Bessie Awards -The New York Dance and Performance Awards LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT IN DANCE awarded to WACD Adjunct Professor Simone Forti. For her revolutionary, fearless, and widely influential approach to movement, pushing the boundaries of what dance could be–in her dance constructions and improvised work. For years of investigation into the human body in motion, finding poetry in gravitational forces, the movement of animals, and the natural world.

IN MEMORIAM: ‘POLLY’ NOOTER ROBERTS, ART HISTORIAN AND SCHOLAR OF AFRICAN ART ROBERTS’ LEGACY LIVES ON IN THE LIVES SHE TOUCHED AND HER CULTURAL CONTRIBUTIONS

Mary “Polly” Nooter Roberts, UCLA professor of world arts and cultures/dance, died peacefully in her sleep at home on Tuesday, Sept. 11. She was 59, and had been living with stage four metastatic breast cancer for more than eight years. Roberts was trained as an art historian and became one of the world’s foremost scholars of African arts. She focused her research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she undertook long-term dissertation research among Luba peoples, and in Senegal, where she conducted field research on the arts of a local Sufi movement called the Mouride Way.

In new book, professor explores the benefits of physical play like martial arts. Q&A with Janet O’Shea, UCLA professor of dance, about ‘Risk, Failure, Play: What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training.’ O’Shea, has dedicated her life and career to the study and performance of dance. Inspired by martial artist Bruce Lee in the 1970s and armed with years of dance training, O’Shea began more recently to practice jeet kune do, the martial art that Lee created.