Sally Banes
SALLY BANES (1950-2020) was a renowned critic and historian of dance and author of numerous influential books covering a range of dance genres. In her obituary the New York Times said that her writing “paired a vivid and inquisitive approach with a lack of agenda and a belief that dance was a crucial part of cultural history.” It was her book, Terpsichore in Sneakers (1980), a historical and critical study of post-modern dance, that made her a leading authority in dance studies. Banes graduated from University of Chicago (B.A. 1972) and New York University (Ph.D. 1980) and was a professor at Wesleyan University, the State University of New York at Purchase, Florida State University, the New York City School of Visual Arts, and Cornell University. In addition, she ran the dance program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1992 to 1996 and was the director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities there in 2001 and 2002. Banes received Guggenheim, Mellon, and The American Council of Learned Societies fellowships. She was an editor of Dance Research Journal, performance art critic for the Village Voice, senior critic at Dance Magazine, a contributing editor to Dance Scope and Performing Arts Journal, and the dance editor of the Chicago Reader and Soho Weekly News. In 2003, Banes won the Lifetime Achievement Award for her Outstanding Contribution to Dance Research from the Congress on Research in Dance. In addition, she was awarded a lifetime achievement award from The Society of Dance History Scholar and a Bessie Award for Lifetime Contribution to Dance Criticism.Her books include Terpsichore in Sneakers; Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body; Writing Dance in the Age of Postmodernism; Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage; Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York, 1976-85; Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater 1962-1964; Fresh: Hip Hop Don't Stop, with Nelson George, Susan Flinker, and Patty Romanowski; Our National Passion: 200 Years of Sex in America, with Sheldon Frank and Tem Horwitz; Sweet Home Chicago: The Real City Guide, with Sheldon Frank and Tem Horowitz; and Amazing Grace: Images in the Avant-Garde Arts of the 1960s. She edited Footnote to History, by Si-lan Chen Leyda, Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s by Elizabeth Souritz and Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible. Her reviews were collected in Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing, which was edited by Andrea Harris.