Congress on Research in Dance

• 1. Introduction

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  The Congress on Research in Dance, known by its initials as CORD, began in 1964 under a far more modest name. It was a committee. Over the following decades it grew into a professional organization for dance historians in the United States and around the world. It gathered scholars, performers and choreographers under one roof, and it left behind a journal, a roster of prize winners and an archive. How does a committee become a congress? What did a society of dance researchers actually do for its members? Who earned its highest honors? And why does an organization with a record like this no longer exist under its own name? The answers begin with a series of addresses, incorporation papers and a change of name.

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• 2. Members and Homes

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  In 1969, the young group was formally incorporated as a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. Eight years later, in 1977, it adopted the name Congress on Research in Dance. By then it had been based at New York University since its founding. Its membership generally included performers, choreographers, artists and dance academics from colleges and universities. CORD described itself as an international non-profit learned society for dance researchers, artists, performers and choreographers. It sponsored annual conferences where those groups could meet, and it gave awards for scholarship and for contributions to the field. In 1991, the organization moved to the State University of New York College at Brockport. In 2007, its national office passed into the care of Prime Management Services, based in Birmingham, Alabama. Today the official records of CORD are held at the University of Maryland, in its Special Collections in Performing Arts.

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• 3. The Dance Research Journal

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  The Dance Research Journal began life in 1969 under a plainer title, CORD News. It grew into a peer-reviewed academic journal that appears three times a year. Its pages carry scholarly articles, book reviews and other reports of interest to dance researchers. Its main orientation is toward the historical and critical theory of dance. For much of its life it was published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Congress on Research in Dance. Its articles were abstracted and indexed in a long list of databases, among them Academic Search Premier, Humanities Index, ProQuest and Expanded Academic. Dancers and historians looking for specialist coverage could also find it in the Index to Dance Periodicals and the International Index to Performing Arts.

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• 4. Honoring the Field

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  In 1995, CORD gave its first Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research award to Carl Wolz. A year later, in 1996, it began the Outstanding Contribution to Dance Research award with Joann Kealiinohomoku. Winners of the contribution prize in the following years included Ann Hutchinson Guest in 1997 and Kapila Vatsyayan in 1998. Later recipients included Ivor Guest, Deborah Jowitt, Sally Banes and Joan Acocella. In 2007 the prize went to Robert Farris Thompson. The leadership award honored figures such as Selma Jeanne Cohen in 1997, and Katherine Dunham and Anna Halprin together in 2005. In 2006 it was shared by Elsie Ivancich Dunin and Allegra Fuller Snyder. The leadership prize is now known as the Dixie Durr Award for Outstanding Service to Dance Research. In 2009, neither award was given. In 2016, the contribution prize was awarded in memoriam to Randy Martin. The society also gave an Outstanding Book award, and one recipient was Marta Savigliano. The final contribution prize went to Thomas F. DeFrantz, and the final leadership prize to Ann Cooper Albright, both in 2017.

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• 5. A Merger in 2017

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  In 2017, CORD joined forces with the Society of Dance History Scholars. Together they formed the Dance Studies Association, or DSA. The merger ended CORD as a separate organization after more than fifty years. Its work did not stop. The Dance Research Journal is now published on behalf of the Dance Studies Association. The awards that CORD created have also been absorbed into the DSA. What began in 1964 as a committee of researchers now continues inside a larger society of dance scholars.

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