Women Choreographers established during the height of the U.S. AIDS pandemic

answer: 

Proquest Genderwatch database gets 3 hits for the search: women choreographer*, including 'Women Dancers Don't Lead: Gender inequities inform world of dance' by Mayers, Dara. Women's Times. Great Barrington: Jul 31, 2001. Vol. 8, Iss. 10; p. 4 . The search: choreographer* and (hiv or aids) gets 84 hits, including that one, but no others that seem helpful.

In Women’s Studies International (Ebsco) the search: women choreographer* gets 36 hits, but nothing closer to this subject than a dissertation: "The Emerging Prominence of Women Choreographers in the American Musical Theatre: A History and Analysis", By: Graves, Kerry Lee. Dissertation Abstracts International. Section A: Humanities and Social Sciences, April 2002, Vol. 62 Issue 10, p3241-3241, 231p. None of the 3 hits for: women and choreograph* and (hiv or aids) seem to relate the epidemic to trends in women as choreographers. In the Women and Contemporary Issues database, the 28 hits for: women and choreograph* and (hiv or aids) are similarly very unpromising.

Proquest Dissertations gets 3 hits for: women and choreograph* and (hiv or aids), including "Dancing up the broken ladder: The rise of the female director/choreographer in the American musical theatre"
by Lodge, Mary Jo Michelle, Ph.D., Bowling Green State University, 2001, 312 pages; AAT 3038417. The abstract mentions "...the breakdown of the Broadway "boy's club"" and "...the deaths of many male director/choreographers due to many factors, including the devastating AIDS crisis." If you are far from a university that has the full text online subscription to Proquest Dissertations, you would still have a fairly good chance of borrowing this dissertation on Interlibrary Loan. The search: women choreographer* gets 4 hits, including the dissertation found by the same search in Women’s Studies International, noted above, Emerging Prominence of Women Choreographers in the American Musical Theatre: A History and Analysis By: Graves, Kerry Lee. But its abstract doesn’t mention AIDS or HIV.

Web searches seem to suggest there is very little out there on this. Google gets 35 hits for: "women choreographers" hiv (including 2 from your question in Radical Reference!). The search: "women choreographers" aids (185 hits) looks pretty doubtful. Limiting it: "women choreographers" aids site:edu (40 hits) does not seem promising, even when using CTRL-F (find in page) to zero in on the words. Google Scholar gets 355 hits for: women choreographers hiv; but it might be wiser to first try the simple short phrase search: "women choreographers"(30 hits).

Finally, even newspapers seem to turn up very little: women choreographers and hiv gets 5 hits in the Full Text of Lexis Academic, "US Newspapers and Wires". Limiting to "headline, lead paragraph, indexing, all available dates", the broader search: women and choreographers and hiv gets 25 hits. So this does appear to be a subject that has not been explored very much. Most of what there is will need to be ordered on interlibrary loan, unless you are near a VERY big academic library. Those dissertations cost at least $29.00 if ordered from Proquest, so you would probably want to try ILL first, though they each are probably only at one library nationwide - at the university where they were done.

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