle, a journal initially edited by her friends Jack Anderson and George Dorris. Taking on the WorldNext she started seriously studying Russian and developing her life’s major undertaking, the International Encyclopedia of Dance. She won planning grants from the Endowments and assembled a team of editors including Dorris, Nancy Goldner, Beate Gordon, Nancy Reynolds, David Vaughan, and Suzanne Youngerman. In 1980 she got a $5000 fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation to write a book on dance aesthetics, a project that became Next Week, Swan Lake. Initially rejected by Houghton Mifflin, it was published by Wesleyan in 1982. Her grant application says she’d studied dance for 20 years, from 1933 to 1953, with McRae, Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, and José Limón. When she gave up classes she began swimming, but bemoaned the loss of her technical studies, especially when arthritis kicked in. “I wish I had kept them up,” she wrote to a dancing friend. “All I can do is swim, and the health clubs don’t play Chopin and Schubert at the pool, and I wish I were back at the barre.”In 1981 she received a Dance Magazine award, the first scholar to be so honored. The next year, dancer Billie Mahoney recorded a video interview in which Selma Jeanne identified herself as a “terpsichologist,” a word she equates with musicologist. Later in this video she discusses her dissatisfaction with being a dance critic. She hated the pressure of overnight deadlines and “wanted to take weeks and months until I got it right.” That year she taught a once-a week class at the New School. Busy steering the International Encyclopedia of Dance, she began to keep cats, at first one named Benny, and then the vaunted Giselle. In 1993 she provided, for The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, a short piece on the “Aesthetics of the Cat.” At her 75th birthday celebration in 1995, she bemoaned the absence of her feline companion, Giselle, who, she reported, did receive an invitation and sniffed, “Will there be shrimp?”She traveled to the USSR, and in 1989 visited Tashkent, on a mission to promote international cultural exchange. Then she led a dance tour to Leningrad, Moscow, and Tashkent, for People to People International. Dance Magazine published a piece on her trip to Uzbekistan. She wrote to a colleague, “I suspect the problems of intercultural meanings are not so different from those of inter-century meanings, which have interested me for some time (see Next Week, Swan Lake).”Former dancer Celia Ipiotis, producer of the cable series Eye on Dance, moved to New York from Ohio and founded the program in 1981. Selma Jeanne, she observed, “was one of Eye on Dance’s godmothers. In 1985 she appeared on a program with Lutz Forster, in the Limón company at the time, and Letitia Ide. The title was ‘Terpsichorean Tales: Telling Stories Through Dance.’ We talked about Othello. She was my ballet-whisperer, my early-roots-of-modern-dance whisperer. I’d take notes, and then I’d go to the library and look people up. She was a fervent learner, a very dear person. She worked Eye on Dance into the fabric of the dance scholars’ community, because she saw it as a platform for them to be heard. It happened to be on TV, but it was serious. She had me introduce the winner of the de la Torre Bueno prize, so people would see me as a dance historian….” Critic Robert Johnson, a longtime staffer at Dance Magazine, occasionally had drinks with her, and once observed the prim, proper, “old-fashioned elegant lady,” as he put it, in the front row at an Elizabeth Streb performance, “wearing a helmet and pearls, impeccably dressed as always. There was broken glass everywhere. She brushed the glass off her skirt. I remember this gesture more than anything else.” During the years she was immersed in engineering the International Encyclopedia of Dance, she also served as the dance specialist on the World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theater, cracking her whip at its editors. This project was planned to release a volume a year over the course of seven years, as opposed to the dance encyclopedia, which took much longer but was finally released all at once. The production of the International Encyclopedia of Dance became a decades-long saga. Initially taken on by Scribner’s, it migrated to the University of California Press, which listed it for the fall of 1991. Consequences of this move were horrific. Nancy Reynolds declared, “I believe we are all paying the price for the Press’s having engaged both copy-editors and a photo editor with no subject background.” Reynolds told me, “It took 24 years of my life, but it did get published. Selma Jeanne was promoted to editor emerita partway; things were going south in her mind. She had an amazing mind, but she began to lose things.”(Photo of Selma Jeanne with cat)Reading the massive files engendered by the encyclopedia project raises one’s blood pressure, even decades later. Furious with inadequate performance by a U.C. Press staffer, Selma Jeanne wrote, “If Alexandra is paid for doing a poor job, shouldn’t the editors be paid for correcting her mistakes?” That memo is signed, “Sincerely, Giselle’s Mommy.”As time went by, people, both subjects and authors of Encyclopedia articles, kept dying. Many revisions became necessary. The University of California Press withdrew from the project in the fall of 1993. In April of 1994, Selma Jeanne signed an agreement with Oxford University Press, then under the direction of Claude Conyers. This agreement commissioned her to supervise editorial review and assist in the preparation of materials, for $5000 plus expenses. Her editorial board and Oxford had by then figured out that she couldn’t do it alone, and assembled a crew, including Elizabeth Aldrich and Dance Perspectives board president Curtis Carter (also a graduate of one of Selma Jeanne’s critics’ workshops), to bring the project home. Its six oversize volumes finally appeared in March of 1998, comprising 4000 pages, costing $1400 and greeted by a mixed review in the New York Times. The name “Cohen” is printed in gold on the spine of each volume, above the title. Today, you can buy the Encyclopedia online, new, in paperback for about $188, and used, in hardcover, for less than that; or in an electronic format.In 1994 the Society of Dance History Scholars established the Selma Jeanne Cohen Young Scholars Program in her honor, to support presentations at its annual conference. Six years later the Selma Jeanne Cohen Fund for International Scholarship on Dance was founded, that prize underwritten by its namesake. The Fund pays expenses for writers of dance history papers to travel to the annual gathering of Fulbright scholars and lecture, keeping excellent dance scholarship in front of a broad swath of academic stars. Recent recipients of this prize have included Millicent Hodson, Barbara Browning, Alice Blumenfeld, Román Baca, and Jonathan Hollander, who was entranced by Selma Jeanne when she invited him for tea: “How powerful were her passion and mission,” he told me, “to take dance and put it where it belonged, in the understanding of the world and how people lived. Her strategic mind understood that her legacy could be endowing people to talk about dance.” Awards are also given in Selma Jeanne’s name at the American Society for Theater Research, supporting a presentation that explores the intersections of theater and dance, and at the American Society for Aesthetics, which offers a biennial prize in dance aesthetics, dance theory, or the history of dance. After Selma Jeanne’s death in 2005, author Susan Manning, mentored by her while she was in college and a former president of the Society of Dance History Scholars, spoke at a memorial at Columbia. Manning said, of Selma Jeanne’s presence at her dissertation defense in 1987: “After the customary rising of all committee members, several approached to embrace me. After they all had filed out, Selma Jeanne … in a tone of amused disbelief exclaimed, “no one ever kissed at a defense in my day!” Then we walked to … lunch, and she voiced her true assessment of my thesis: “There are ten books buried within that dissertation; now you have to figure out which one you want to write.” Later Manning said of Selma Jeanne, “… her influence… far exceeded her official roles… her vision of dance studies as a passionately rigorous, multidisciplinary, and international inquiry continues to inform our mission.”In 1995, Selma Jeanne’s 75th birthday was celebrated at the Dance Division, at a grand party hosted by George Dorris and Jack Anderson and videotaped by Nina Bennahum, Judith’s daughter and herself a dance scholar. On that occasion Gigi Oswald called Selma Jeanne “a woman of tremendous graciousness and poise…a one-woman task force.” Colleagues in the theater community pointed out that she brought dance history to the study of popular entertainment, wrote about dance in Shakespeare, and was more responsible for the spread of dance history and dance aesthetics than anyone else in the world.Selma Jeanne began working in New York at the dawn of the dance boom, when artists like Merce Cunningham, Doris Humphrey, George Balanchine, and Twyla Tharp were in their prime productive years. She built a corps of scholars who took dance seriously as an academic discipline. We who follow her are grateful. EpilogueIn 2020 we find ourselves looking at a reduced dance landscape, with many factors combining to keep viewers out of theaters. Audiences are shrinking. Hardly any professional outlets remain to publish criticism. An NYU dance teacher told me recently that her students don’t know who Martha Graham is. The New York real estate situation, which permitted so much creative ferment from the 1950s through the 1980s, is now impossible for most artists; many are returning to the universities that sheltered them initially; others are just giving up. Apart from peace and quiet and the wealth of resources, what I will miss most about my time in the Reading Room are the many guards, both members of the curatorial staff and of the security force outside the glass doors, who took turns protecting the collection from us human users. Frequent was the urge, when I found multiple copies of the same document in a file, to quietly lift one and save myself a stretch of note-taking. Knowing they were watching kept me on the straight and narrow. Grateful thanks for their support to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellowship, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library, and the generosity of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Estate of Louise Guthman, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Frederick Loewe Foundation, Nancy Dalva, and the Committee for the Jerome Robbins Dance Division.February 27, 2020 ................
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