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Jan E. Van Dyke

Jan Van Dyke has wide experience as a producer and administrator, as well as an artist, and she has set her choreography on a variety of groups ranging from the Washington Ballet to students at the Western Australia Academy for the Performing Arts in Perth. Her work has earned support from agencies including the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She was recently honored by DANCE TEACHER magazine with the 2008 Dance Teacher Award for Higher Education and by the United Arts Council of Greensboro with the 2011 Betty Cone Medal of Arts. Van Dyke formerly directed a studio and company in Washington, D.C. for eight years, touring nationally with her company and as a solo artist. In 1989 she joined the UNCG dance faculty where she was Department Head from 2006-2011. After stepping down, she has continued to teach on the faculty. In addition, she is director of the Jan Van Dyke Dance Group, and co-founder and producer of the NC Dance Festival, a statewide touring showcase. A 1993 Fulbright Scholar, Van Dyke spent one semester teaching dance in Portugal and in 2000, she taught for term at the Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts. She was awarded a NC Arts Council Choreography Fellowship in 1993, and in 2001 the North Carolina Dance Alliance honored her with its annual award for Contributions to the Development of Dance in this state.

There are 12 included publications by Jan E. Van Dyke :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Art and Place: The Local Connection. 1999 205 I write to praise home-grown, local art--the kind of art that typically gets little respect, the kind we Americans have traditionally felt could not be as good as anything that comes in from out of town. I also write to make a case for the positive a...
Choreography as a Mode of Inquiry: a Case Study. 1998 248 This paper is a personal case study of the choreographic process, a subjective investigation of the creative process and the work produced. In addition, an attempt is made to relate the creative work of choreography to qualitative research, likening ...
Gender and Success in the American Dance World. 1996 413 This article will explore the relationship of gender to funding for dance in the United States. Historically a female field in this country, since the 1960s, dance in America has turned to men for its leadership. At about the same time, in 1965, the ...
Intention: Questions regarding its role in choreography 2001 9 What do you see when you watch a dance? Do you try to figure out what the choreographer was trying to say? Does that influence the way you evaluate the piece? Or do you limit your observations to the dance itself? These questions are at the heart of ...
An interpretive study of meaning in dance: Voices of young women students. 1988 316 This study attempts to gain understanding of how adolescent pre-professional dance students experience dance; a qualitative methodology is used. The researchers describe larger issues which emerge from the analysis, focusing primarily on how the stud...
Questioning Trends in Higher Education 2012 9 This article revisits ideas put forward at the beginning of an academic career and discusses the ways in which time and experience within academe has shifted my perspective. Specifically, focusing on the balance of artistic thinking with the widely p...
A Realistic Look at Graduating Dance Majors: Problems and Solutions 2010 12 My life in dance has had its share of indecision, relocation, changes in direction involving two returns to school, and many years of living poor. The circuitous route I took to stay in the field made me into entrepreneurial artist and teacher and fi...
Redefining Excellence 2009 5 I am writing in response to the recent series of editorials by Dr. Doug Risner dealing with the issue of equity in dance education. He looks critically at the choices dance programs are making: cutting out many liberal arts and education courses to e...
Smart Audiences Will Keep More Homegrown Artists at Home. 1998 88 I am writing in praise of home-grown, local art, the kind that typically gets little respect - the kind we Americans have traditionally felt couldn't be as good as anything from out of town. My interest stems from an exchange I had recently while def...
Teaching Choreography: Starting with Craft 2005 11 This is a report on teaching the first semester of college-level choreography with an emphasis on elements of craft. The philosophical and aesthetic issues that lie behind this choice are described and an attempt is made to explain the sequence of co...
Vanishing: Dance Audiences in the Postmodern Age 2010 13 Focusing on declining attendance at dance concerts in the United States, this essay raises questions about how we, as artists, are thinking about what we are doing in contemporary concert dance, what we value, how we teach, and the place of dance in ...
The Voices of Young Women Dance Students. 1990 573 What is dance and what is the experience of dancing? What does dancing mean for those who do it? Dance scholars and critics have written many words in response to these questions. Choreographers give their answers to "what is dance?" in the work they...