Sally Rachel Banes (October 9, 1950 – June 14, 2020) was a notable dance historian, writer, and critic.
[1][2] Born and raised in Silver Spring, Maryland,[3] a suburb of Washington, D.C., Banes studied dance, and particularly ballet, throughout her childhood.
In 1974, she founded the Community Discount Players which was a loosely organized company of actors, dancers, filmmakers,and visual artists.
As she grew older, Banes continued to take dance classes in both Chicago and New York City.
She also studied modern with Jim Self, Maggie Kast, and Shirley Mordine as well as taking class at both the Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham studios.
In 1978 Banes produced a film of Yvonne Rainer's 1966 dance piece "Trio A (The Mind is a Muscle, Part 1).
Her doctoral advisor was Michael Kirby and she also learned from Deborah Jowitt, John Mueller, Dale Harris, Gretchen Schneider, David Vaughan, and Selma Jeanne Cohen.
[6][7][3] Banes' first work, A Day in the Life of the Mind: Part 2, was created in collaboration with dancer Ellen Mazer.
It was a day-long performance beginning at the lagoon in Hyde Park and ending at a popular local bar, Jimmy's.
The audience followed the performers from the lagoon and down 57th Street while listening to a Charlie Parker record on repeat and having soybeans thrown at them.
When it became dark nightgown-clad dancers appeared in the large lighted windows of the Regenstein Library as the performance continued to its end at Jimmy's.
Banes also collaborated with Ellen Mazer on a series of works about an imaginary 19th century woman named "Sophie," who was "sometimes a ballerina, sometimes a communist."
Sweet Home Chicago: The Real City Guide, coauthored by Banes, was her first published book.
Finally, starting in 1991, she began teaching at University of Wisconsin – Madison[2] where she was the Marian Hannah Winter Professor of Theater and Dance Studies.
The choreographers include Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, David Gordon, Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, Meredith Monk, Kenneth King, Douglas Dunn, and The Grand Union.
Rainer, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and other post-modern choreographers of the sixties were not united in terms of their aesthetic.
Attracting a grassroots audience of Greenwich Village artists and intellectuals, the Judson Dance Theater affected the entire community and flourished as a popular center of experimentation.
– Sally Banes, Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964[11]This book focuses on the year 1963 and the changing face of the art world.
A distinctively twentieth-century, postwar, postindustrialist American avant-garde art: democratic yet sophisticated, vigorous and physical, playful yet down-to-earth, freely mixing high and low, academic and vernacular traditions, genres and media.
– Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-garde Performance and the Effervescent Body[12]This book is an anthology of published and unpublished essays and talks about dance since the 1970s.
These articles were published chiefly in the Village Voice and the SoHo Weekly News, two alternative publications based in New York City.
It consists of eleven essays, including one by Banes herself and a section of choreographers' statements from the White Oak PASTForward project, organized by Mikhail Baryshnikov.
These choreographers include Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Simone Forti, David Gordon, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer.
There were no limits, nothing that could not be tried, from rising up to protest injustices like racism, sexism, and the Vietnam War to ingesting mind-expanding drugs to sexual experimentation.
This prize awards $500 to the publication that best explores the intersection of theater and dance or movement and has been published within the previous two years.