The dance historian and critic Sally Banes died on June 14th. The last time I saw her was several years ago in front of the Joyce Theater. She was in a wheelchair, smiling at me and speaking in a gentle voice, after her husband, philosopher Noël Carroll, had discreetly mentioned my name to her. I reminded her that the necklace I was wearing had been made by her mother; she told me politely that it was becoming.
The Sally who didn’t recognize me was no longer the brash, quick-talking, brilliant, no-nonsense scholar, writer, colleague, and friend whom I had once taught, worked with, and learned from. In 2002, while teaching at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, she had suffered a massive stroke, which left her, in Wikipedia’s grim words, “cognitively and physically severely handicapped.” With Noël’s help, she struggled on, before that became impossible for her.
In the 1980s, when Banes was working on earning a PhD at New York University’s Department of Performance Studies, she took one of the courses that I taught there. Her dissertation was published in 1983 as Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962-1964. That was just one of the books that she produced over her lifetime, prominent among them Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (1980) Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (1994), and Dancing Women: Female Bodies Onstage (1998). She also edited Dance Research Journal from 1982 to 1988.
Together she and I taught the newly established dance history course at NYU-Tisch School of the Arts on Second Avenue, splitting the graduate students from the undergraduates and boning up on the subject ourselves as we did so. I have a vivid memory of hurrying into the university’s Bobst Library as Sally was exiting it. “I just discovered that the ‘Ballet Comique de la Reine’ was never actually performed,” she called out, barely stopping her trajectory. “No, wait!” I yelled back, telling her that I had fortunately just come across a full account of the 1581 landmark and its audience. Then we raced away in opposite directions.
During the years when Sally taught at Wesleyan University and then at Cornell, she and I conducted workshops for dance writers in London at the Dance Umbrella and in Lee, Massachusetts at Jacob’s Pillow. We travelled, shared stories, worried about our methods and our students. It’s at Jacob’s Pillow, perhaps in 1988, that the photo below was taken. How young we looked. How little we knew what lay ahead.
So sad. What a beautiful picture of you two! Thank you for this lovely memory.
Thank you for this evocation of a brilliant, imaginative, and empowering scholar and colleague. So sad what happened to her.
She was an incisive & thoughtful writer, & I used her template for writing dance criticism (description, interpretation, evaluation, contextualization) regularly in my courses on writing arts criticism. I didn’t know about the health problems of her final years. Thank you for this tribute, Deborah.
Thank you, Deborah.
Sad and beautiful Deborah. Sending love. Such a lovely picture of you both.
Oh Deborah… I saw this on facebook and just cried. I had not seen Sally in a number of years, but in the 90s she sent students over to my place for butoh research! what a brilliant person; and great friend to many. This photo is so lovely… so full of life and spirit. The hand colored flowers are additionally touching. with love
Thanks for this obit, Deborah on SALLY BANES.. I actually used to do modern dance as a teen with Sally’s sister, Betsy Banes, in the D.C. area where Sally and I were both from.
I wouldn’t have known Sally died except for your writing about it. I’m not following the news much, though I try to keep up somewhat just to see what’s going on in NYC with the virus. . I hope there’s an obit in the NY Times or Washington Post about her.
I still have “Terpsichore in Sneakers “in my book collection.
Sally wrote a nice piece about the work of my still burgeoning Changing Times Tap Dancing Co., was it was first starting out,not even incorporated yet when my initial company of dancers from Elaine Summers loft (combine with the old black masters Cookie Cook and Ralph Brown, performed with Andrew Levine and me. From Ralph’s work, two of my students, then peers, the late Jackie Raven and Katherine Kramer, asked Ralph for lessons and the tap movement “jes grew” (Ishmael Reed on Mumbo Jumbo) from performances like that as the old masters were being discovered. Max Gordon, Village Vanguard Proprietor, climbed 5 flights because the elevator to Elaine Summers loft was broken. I had been pestering Max to have tap at the Vanguard, and he liked what he saw, although at the time he only wanted Cookie Cook and me. I suspect Sally’s informational/review piece on tap in general, and the Vanguard Show we did in particular, helped with tap growing to where it seems there are a lot more interested in tap, since the Great Tap Drought of the 50s and 60s. All the writing including yours on “The Ushers wear Tap Shoes” in 1978, added up to create lots of tap happening globally now.
Sally’s think piece—(remember “think pieces in the Village Voice” when there was plenty of room for dance writing.?
Although I think it was published in The Soho Weekly News.
Her “think piece” she wrote when we performed at the Village Vanguard in 1978, probably the only tap company that did so. I will remember Sally fondly. You knew her well. It’s obvious from your review. I guess because of the virus , there will be no public funeral, but if there is a zoom tribute, please let your community of readers know.
Thank you for this and the lovely lovely photograph!
Deborah, thank you so much for these words!
I am touched all over again by the spitfire Sally I too knew you so beautiful describe. I’ve always been so admiring and astounded by her work and honored that very occasionally I too worked with her, especially when she was editor of the “Dance Research Journal.” and produced the special section on Jewish Wedding Dances for a double issue in 1986. I treasure her work and know that her memory will continue to inspire others, whether in “Dance Studies” –which surely is built on so many of her books and thinking– and beyond.
Judith
Jack and I have also known Sally for many years, even before we published her piece on Meredith Monk’s Chacun in our first issue of Dance Chronicle in 1977. She has been much missed during her long illness, even as her books have become classics, and now we will miss her even more.
Beautiful article Deborah. Thank you.
Thank you Deborah. Though I’m long retired from teaching and writing, I still keep Sally’s books in my collection (along with yours, Marcia Siegel’s, Arlene Croce’s and Edwin Denby’s.). So sad that we lost her great talent so early in her promising career.
Thank you Deborah for this heartfelt tribute to a woman who left an indelible hand print on everyone she touched, professionally and personally. And yes, that’s a charming photograph of the two of you.
Thanks so much, Deborah, for this touching tribute. I’m particularly happy that you shared this photo from the Pillow, as this is where I first met Sally in 1984. I was running the School here then, and she came on board as a guest faculty member in the Post-Modern Workshop directed by Wendy Perron. We worked together closely for several years, and she was a key advisor in my Master’s thesis project at Columbia. Reading through all these comments is a reminder of the beautifully intertwined nature of our dance community and how one life can make such an enormous difference to so many.
Dear Deborah,
Thank you for this tribute to Sally. I had no idea she started Dance History with you at Tisch, but it makes so much sense. I would never have been able to do my thesis without her scholarship, in tandem with yours.
Thanks to you both for humanizing history so well. One of my favorite books of hers is Greenwich Village 1964, which I think is often overlooked. It captures the era so vibrantly,
I’m glad she was so prolific and I will go back to her writing again and again. I”m sorry you lost a good friend.
Yours, Patricia
This is a beautiful and elegant tribute to an pathbreaking and genuinely foundational scholar. Thank you for this moving obituary.
She was generous with her time and her insight — she opened doors for herself with her work, and then kept them open for others.
Debbie: This is a lovely, poignant memory of a fierce goddess of the dance, thanks so much, gigi
I’m so sad to learn this news. Thank you for your beautiful remembrance. Sally was such a vibrant and vital force on the dance scene at the time I began to watch and learn, at the height of the “dance boom.” I remember looking for her byline in the Soho Weekly News and other publications, and of course her books are important and enduring dance texts that will continue to be read and appreciated.
She was my dance history teacher and inspired me to love to write about dance …. I will forever be endeared to her and grateful for the world she opened for me…
Thank you for writing this beautiful tribute and capturing her spirit so fully….
Thanks, Deborah, for reminding us of the exuberance of dance and dance history writing, and for your memories of the irreplaceable Sally Banes.
Thank you for conjuring her brilliance and passion, Deborah. Sally prescribed the cadence of all my dance writing, and gave me permission to explore all genres of dance— from her doctoral investigation of Master Juba and the Five Points, and the visual and performance milieu around a single year (Greenwich Village 1963) to Judson’s democratic bodies and the iridescence of dancing women. That bright golden shock of curly hair was her fire, and behind those round-rimmed glasses, twinkling blue eyes that belied a vicious and unending curiosity. Thank you, Sally, forever grateful.
Thanks dear Deborah for this tribute what a pair you were how great for me to meet you both at jacobs pillow this image rings so many bells
Our guest teachers in the studio and you and sally as our mind full guides to these bodies of moving thoughts that still engage now sally and Trisha moving still in different ways
Beautiful! Every word, every remembrance.
Gratefully,
Sara
You have touched so many people with your writing, Deborah, and brought on a chain of fond remembrances. What a beautiful picture of you both.
thank you much for this moving tribute,
respectfully
Johannes
Thank you Deborah for capturing this moment for us all: two iron fists in velvet gloves, doing The Work that move/moved so many of us forward. I am grateful for the language, the ideas, the humanity you both bring to the longevity of our craft.
Sincerely,
Katie
With everlasting thanks to Sally Banes, and to you, Deborah.
Thank you for this remembrance, Deborah; your writing about a creative time in both of your lives is wonderful. Sally will live on in the classes we teach and her many books and essays that we will always reference and cite and recommend to our students..
A beautiful Spirit!!!, Alway pleasant and informative. Sally was very dear to my heart.
Dear Deborah,
I greatly appreciate the gentle beauty of your prose in capturing the spirit of Sally so well. Seeing the photo of the two of you brings back memories of my own introduction into the amazing sorority of New York dance critics that thrived in the 1970s-1990s when indeed everything seemed possible. I remember meeting both of you in New London in the summer of 1977 when I was part of the cohort of dance critics in the NEA dance critics institute you and Marcia taught at ADF that summer – and Sally assisted. She was a generous and inspirational colleague and friend over decades and past the trauma of her stroke when eventually even talking/remembering became too difficult… The vibrant, indefatigable Sally lives on in her prodigious scholarship.
Thank you Deborah for wonderful tribute. I took that dance history course at NYU. I still have her books in my library.
Thank you Deborah. For those of us less eloquent, I am glad that you wrote so beautifully and spoke for all of us about her value, her courage, and her grace as a human being and a scholar. This is such a sad loss.
Sally will be remembered long for her breakthrough work as a scholar. Thank you Deborah for this personal tribute and for all your wonderful writing as well.
Thank you, Deborah, for these poignant words and wistful image. A mighty oak has fallen, leaving the forest richer for her having fertilized it, poorer for having left it behind. Her brilliant mind and energetic scholarship galvanized a generation of writers, historians and educators, and I am grateful to have been one of them.
Thank you for posting the memories and inviting these wonderful tributes. We overlapped at Tisch in the years just before the department became Performance Studies, when we had to fight for Dance.. We even had a Comprehensive Exam essay topic in common.. When I read your essay, I had a flash of memory — conversations in the middle of the street were one of Sally’s specialties, while she rushed off to a performance.
We will all miss her and what should have been more books, more conference papers, and more conversations.
This is so touching and personal and so captures a life, a friend — so profoundly sad.
Your last line really got to me — and then there’s that beautiful, dreamy photo with only the flowers in color.
Thank you.
Gracias, Deborah,
Thank you for shining light on Sally’s magnificent legacy and inspiring leadership. My most sincere condolences.
Sincerely,
Gabriela
Dear Deborah,
I’d heard of Sally’s death on Monday, but only now have made time to read your words, so tender and evocative. How I laugh to hear of you exchanging news of the “Ballet Comique de la Reine”! I remember so many similar moments in my own discovery of dance history – and Sally and you were already part of that discovery, opening up the past and present to me and many. I have felt pangs this week and others since her stroke in 2002, but mainly I like to remember her in laughter, in enthusiasm, and in passion. She was a vital force – and she changed dance history.
Love
Alastair
“she changed dance history.”
Yes she did, and we are all the beneficiaries of it.
Thank you for this remembrance and for the photo from 1988. In that year, two years before I started my graduate work in Performance Studies at NYU, I taught alongside Sally at Wesleyan’s department of Theater. She was such a funny, warm, fiercely smart colleague. I was barely out of undergrad studies and pleased to have, as part of my job, the honor of supporting her Outside the Box performance series at Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts, which brought contemporary performers to campus.
That’s my beautiful Aunt Sally
I went to high school with Sally. Even then, in the late 60’s she was vivacious, inquiring, brilliant. Alway pushing, asking, stretching the limits. We both moved away but I remember her fondly. This is a lovely tribute.