Dance scholar Ramsay Burt reflects on issues around ethics and aesthetics that he observed at play in Rosemary Butcher’s work, remembering her particular way of collaborating through conversing in the studio and as a writer, and her ‘intimate process of creative responsiveness.’
Ramsay Burt is Professor Emeritus of Dance History at De Montfort University, UK. His publications include The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities (1995, revised 2007, 2022), Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, ‘Race’ and Nation in Early Modern Dance (1997), Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces (2006), with Valerie Briginshaw, Writing Dancing Together (2009), and Ungoverning Dance (2016), and with Michael Huxley Dance, Modernism, and Modernity (2020). In 2013-2014, with Professor Christy Adair, he undertook a two year funded research project into British Dance and the African Diaspora which culminated in an exhibition at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool; their jointly edited collection British dance: Black routes was published by Routledge. With Susan Foster, he is founder-editor of Discourses in Dance. In 1999 he was Visiting Professor at the Department of Performance Studies, New York University. Since 2008 he has been a regular visiting teacher at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. In 2010 he was Professeur Invité at l’Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis.
