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Allegra Kent to Lead Off Department of Dance's New Monday Evening Series "On Dance: Conversations, Films, Lectures"

New York, N.Y. - Former New York City Ballet star Allegra Kent leads off the Barnard College Department of Dance's new Monday evening series "ON DANCE: CONVERSATIONS, FILMS, LECTURES" at 7:30 p.m., on October 30, in the Julius Held Lecture Hall, 304 Barnard Hall, Broadway at 117th Street.

Kent, who created roles in Episodes, Ivesiana, Seven Deadly Sins, Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet, and numerous other Balanchine works, danced with the company for thirty years, most of them as a principal dancer. She will be interviewed by dance faculty member and New Republic dance critic Mindy Aloff, in a "Conversation" that will include rare footage of her career as a Balanchine ballerina and muse.

Additional events include:

Monday, November 13
Dance faculty member Lourdes Lopez, who retired from the New York City Ballet in 1997 after a long and distinguished career, joins Adjunct Professor of Dance, Lynn Garafola, the series curator, to speak about ballet in Cuba. Born in Havana, Lopez studied with Cuban teachers in Florida before completing her training at the School of American Ballet in New York City. Since 1997, when she returned to Cuba as a cultural reporter for WNBC-TV, she has paid several visits to the country of her birth, mostly recently in October. Her talk will be accompanied by video.

Monday, November 20
A former dance faculty member Elena Kunikova joins Garafola for a "Conversation" with video cosponsored by Columbia University's Harriman Institute. A graduate of the Vaganova Institute in St. Petersburg and a former principal dancer with the Maly Theatre Ballet, Kunikova is a leading exponent of Russian classical style. She has staged works from the classical repertory for companies throughout the United States and is much sought after as a teacher and a coach.

Monday, January 29, 2001
"ON DANCE" resumes with a film lecture by Thomas F. DeFrantz, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on Alvin Ailey's forty-year-old masterpiece Revelations. DeFrantz, who has taught at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, is the editor of Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, which will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2001. He is at work on a book-length study of Ailey.

Monday, March 5, 2001
Sally Banes, Marian Hannah Winter Professor of Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will speak on Yvonne Rainer, the Judson Dance Theater choreographer and feminist filmmaker. Banes is the author of Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage as well as books about postmodern dance and the 1960s avant-garde, including Terpsichore in Sneakers, Democracy's Body, and Greenwich Village 1963.

Monday, April 9, 2001
The series ends with an evening of vintage films of Martha Graham. Introduced by Donlin Foreman, Associate Professor of Dance and former principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company, the program will include A Dancer's World, the 1957 documentary by Peter Glushanok, and two of Graham's most celebrated works, Lamentation and Appalachian Spring. Graham appears in all three films.

All events begin at 7:30 p.m. and take place in the Julius Held Auditorium, 304 Barnard Hall, Broadway at 117th Street, New York City.

"ON DANCE: CONVERSATIONS, FILMS, LECTURES" is free and open to members and friends of the Barnard College community. Contact: Lynn Garafola, Department of Dance, 212-854-2995 or Petra Tuomi, Associate Director of Public Affairs, 212-854-7907