Cornelius Carter, Professor of the Year - The Teach-Learn Connection - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, May, 2002 by Iris Fanger

WHEN CORNELIUS CARTER ACCEPTED THE PROFESSOR OF the Year award at a luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in November 2001, he understood that it was an honor to savor for his own achievements, but also one to share with college-level dance teachers throughout the country. [] Carter is the first dance academic to be chosen in the twelve years that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education have given the award. And to make the recognition even sweeter, Carter was picked to represent the doctoral and research universities, where previous recipients have been professors in subjects as weighty as history and physics. Dr. Lee Shulman, Carnegie Foundation president, said Carter was selected because his activities extend beyond the dance program to the university at large and into the community. "Cornelius made dance visible and meaningful across the campus as well as in the community. He did the sorts of things that made his colleagues take notice," said Shulman. "What is striking about Cornelius and his colleagues in the field of dance is that they profess in ways that make the learning public."

Carter has been teaching in the dance program at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa since 1992. He was promoted to associate professor in 1997 and received tenure a year later. With Carter's help, the dance program (part of the theater department) has grown from fifteen majors ten years ago to more than forty this year, plus a sizeable enrollment from the university at large. In addition to teaching courses in modern technique, jazz, and choreography, he directs the Alabama Repertory Dance Theatre, the company he founded to showcase the program's more advanced students. Last year Carter started a new course, "Body Politics in Dance," for the university-wide honors program, to explore the relationship of American dance figures to contemporary issues.

To meet Carter is to understand why he was singled out for the special honor. He's a hard-working, optimistic personality well known in Tuscaloosa on and off the campus, as well as among dance educators beyond Alabama.

Carter's teaching has taken him around the globe, including two visits to Russia with the American Dance Festival. He has taught at American Ballet Theatre's summer intensive programs, first at UA-Tuscaloosa and later in New York and Detroit, and served as a Harvard Summer Dance Center instructor and dean of students for four years. In 2001, he was choreographer in residence at the Ailey School summer intensive in New York City. Summer 2002 will find him in Seoul, South Korea, with ADF's international project. "I believe that my traveling has helped the University of Alabama dance program grow because I meet students who are attracted to study with us," he said.

For all his achievements, Carter hasn't forgotten his origins as a kid from rural Mississippi. He remembers his mentors and has become one himself, returning favors in kind, such as collaborating on dance productions at nearby Stillman College or working with Tuscaloosa's Central High School student performers. Carter's efforts reach beyond advice and teaching. While dean at Harvard Summer Dance Center, he raised funds for eight full scholarships that brought UA students to Cambridge each summer. Many of these students had never before traveled beyond the South.

"The majority of the students in the dance program come from rural communities in Alabama. They have not been exposed to the richness of a major cultural center, the performing arts in general, or to concert dance in particular," Carter stated. "I want to put these students on an even playing field."

Carter knows of what he speaks. Born in Greenville, Mississippi, Carter and his family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he ran track at Carver High School, an all-black school. During senior year, he worked as an usher at the Orpheum Theater, then home of a group called Mid-America, which staged workshop productions of black musicals. "I went to all the rehearsals and learned the dance parts. Someone got sick, so I had to go onstage in Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope," he said.

He was accepted on scholarship at the Conservatory of Theatre Arts at Webster University in St. Louis, and while there, apprenticed briefly in Katherine Dunham's company. After graduation, he joined the Cleo Parker Robinson company in Denver. A scholarship to the Ailey School brought him to New York, but soon after he moved on to a teaching job at a studio in Reykjavik, Iceland.

"The studio came to the Ailey studios to recruit faculty and I was hired. I knew right away that I wanted to teach," said Carter. "I wanted stability in my life." Carter stayed in Iceland for three years. When the studio sent him to study at the Harvard Summer Dance Center, Carter realized he wanted to teach at the college level. After earning an MFA from The University of Hawaii, he returned to Webster as an artist in residence, then joined the University of Alabama.