Selma Jeanne Cohen, 85; Dance Author, Scholar

Selma Jeanne Cohen, who brought the field of dance scholarship to a new level of visibility and respect with the publication in 1998 of the six-volume International Encyclopedia of Dance, has died. She was 85.

Cohen died Dec. 23 at her home in New York City, reportedly of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

In a field often dominated by cant and jargon, Cohen’s emphasis on key issues of performance and perception remained refreshing -- and brave. “Today we are confronted not only with a fantastic variety of annual creations but also -- thanks to the more extensive use of notation and film -- with a growing repertory of works from the past,” she wrote in 1982.

“We frequently now refer to the emergence of the versatile dancer.... We might also consider the desirability of cultivating the versatile audience, one that will adjust its sights to the work at hand, not wishing always that it were either more comfortably familiar or more provocatively avant-garde, but welcoming each opportunity to challenge the perception and enrich the sensibility.”

Cohen was born Sept. 18, 1920, in Chicago, took ballet lessons there and later sought out major teachers of modern dance. After attending elementary and high school at the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School, she pursued studies in English literature, receiving a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1946.

She taught English at the university from 1942 to 1946, then moved to UCLA for two years, and in 1953 began teaching dance history at the School of Performing Arts in New York City.

In the same period, she started contributing dance articles and reviews to the New York Times, the Saturday Review magazine and the Dance Observer, and then held a series of dance-related teaching positions at a number of colleges and universities, from 1963 to 1977.

Included were Connecticut College, New York University, Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College and University of Massachusetts. She also ran a number of workshops and conferences.

She served on the boards of the American Society for Aesthetics and the American Society for Theatre Research, received a Rockefeller grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship and became a member of the advisory panel on dance for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Besides writing for arts periodicals and reference books, Cohen became the American editor of “The Dictionary of Modern Ballet,” the managing editor and later the editor of Dance Perspectives magazine and the editor of the anthologies “The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief” (1966) and “Dance As a Theatre Art” (1974). She also was the author of the books “Stravinsky and the Dance” (1962), “Doris Humphrey: An Artist First” (1972) and “Next Week, Swan Lake” (1982).

After two decades of planning and many delays, her massive editing project, the International Encyclopedia of Dance, was published by Oxford University Press.

It was an “immeasurable” accomplishment, wrote Janice Ross in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. “There is now a new standard of accuracy and intellectual rigor that adds permanence to the achievements of this evanescent art form.”

Although more critical in its evaluation of the result, Robert Gottlieb’s review in the New York Times called the encyclopedia “a basis for all future endeavors.”

“People in the dance world have been rooting for Selma Jeanne Cohen for almost 25 years,” he wrote, “and she has held on with remarkable tenacity to her project. Because of her, and despite extraordinary obstacles, the encyclopedia now exists and the fact of its existence is the most important thing about it.”

After its publication, Cohen told the Chicago Tribune that she wouldn’t be writing anything else, except possibly a book on the aesthetics of the cat.

And the name of her cat?

Giselle, she said.