February 9, 2015—The University of Oregon is honored to welcome Professor Stephanie Jordan of the University of Roehampton, London for a scholarly residency on the UO campus the first week of March.

 

The UO School of Music and Dance has named Jordan a 2015 Trotter Visiting Professor, a mark of distinction reserved for honored guest artists and scholars.

 

Formerly head of the Department of Dance (1992-2000) and Director of the Centre for Dance Research, Jordan is currently Research Professor in Dance at Roehampton University. With a background as dancer, musician, and dance critic, Jordan’s academic career has led her to publish and present at conferences throughout the world. She has written three books: Striding Out: Aspects of Contemporary and New Dance in Britain (1992), Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet (2000), and Stravinsky Dances: Re-Visions across a Century (2007), all published by Dance Books. 

 

For Moving Music, Jordan was awarded the 2001 Special Citation of the Dance Perspectives Foundation, the major annual dance book award. In 2010, she was honored with the award for Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance from the Congress on Research in Dance. She has received numerous grants for her work in music and dance. 

 

Jordan’s work on Stravinsky and dance began when she was commissioned by the George Balanchine Foundation as project director for the analytical video Music Dances: Balanchine Choreographs Stravinsky (2002), working with dancers from New York City Ballet. Later, she compiled with Larraine Nicholas the database Stravinsky the Global Dancer: A Chronology of Choreography to the Music of Igor Stravinsky (2003).

3 p.m., Room 167, Frohnmayer Music Building 

Free admission

 

We virtually always think of dance as “music-and-dance,” and still today, many believe that dancing is simply a matter of moving to, or visualizing, music. This presentation will reveal a number of “choreomusical” strategies. Illustrations will be taken from the work of American modern dance choreographer Mark Morris, who is exceptionally wide-ranging in his exploration of music and its relationship with dance. This lecture will illustrate various ambitious experiments with music across his career, including his so-called “music visualizations,” his homage to the radical collaboration of Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and his treatments of large-scale symphonic scores never written for dance. 

 

1 p.m., Room 178, Frohnmayer Music Building 

Free admission

 

Professor Jordan will address the Student Forum of the UO School of Music and Dance; free and open to the public. No score has been choreographed more often, or more globally, than Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, yet soon after the work’s 1913 premiere, dance and musical traditions went their own ways. The score became an “abstract” concert piece, crowning symbol of the musical avant-garde. This presentation will focus on the dance tradition, the scenario and its modifications, the recent conceptual explorations, the Rite as metaphor for the “machine,” and the burden of a century of choreographic settings. The presentation will address a range of Rites, from the original Nijinsky to that of Pina Bausch, as well as recent settings by choreographers such as Jérôme Bel and Xavier Le Roy.

 

Jordan’s visit to the UO campus is facilitated by the university’s THEME colloquium. Founded by Professor Steve Larson at the University of Oregon, THEME is an interdisciplinary colloquium of faculty and student researchers in music theory (T), musicology/music history (H), ethnomusicology (E), and music education (ME).