Personal profile

Biography

Formerly Head of Roehampton University’s Department of Dance (1992-2000) and Director of the Centre for Dance Research (1993-2011), Stephanie Jordan is currently (from 2020) Emeritus Research Professor in Dance.

With a background as dancer, musician, scholar and critic, Stephanie has written four books: Striding Out: Aspects of Contemporary and New Dance in Britain (1992), Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet (2000), Stravinsky Dances: Re-Visions across a Century (2007), and Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer (2015, with illustrative clips on the Mark Morris Dance Group website), all published by Dance Books.  Stephanie’s academic career has also led her to publish and present at conferences internationally: in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Russia, North America, and throughout Europe.

For Moving Music, she was awarded the 2001 Special Citation of the Dance Perspectives Foundation, New York, the major annual dance book award. In 2010, Stephanie was honoured with the award for Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance from the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD, USA). In three UK university research assessments (RAE/REF), her field of Music and Dance was specially commended as 5* equivalent (2001) or world-leading (2008 and 2014).

Stephanie has also edited Parallel Lines: Media Representations of Dance (with Dave Allen, 1993), Following Sir Fred's Steps: Ashton's Legacy (1996), Europe Dancing: Perspectives on Theatre Dance and Cultural Identity (with Andrée Grau, 2000) and Preservation Politics: Dance Revived, Reconstructed, Remade (2000). In 2002, her edited collection of writings by the Russian choreographer Fedor Lopukhov was published in the American series Studies in Dance History.

Stephanie's work on Stravinsky and dance began when she was commissioned by the George Balanchine Foundation, New York as project director for the analytical video Music Dances: Balanchine Choreographs Stravinsky (2002), working with dancers from New York City Ballet. Later, she compiled with Larraine Nicholas the database Stravinsky the Global Dancer: A Chronology of Choreography to the Music of Igor Stravinsky (2003). This was the foundation for Stravinsky Dances, which encompasses ballet, contemporary dance and radical, conceptual work of the twenty-first century.

Stephanie has received grants from the Radcliffe Trust, British Academy, the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland (for work in its Stravinsky archive), and Harvard University's John M. Ward Fellowship in Dance and Music for the Theatre. Grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Board/Council have supported the Stravinsky database and a second analytical DVD/video in collaboration with Geraldine Morris and The Royal Ballet entitled Ashton to Stravinsky (2004). To support research for her 2015 book on Mark Morris, Stephanie was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant.

For the Royal Opera House's 2004/5 season, Stephanie curated 'The Ashton Exchange', the first academic series in dance to be held there. Since 2007, she has written programme notes regularly for The Royal Ballet. In 2014, she was Visiting Scholar at San Francisco Ballet and in 2015, the Robert M Trotter Visiting Distinguished Professor in the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance.  In 2017 and 2018, she was lecturer/dramaturg for composer/choreographer workshops (Estancias Coreograficas) in Oviedo, Spain.  Stephanie's main teaching at Roehampton continues to lie in the area of research student supervision, but she has also contributed to the MA course Music and Dance.

A variety of committee and consultancy work includes the following: membership of the Arts Council Dance Panel, the judging panel for the Prudential Awards for the Arts, the Arts and Humanities Research Board/Council Postgraduate Panel and Strategic Reviewers' Group, and RAE/REF sub-panels in 2001, 2008 and 2014.  Stephanie has also been a board member for Studies in Dance HistoryDance Research and Dance Research Journal.

Contributions as a speaker and consultant for numerous television and radio programmes include: the 2002 BBC documentary on The Rite of Spring (repeated 2022) and 2022 broadcast of The Royal Ballet in Firebird and Les Noces; the BBC Radio 3 programme on The Rite of Spring (2013) and Radio 4 programme on Mark Morris (2014), and a Sky Arts South Bank Show Original on Morris (2018).

Stephanie’s recent research projects include re-visioning Chopin as a dance composer, in particular, examining the working processes of Richard Alston in his Chopin settings, the ballets of Jerome Robbins, and multiple musical re-readings of Les Sylphides.  She also co-edited with Richard Cohn (Yale University Music Department) an issue of Journal of Music Theory (Duke University Press), out in 2021.  The focus of this is on choreomusical analysis, a range covering both social and theatrical dance and featuring articles by five early-career American and Canadian researchers.  Meanwhile, Stephanie collaborates with Alston on a book about his choreographic career.  She also delivered a keynote lecture at the ‘Stravinsky Festival’, Louisiana State University (2022).

Qualifications

BMus (University of Birmingham), ARCM (Royal College of Music, piano performance), MA (UCLA), PhD (London University, Goldsmiths’ College)

Research interests

Choreomusical studies, dance history, dance analysis (ballet and modern dance)