This article has been updated with corrected information.
There is no argument that Sally Banes was an eminent, groundbreaking scholar, and that her writings informed, inspired, and connected many dance artists. Her work will continue to be taught and explored. It has already been pushed against; Manning explains that Ramsay Burt’s 2006 book Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces and the 2019 MoMA exhibit about Judson-era art, The Work Is Never Done, both revise Banes’s narrative of the postmodern dance era.
Mazer explains that the innovations in Life of the Mind and later works were fueled by the research Banes had done in New York City in 1973 in preparation for the writing of Terpsichore in Sneakers. “She was immersing herself in what would later be called postmodern dance,” says Mazer, “She would write me letters about all the artists and art she was seeing; not all of it was dance exactly, I remember her writing about seeing Carolee Schneeman [the feminist visual and performance artist].” The summer of that same year, Mazer and her then-boyfriend had also taken a road trip to Oberlin College to see Banes perform in Meredith Monk‘s Chacon. As a participant-performer, Banes was engaged in a type of embedded research, which she describes in a clear and direct account in vol. 1, no. 1 of Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts, an academic journal that is still being published today.
Asimina Chremos is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Philadelphia. She lived and worked in Chicago from 1997 to 2010, during which time she served in various capacities for the dance field including artistic director of Links Hall, instructor at Lou Conte Dance Studio, and dance editor for Time Out Chicago magazine.
