Lynn Garafola

Prof. Lynn Garafola.
Lynn Garafola.

Lynn Theresa Garafola (born December 12, 1946) is an American dance historian, linguist, critic, curator, lecturer, and educator. A prominent researcher and writer with broad interests in the field of dance history, she is acknowledged as the leading expert on the Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev (1909–1929), the most influential company in twentieth-century theatrical dance.[1]

Early life and education

Born in New York City, Lynn spent her early years in the Upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights. Her parents were Louis Salvatore Garafola, a printer, and Rose Jean (Marchione) Garafola, whose surname is a Southern Italian corruption of garofalo, meaning "carnation."[2] As a child Lynn studied ballet and violin with teachers from the Armenian diaspora, including Madame Seda Suny, a well-known dance teacher in the neighborhood, and spent leisure time in reading, knitting and stitchery, acting, and swimming. Madame Seda, who was always considered "Russian" by her students, introduced the young girl to the art form that would become one of the guiding passions of her life. After six years of elementary school, she entered the seventh grade of Hunter College High School, an elite, all-girls school with high academic standards and a strong arts program. There, her Latin teacher, Irving Kizner, sparked her facility in languages, which would become another lifelong interest. While in high school, she also studied modern dance with Alice Halpern and, in her senior year, took occasional classes in "jazz dance" with Alvin Ailey, which was really Horton technique accompanied by drumming.[3]

Upon graduation from high school in 1964, Garafola found her first summer job, as a salesgirl at Arnold Constable's flagship store in New York, the "Palace of Trade" on Broadway at West 19th Street. That autumn, she entered the freshman class of Barnard College, the prestigious women's college associated with Columbia University, on Morningside Heights in Manhattan. As a budding linguist and an amateur actress, she became attached to faculty members who were émigrés from the Spanish Civil War and who, to Garafola's delight, staged plays in Spanish, in which she often appeared. Besides Spanish, her major field, her course of study included classes in French and Italian as well as general academics. Throughout her college years, she continued to study dance and to take part in theatrical productions. She graduated from Barnard with a baccalaureate degree (A.B.) in 1968.[4]

Having avoided the political upheaval and student riots at Columbia and Barnard in 1968, Garafola spent a year in Quito, Ecuador, teaching English and studying Spanish. Then, after another year in the American Midwest and some time in Mexico, she returned to New York, where she found employment in 1970 as a staff translator at the Berlitz Translation Service in midtown Manhattan. Deciding to pursue graduate studies, she entered the doctoral program in Spanish at the Graduate Center of City University of New York. She soon switched her field from Spanish to comparative literature, which she found more intellectually stimulating, and began regular attendance at dance performances in the city. She eventually earned a master's degree (M.Phil.) in 1979. More years of study followed, as her interest in dance history grew to become her primary focus. With a dissertation entitled "Art and Enterprise in Diaghilev's Ballets Russes," she earned a doctoral degree (Ph.D.) in 1985.[5]

Academic career

While still a graduate student, Garafola began her academic career in February 1975 as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brooklyn College, a job she held until June 1977. After a hiatus of almost ten years, she was again a part-time lecturer, back uptown at Columbia University during the summers of 1985 and 1986. In September 1988, she was appointed adjunct assistant professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia, and in September 2000, she moved across Broadway at West 116th Street to the Department of Dance at Barnard, where she was an adjunct professor on a half-time schedule. In July 2003, she became a term professor, and in September 2006 she was named a full professor of dance. Granted tenure in 2007, she occupies this position to the present day. She has been co-chair of the Department of Dance at Barnard since September 2014. She also is a non-voting member of the Department of History at Columbia and a faculty member of the university's Harriman Institute, which is devoted to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies.

An autodidact in dance history, Garafola has taught numerous courses at Barnard in Western theatrical dance from the Renaissance to the 1960s. She has also directed numerous projects on nineteenth- and twentieth-century topics in ballet as well as in modern, contemporary, African-American, social, and national dance forms. She has served on Ph.D. dissertation committees in history, theater, and music at Columbia, in performance studies and French at New York University, in French at Johns Hopkins University, in history at Northwestern University, and in music at Princeton University.[6] She has a deep commitment to guiding and developing dance history scholars in work that is empirically rich and that opens new windows onto the past.

Writing about dance

After Garafola returned to New York City in 1970 and began to attend performances of American Ballet Theatre, she fell n love with the nineteenth-century classic ballets: Swan Lake, Giselle, Coppélia, The Nutcracker, and The Sleeping Beauty. Seeing these works reignited her childhood interest in dance, and attendance at performances by the Joffrey Ballet, the New York City Ballet, and various modern dance companies led to a growing fascination with the history of dance, particularly ballet. In her readings in comparative literature, she chanced across an account of the meeting of Marcel Proust and James Joyce at a 1922 cast party for the Ballets Russes. Its description of impresario Sergei Diaghilev captured her attention, and she began to think about writing her doctoral dissertation on the influence of the Ballets Russes on intellectuals and writers of imaginative literature. Trained as a literary scholar, she reconceptualized her dissertation topic to focus on the history of the Ballets Russes itself, thus transforming herself from a literary comparatist into a historian of performing arts.[7]

In time, Garafola's dissertation metamorphosed into a history book, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, published in 1989. This was followed by a number of edited works and a torrent of articles in scholarly journals, anthologies, encyclopedias, newspapers, and popular magazines as well as dozens of book reviews, program notes, interviews, public lectures, scholarly presentations, and other writings. She has also made many appearances on television and public radio that have resulted in written transcripts of her commentary and addresses. Her current project focuses on the life and work of choreographer Bronislava Nijinska, younger sister of Vaslav Nijinsky and member of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. All of Garafola's writings have been motivated by her belief in the centrality of dance and its importance to scholarship and the cultural life of a city, a nation, and communities throughout the world.

Publications

Among the published works of which Garafola is the author, editor, or translator are the following books, articles in other books, and scholarly journal articles. In addition to these are scores of book reviews and papers included in the proceedings of academic conferences and meetings.

Books

Selected Articles in Other Books

Selected Journal Articles

Lectures and public readings

Garafola has delivered dozens of lectures and public presentations on a great many topics in dance history. Those listed here are but a sampling of this body of work, intended to indicate the breadth of her interests and the extent of her reach.

Exhibitions

Awards and fellowships

In addition to glowing reviews of her books and accolades from her peers, Garafola has been the recipient of a number of prestigious awards and fellowships. Among them are the following.

Related activities

Since 1988, Garafola has been an active member of the Society of Dance History Scholars, serving as editor of its monograph series Studies in Dance History (1991–98), chair of its fundraising committee (2000–01), chair of its editorial board (2002–04), and a judge on its annual prize committee on several occasions. She has also been active in the Dance Critics Association, the Congress on Research in Dance, the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For several years (2000-2004), she was a principal researcher on the Popular Balanchine project of the George Balanchine Foundation, charged with compiling dossiers on the 1936, 1954, and 1982 productions of the Broadway musical On Your Toes, choreographed by Mr. Balanchine. She has also been a panelist and judge in programs sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Library of Congress, and various universities, publishers, and other organizations.[8]

Personal life

In 1980, Garafola married Eric Foner, the Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. They have one daughter, Daria. A former dancer with the Norwegian National Ballet in Oslo, she is now a graduate student in Art History at Columbia University.

References

  1. ↑ "Lynn Garafola, Professor of Dance," faculty profile, Barnard College website, http://dance.barnard.edu/profiles/lgarafol. Retrieved 6 November 2015.
  2. ↑ Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, "Garafalo," in A Dictionary of Surnames (Oxford University Press, 1989).
  3. ↑ Lynn Garafola, responses to autobiographical questionnaire, 31 October 2015, digital submission for Claude Conyers dance history Wikipedia files, Charleston, South Carolina.
  4. ↑ Lynn Garafola, Professor of Dance, curriculum vitae, dated 1 July 2015, in faculty files of Barnard College and Columbia University. This extensive and highly detailed document is the primary source of scholarly information presented herein.
  5. ↑ "Garafola, Lynn," in International Who's Who of Authors and Writers, 30th ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2015).
  6. ↑ Garafola, curriculum vitae, dated 1 July 2015.
  7. ↑ Lynn Garafola, "Enchanted with Dances Past, or How I Became a Historian of Dance," manuscript prepared for publication in Dance Research (Edinburgh), and responses to autobiographical questionnaire, 31 October 2015, digital submission for Claude Conyers dance history Wikipedia files, Charleston, South Carolina.
  8. ↑ Garafola, curriculum vitae, 1 July 2015.

External links

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