Dance Professor Miriam Phillips on ACE's Choreometrics Advisory Board

Congratulations to Professor Miriam Phillips, who was recently invited by Anna Lomax Wood to join the Choreometrics Advisory Board for the Association of Cultural Equity (ACE) and the Global Jukebox!

Congratulations to Professor Miriam Phillips, who was recently invited by Anna Lomax Wood to join the Choreometrics Advisory Board for the Association of Cultural Equity (ACE) and the Global Jukebox!

Choreometrics is the project launched in the 1960s by Alan Lomax, Forrestine Paulay, and Irmgard Bartenieff to study dances around the world as formalized, culturally conditioned communicative behavior. TDPS Dance professor Karen Bradley and Phillips are both working with the Choreometrics team to digitize Lomax's film clips (currently housed at the Library of Congress) and make these valuable records readily accessible to the general public for analysis and annotation. Global Jukebox is a project that makes music recordings from Lomax's larger and more widely known Cantometrics project available online through an interactive interface that catalogues the recordings by region and culture. 

In addition, Professor Phillips' chapter "Spectacle of Ethnicities: The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival" was published in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity, along with TDPS Dance MFA alumna Ana Patricia Farfán's "San Miguel the Arcángel, Capitan of Many Troops: An Ethno-iconographic Study of Danza de Migueles." Professor Phillips mentored Ana throughout her 3 years in the MFA Dance program at TDPS, helping her develop her research from an early idea in coursework, to a conference presentation, and finally to a published book chapter.

She was also invited to write a new introduction to Alan Lomax’s long awaited book on the Choreometrics system, soon to be published by Wesleyan University Press.

Great news all around, Professor Phillips!