Olga Maynard - Olga Maynard's Career

Olga Maynard's Career

In New York City she began ballet research as well as a long career as an educational reformer, particularly with regard to integration of theater arts into existing systems. In 1947 she left New York and Wibberley, to settle in Yuma, Arizona with E. R. Maynard. Absorbed by domestic matters in confining economic and cultural circumstances, she drew support and inspiration from friendship with dance teacher Merlyn Legge. Her family moved to La Mesa, California in 1955, where she wrote reviews and feature articles for The San Diego Union, and completed The Ballet Companion. Its success marked the beginning of her publishing career.

Following its delayed starting point, Olga Maynard’s career soon had its turning point. By the time of that first book publication (1957), she was already well into research for her major work, The American Ballet, which had been in the planning since her arrival in New York. Rather than a “how to look and how to listen” aid for beginners, or a collection of critical essays, this constituted a bold attempt to conceptualize all dance in America, from its native and colonial roots to its present, for its practitioners and its audience, and so to encourage its future. Of it Ted Shawn wrote that “what has lain, unformed in words, in the dance artists’ consciousness is made explicit here”, yet it was written from the point of view of an audience that she argued was distinctively American. With Agnes de Mille recommending the first book by an unknown as "a key, a talisman" for young dancers, and Shawn hailing the second as "an ideal catalytic agent between stage and audience", she was well-positioned for the beginning of the 'dance boom'.

Olga Maynard gained increasing university experience as guest lecturer at California State University Long Beach, the University of Utah, the University of Oregon and the University of California, Irvine. Although she continued to publish locally, by the mid-1960s, as part of a cultural growth of interest in dance, she had taken a national position as a writer on dance and theater arts, developing close friendships with such dance luminaries as Shawn and Maria Tallchief. Tallchief was the subject of the follow-up book, which was a particular “study of an American ballerina in her setting.” The next development of The American Ballet was its extension into her best selling book, American Modern Dancers. That book has a subtitle, “The Pioneers”, implying a sequel—perhaps as sketched in a “family tree” diagram at the end. But despite Maynard’s associations with Helen Tamiris, Katherine Litz, Pauline Koner, and Bruce King, such a 'sequel' would have to be conjectured from her subsequent articles on them, Merce Cunningham, Carolyn Brown and others, together with her final book, on Judith Jamison and Alvin Ailey. Her next two (overlapping) book projects brought her work back to basic issues of education and "how to look and how to listen".

The return to educational concerns was consolidated by a 1969 invitation to join the faculty of Eugene Loring's new, academically unique, professional Dance Department in Dean Clayton Garrison's School of Fine Arts, at University of California, Irvine (joined four years later by Antony Tudor). Garrison's and Loring's programs explicitly encouraged continuing contact with working artists, in dance and visual arts: an unusual arrangement, luckily ideal for balancing two of Maynard's vocations, and she settled permanently in Irvine, California. Able to put her ideas about humanities education into institutional setting, at UCI Maynard helped develop and taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in the MFA program, which she had originally written. Her courses included dance history and aesthetics, elements of performing, opera, criticism, research and bibliography. She conducted graduate seminars as well as large lecture courses, courses for the University of California Extension system, and lectured at UC-Berkeley. She continued in this post, as Full Professor, also serving on the University Senate, executive committee for community education, and Chancellor's advisory committee on minority affairs, until 1989.

Given the School's professional policies, in this period Professor Maynard wrote articles and shorter pieces, and made frequent trips within North America and abroad (significantly including the Soviet bloc and Cuba) as interviewer, dance jurist, critic, conference participant, researcher and lecturer. She studied tsarist repertoire with Peter Gusev, director of the Leningrad Choreographic Institute, and observed and commented upon not only international theater dance but also—returning to her roots--'world dance' of ethnic or folk derivations. Among choreographers with whom she worked closely on issues of history, period and style were George Balanchine, Robert Joffrey, Gerald Arpino, John Neumeier, Norbert Vesak. Her “lauds and laurels” at UCI include those for professional achievement (1981) and distinguished teaching (1987). For her support of racial minorities in the arts, she received a Rainbow award, also an award from the English-Speaking Union for promoting international understanding. The gala for her postponed UCI retirement was to be attended by leading choreographers and dancers.

University activity corresponded with a decline in Olga Maynard's book production. Having published six books in eleven years, she published just one more in her last twenty-six. This was to an extent offset by her shorter publications during the university years, mostly in what had become the dance periodical of record, Dance Magazine. Although she had written more than twenty earlier pieces for that journal, beginning in 1970, when William Como assumed the post of Editor-in-Chief of Dance, she averaged one publication a month, for six years. Some of these articles—particularly those in Como's and Richard Philp's "Portfolio" series, printed on heavy stock paper, with the art design of Herbert Migdoll--amount to research monographs, still advertised independently on websites. This was at a time in which the developing dance world constituted something like a 'world', with not only a spatial span but a sense of past and future, because, while journalism kept it before the general public, Dance helped to coordinate it internally.

The death of her husband in 1984, along with changes in the dance and university scenes, marked Olga Maynard's relative withdrawal from public appearance and publication. The personal loss was chief among a series over seven years, from Loring and Balanchine through Como and Robert Joffrey, and the onset of the AIDS epidemic, which struck the dance world with special vehemence.