As interest in the history of Russian ballet grows, it is logical – inevitable, one hopes – that Russian writers of a century ago who specialized in ballet be scrutinized ever more closely. Who were the ballet historians of the time? What were their credentials? their points of view? To consider just three – Alexander Pleshcheyev, Konstantin Skalkovsky and Sergei Khudekov – formidable names with reputations to match, is not to deny the importance of yet others who in many ways also deserve our attention. But there are good reasons to start with these three.

All were publitsisty or “publicists”, a useful if not precisely translatable term that connotes writers on current affairs, who went beyond regular journalism to compile histories of Russian ballet based in part on their long firsthand experience. None was a dancer or a historian by profession, so all came to ballet with a larger vision: ballet was a beloved avocation. This left them open to certain biases, but these do not detract substantially from their value as commentators on the scene. Indeed, their broader outlook is precisely what lends significance and credibility to their work. All were Petersburgers; their writings tell us little about the second imperial company in Moscow. All present to the modern scholar difficulties of access: the works of Pleshcheyev and Skalkovsky are preserved only in major western collections, and much of Khudekov's work is virtually unavailable outside the USSR.

With this tribute to Dr. Juana de Laban, Dance Research Journal acknowledges the part that the whole life of the scholar plays in one's contribution to a field. In this particular case, we are trying to show the multiplicity of experiences that Juana de Laban brought to her profession. Although well-recognized as a teacher and a scholar, Juana's early life and her professional dancing career remained a mystery to many of her colleagues, friends, and students. The field of dance research, new by the standards of many disciplines, has been the product of a number of dedicated individuals, many of whom are still living. How we can responsibly document their lives, and in the process, the discipline of dance studies, is a question to which these articles on Juana de Laban attempt a response.

In the West, the categories of music and dance are generally thought of as related, but distinct performing arts. Those of us who devote our time to studying and performing music often forget that no sound is produced without physical movement and that in most (if not all) cases performers have learned to move in certain ways in order to produce a desired pattern of sounds. Yet when we attend a piano recital we may very well enjoy the performance without actually seeing the pianist's fingers in motion on the keyboard. The movements of western “classical” musicians are, for the most part, aimed at producing sounds, and it is these sounds that the audience is expected to apprehend and appreciate aesthetically. In Okinawan “classical” music (koten ongaku), however, the “musical aesthetic” relies on a combination of formalized patterns of movement and sound, particularly in the playing of the two drums, collectively called tēku. The movements of the Okinawan drummer are thus more than a means to correct sound production they have aesthetic significance in their own right. Some of these movements, in fact, produce no sound at all. Others, though highly contrastive visually, may produce sounds which are acoustically the same.

Interplay of the visual and the aural is found in performance traditions around the globe. In East Asia alone there are numerous genres in which dancers sound drums – Japanese and Okinawan Ancestor Festival dances (bon-odori in Japan, eisā in Okinawa), the Korean “monk's drum” dances (puk-chum) and hourglass drum dances (sol-changgo), to name a few. In these dances, however, the “drummer” is more readily identifiable as a “dancer.” He or she moves through space; the striking of the drum is but one of the activities which the audience beholds and may not be the primary one. Usually these dances are accompanied by music performed by “non-dancing” musicians, whose ensemble may include drums other than those played by the dancing drummer.

I knew Juana de Laban for about twenty-three years. She was my mentor and distinctly affected the course of my life. Throughout those years I was thrilled but perplexed as to why this very strong woman with so many prominent associations would choose to befriend me, and why our friendship kept recurring after periods of being apart. When at the end of her life she handed her personal collection to me for deposit in the Dallas Theater Center, I became the link between this dynamic individual and her final effort to remain part of the fabric of life. In retrospect, as her personal and professional history unfolds a clearer picture emerges.

I have constructed this biography from her materials and from correspondence with her family, students, and colleagues. I must stress that Juana was an extremely private person. She almost never spoke of personal things. Many persons still living also wish to respect her privacy. Furthermore, her own notes are often in conflict as to dates and figures. This brief account, therefore, stands to be verified, expanded and perhaps corrected in time.

Dance critics often use information external to a performance to identify and separately evaluate the creative aspects of dance (composition of music and movement; design of scenery and costumes) and the interpretive aspects (performance by dancers and musicians; execution of scenery and costume designs). Their evaluation may also take into account production factors not directly perceivable in a performance, including the type of floor, rehearsal time, illness, and injury.

These critical practices are problematic for an anti-geneticist theory of aesthetic value, the best-known of which is that of philosopher Monroe Beardsley. As a way of legislating against irresponsible criticism, such as describing Schubert's music as “pathetic” solely because one “sympathizes with his poverty,” Beardsley will “…count as characteristics of an aesthetic object [the proper object of criticism] no characteristics … that depend upon knowledge of their causal conditions, whether physical or psychological.” Even some who consider this position too strict, excluding as illegitimate certain important critical discourse, agree that it contributes to a desirable goal, the exclusion of “clearly irresponsible criticism,” or “‘fantastic’ criticism that finds in the work any property whatever suggested by biographical information.”

The apparent conflict between anti-geneticism and these critical practices in dance can be resolved by distinguishing evaluation of perceivable performances from assessments of the continuing skills of performing and creative artists.

It is a modest space, an angular, cramped room with exposed pipes overhead, a concrete floor. On all sides sprout wooden shelves laden with three thousand books and journals, photographs, slides, programs, and memorabilia – the Juana de Laban Collection, now housed at the Dallas Theater Center. To find the collection, one must climb narrow stairs and burrow through the Theater's wardrobe area to the tiny room beyond that houses the material lovingly collected by that bright and fiercely proud dance historian and critic who was also, overwhelmingly, the daughter of Rudolf Laban.

Any scholar's library reflects his heart and mind, his interests and aspirations, his education. Juana de Laban's collection reveals an intellect remarkably catholic in its taste, astonishing in its breadth. It is the sort of library that skips across disciplines to include volumes on anthropology, psychology, history, aesthetics and criticism, all related to the study of human movement.

I think of Juana often, and her memory remains undiminishedly vivid. And that word – vivid – seems the best to evoke so many things about her: her crisp slightly accented speech with its medley of languages; the clear, bright colors she liked to wear; the keen cobalt glance; and most of all her opinions – her palpable intellectual presence. Even though by the time we met she was in her mid-fifties, her hair had faded to a warm ashen grey, and she had lost the high coloring that must have been hers as a young woman, the impact of her physical presence was quite undiminished I think, and one couldn't help but be aware of its authentic potency as well as the vigor of her opinions and reactions in any situation that caught her interest. I think of her as having been tall but perhaps it was just that she carried herself so erectly and occupied space with such energy and assurance.

While gathering the articles for this issue of Dance Research Journal with Dianne Woodruff, I often smiled as I recognized “the essential Juana” in the written perceptions of my colleagues. It has been hard to resist adding my own reminiscences, for “Dr. Laban” was a powerful figure in my introduction to dance after I transferred to UCLA's Dance Department in 1963. In fact, it was Dr. Laban who taught me dance history.

I particularly remember laboring for months on my first dance history term paper. The topic consumed me then and amuses me no end today: Dancing had been born of animals and evolved to great humanistic expressions. How such a daringly broad yet hopelessly unlimited hypothesis got accepted, I will never understand. Part of the explanation may lie in the fact that Curt Sachs's World History of Dance was the uncritically-used text for the class, and part of the explanation may lie with my valiant effort to rationalize two earlier undergraduate years as an analytical biology major. Dr. Laban grasped the opportunity for interdisciplinary education and had me reading many things in science, including Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees and Darwin's Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. I was fascinated by the worlds of thought opening, but completely at sea in the necessity of bringing ideas together for a term paper.

In 1949, Mabel Dolmetsch first published her work on dance history, Dances of England and France from 1450 to 1600, with their music and authentic manner of performance. Five years later, her companion volume, Dances of Spain and Italy from 1400 to 1600, appeared. Recently, both volumes have been reprinted by Da Capo Press, New York (1975), and they are thus readily available to anyone interested in the reconstruction of dances of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While Da Capo Press is to be applauded for providing these classic works with a renewed distribution, the absence of a modern preface discussing the progress which has been made in historical dance reconstruction since the original composition of these books may well mislead readers into believing that they represent the current state of the art.

“My school work became more and more difficult for me. Nobody listened to me at school or at home. I gave up trying to do my homework and closed out everything but stolen outings to join my friends at the stage door. I got terrible grades, but still I found no way to study. I could not seem to learn anything from a book. I was expelled from school.

“To make matters worse, my father constantly yelled at me and then he would end up beating me. Finally, I remember my father screamed, ‘You cannot spend your days at home anymore. You are fourteen and a half years old and it is time you start working. I will find you work as a furrier or a goldsmith apprentice, whichever allows you time off for the Sabbath.’ When he could get no response from me, he took his cane and beat me until it broke.”