Presentation: “Modern Dance in America’s Midwest — Reinvention and Innovation”

This lecture is open to the public. It is part of the offering of the Space Between Society's annual conference. For more information visit the conference website.

When the Great War shuttered stages across Europe, Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes took his famed dance company to America. While most scholars focus on the New York run of Diaghilev’s two American tours, this talk centers on the impact the Ballets Russes had in the Midwest: America’s “space between.” I investigate the tours’ impact in three Midwestern cities: Chicago, Cincinnati, and Dayton. First, I examine the dance scene Diaghilev arrived to find in the Midwest, and then look at the engagements from 1916 through 1918 highlighting the distinctly midwestern sensibilities of the press coverage. The talk concludes by examining some of the longstanding impacts of the Ballets Russes’ visits on the innovative dance legacies of these famed midwestern cities.

Samuel N. Dorf currently serves as Acting Executive Director of the University Honors Program and Professor of Music at the University of Dayton (UD). Next year he will begin an appoint as the Alumni Endowed Chair in the Humanities at UD. As a scholar he often writes on the continual performance and reinvention of music and dance from the ancient world and the complex relationship between scholars and their objects of study. His monograph, Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890-1935 (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the performance and reinvention of ancient Greek music and dance in fin-de-siècle Paris, and queer music reception. His current research interests include the performance of ancient musics today, the history of musical historically-informed performance practice, music and dance relations and the intersections of music and culinary historiography.