Olga Maynard As A Dance Scholar and Critic
Testimony from the dance world shows that Olga Maynard was recognized as a literary artist among them, who devoted her talents to giving them voice. She gave many lecture/demonstrations with dance companies, notably with the Robert Joffrey Ballet, and her counsel was particularly helpful to the two major ballet companies in Canada, The National Ballet of Canada and The Royal Winnipeg Ballet, as well as to individual performers such as Rudolph Nureyev. Her writing, lectures and activities celebrated dancing more than ‘the dance’, and, although she considered herself an aesthetician, she had no interest in critical writing for its own sake, or in theories about it.
Maynard’s is also a rare case, in any art form, of a leading contemporary critic who is also an active field-research historian of the art, working through library sources, interviews and personal papers of contemporaries. This has two implications. First, unlike most American critics of the time, she had cultural knowledge and affinity regarding European and Russian history, including all their arts, and travelled extensively. Second, aside from her interpretations and evaluations, her publications are characterized by precision, fact-checked names and dates, which alone give them permanent value, notably regarding events and careers. Few arts critics of that period also taught graduate courses on bibliography. Her writings—particularly her books—are again unusual to art criticism by their roots in education, academically from children through studio and graduate work, within a dance community that she helped to inform and to maintain, and also for general audiences that support the arts.
A final feature, understandably overlooked, is that Olga Maynard was a fusion not only of disparate features, but of powerful ones—including features that American society, with its tendency to look east and west for its influences, neglects: South America. While she published mostly on Western concert dance, Olga Maynard’s early interests in Afro-Caribbean and other dances of the West Indies and Brazil were formative: her analytic discernment linked with a memory of sensuous particularity, shaping her words and phrases.
All period and regional styles are embraced by her remark, “Dancing is a serious, an honorable, a noble profession.”
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