Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing

     Sally Banes has been a preeminent critic and scholar of American contemporary dance, and Before, Between, Beyond spans more than thirty years of her prolific work. Beginning with her first published review and including previously unpublished papers, this collection presents some of her finest works on dance and other artistic forms. It concludes with her most recent research on Geroge Balanchine's dancing elephants. In each piece, Banes's detailed eye and sensual prose strike a rare balance between description, context, and opinion, delineating the American artistic scene with remarkable grace. With contextualizing essays by dance scholars Andrea Harris, Joan Acocella, and Lynn Garafola, this is a compelling, insightful indispensable summation of Banes's critical career.

     Sally Banes has been a preeminent critic and scholar of American contemporary dance, and Before, Between, Beyond spans more than thirty years of her prolific work. Beginning with her first published review and including previously unpublished papers, this collection presents some of her finest works on dance and other artistic forms. It concludes with her most recent research on Geroge Balanchine's dancing elephants. In each piece, Banes's detailed eye and sensual prose strike a rare balance between description, context, and opinion, delineating the American artistic scene with remarkable grace. With contextualizing essays by dance scholars Andrea Harris, Joan Acocella, and Lynn Garafola, this is a compelling, insightful indispensable summation of Banes's critical career.

Publishers Weekly

Veteran dance critic and scholar Banes (Terpsichore in Sneakers) is best known for her postmodern take on modern dance and women onstage. This new collection of essays showcases the best of her 30 years in the field, starting with her first-ever published piece (on the dance company Pilobolus) and ending with her most recent work (on George Balanchine's 1942 choreography for elephants in Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus). The essays in between cover Alvin Ailey, Jerome Robbins, Meredith Monk and even Madonna and disco dancing. Clear, incisive and personable, Banes is in fine form in all these pieces (some published for the first time). She brings a historical perspective to her observations, then links them to the larger worlds of politics, economics, religion and sexuality. That she's able to express such sophisticated ideas in plain, even conversational, English results in what feels like a witty and exuberant postperformance conversation in a small West Village cafe over a steaming cups of espresso. This collection tragically Banes's last due to an incapacitating stroke will make a welcome addition to any dance and performing arts library. (May 25)

Sally Banes is the Marian Hannah Winter Professor Emerita of Theater History and Dance Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her many books include Reinventing Dance in the 1960s, Terpsichore in Sneakers, Dancing Women, Democracy’s Body, and Greenwich Village 1963.

Andrea Harris is assistant professor of dance at Texas Christian University. A former student of Sally Banes, she contributed to Banes’s earlier book, Reinventing Dance in the 1960s, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press.