Pylyshenko-Strasser Graduate Dance Award

Rose L. Strasser, professor emerita and founder of the Department of Dance at SUNY Brockport established the Pylyshenko-Strasser Graduate Dance Award at the College to recognize the department and its co-founder, Irma Pylyshenko.

Ms. Strasser earned her bachelor’s degree in 1929 and her master’s in 1932 at the University of Michigan, where she intended to major in science, but was encouraged to switch to physical education teacher education after joining the school’s field hockey team.

She became acquainted with dance at a young age when she was selected to present flowers to legendary ballerina Anna Pavlova during an appearance in Buffalo. She learned more about movement to music during evening classes from the American Gymnastics Union during high school. She taught high school in Buffalo and Keuka, attending summer workshops in dance. In summer 1938, she worked with Martha Graham at Bennington College, and in 1940, she attended a workshop at UCLA where she learned the Rumba, Tango, and Samba. She incorporated those dances into her physical education classes, which already included folk and square dancing.

She joined the Brockport faculty in 1946 at a time when the dance classes were part of the physical education department curriculum. Dance clubs were offered to general education students.

When the New York State Board of Regents changed the structure of the state’s 11 teachers’ college, creating liberal arts institutions in the 1960s, Ms. Strasser began positioning a potential dance department. President Albert Brown, who joined Brockport in 1965, supported arts education. He hired additional faculty in the creative arts, including associate professor Irma Pylyshenko, who in 1965 joined Ms. Strasser in laying the foundation for not only a dance department but a division of fine arts that would include theater, music, and art along with dance. Both the department and the division received approval, first by the faculty in 1966 and next by the Board of Regents in 1967.

Ms. Strasser was known as a legendary figure in dance education in the mid-twentieth century. Her tenure covered the history of dance at Brockport as well as the College’s transit from a teachers college to a comprehensive liberal arts school, noted Marguerite Hare Browne, emerita faculty member and an early member of the Advancement division, at the time of Ms. Strasser’s retirement in 1970. “Rose Strasser was part of the community’s heritage. She brought culture to Brockport,”
Mrs. Browne concluded. Rose Strasser passed away in 1998.

To qualify for the Pylyshenko-Strasser Graduate Dance Award, applicants must be matriculated students in the College’s Department of Dance, having completed at least nine academic hours, demonstrate high academic achievement, exhibit artistic and creative ability, and show evidence of service to the dance department in such areas as production, teaching, public relations, and/or administration.