Ruth Solomon's Biography

s a performer Ruth Solomon has appeared on and off Broadway, on television, and in concerts throughout the United States, Canada, and Japan. She was for many years a permanent member and solo dancer with the Jean Erdman Dance Theater.

Ms. Solomon has created more than sixty works in her unique version of the modern dance idiom, in addition to staging and choreographing such diverse musical/dramatic productions as Euripides' Hecuba, Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat, and Brecht's Three Penny Opera. Her productions, based loosely on the lives and works of Egon Schiele and Dimitri Shostakovich, were done on dancers at SUNY-Potsdam and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

From 1967 to 1970 she was assistant director of the dance program at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. She then directed the dance program that she established in Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until her retirement in 1995.

Her highly successful teaching technique has been documented in an hour-long video, Anatomy as a Master Image in Training Dancers. After appearing as an invited speaker at the Olympic Scientific Congress in Seoul, South Korea (1988), she subsequently taught in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and Japan (1990-2002). She has also been a guest teacher on numerous college and university campuses in this country.

Ruth Solomon

Other aspects of Ms. Solomon's multi-faceted career are represented by her publications. Her articles on dance performance, administration, and pedagogy have appeared in Dance Magazine, Dance Teacher Now, Kinesiology and Medicine for Dance, and various other periodicals. Her research in dance medicine has produced publications in such medical journals as The Physician and Sports Medicine and The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. Her most extensive books are Prevention of Injuries in the Young Dancer (Springer International Publications 2017) Preventing Dance Injuries (Second Edition, Human Kinetics Books, 2005), Soviet-American Dance Medicine 1990 (AAHPERD Press, 1991), The New Faces of Dance Scholarship (AAHPERD Press, 1992), and East Meets West in Dance: Voices in the Cross-Cultural Dialogue (Gordon and Breach/Routledge Press, 1995). The Seventh Edition of her Dance Medicine & Science Bibliography, covering the literature in the field for the last 60 years and containing 4,453 citations, became available in January, 2017. She has also edited the Proceedings and Abstracts for the 2003-2013 annual conferences of the International Association for Medicine and Science (IADMS).

In recent years Ms. Solomon's research studies have appeared in Medical Problems of Performing Artists and the Journal of Dance Medicine & Science. Some of her latest publications include: “Surgical Posterior Ankle Decompression and Os Trigonum Resection in Dancers: Report of a Case Series and Review of the Literature” (in process), “Chronic Lower-Leg Compartment Syndrome in Young Athletes” (American Journal of Sports Medicine), “Arthroscopic Debridement of Hip Labral Tears in Dancers,” “Neurologic Back Injuries in Dancers,” a chapter in Sports Neurology (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott-Raven Publishers), “Psychological Issues in Dance Medicine” (a two-part Special Issue of the Journal of Dance Medicine & Science), and “Publications in Dance Medicine and Science: A Bibliographer's Perspective” (Medical Problems of Performing Artists).

She was the National Dance Association's “Scholar of the Year” for 1992, “Dance Professional of the Year” (1998), and “Heritage Honoree” (2003). She served on the Board of Directors of the International Association for Dance Medicine and Science from its inception in 1990 to 2010, and in 2007 was elected Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Dance Medicine & Science, and continues to serve in that capacity.

She has done annual three-month “residencies” under the direction of Dr. Lyle Micheli at the Division of Sports Medicine, Harvard Medical Center, Boston, for the last 39 years. She became a Certified Medical Assistant in 2003. During these residencies she conducted several major dance medicine studies utilizing as participants the dancers of the Boston Ballet. In 2010 she was named Honorary Fellow of the Division of Sports Medicine, Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical Center. In 2017 she was elected as a Fellow of the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science, and given “A Lifetime Achievement Award.”


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