Olga Maynard

[2] Precociously active in the burgeoning literary and arts scene of that city during the 1930s and 1940s, she published journalism, poetry, fiction and criticism in periodicals, notably the Trinidad Guardian newspaper.

[6] Rather than a “how to look and how to listen” aid for beginners, or a collection of critical essays, this constituted a bold attempt to conceptualize all dance in America, from its native and colonial roots to its present, for its practitioners and its audience, and so to encourage its future.

Of it Ted Shawn wrote that “what has lain, unformed in words, in the dance artists’ consciousness is made explicit here”, yet it was written from the point of view of an audience that she argued was distinctively American.

With Agnes de Mille recommending the first book by an unknown as "a key, a talisman" for young dancers, and Shawn hailing the second as "an ideal catalytic agent between stage and audience", she was well-positioned for the beginning of the 'dance boom'.

But despite Maynard's associations with Helen Tamiris, Katherine Litz, Pauline Koner, and Bruce King,[9] such a 'sequel' would have to be conjectured from her subsequent articles on them,[10] Merce Cunningham, Carolyn Brown[11] and others, together with her final book, on Judith Jamison and Alvin Ailey.

Garrison's and Loring's programs explicitly encouraged continuing contact with working artists, in dance and visual arts: an unusual arrangement, luckily ideal for balancing two of Maynard's vocations, and she settled permanently in Irvine, California.

[12] Able to put her ideas about humanities education into institutional setting, at UCI Maynard helped develop and taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in the MFA program, which she had originally written.

Given the School's professional policies, in this period Professor Maynard wrote articles and shorter pieces, and made frequent trips within North America and abroad (significantly including the Soviet bloc and Cuba) as interviewer, dance jurist, critic, conference participant, researcher and lecturer.

Among choreographers with whom she worked closely on issues of history, period and style were George Balanchine,[15] Robert Joffrey, Gerald Arpino, John Neumeier, Norbert Vesak.

Some of these articles—particularly those in Como's and Richard Philp's "Portfolio" series, printed on heavy stock paper, with the art design of Herbert Migdoll—amount to research monographs, still advertised independently on websites.

The personal loss was chief among a series over seven years, from Loring and Balanchine through Como and Robert Joffrey, and the onset of the AIDS epidemic, which struck the dance world with special vehemence.