Dance Perspectives Foundation.

The Dance Perspectives Foundation was founded in 1966 as an organization devoted to supporting dance scholarship, through publishing academic and reference works, sponsoring lectures and conferences, and providing research and travel grants to dance scholars. Founding members included dance scholar Selma Jeanne Cohen, editor and artist Karl Leabo, Julliard Director of Dance Martha Hill, Wesleyan University press editor José Rollins de la Torre Bueno, and dance critic Edwin Denby.

From 1966 to 1977, the foundation published Dance Perspectives, a quarterly journal of international dance history founded in 1958 and edited by Cohen. Beginning in 1973, the foundation, in conjunction with the de la Torre Bueno family, awarded the annual de la Torre Bueno Prize for dance studies publications. In 2001, the family and the foundation parted ways, and the Society of Dance History Scholars took over administration of the prize.

In 1976, the Dance Perspectives Foundation received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to create a comprehensive scholarly reference work covering the history of dance, after the idea was proposed at a 1974 meeting of the Dance Critics Association. Following an initial planning conference attended by leading dance scholars, an editorial board, with Cohen as editor-in-chief, was appointed to oversee creation and publication of a multi-volume work titled the International Encyclopedia of Dance, with articles commissioned by dance experts from around the world. As the number of articles and associated costs grew, the foundation bolstered their NEH funding with both corporate grants and individual donations.

The project was plagued by financial and editorial troubles, due to the difficulty of providing adequate translations, fact-checking, and proof-reading of the highly specialized, non-English articles; complications regarding the book's illustrations and index; and friction between the foundation board, editorial board, and the encyclopedia's publishers. Originally set to be published by Scribner's in 1983, publication was delayed several times, and after Scribner's merged with Macmillan in 1984, discontent between the editorial board and publishers grew, particularly after a number of manuscripts and documents were lost during the publisher's move to new offices. After a series of failed negotiations, Macmillan terminated the publication agreement in 1987. In 1988, the foundation signed a new contract with the University of California Press, but this was canceled in 1993 after a budget crisis in California forced state university cutbacks. In 1994, Oxford University Press took on the project, eventually publishing the six-volume work in 1998.

From the guide to the Dance Perspectives Foundation records, 1966-2003, 1976-1998, (The New York Public Library. Jerome Robbins Dance Division.)