Following the success of the inaugural DANSOX Summer School in 2019, we held a second Virtual Summer School on 16 July 2020. There will be a DANSOX Roundtable Discussion at 4pm on 24th July to discuss the themes of the lectures. You can send your questions by email to our Development Office  by 23rd July, with DANSOX in the subject line. Join the DANSOX discussion here. 

The following lectures are available to view on the DANSOX playlist of the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building's YouTube channel. Alastair Macaulay's special guest lecture will be available from 21 July (late afternoon).

Introduction

Professor Sue Jones, Director, Dance Scholarship Oxford (Dansox)

Sue Jones is a Fellow in English at St Hilda's College, Oxford. Formerly a soloist with the Scottish Ballet, Glasgow, her research focuses on literature and dance in the modernist period.

Part One (Lectures 1 & 2): Life and work of Paul Taylor (1930-2018) American dancer and choreographer

Lecture 1: Guest Lecture by Alastair Macaulay on Paul Taylor

Alastair Macaulay is an international writer and critic of dance and drama who also lectures widely on dance. He has given guest lectures for DANSOX on Cunningham, Ashton, Astaire, and Balanchine. During his career he has held posts at the Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement and was Chief Dance Critic for the New York Times. He has taught dance history and published books on Margot Fonteyn and interviews with Matthew Bourne. He gave the New York Lincoln Kirstein Lecture on Ashton and Balanchine and is currently writing a book on the life and work of Merce Cunningham.

Lecture 2: Guest Lecture by Parisa Khobdeh on working with Paul Taylor

Parisa Khobdeh is an internationally renowned dancer, répétiteur, teacher, dance maker, collaborator and writer living and working between London and New York City. In 2019, Parisa took her final bow at Lincoln Center after performing at Paul Taylor Dance Company for 16 years. At the same time she set up her own vehicle for her creative output, Parisa Khobdeh Dance. Parisa is currently collaborating on a dance for film in "expanded cinematic forms" for exhibitions, video-clips and art installations; she is seeking innovative and unique ways to explore movement and the moving image.

Part Two (Lectures 3-8): New Scholarship on Dance: Text and Practice

Lecture 3: Marcus Bell on Pina Bausch and Tragedy

Marcus is a dancer, choreographer and researcher. Marcus is currently reading for a DPhil at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the, often contested, relationships between the classical and the postmodern in dance at the turn of the twenty-first century. 

​Lecture 4: Joseph Kay on musical notation and dance notation

Joseph is a composer and sound artist based in London, having recently completed a doctorate in composition at the University of Oxford. His work explores queerness and noise through collaborative multimedia practice and has been shown and played in venues around Europe and in Japan.

Lecture 5: ​Susie Crow on the ballet class

Susie danced with Royal and Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet. She is now an independent dance artist based in Oxford as Ballet in Small Spaces, she choreographs, teaches students, professionals and adult learners, and runs the Oxford Dance Writers website.  She has an MA in Dance Studies (Surrey), a Certificate of Teaching and Learning in Higher and Professional Education (London) and a PhD from University of Roehampton. Her thesis was entitled The Ballet Class: Educating Creative Dance Artists?

​​Lecture 6: Gabriela Minden on The Dance of Death, Rupert Doone, W.H. Auden, Kurt Jooss, and the Ballets Russes

Gabriela is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Oxford.  Her research explores the impact of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on early twentieth-century British theatre. 

Lecture 7: Megan Smith on literary criticism meets fiction and performance in John Haskell's The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in Five Acts (2017)

Megan is an English finalist at St Catherine’s College, Oxford who has combined her loves for literature and dance into a dissertation researching their theoretical interaction. Megan hopes to work in arts education in the future.