Dance's New Encyclopedia.

The eagerly awaited appearance of the International Encyclopedia of Dance was a major event in the dance world. This month we publish the first of three reviews by journalists of this long-delayed major reference work.

Publication of the International Encyclopedia of Dance came only at the end of a struggle worthy of The Perils of Pauline. Indeed, the successful appearance in print of this handsome six-volume set from Oxford University Press, the third publisher involved, brought huzzahs. Here at last--after twenty-four years of confusion and delay--was an authoritative voice in the unruly world of dance scholarship. All dance. Every-where. What if it cost $1,250? Oxford touts it as "the definitive reference on dance throughout history and around the world"--2,000 articles, 2,200 illustrations, coverage of more than 100 countries, contributions by more than 650 experts, and a total of some 4,000 pages. Who could ask for anything more?

Frustrated users, that's who. After initial euphoria over the many authoritative articles by acknowledged experts, IED readers will soon want to know who designed this thing. What encyclopedia was the model?

The obvious model would have been The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Macmillan, 1980, the sixth edition, familiarly known as Grove 6 or the New Grove). Despite the title, Grove is a twenty-volume encyclopedia that treats music and dance as kindred forms and covers performing arts outside Western European traditions as extensively as it does those within it.

There is no indication that IED editors even looked at Grove 6. To the eternal gratitude of researchers everywhere, Grove 6 provides detailed and extensive lists of works for composers. IED not only fails to provide a list of works for every noted choreographer, composer, and scenic designer, but regularly fails to provide any adequate substitute. For example, Rouben Ter-Amtunian, one of the great scenic artists, receives scant credit for his breadth and range in his entry. His biographer dutifully mentions that he worked with George Balanchine, Paul Taylor, Martha Graham, and Glen Tetley.

Actually Ter-Arutunian designed, as far as my own very sketchy investigation shows, some thirty-nine ballets, and he also worked with Jerome Robbins, Lew Christensen, Leon Danielian, John Taras, Brian Macdonald, John Butler, Dennis Nahat, Todd Bolender, Alvin Ailey, Eliot Feld, and Gerald Arpino. The Balanchine entry mentions only five collaborations: The Seven Deadly Sins, Harlequinade, Variations pour une Port et une Soupir, Vienna Waltzes, and The Nutcracker. It could have doubled that number.

Fortunately Balanchine is already documented in Choreography by George Balanchine; A Catalogue of Works (Eakins Press, 1984; revised edition Viking, 1983). Admittedly, it runs some 400 pages, but I notice that extensive creativity didn't stop Grove 6 in the case of such extraordinarily prolific composers as Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn. The grid system used in The Grove Dictionary of Opera (Macmillan, 1992), an offshoot of Grove 6, would condense such information. For dance collaborations, the grid could include the company or artist(s) of the premiere, the scenic designer, and revised versions.

Of course, a list of works is not possible when dealing with a still-living choreographer, but surely IED editors could have done better by, say, Twyla Tharp; only seventeen of her dances are mentioned in passing, but she already has sixty-five listed in the Dictionary Catalog of the Dance Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

The IED reader must cope with other quirks. Instead of running biographical entries in alphabetical order, the editors have hidden some within other articles. You can turn to Tallchief and find a nice entry on Maria, but nothing about sister Marjorie, who also had a long career. Could this be because Maria was married to the all-but-sainted Balanchine, while Marjorie had no such alliance? To find information on Marjorie, one must refer to the IED index--cumbersome and, in this case, inexcusable. It should be noted that neither Grove nor Encyclopaedia Britannica bothers with an index.

What about dance awards? Tharp is credited with two of some importance, the 1990 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award and a 1981 Dance Magazine Award. What are these? Neither is listed in the index, but if these honors are worth citing, shouldn't there be some indication of their worth in the dance world? Also missing: the Isadora Duncan Award, the Obie Award, the Ingram Merrill Award, the Capezio Dance Award, the Bessie, and the Emmy.

Then there is the problem of translation. Should it be Die sieben todsunden or Les sept peches capitaux or The Seven Deadly Sins? The index makes readers go to the English title and then lists choreographers who have done versions. And what about the reader who wants to know the plot? Wishful thinking. There is no consistent approach to the synopses of works. Grove Opera is particularly good on the libretto of Sins. I suggest xeroxing that entry and taping it between the pages of the IED.

Anyone merely paging through the IED soon gets skittish. Petty annoyances such as typos abound. There's no entry under sociology except in the index, and that entry doesn't really refer you to anything about the dancer in society, economic prospects, or professional concerns. There are no entries for such major dancers as Ann Reinking, Merrill Ashley, Darci Kistler, Christopher Gillis, Virginia Johnson, Peter Boal, Susan Jaffe, Sylvie Guillem, or Darcey Bussell. Romeo and Juliet has an entry but not A Midsummer Night's Dream (up to 140 Dream ballets are listed by the New York Public Library). No entry for carol or carole, a song-dance form of the Middle Ages (the origin of Christmas carols), yet bunraku--puppet theater!--has one; the word dance occurs only twice in the article, and the illustration is so indistinct as to be useless (an all-too-common occurrence, unfortunately).

What is most disturbing about the IED is its decided bias toward historical and scholarly contributors. Mere critics need not apply. Yet where do scholars inevitably go to read about how a choreographer, company, or dancer was received? It's a slap in the face to noted critics such as Arlene Croce, whose collected columns are terrific reading still, or Clive Barnes or Doris Hering to be relegated to a mere mention in an article. The popular press also gets short shrift, despite its regular coverage of such vital matters as labor issues, injuries, and education. I notice that profiles drawn from Dance Magazine figure prominently in many IED bibliographies, yet this magazine and the influence of its writers and editors on twentieth-century dance are all but ignored. Another example of this historical-scholarly bias is the inadequate consideration of U.S. regional dance; Miami City Ballet, for example, is mentioned only in the Edward Villella entry.

Even after making an allowance for the disorganization that undoubtedly came from the scramble just to get the IED into print, the result can charitably be called only an earnest effort. The rule of thumb in publishing circles is that an encyclopedia is revised about every generation, say, twenty or thirty years. (A Grove 7 is already in the works.) There's need for much revision here, but Oxford has one advantage: Because it has published Horst Koegler's Concise Oxford Dictionary of Ballet (1987), it could incorporate Koegler's entries as a starting point. Certainly that user-unfriendly index should be dropped; a good substitute would be a listing of technical dance terms, including foreign ones, with page references, as Grove 6 does for musical terms. Above all, the revised IED should aim, as does the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for the maximum in authority, coverage, readability, objectivity, and accessibility.

Glenn Giffin, dance critic for the Denver Post for twenty-eight years, is also curator of the Carson-Brierly Dance Library at the University of Denver.