{"id":26945,"date":"2024-05-22T10:25:08","date_gmt":"2024-05-22T14:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cws.charlotte.edu\/backup-coaa\/?page_id=26945"},"modified":"2026-03-04T08:50:20","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T13:50:20","slug":"research-dance","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/cws.charlotte.edu\/backup-coaa\/dance\/research\/","title":{"rendered":"Research – Dance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Research – Dance<\/h2>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Alyah Baker<\/h2>\n\n\n
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Alyah Baker researches the transformative impact of somatic practice, Black feminism, and queer aesthetics on concert dance traditions in the United States. Her current project, Quare Dance<\/em>, delves into both historical and contemporary articulations of ballet pedagogy and performance, highlighting the contributions of often-overlooked teachers, choreographers, and performers. These resurfaced dance genealogies serve as the foundation for a new evening-length ballet and inform Baker\u2019s collaborative and empowering approach to ballet technique and choreography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baker has received grants from the National Performance Network, South Arts, and United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County to support her ongoing research and choreography projects. Her writing has been published in Anti-Racism in Ballet Teaching<\/em> and will appear in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Ballet Pedagogy<\/em>. Baker has presented her research at various international and national conferences, including the Dance Studies Association, CORPS de Ballet International, the National Dance Education Organization, and the American Studies Association. In addition to her academic research, Baker maintains an active performance career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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E.E. Balcos<\/h2>\n\n\n
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UNC Charlotte Faculty Dance Concert Fall 2015<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

E.E. Balcos’s research in dance concerns somatic movement practice, primarily Body-Mind Centering\u00ae, and its application to dance technique and performance, improvisation, contact improvisation, choreography, and interdisciplinary collaboration. His performative works artistically express issues in social and environmental justice and equality. He is a certified Body-Mind Centering\u00ae Somatic Movement Educator, a registered Master Somatic Movement Educator, and a registered Somatic Dance Educator with the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA), serving on the ISMETA Board of Directors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ann Dils<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Professor Ann Dils\u2019s current project is “Dancing the Depression: Community-Based Movement in 1930s New York City,” a book about dance in Manhattan in the 1930s, focusing on vernacular dance as integral to ethnic identity and community stability and support during the Depression. Existing research regarding dance in the 1930s emphasizes modern dance as a means of social protest; the vibrant dancing of Lindy Hoppers at the Savoy; or dance marathons during which exhausted participants vied for prize money over long hours of dancing. To these understandings, Dils hopes to contribute little-known histories like that of New York\u2019s resident Chinese opera, and information about large public events in which hundreds or thousands of dancers and spectators celebrated and shared dance styles from home countries. Among her resources are Folk-News newsletters, published throughout the 1930s by New York City\u2019s Folk Festival Council, currently held at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; maps of ethnic neighborhoods that are part of 1930s urban planning studies; and library holdings such as those of New York University\u2019s Archives of Irish America. In Spring 2025, Dils will research Italian-American folk dance leaders through archives at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and performances held at the 1939-1940 New York World\u2019s Fair, through archives at the Schoenberg Center of the New York Public Library.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dils has also written about choreographers Bill T Jones and Doris Humphrey and contributed to sources supporting the pedagogy of dance studies. With Ann Cooper Albright, Dils co-directed Accelerated Motion: Towards a New Dance Literacy,<\/em> a National Endowment for the Arts-funded digital collection of materials about dance, and co-edited 2001 Moving History\/ Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader<\/em>.<\/a> Her work can be found in edited collections and scholarly journals, especially Dance Research Journal.<\/em>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Excerpts from Folk-News Newsletters. New York City, Chinatown. Dragon performing in front of Hip Sing headquarters on Pell Street. Acme, April 27, 1931. Used with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Kim Jones<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Associate Professor Kim Jones has established a national reputation as a researcher and recreator of historical dances. In 2013 she brought to life a lost solo that modern dance pioneer Martha Graham had choreographed in 1935. Pieced together through interviews with former Graham dancers and archival study of photographs, newspaper articles and other materials, the reimagined \u201cImperial Gesture\u201d garnered attention from the New York Times and, after performances in Charlotte and New York City, was accepted into the Graham Company\u2019s repertory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just three years later, Jones was asked to rescue another work from obscurity: \u201cTracer,\u201d a 1962 work by the famed modern dance choreographer Paul Taylor. That work, also covered in the New York Times, is now performed by the Paul Taylor Dance Company. Read a New York Times article about her process<\/a>.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jones’s newest research project is an investigation into the choreography of Korean dancer\/choreographer Choi Seung-Hee (1911-69). Widely regarded as Korea\u2019s first modern dancer, Choi lived an eventful life through the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean war. Jones began her study of Choi in 2019 and in June 2022 presented a work inspired by Choi at the DAP Festival in Italy. In July 2022 she joined a cohort of 25 higher education faculty in Chicago for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute: Making Modernism: Literature, Dance, and Visual Culture in Chicago, 1893-1955, where she continued her research. In 2023 she was awarded a Dance Research Fellowship with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, presenting at their symposium in January 2024<\/a>. Jones also presented her research as the keynote speaker at the 2023 Asia Scholar Network Conference in Chapel Hill. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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