NDT in NYC

NEW YORK CITY   Nederlands Dans Theater returns to New York City Center for the first time since Emily Molnar took the helm. William Forsythe’s N.N.N.N. is joined by a pair of U.S. premieres: Imre and Marne van Opstal’s The Point Being and Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar’s Jakie. April 3–6. nycitycenter.org. —Courtney Escoyne

Centering Latina Voices

SAN FRANCISCO  The Carmen premiering at San Francisco Ballet this month won’t look or sound the same as usual. Choreographer Arielle Smith (a 2022 “25 to Watch” pick) sets the tale in contemporary Cuba—specifically at the family restaurant to which the titular heroine returns with her new husband after the death of her mother—while refocusing the story on Carmen and emphasizing the depth and complexity of the characters with cinematic flair. Escamillo, whom Carmen falls in love with, is recast as a woman, and the new score by Arturo O’Farrill only references the familiar Bizet opera as it layers in Cuban folk music. Joining the new ballet on the Dos Mujeres program is Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Frida Kahlo–inspired Broken Wings (which SFB artistic director Tamara Rojo commissioned and starred in during her English National Ballet tenure). The evening marks the first double bill choreographed by women and the first full program dedicated to Latinx stories at SFB. April 4–14. sfballet.org. —CE

Eclipsing All Else

NEW YORK CITY  Ahead of the Great North American Eclipse on April 8, the feath3r theory alights at NYU Skirball to premiere a devised dance theater work about a group of friends who team up to watch the celestial event and miss it. Raja Feather Kelly draws on Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, the popularity of the science fiction concept of the multiverse, and the ways social media exacerbates loneliness and society’s inability to face it for The Absolute Future (or Death, Loneliness, and The Absolute Future of the Multiverse, or How to Cover the Sun with Mud). April 5–6. nyuskirball.org. —CE

Carnival of Politics

SEATTLE  Choreographed and directed by Francesca Harper and performed by dancer Wendy Whelan and poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Carnival of the Animals reframes the Camille Saint-Saëns classic to consider the animals of a political jungle as it responds to the January 6 insurrection and contemplates the future of democracy. The SOZO-produced work premieres at the Meany Center for the Performing Arts on April 6. sozoartists.com. —CE

Memories of Matriarchs

HOUSTON  With three “Bessie” Awards, the Rome Prize, and a sumptuous stage presence, Jasmine Hearn is one of the most acclaimed contemporary dance artists to come out of Houston. But Memory Fleet: A Return to Matr, a performance, installation, and online archive that preserves the memories of eight Black Houston matriarchs, is their first major commission in their hometown. Commissioned by DiverseWorks, the multidisciplinary project includes original sound scores, choreography, and garments, along with guest performances by former Houston Ballet soloist Sandra Organ Solis and additional vocals and performances by local dancers and “Houston Aunties,” as Hearn calls them. The premiere at Houston Met April 6–7 will be followed by tours to Pittsburgh and New York City. diverseworks.org. —Nancy Wozny

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

COSTA MESA, CA  American Ballet Theatre presents the North American premiere of Woolf Works, Wayne McGregor’s three-act meditation on the writings of Virginia Woolf, at Segerstrom Center for the Arts. Inspired by her novels Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves as well as her letters and diaries, the critically acclaimed ballet eschews narrative adaptation to take a stream of consciousness approach to the modernist writer’s oeuvre. April 11–14. abt.org. —CE

Packed With Premieres

CHICAGO  South Chicago Dance Theatre returns to the Auditorium Theatre for an evening filled to the brim with premieres by Donald Byrd, Joshua Blake Carter, Monique Haley, Tsai Hsi Hung, Terence Marling, and founding executive artistic director Kia Smith. April 27. southchicagodancetheatre.com. —CE

The Weight of a Lie

ZURICH  Cathy Marston brings her penchant for literary adaptation to Atonement, her first new work as Ballett Zürich’s director. In Ian McEwan’s novel and Joe Wright’s acclaimed film adaptation, teenage writer Briony Tallis tells a deliberate lie about her older sister’s lover and spends the rest of her life attempting to make up for its unintended consequences. Marston transfers the action to the world of ballet, making Tallis a choreographer while wrestling with the story’s questions about the fallibility of memory and the nature of self-deception and guilt. April 28–June 7. opernhaus.ch. —CE

A Jazzy Centennial

Dance artists join the nationwide celebration of iconic jazz drummer and composer Max Roach.

Max Roach 100 at The Joyce Theater

NEW YORK CITY  Richard Colton curated The Joyce Theater’s Max Roach 100 program, which will feature a new work to Roach’s Percussion Bitter Sweet album by Ronald K. Brown for Malpaso Dance Company and EVIDENCE, A Dance Company; Rennie Harris Puremovement in The Dream/It’s Time; and a solo by tap star Ayodele Casel set to a series of duets by Roach and Cecil Taylor. April 2–7. joyce.org. —CE

Bill T. Jones at Harlem Stage

NEW YORK CITY  Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company revisits Degga, a 1995 collaboration between Jones, Max Roach, and Toni Morrison, as part of Harlem Stage’s E-Moves program. Also on offer is a new work by Roderick George. April 19–20. harlemstage.org. —CE

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Comings & Goings

At San Francisco Ballet, Jasmine Jimison has been promoted to principal.

At Carolina Ballet, Joseph Gerhardt has been promoted to principal.

At Paris Opéra Ballet, Bleuenn Battistoni has been promoted to étoile.

At Miami City Ballet, Taylor Naturkas has been promoted to principal soloist, Brooks Landegger and Satoki Habuchi to soloist.

At American Ballet Theatre, Jarod Curley, Carlos Gonzales, and Jake Roxander have been promoted to soloist.

At Boston Ballet, Daniel Durrett, Lauren Herfindahl, and Sangmin Lee have been promoted to soloist, Kaitlyn Casey and Courtney Nitting to second soloist.

At Colorado Ballet, Leah Rose McFadden and Jessica Payne have been promoted to principal, beginning with the 2024–25 season.

English National Ballet répétiteur Antonio Castilla has been named associate artistic director at San Francisco Ballet, beginning in June. He succeeds Kerry Nicholls, who has been named director of artist development, beginning in May.

Taja Cheek has been named artistic director of Performance Space New York, sharing leadership with senior director Pati Hertling and associate director Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda-Echegaray.

Ilter Ibrahimof will step down as artistic director of Fall For Dance North in October, after the festival’s 2024 edition.

Deborah S. Brant has been appointed president and CEO of Cincinnati Ballet after serving in both roles in an interim capacity following Scott Altman’s departure at the end of 2023.

National Ballet of Canada executive director Barry Hughson will step down at the end of the 2023–24 season to join American Ballet Theatre in the same role, effective July 1.

Orlando Ballet executive director Cheryl Collins will part ways with the company at the end of the 2023–24 season. Artistic director Jorden Morris will serve as interim executive director while the search for her successor is underway.

The American Tap Dance Center will close its doors on June 30. This summer’s Tap City, American Tap Dance Foundation’s annual festival, has been canceled, and the non-profit will downsize.

Awards & Honors

Bril Barrett and the Zuni Olla Maidens were named 2024 National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellows, which includes a $25,000 prize.

Pam Tanowitz will receive the 2024 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award, which includes a $25,000 unrestricted grant, at the Pillow’s season opening gala on June 22.

Ishmael Houston-Jones will receive the American Dance Festival’s 2024 Balasaraswati/Joy Anne Dewey Beinecke Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching, which includes a $5,000 honorarium, on June 30.

Alice Sheppard and taisha paggett are among the recipients of Spring-Summer 2024 MacDowell Fellowships.

Iana Salenko was awarded the honorary title of Berlin Chamber Dancer.

Recipients of Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (“Izzies”) for the 2022–23 performance season included Rogelio Lopez and Danielle Rowe (Outstanding Achievement in Choreography or Direction, Entre Despierto y Dormido and MADCAP, respectively); Jin Lee Baobei, Lawrence Chen, and Nicole Townsend (Outstanding Achievement in Performance — Individual); Joseph A. Hernandez and Kelsey McFalls (Outstanding Achievement in Performance — Ensemble, Natasha Adorlee’s Blooming Flowers and the Full Moon); Los Lupeños de San José (Outstanding Achievement in Performance — Company, Yahir Padilla’s Ritos y Costumbres); and San Francisco Playhouse (Outstanding Achievement in Restaging/Revival/Reconstruction, A Chorus Line). Rena Butler, Dance Mission Theater, and José Ome Mazati and Debb Kajiyama of NAKA Dance Theater received Special Achievement Awards. Dimensions Dance Theater, Nancy Karp, and Robert Henry Johnson (posthumous) were honored for Sustained Achievement.

New Funding Opportunities

The Doris Duke Foundation is accepting applications for its new Performing Arts Technologies Lab. It will fund selected project proposals utilizing new digital tools and production methods from individuals, organizations, and partnerships working in jazz, contemporary dance, and theater. Application deadline is May 6; further information available here.

The post News of Note: What You Might Have Missed in March 2024 appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Though musicals and plays can come to Broadway via many different routes, the majority of them transfer from regional theaters, off-Broadway, the West End, or national tours. In this 2023–24 season, there are 20 musicals premiering on Broadway, including brand-new shows and revivals. Every single one of those productions was previously staged somewhere else.

This tactic has become even more common in the wake of pandemic shutdowns, as the financial risks of mounting a show have increased. The producing and creative teams can get a feel for how their show works in an environment that has less pressure and requires less money. They can take time to gauge audience reactions to the work, read reviews, and analyze public interest and ticket sales. And the process can ultimately lead to big career opportunities for the dancers and actors involved.

Theater Matchmaking

Pre-Broadway runs of a show can help more experimental, outside-the-box productions find financial investors and Broadway theater owners who are interested in helping them have a future life. Mandy Hackett, the associate artistic director of The Public Theater in downtown Manhattan, has helped shepherd 15 shows from the famous off-Broadway venue onto Broadway, including Hamilton and this month’s Hell’s Kitchen.

“Broadway has expanded a lot over the past 20 years,” she says. “More diverse work is coming from the nonprofit world, and producers are getting more comfortable taking risks with putting up a wider range of adventurous work. But that means there are so many shows vying for theaters, and theater owners are getting pitched from all different places day in and day out.” Previous runs give everyone a better sense of which shows and theaters might be good matches—aligning what’s right artistically for the show with what’s smart for the business of the theater.

A Feat of Logistics—and Creativity

Once a theater gets officially locked in, the real heavy lifting of the transfer begins. It’s a massive undertaking that, among other things, includes the public relations team finalizing the show’s artwork for marketing and advertising, the box office setting ticket prices and rolling out a calendar for announcements and sales, and the production team planning when their load-in can start and what the company’s rehearsal schedule will look like.

While all of this is going on behind the scenes, the show’s creative team is also hard at work. Initially putting up a full-scale version of their show somewhere other than Broadway gives them a chance to see what doesn’t translate effectively from the page to the stage. This information is then used to make changes to the piece in another workshop or during their Broadway rehearsal process. These could be small tweaks, like script and choreography edits or a costume redesign, or there could be bigger restructuring involving cutting, adding, or rearranging entire scenes, songs, or characters. Sometimes creative-team members can also change—a new set designer is brought in to shift the aesthetic, or a different choreographer is brought in to adjust the movement style.

The new Broadway revival of The Wiz toured 13 cities over the past seven months before it sat down on Broadway this month. Matthew Sims Jr. is a swing in the company, and he’s glad their show had an opportunity for a test drive. “Since COVID, it feels like a lot of shows are hanging on by a thread. Closing notices come quickly, it’s more expensive to put up a show and harder to get audiences to come,” he said. “But with touring, we’ve gotten to see what speaks to people from different places and from different demographics before putting it all together on Broadway.”

Choreography, especially, often undergoes significant revisions during the transfer process. I’ve had the pleasure of working on the choreography team of two shows that transferred to Broadway from out of town: How to Dance in Ohio, which premiered in September 2022 at Syracuse Stage and transferred to Broadway this past fall, and The Who’s TOMMY, a revival that we staged at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago last summer and is opening on Broadway this spring. While preparing for these transfers, there were a few things we needed to consider: What are the dimensions of the new stage and how will that affect the spacing and movement we created in the regional versions? Were there any parts of our choreography that we weren’t fully satisfied with last time that we now want to update? If we have new set pieces, new dancers, or new costumes, what changes do we need to make to accommodate the updates being made by other departments? For both shows, our dance teams did a lot of work in the studio to revisit what we initially created and brainstorm new ideas we wanted to implement for the next iteration.

Casting Variations

Changes may also be made to a show’s cast between a preliminary run and Broadway. Sometimes cast members need to be replaced for various reasons—the director or choreographer may feel that a performer wasn’t properly suited to the show, or maybe the dancer has booked another job that’s happening at the same time. Frequently, auditions are also held to add additional swings and understudies to bulk up coverage for a longer run. In the case of a transfer from London, using international talent can get complicated and expensive with visas, unions, and housing relocation fees, so often almost an entirely new company of American workers is needed.

Claire Burke, a casting director with Tara Rubin Casting, helped usher in last summer’s hit show Back to the Future from the West End. “While casting a transfer, there is already existing choreography and a set of skills that have been determined,” she says. “So instead of building a brand-new piece in collaboration with whoever we choose, we have to cast people who are able to do exactly what has been previously established. There can still be creative freedom and different interpretations, but it’s a balance between finding someone unique and still honoring the original piece.”

The Broadway Boost

The cast of a Broadway transfer will often, however, include many of the artists who have been attached since its early stages. The original dancers, specifically, tend to be integral to the creation of the show’s movement, and a lot of times the choreographer prefers to keep their ensemble intact.

And while a transfer is certainly not the goal for every show, being in a Broadway house brings with it the perk of potential widespread success, which can ultimately trickle down to all the hands that touched the production. Sims, who is making his Broadway debut with The Wiz, says he’s proudly enjoying the feeling of reaching the pinnacle of the industry and is excited for where it will all lead him.

The sense of community that can come from a big Broadway audience is also a boon for many artists. “I remember being in the Broadway house of one of the earliest transfers I worked on, and feeling how many more people were there laughing and applauding,” said Hackett. “Of course it’s equally as magical downtown at The Public, but there is something so cool about the increased scale of people gathering in that theater, on that day, to share in that moment together. It sticks with you.”

The post The Whys and Hows of Broadway Transfers appeared first on Dance Magazine.

In making Chasing Canyons, I set out to choreograph a site-specific dance for a site so big it is impossible to see in its entirety. I began with my geologic knowledge of the Grand Canyon, built from my years of scientific training and the weeks I spent climbing up and down its walls. The resulting gesture phrase follows the canyon’s life cycle: the initial crush of its basement rocks, the tilting of overlying strata, the massive gap in time known as the Great Unconformity, subsequent deposition of layers upon layers of sediments, and, finally, the coming of the Colorado River to uncover it all. From there, I began to draw the parts of the canyon that I could see, tracing the terraces and side canyons, dragging feet and fingers from the tops of the cliffs to the shady hollows at the base. I worked in the positions of the stars above the canyon, which mark its location in space and time. Then I merged it all together to create a moving map, not just of the canyon, but of how humans relate to it.

Connecting the canyon to the stars raised more questions: How do we interact with beautiful spaces, here on Earth and elsewhere? When we land on Mars, will we be owners or caretakers? At the end of the piece, I answer these questions: I erase the map. Much like art and science, I think that “to boldly go” and “take only pictures, leave only footprints” are two complementary, not conflicting, philosophies.

My time as the Astronomer (and dancer) in Residence at the canyon has ended, but I will carry it in my body as well as my mind. It is my greatest hope that in making these kinds of dances, I can inspire audiences to expand their minds—to explore the different ways we can understand, learn, and appreciate the universe in which we live.

The post Dancing Across the Solar System as the Grand Canyon’s Astronomer in Residence appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Broadway choreography has long been an amalgam of different social dances and forms like jazz, tap, and ballet. But today’s shows are increasingly using movement makers from genres outside the musical theater world altogether, like experimental dance (David Neumann, Annie-B Parson, Raja Feather Kelly), commercial dance (Sonya Tayeh, JaQuel Knight, Keone and Mari Madrid), modern dance (Camille A. Brown), and physical theater (Steven Hoggett).

“There’s a whole cadre now of choreographers who never were in a Broadway show, who never danced in A Chorus Line,” says veteran Broadway journalist Sylviane Gold. “And they’re bringing something different.”

Traditionally, musical theater dance had “artistic aspirations but with popular appeal,” says Appalachian State University professor Ray Miller, author of Dance on the American Musical Theatre Stage. Broadway is, after all, a for-profit business. While today’s musical theater choreographers still face pressure to sell tickets, those coming to Broadway from other traditions are sometimes less oriented toward popularity. And that can lead to more risk-taking.

For instance, when Neumann choreographed Hadestown, he brought the narrative to life by leaning into abstraction and subtlety, creating simple movements—like loose, rhythmic walking—that had a magnetic pull. “I don’t want to dictate the audience’s entire experience,” Neumann says. “I want them to lean in and become curious.”

It’s not just the steps that have changed. The role dance plays in musicals has also shifted. “Theater choreography used to be more about literal storytelling,” says longtime Broadway choreographer and director Susan Stroman. “Today the choreography is more about atmosphere, capturing the essence of the emotion that’s happening onstage, whether it’s tension or romance.” She credits Andy Blankenbuehler’s work on Hamilton and Camille A. Brown’s Choir Boy in particular for spurring this development.

This more abstract approach has meant less choreography featuring characters dancing as individuals and more collective ensemble movement, says Stroman. When someone does break out for a solo, “the choreography today has unbelievably interesting and very intricate steps,” Stroman says—a trend that might reflect the distinctive showmanship of social media dance. “Younger choreographers are able to tap into video and TikTok and Instagram, where steps are mostly the stars,” Stroman says.

The 2020 sea change also had an impact. Since COVID-19, older audience members—who got used to safer and more convenient entertainment options—have become less-dependable ticket buyers, says Stroman. That means producers are sometimes willing to take a chance on something different, hoping to draw in younger audiences. And following big pushes from social justice movements, producers are also hiring directors from a variety of backgrounds, who are in turn seeking out choreographers from different genres—which is changing the type of movement that ends up onstage.

“We’re telling more diverse stories,” says Ellenore Scott, who choreographed Broadway’s Funny Girl and Mr. Saturday Night in 2022. “We’re using voices that were not heard back in the 1940s, 1950s.”

And a wider array of creative perspectives—both on Broadway and well beyond it—is part of the path to progress. As Neumann says, “An art form is only as strong as the number of voices able to tell stories and speak through their particular weird proclivities.”

What About Tap Dance?

Tap dance has been an essential component of Broadway dance since the 19th century, and as far back as the late 1700s dancer John Durang brought soft-shoe–style elements to the Great White Way, says historian Ray Miller. By the 1930s, musicals like Anything Goes and the original film version of 42nd Street were chock-full of crowd-pleasing tap numbers. But the iconic genre is no longer an expected staple of new musicals.

“Tap’s role kept changing as musicals changed,” says arts writer Sylviane Gold. “Today, tap can be a specialty number that is thrown into a show with a wink, as a little gift to the audience, even though it’s clearly out of place—as in Aladdin. It can be used as a dramatic element—as when the Irish and Black characters in Paradise Square stage a tap challenge.”

Choreographer Susan Stroman points out that there are fewer big ensemble tap numbers today: “It’s more about the strength of an individual tap dancer coming out and starring in a moment.”

The style of tap has also evolved. The traditional up-on-your-toes choreography is being replaced not only by grounded, hip-hop–inspired hoofing, but also by more complex steps and rhythms. “I think people are starving for more interesting rhythms, a new way to do something that’s old, trying to take something we’re familiar with and flip it on its head,” says Stroman.
Tap dance isn’t going away anytime soon. “As long as there are Broadway musicals, there will be some kind of tap,” predicts Gold. “But it won’t necessarily be performed by an ensemble doing time-steps in dazzling unison.”

Where Could (or Should) Broadway Choreography Go Next?

“I get excited by things like American Utopia that are really off the beaten path. I want choreography to be more inclusive and to say, ‘This can work, and this,’ looking for different ways to share what we think about our experience being alive on the planet.”
—David Neumann,
choreographer

“I would love Broadway to take a chance on the dance narrative, like it did at one time when I was able to do Contact or Twyla Tharp was able to do Movin’ Out.”
—Susan Stroman,
director and choreographer

“Just show me something I haven’t seen before. That’s what excites me. And that’s not to say that it isn’t absolutely wonderful to see something familiar brought to a new level of execution or excellence. But theater is about sitting in the audience and being surprised.”
—Sylviane Gold, arts writer

“I hope that Broadway creative teams take chances on different styles of movement as a way to tell a story. You can have one script and tell it 1,000 different ways depending on how that show is choreographed and staged and directed.”
—Ellenore Scott, choreographer

“Straight plays are beginning to pay attention to ecology, and I’m sure that it will happen on the musical stage, too. We now have the talents and the tools to create musicals that address climate and other environmental concerns. We need more stories to help us to conceive more sustainable ways of being.”
—Ray Miller, historian

The post What Does “Broadway Choreography” Mean Today? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

A Little More Mascara

Dennis Callahan (Monique): I think there were between 800 and 1,000 at the original open call. Scott Salmon, who was the choreographer, was not a New York person. So it was really like a clean slate as far as what he was seeing at these auditions.

David Engel (Hanna): I was only being seen for Jean-Michel [one of the leads]. Then they said, “We need to see you dance and in drag.” I didn’t know why. I came to the final dance call. Everybody else had learned all this choreography. I learned it on the spot.

Dan O’Grady (Odette): It got down to maybe 25 of us at the end. I had never done any drag, but I decided to show up in drag [for the final audition]. It was really, really funny. When I got into the cab, the cab driver got out, opened the door for me, called me ma’am. Then I went into the theater, and they didn’t know who I was. No one else arrived in drag.

DC: From 10 in the morning to 4 or 5 in the afternoon, we did all of the dancing in drag. And at the end of this long day, we were 12 and 12 across the stage.

DE: Basically, it was like the end of A Chorus Line. We were all lined up across the stage. And then they’re like, “Rehearsals start on this date—congratulations.” Everybody’s jumping up and down screaming, and I’m like, “What’s happening? What’s going on?”

DC: After the others left, they had the 12 of us gather around the piano and sing “There’s No Business Like Show Business” in real short-clipped piano voices. [Composer] Jerry Herman said, “This is the style of La Cage’s opening song, ‘We are What We Are.’ ” It was such a cool moment to be around the piano with Jerry and [music director] Don Pippin, all of us in drag.

Not a Place We Have to Hide

DE: The very first day of rehearsal, [director] Arthur Laurents said, “We are not doing this apologetically. We are proudly playing these roles.”

DO: He gave us all storylines. Some were more developed than others, but we all had a bit of one. He really instilled in us that we were important to the story.

DC: Though I don’t think any of us had any experience doing drag, I don’t think any Cagelle would say it was hard. The atmosphere in the room was so supportive and nurturing that none of us felt any fear of being judged.

DO: I remember Arthur working on “I Am What I Am” with George Hearn [who played Albin], a straight man. The amount of pride and dignity that Arthur conveyed not just to George but all of us was very powerful. It moves me even just to think of it now.

DC: The Cagelles were given the last bow. When does that ever happen? We each just took a humble bow as ourselves. The sound of the audience was unbelievable.

Sometimes Sweet and Sometimes Bitter

DE: We had a whole warm-up area in the basement, and at intermission, we’d dress up, we’d be ridiculous. We just kept creating and playing.

It was the best of times. And it was the worst of times.

DO: I first started hearing about the “gay cancer” when we were in Boston. Nobody knew what it was.

DE: I remember thinking to myself, if I went to a gay bar, I would hold my breath. You just didn’t know. It was everywhere, and if you tested positive, it was a death sentence, definitely. And you could go quick.

DO: I think David Cahn [Chantelle] was the first of us Cagelles who got sick and left, then John Dolf [Nicole].

DC: I don’t remember any conversation between the rest of us about the boys being sick. I think it was sort of a feeling of: If they wanted to talk about it they would, and they’re not, so neither should we. And maybe there was also a fear.

DO: We felt the loss from the inside, and I think that’s what sort of led us to start thinking about the Easter Bonnet competition. Howard Crabtree and the other costume folks did these silly Easter bonnets, and we had folks donate. In the beginning it was just the cast, the crew, and the orchestra.

DE: We did the Easter Bonnet pageant in the basement and a Queen of Hearts pageant for Valentine’s Day, both just among ourselves, and raised money for Gay Men’s Health Crisis. The next year we decided to bring the Easter Bonnet pageant onto the stage and invited other casts to come—A Chorus Line, Cats, there were a few companies. I remember when they flipped over the cards at the end, we had raised $17,000. I was sobbing, sobbing.

DO: I think we needed a sense of agency. Because there was no hope. There really wasn’t. Our friends were dying, and we couldn’t do anything about it. But we could dress up and act silly and ask people for money.

DC: Teddy Azar was instrumental in the whole look of the show makeup- and wig-wise. He was one of the first in the company to come down with AIDS. He was at St. Vincent’s, and David [Scala, who played Phaedra], Sam [Singhaus, Clo-Clo], and I got some nurse drag with these giant hypodermic needles and resuscitation devices, just ridiculous stuff, and we went down there. People who worked there came up to us and said, “Could you please come bring some of this joy into some of the other rooms?” And we went in and out of these rooms, these three big old drag queens in nurse drag, and it was joyous. The whole thing was joyous.

DE: I had plenty of hard losses, but the hardest was [executive producer] Fritz Holt. At the show that night, we silently got in place, and one by one we turned around in the opening number and we all started singing “We Are What We Are.” But then one by one voices were dropping out. We just couldn’t sing. We were all crying. The cast members in the wings on both sides were singing for us, trying to keep it going.

We Are What We Are

DC: When we would turn around one by one in the opening number, you could feel, physically, this sort of crossed-arm, furrowed-brow feeling from the audience. They were probably wondering if maybe we’re too close, we’re going to get [AIDS].

By the end of the show those same faces were leaning into the stage, wide-eyed. I left every night thinking, Wow, I think I was part of something that changed what people think about homosexuals.

DE: I came out to my mom when I was 18, and she really struggled with it. She couldn’t understand what she had done wrong. And it was La Cage that turned her around. It let her know that you can have love and family being gay. She became a mother to all of my gay friends that had parents that disowned them. They adored her, and she loved all of them.

DC: From the beginning my parents saw something in me. They would take me to the Muny Opera, to the Starlight in Kansas City, and nurtured that in me. But at the same time I didn’t ever feel like I needed to tell them I was gay. I thought the words and the situation would hurt them. And they knew.

When they saw the show, that was my way of being able to tell them and show them that I was going to be okay.

DO: La Cage changed my life. I got to work with Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman and Arthur Laurents and Fritz Holt and Barry Brown and Don Pippin, and George Hearn and Gene Barry [Georges] and Merle Louise [Mme. Didon]. I also learned so much from Linda Haberman [Bitelle] and Jennifer Smith [Colette]. The work ethic, the creativity, and the artistry was like nothing I had ever been exposed to.
DC: At the 40-year reunion, we sang “The Best of Times.” There were two older gentlemen sitting next to each other in the audience, and they were bawling. And I thought, god, this show affected more people than we will ever know. It’s so special to have been a part of something like that.

The post <i>La Cage aux Folles</i>’ Cagelles, 40 Years Later: Something About Sharing, Something About Always appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Stats like those raise a big question: After the shanks have collapsed and the boxes have turned to mush, where do all the dead pointe shoes go?

According to Ozgem Ornektekin, a mechanical engineer who specializes in sustainability, a pointe shoe as a whole can’t go into a recycling waste stream. It needs to be pulled apart to salvage individual materials: The box and sole can go into paper and cardboard recycling streams, while the nails in some shoes can be recycled with metals, but the fabric needs to be donated to local fabric recycling collection boxes. The entire process of deconstructing the shoe is difficult, expensive, and time-intensive—which is why, unfortunately, most pointe shoes end up in landfills.

But some people and organizations are working valiantly to keep shoes out of the trash. Here are three ways dead shoes are getting a more environmentally friendly second act.

Shoe Souvenirs

The most common way companies repurpose pointe shoes is through signed-shoe sales. Many sell dancer-signed pairs in their gift shops, or send them as thank-you gifts to those who contribute to company pointe shoe funds.

During Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker season, young students who participate in the production have the chance to write letters to company members they admire, and request a signed pair of pointe shoes from them. “That’s very popular,” says Sandy Barrack, PNB’s production stage manager.

The company also offers old shoes to the young children in its Eastside Summer Workshop for crafting purposes. And every so often, “someone will ask me for pointe shoes so they can make a wreath out of them, and things like that,” Barrack says. “I try to make use of the ones that can’t be sold when I can.”

Creating Art

Dead pointe shoes have also been used in professional artwork. The artist Karon Davis featured a small mountain of pointe shoes in her ballet-themed exhibition, Beauty Must Suffer, at New York City’s Salon 94 last fall. Davis’ mother, who like Davis was a dancer, sourced the shoes from thrift stores and estate sales; the installation gave them a poetic second life.

At Leigh Purtill Ballet Company, dancers turned their old pointe shoes into detailed floral centerpieces for the company’s spring gala. “The theme was ballet in bloom, and I wanted to incorporate pointe shoes,” says Vivian Garcia, a dancer and member of the company’s production team. She asked the other performers to save and donate their old shoes. “We were immediately bombarded,” says fellow dancer and production team member Elena Castellanos. Many dancers contributed—including one who had kept every pointe shoe she had ever worn—and in the end the production team had roughly 50 pairs to work with.

A team of four company members came together to bring Garcia’s vision to life in her mother’s backyard. “We painted flowers onto the shoes, put beautiful pieces of fabric both inside and outside of the soles of the shoes, and used shimmery paint to give it a glow,” Garcia says. Then the company raffled the shoes off as part of the gala’s fundraiser, helping to raise $5,000, which went toward their production of The Nutcracker and other expenses.

“I care a lot about the environment, and it’s been hard for me to go through so many shoes so quickly,” Castellanos says. Garcia agrees: “I think it’s wonderful for our pointe shoes to have this second phase of life.”

Recycling and Upcycling

Despite the difficulties, there have been various efforts over the years to recycle pointe shoes—or upcycle them.

Ornektekin founded Petit Pas New York, which transforms old pointe shoes into leather and satin accessories, after learning about how many pointe shoes professionals and advanced students were flying through. Partnering with the School of American Ballet (and with shoe maker Freed of London’s support), Ornektekin dissected students’ pointe shoes to determine what materials could and could not be reused. Then, with her team, she created four products: three bracelets and a small coin/hairpin bag. “We used the leather at the front of the shoe to make bracelets, and the satin from the back of the shoe to make bags,” she says.

All of the dead pointe shoes that Ornektekin revitalizes come from students at SAB. “At the end of each semester we get a big dump of them, and everything gets sanitized before we use it,” she says. Beyond what Petit Pas is doing for the environment, 50 percent of their proceeds goes back to the school’s pointe shoe fund to reduce the cost of shoes for the students.

Consider asking your school or company if they offer opportunities to donate or recycle. Though Ornektekin says her current priorities are local, she recommends that dancers around the world look into ways in which they, too, can reuse pointe shoes in their own community.

The post How Artists Are Keeping Mountains of Dead Pointe Shoes Out of Landfills appeared first on Dance Magazine.

“Within a week of the premiere, every single ballet company that one would ever dream of working for was in my inbox asking for a new ballet for the same season,” she says. Portner decided to give herself another year in ballet, which eventually dragged into several. Now, she’s on track to have created five ballets for major companies before she turns 30 in November.

Last month, she premiered her Bathtub Ballet at the Royal Swedish Ballet, and in April, she’ll have yet another premiere, her Forever, maybe at GöteborgsOperans Danskompani. For now, though, islands—the piece that started it all—is back, this time at the National Ballet of Canada. It’ll be Portner’s first time sharing a major work in her home country, where she still escapes to spend time at her house and studio in the woods on her rare week off. 

What’s new? It’s been a while.

My life has been crazy. I feel like the last time I connected with Dance Magazine I was a baby. It’s been forever since I’ve been interviewed because I’ve been in this prolonged period of discovery and change. 

Are you based in Europe now? 

I would consider Canada home, but I only get to spend really random bouts of time out here. I’m working in Scandinavia a lot. What was supposed to be a two-ballet contract with the Norwegian National Ballet ended up spanning four or five years because of the pandemic. I actually just finished dancing in a new ballet at the Oslo Opera House, a new piece by Alan Lucien Øyen. I was acting, which was a really fun departure for me. 

I didn’t realize that islands changed your life in such a major way. Tell me about that piece. 

Islands saved my life, in a way. When I went into it, I wasn’t in a great place. I was going through a lot in my personal life. I didn’t feel like a legitimate person to be making ballets. I felt like my personality was incompatible with the machine of the ballet institution. So when Ingrid called me, I declined at first. The only reason I ended up doing it was because I felt like I needed to escape the States. I needed to have a new start. 

I wanted the piece to be two women. I wasn’t setting out to do a gay piece, I just felt that in the ballet space in 2018, queer representation was either by chance—like the lead got sick, so someone else had to come in and now it’s a queer duet for one night—or it’s this big, sweeping, romantic duet. I felt there was nuance and reality lacking. And I felt like, What if queerness isn’t the thing we’re putting onstage, it just exists? And we’re allowed to have a complex relationship, and have the queerness be secondary to that? Because that’s the truth to me.  

In my earlier work, I would put way too many ideas into one thing. I couldn’t tolerate sitting with an idea long enough to see it develop. Now, I’m much more able to sit with things, and that’s what I really wanted to do with this one. The only idea I had going into it was that because­ of the classical tutu, women’s hips have been four feet apart for hundreds of years. I was like, What if we were able to reverse that? So for the first half of the piece, they are literally dancing inside the same pair of pants. That was the most fascinating and most frustrating and most awkward process. Some days in rehearsal, it was like, Okay, we need a break from the pants for five minutes. 

What does it feel like to be sharing this piece in your home country and on such an iconic company?

When I was growing up, I had posters of Heather Ogden and Karen Kain in my bedroom. And then, Heather Ogden is cast in the piece. I really have to pinch myself. I actually went to the National Ballet summer programs growing up, and I was desperate to go to the school, but my mom didn’t let me. It’s this unattainable place that I never thought I would get to because I didn’t go through the front door. I’m entering through this magical backdoor. 

You’ve said that you don’t consider yourself a ballet choreographer, but you’ve been working extensively in ballet. What does your relationship to ballet feel like right now?

This question is always swirling around in my head. I have to really leave myself in order to fit into the ballet institution because it’s so demanding of me on so many levels. I’m this question mark. People are taking a risk on me, and it’s a lot of pressure to walk into these spaces with so much history, and have it feel like it’s on my shoulders to change it. And people are looking at you and people are hoping with you and people are scared with you. But it feels like people are holding my pinky finger and not holding my hand through it. That’s where it gets really hard for me, because there’s still so much that needs to change. This is why I wanted to do five ballets before I’m 30: so I can say that I did it, and then I can step out of the ballet world for a second and reenter it in an entirely different way. I want to help ballet make itself more sustainable and to open the door for other people. Because I love ballet, and I want to see it thrive, but I want to see its people healthier. I want to see more people making ballets and trying new things and making a mess onstage and for that to be okay. I just feel like the whole system can use a little more breath and a little more optimism and a little more chance. But what is chance at the end of the world? You know, I’m someone who never wants to do interviews, but then I start doing an interview and I can’t stop talking. It’s fascinating. 

The post Emma Portner Brings the Work That Kept Her in the Dance World to National Ballet of Canada appeared first on Dance Magazine.

We’re still rooting for a “Best Choreography” category as dance continues to be an integral part to each year’s nominated films. But until then, we still enjoy seeing our beloved artform on the Dolby Theater stage.

“Wahzhazhe” from Killers of the Flower Moon

Eight Osage Nation dancers joined Scott George and the Osage Tribal Singers in a historic performance of “Wahzhazhe (A Song For My People)” from Killers of the Flower Moon. George made Oscars history as the first Native American to receive a nomination for best original song with “Wahzhazhe.” He is also the first member of the Osage Nation to be nominated by the Academy. 

As the dancers and singers followed the drum against a sunset backdrop, they invited the international audience to witness a simultaneously intimate and boundless celebration. A groundbreaking performance, it marked the first time members of the Osage Nation, or of any indigenous community, has danced on the Oscars stage.

“I’m Just Ken” from Barbie

It’s safe to say that the Oscars felt the “Kenergy” after Ryan Gosling and his ensemble of Kens took to the stage with Barbie’s tongue-in-cheek power ballad, “I’m Just Ken,” which was also nominated for best original song. The number, choreographed by Mandy Moore, featured several members from the film’s original cast, including Simu Liu and Kingsley Ben-Adir, and was complete with a kickline, unapologetic melodrama, cardboard cutout–ography, and on-the-nose references to Jack Cole’s choreography for “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Oh, and Slash.

Best Actress winner Emma Stone later pointed to the performance as the culprit behind her tearing her dress. (Don’t worry, Emma, we were dancing too.)

The “In Memoriam” Segment

A welcome surprise for some and an irritating visual distraction for others, this year’s “In Memoriam” tribute featured an ensemble of dancers that accompanied Andrea and Matteo Bocelli as they sang the former’s hit “Time to Say Goodbye.” This was not the first time dance has appeared in the segment; in 1996, Savion Glover tapped to “Singin’ in the Rain” in a tribute to the late Gene Kelly, who passed away that year. This year’s performance included a subtle and touching moment for the late Chita Rivera, who died on January 30—a simple weight shift and slow-motion hip sway, facing Rivera’s photo on the projection screen. 

While the dancers brought stunning synchronicity and reverent artistry to Moore’s second choreographed work of the night, the performance has earned pushback from audience members who found them and the Bocellis distracting. 

The post The Most Memorable Dance Moments From the 2024 Academy Awards appeared first on Dance Magazine.

But there’s no doubting the rigor and penetration of his eye as he asks a dancer with a paintbrush to tackle his easel with “more velocity,” urges a couple to make a lift “sharp,” and encourages a leg into a clearer diagonal as the bustling number evokes kaleidoscopic images of the City of Light.

Later, in separate interviews, Kelly and Chavkin talk about Lempicka the show, Lempicka the artist—Chavkin knows many audiences likely won’t recognize Lempicka’s name, but suspects they will recognize her art—and their own collaboration on the musical. At times, they’re like he-said, she-said accounts of the same happy marriage. Below are a few excerpts from those conversations, edited for length and clarity.

On Lempicka’s Paintings

Kelly: There is so much movement—the way that curves move forward and backward, how diagonals are made in the body. And I think any dance person could see the épaulement in the paintings. I told them [Chavkin, Kreitzer, and Gould] that épaulement is the central movement language to begin any choreography for this work.

Chavkin: He explained to us what “épaulement” meant, and it was, “Oh, my god, that’s it—we were meant for you, and you were meant for us!”

On Storytelling With the Body

Kelly: I’m a postmodernist, and I am a contemporary dancer. I have to use everything I’ve learned to find a new language—I have to use postmodernism, I have to use lyrical, I have to use jazz. And I’m always going to tell a story, no matter what.

Chavkin: When I first encountered [the theatrical training technique] the Viewpoints in college, I was like, “Oh! I get how to do this!” I get that story is communicated through the body, through the physical state of the performer, through the physical state of the stage, and tension and line—all of the things that are absolutely principles of dance but that are also principles of staging.

On Working Together

Kelly: What’s exciting for me is that now, in 2024, she really does trust me. We’ve been doing it for almost eight years, and I think she trusts my understanding of the show. I tend to take care of the ensemble, and she leaves me to do that. Then we come together, and we note each other. Sometimes I’m offering her behavior for scenes, because I love for it to blend—so that the show doesn’t go from scene to dance. So that the whole show is alive with the same behavior. It can’t happen unless we’re working both in tandem and also separately, because we might have a different point of view on something. I’m certainly not a choreographer that just makes dances.

Chavkin: There’s a dance that every single director-choreographer team does once they get to know each other. Raja and I had the necessary luxury of many years and multiple incarnations of this project to figure out whose territory is whose. What’s been so exciting and so helpful is I tend to think in large movement of bodies and energy in the space—where do we need chaos, where does it need to be more stable, et cetera, et cetera. And Raja is so exquisite on human specificity and detail. It’s a big-picture/intimate-picture kind of dialogue between us. He gives it more shape, more line, further articulation. It’s so satisfying when you meet someone who can pick up what you’re putting down.

The post Raja Feather Kelly and Rachel Chavkin on <i>Lempicka</i> the Show and Lempicka the Artist appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The Oscars and dancemakers don’t have the easiest relationship. Although many of the films nominated inevitably include dancing, there’s no award for choreography. The past year has shown what may be the first signs of change: In March of 2023, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which presents the Academy Awards, created a new Production and Technology branch, which will house choreographers admitted to the Academy. (That number, however, remains very small—with last year’s addition of Fatima Robinson, it’s not even at double digits.) In 2025, the Academy will add an Oscar for casting, a development that could set a precedent for choreographers. And as of last month, IMDb started recognizing “choreographer” as a primary profession.

Hopefully, dancemakers will soon be able to chassé onto the Dolby Theatre stage to collect a golden statuette of their own. In the meantime, we’ll recognize their work here.

Barbie, Choreographed by Jennifer White

In an interview, director Greta Gerwig said that she fought hard to keep the “I’m Just Ken” dream ballet in Barbie. “I was like, ‘If people could follow that in Singin’ in the Rain, I think we’ll be fine,’ ” Gerwig reportedly said.

Gerwig has a good dance track record: For her 2019 film Little Women, she turned to choreographer Monica Bill Barnes. For Barbie, she broughton London–based choreographer and movement director Jennifer White, with associate choreographer Lisa Welham. White, who has a long list of film, music video, and stage credits, strikes the perfect balance of wittiness and whimsy in Barbie’s dream ballet and its earlier “Dance the Night” number.

Barbie is nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Ryan Gosling), and Best Supporting Actress (America Ferrera). It is available to stream on Max, and to rent or buy on Amazon’s Prime Video and Apple TV.

The Color Purple, Choreographed by Fatima Robinson

The Color Purple is a full-fledged movie musical: Its choreography, by Fatima Robinson, isn’t relegated to just one or two scenes. Based on the stage musical, which in turn is based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1982 novel, the film follows Celie, a Black woman living in the rural American South in the early 1900s. Her long journey to empowerment is driven by strong female friendships and her bond with her sister. (The book was first adapted for film in 1985 by Steven Spielberg.)

Dance is everywhere in this movie: on the walk to church, in a crowded street, at a juke joint. Throughout, Robinson’s years of experience choreographing for major musical artists—Beyoncé, Britney Spears, Rihanna among them—shine through. The dancing is a blend of social dances from the film’s era, African forms, hip hop, and musical-theater–style movement. 

The Color Purple is nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Danielle Brooks). It is available to stream on Max and to stream or buy on Amazon’s Prime Video and Apple TV.

Maestro, Choreographed by Justin Peck

Leonard Bernstein’s collaboration with Jerome Robbins is the stuff of legend: It produced West Side Story, On the Town, and works for New York City Ballet, including Fancy Free and Dybbuk. So it’s only fitting that Maestro, the Bernstein biopic starring and directed by Bradley Cooper, includes dance.

In a dreamlike dance scene choreographed by Justin Peck (with Craig Salstein as associate choreographer), Cooper and Carey Mulligan, playing Bernstein’s wife-to-be, Felicia Montealegre, watch a version of Fancy Free onstage that melts into an original dance number, which they become a part of. The list of dancers includes NYCB’s Harrison Coll and Sebastián Villarini Vélez, and freelancers Gaby Diaz, Benjamin Freemantle, and Jeanette Delgado. Peck is often called a creative descendent of Robbins; after choreographing 2021’s West Side Story, this feels like a natural progression.

Maestro is nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Cooper), and Best Actress (Mulligan). It is available to stream on Netflix.

Poor Things, Choreographed by Constanza Macras

Poor Things, director Yorgos Lanthimos’ feminist abstraction of Frankenstein,stars Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a grown woman reborn with the mind of a child. In a Victorian-era restaurant, Stone (who honed her dancing chops in La La Land and Broadway’s Cabaret) finds herself drawn to the music and takes to the dance floor. Rather than imitate the couples around her, she finds her own, intuitive movement style. For a while she’s joined by her lover, played by Mark Ruffalo, but, ultimately, she wants to dance on her own—a choice that helps further the film’s plot.

The scene is choreographed by Constanza Macras, a Berlin-based dancemaker who runs the dance and theater company DorkyPark and recently staged a production of Carmen for Switzerland’s Theater Basel. She first worked with Lanthimos on his 2018 The Favourite, whose dance scene also delightfully defies convention.

Poor Things is nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress (Stone), and Best Director (Lanthimos). It will be available to stream on Hulu starting on March 7.

The post The Best Dance in This Year’s Oscar-Nominated Films appeared first on Dance Magazine.

By day, Pehrson is an executive assistant. Evenings and weekends, she’s a dance class devotee: She typically takes six days a week, and has participated for decades in Wildish’s showcases.

She doesn’t take these opportunities for granted.

“A lot of people think that they’re too old to perform,” she says. “There’s that stigma about, ‘Well, past a certain age, why would you want to do it?’ Or ‘Who would want to see it?’ ”

But Wildish and a growing number of other teachers and organizations are offering adult recreational dancers a chance not only to take class but also to get onstage—whether­ they danced as kids and want to continue after high school or college without pursuing dance professionally, or came to dance as beginners in adulthood.

A Chance to Dance

Anyone who finds joy in dancing and performing should have the outlet to do it, says Wildish, who danced with New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. “I want to make it possible for others to experience those moments,” she says. “It’s important that that doesn’t die because you’re over 18.”

Allison DeBona—a former first soloist at Ballet West, who runs the artÉmotion adult summer ballet intensive with her husband, former Ballet West principal Rex Tilton—agrees. “There’s still this idea that if you are not on a professional company stage, you are not worthy,” she says. “We all need to move past this.”

And the landscape, it seems, has started to shift. In addition to Wildish’s showcases, there are now several adult intensives and workshops—including at artÉmotion in Salt Lake City and with companies like New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and Louisville Ballet—that culminate in performances. There are adult recreational companies—such as Kathy Mata Ballet in San Francisco, which recently celebrated its 35th anniversary, and DanceWorks in New York City and Boston. There are adult-focused schools, like Rae Studios in San Francisco, that incorporate performances into their offerings. And there are other one-off opportunities.

DeBona was happy to see so many Ballet West Academy students and alums attend last summer’s artÉmotion adult-intensive performance and leave feeling inspired. “They’re all facing that time where it’s like, ‘I’m auditioning, but I might not get a job. What does that mean for me? Is this over?’ ” she says. Seeing the adults onstage in a high-quality production signaled that no matter what happens, there’s still a place for them to dance and perform.

Adult recreational performance opportunities are also transformative for those who never thought there was room for them in dance to begin with. “My idea of who could and couldn’t do ballet was very warped as a kid,” says Janay Lee, 25, an au pair who’s participated in the artÉmotion intensive the last two summers. For a long time, Misty Copeland was the only brown ballerina she knew of—none of the other stars she saw looked like her. Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, she did some dance at school and church, but didn’t start taking ballet until she was 18. “It’s like one of those dream careers that I never quite pursued.”

The chance to perform sends an important message. “It feels like your art is being taken seriously, I think, even if that art is recreational,” Lee says. “When you work so hard at something, it’s nice to get to show it off every once in a while.”

A Growth, and Bonding, Experience

Jessica Rae, who founded Rae Studios in San Francisco to make dance accessible to adults, added showcases in recent years because “the natural progression for a student is to have a final end goal,” she says. It seems obvious for an amateur runner signing up and training for a race, she says, and the same should go for dance. “It also creates the urge of, like, ‘Okay, I want to get back in the studio and train more.’ ”

That rings true for Corina Chan, 61, who started taking ballet with Kathy Mata at 37 and also does hip hop and heels classes at Rae Studios. She sees performances as an excellent way to apply what she’s learning in class. “I love being able to do things I didn’t think that I could do,” says Chan, a semi-retired small business owner and mom of three. She says being onstage has shaped her not only as a dancer, but also as a person. “Performing teaches me to be in the moment,” she says. “It builds fortitude and persistence.”

There’s something terrifying about putting yourself onstage, says Emma Melo, 50, a preschool program coordinator and arts teacher who danced in college. She started taking classes again at Louisville Ballet after watching her daughter there and deciding she’d rather be dancing than sitting in the lobby. “I hate that thundering-heart feeling. But I also feel like I need to feel that sometimes,” she says, in order to challenge herself. “You can’t grow that way just by going into a studio and taking class.”

Over the last several years, Melo has performed with fellow adults in the school’s spring shows, at the adult intensive, and even in the main company’s production of Coppélia. “It’s always been such a bonding experience to work with other people to create something, and then share in that experience of the risk of taking it live,” she says.

An Open Invitation

The sense of community that comes with making a shared commitment to a rehearsal process and performance is a major draw for many adult dancers. At DanceWorks, community is enshrined as part of the mission: The group’s number-one core value is to “know each other’s name,” says executive director Betsy Moran. “It creates a space that is really welcoming to all different types of dancers and all different types of people.”

And acknowledging the existence, needs, and desires of these dancers—who are neither kids nor professionals—might force the dance world to ask some questions that are deeply entwined with other conversations about diversity and inclusion.

“We are expanding who can be a dancer and what dance is,” Melo says. “Adults can be part of that picture.”

The post Why the Rise in Performance Opportunities for Adult Recreational Dancers Matters appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Comings & Goings

Béjart Ballet Lausanne has terminated the contract of artistic director Gil Roman, effective April 30.

Wen Wei Wang will step down as artistic director of Ballet Edmonton at the end of the current season. He will be succeeded by Kirsten Wicklund, effective in August.

Vicki Capote, Sara Roer, and Candace Thompson-Zachery have been named co-executive directors of Dance/NYC.

Cara Lonergan has been appointed executive director of BalletCollective.

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts president and CEO Henry Timms will depart the organization in August.

Royal Ballet principal Alexander Campbell will give his final performance with the company on March 8. He has been appointed artistic director of the Royal Academy of Dance, effective in April.

Guillaume Côté will retire from the National Ballet of Canada in June 2025.

Minnesota Dance Theatre, led by Elayna Waxse since January (after taking over from interim artistic director Kaitlyn Gilliland), will pause operations of its performing company at the end of May. The company’s affiliated school will continue.

The Cowles Center in Minneapolis will cease operations of the Goodale Theater, discontinuing dance presentations, on March 31.

Awards & Honors

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar will receive the 2024 Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award, which includes a $50,000 prize, in July.

Recipients of Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ 2024 Grants to Artists awards included Petra Bravo (Dorothea Tanning Award), Joanna Kotze, and Hsiao-Jou Tang (Viola Farber Award). Each will receive a $45,000 unrestricted grant.

Michael Manson (House of Jit) is part of the inaugural cohort of the Gilbert Family Foundation’s Seed and Bloom: Detroit program, through which he’ll receive a $150,000 grant over a three-year residency as well as additional institutional support.

At the Venice Biennale, Cristina Caprioli will receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, Trajal Harrell the Silver Lion.

Faye Driscoll won an Obie Award for direction for Weathering at New York Live Arts.

The post News of Note: What You Might Have Missed in February 2024 appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The judging panel is not all that’s new. After the auditions round, 10 dancers will compete in challenges intended to reflect a freelance commercial-dance career, such as performing in music videos, football halftime shows, or Broadway numbers—a departure from dancing on a soundstage in short routines of rotating styles, the show’s signature. Rather than audiences voting live for their favorite dancers (filming reportedly began in Atlanta, rather than in Los Angeles as in previous years, in early December), eliminations will be entirely up to the judges.

Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising facet of the show’s new format: While in previous seasons, short, behind-the-scenes packages of rehearsal footage and interviews introduced each routine, this season “viewers will get a documentary-style inside look at the contestants’ dynamics, following them throughout the competition as they go through their personal and competitive journeys, including the daily struggles, new relationships, personality clashes and more,” according to a release. What will the seemingly more “reality TV” angle mean for the dancers on the show, and will the winning competitor’s title still be “America’s Favorite Dancer” with voting seemingly out of the audience’s hands? Fans will have to tune in on Fox (or the day after on Hulu) to find out. 

The post “So You Think You Can Dance” Season 18 Kicks Off With a Slew of Changes appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Paxton’s dancing—with his loose limbs, swerving spine, and charismatic aura—was magnificent to behold. In her book Terpsichore in Sneakers, Banes describes him as projecting “a continuing sense of the body’s potential to invent and discover, to recover equilibrium after losing control, to regain vigor despite pain and disorder.” His dancing body was an elucidation of his ideas.

Judson Dance Theater grew out of Dunn’s composition class. From 1962 to 1964, Paxton and a group that included several of Dunn’s other students—Rainer, David Gordon, Trisha Brown, Rudy Perez, Deborah Hay, and Elaine Summers among them—collectively produced a series of 16 numbered concerts, many of them at the Judson Memorial Church.

These concerts marked a historical moment when (portions of) modern dance transformed into postmodern. At the time, Paxton thought of Judson as a place where you could not worry about big entertainment in big theaters and instead just do stuff. Rather than thinking he was doing something revolutionary, Paxton located himself in the lineage of modern dance tradition. In a recent Pillow Voices podcast about Grand Union, he says that modern dance—Graham, Limón, Cunningham, Humphrey, Dunham—gave permission to create new forms “from the ground up.”

Yvonne Rainer wrote about his work at Judson in her memoir, Feelings Are Facts:

Steve’s was the most severe and rigorous of all the work that appeared in and around Judson during the 1960s. […] Eschewing music, spectacle, and his own innate kinetic gifts and acquired virtuosity, he embraced extended duration and so-called pedestrian movement while maintaining a seemingly obdurate disregard for audience expectation.

One of the landmark pieces that came out of that aesthetic, which celebrated the untrained human body, was Paxton’s Satisfyin Lover. In it, a large group of dancers simply walked, stood still, or sat on a chair. Jill Johnston wrote this now famous passage in The Village Voice:

And here they all were […] thirty-two any old wonderful people in Satisfyin’ Lover walking one after the other across the gymnasium in their any old clothes. The fat, the skinny, the medium, the slouched and slumped, the straight and tall, the bowlegged and knock-kneed, the awkward, the elegant, the coarse, the delicate, the pregnant, the virginal, the you name it, by implication every postural possibility in the postural spectrum, that’s you and me in all our ordinary everyday who cares postural splendor. […] Let us now praise famous ordinary people.

At the end of the ’60s, Paxton was working with Rainer on her piece Continuous Project—Altered Daily, which changed with every performance. Rainer had given the dancers—Paxton, Gordon, Douglas Dunn, Barbara Dilley, and Becky Arnold—so much freedom that the choreography eventually blew open, obliterating all planned segments. After a period of uncertainty, the group then morphed into the Grand Union, an improvisation collective with no leader. It was then augmented by Trisha Brown, Nancy Lewis, and Lincoln Scott.

“Grand Union was a luxurious improvisational laboratory,” Paxton said in Dance Magazine’s June 2004 issue. “All of us were very formally oriented, even though we were doing formless work.”

When Grand Union was engaged for a residency at Oberlin College in 1972, Paxton taught a daily class at dawn that included “the small dance.” Nancy Stark Smith, then a student, loved it. “It was basically standing still and releasing tension and turning your attention to notice the small reflexive activity that the body makes to keep itself balanced and not fall over,” she once said. “You’re not doing it, but you’re noticing what it’s doing.” This concept of noticing interior movement became foundational for contact improvisation.

Although Paxton is called the “inventor” of contact improvisation, he pointed to the mutuality of the form. It’s “governed by the participants rather than by a leader, similar to the structure of Grand Union,” he said.

Contact improvisation attracted thousands of people who wanted to move—and move with other people—but who did not want to train to be concert dancers. Paxton was involved in contact improvisation, often with Smith, for 10 years.

Then he started developing his solo works, including his improvisations to Bach’s Goldberg Variations from 1986 to the early ’90s. He went on to develop “material for the spine,” which he described in Dance Magazine as “what the spine is doing in that tumbling sphere with another person—a kind of yogic form, a technique that focuses on the pelvis, the spine, the shoulder blades, the rotation of the head.”

Paxton collaborated with Lisa Nelson, his life partner and fellow improviser extraordinaire, on two entrancingly improvised duets: PA RT (1978) and Night Stand (2004). He gave workshops all over the U.S. and in Europe. While he wasn’t a warm and fuzzy teacher, he was thrillingly articulate. He never faked enthusiasm. And he was trusted completely by colleagues from the ’60s—Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, and Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown—in a way that I would call pure love.

Paxton always opted for the organic, close-to-nature option. Toward the end of his life, he spent much time in his garden in Vermont. In a talk at the Judson Dance Theater exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2018, when asked about his life at that time, he said: “Every atom in the landscape in front of me that I look at every day is changing…I feel like it’s a living soup and I’m…kind of dissolving into its space.” He has now completed his dissolution.

Read an expanded version of this post here.

The post Steve Paxton (1939–2024): A Lifetime of Burning Questions appeared first on Dance Magazine.

A Lake of Nightmares and an Android Coppélia

ON TOUR  Les Ballets de Monte Carlo brings two twists on ballet classics by artistic director Jean-Christophe Maillot stateside this month. Lac, which probes Swan Lake’s inherent dichotomies, lands at New Orleans’ Mahalia Jackson Theater March 1–2. Coppél-i.A., which updates the narrative so the lovers’ relationship is threatened not by a lifelike doll but, instead, an artificial intelligence, follows March 7–10 at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, CA. balletsdemontecarlo.com.

Like Rabbits

NEW YORK CITY   A surreal contemplation of childhood attachments and the nature of desire, Pontus Lidberg’s On the Nature of Rabbits makes its North American debut at The Joyce Theater March 6–10. joyce.org.

Dismantling Classic Cinema

SAN FRANCISCO  How do the archetypal roles in classic genre films—the romantic lead, the hard-boiled detective, the femme fatale—shift when embodied by BIPOC performers? Kayla Farrish is joined by five other dancers and musician Alex MacKinnon to explore the question, pushing back against the erasure and marginalization of non-white actors in Hollywood’s golden age, in Put Away the Fire, dear, which premieres at ODC Theater March 8–10. odc.dance.

Eating Its Own Tail

CHICAGO  Ouroboros, a new evening-length dance-theater solo from Nejla Yatkin, draws inspiration from Middle Eastern snake dances and the choreographer’s nomadic ancestry. Set in the round, the work invites audience participation as it incorporates multiple languages and movement styles, all connecting to, in Yatkin’s words, “heal the sacred thread of the feminine.” March 8–10. ny2dance.com.

Statement Begins

VANCOUVER AND SURREY  Ballet BC’s NOW program features a pair of commissions—one from Micaela Taylor, the other by choreographic duo Out Innerspace (Tiffany Tregarthen and David Raymond)—alongside the return of Crystal Pite’s darkly political dance theater work The Statement. The program premieres in Vancouver March 7–9 and repeats in Surrey March 22–23. balletbc.com. 

Intimate and Explosive

NEW YORK CITY  Doug Varone’s two-part To My Arms/Restore plays with contrasts. The first half, set to a suite of Handel arias, evokes intimacy, love, and loss, while the second focuses on visceral, explosive physicality to the beats of Nico Bentley’s “Handel Remixed.” With live music by MasterVoices and New York Baroque Incorporated, the new evening-length premieres at NYU Skirball March 22–23. nyuskirball.com.

New at NW

PORTLAND, OR  Associate choreographer Joseph Hernandez, former Luna Negra Dance Theater artistic director Gustavo Ramírez Sansano, and independent dance theater choreographer Nicole von Arx each contribute a premiere to NW Dance Project’s spring program, Secret Stories. March 29–30. nwdanceproject.org.

Books on Broadway

Two page-to-stage adaptations sing and dance to the Great White Way.

The Notebook

Based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks and the blockbuster movie it inspired, the musical adaptation follows Allie and Noah as their love repeatedly brings them back together in spite of the forces trying to keep them apart. Katie Spelman (associate choreographer on Moulin Rouge! The Musical) choreographs to music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson. Opens at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre March 14. notebookmusical.com.

Water for Elephants

A young man jumps on a train with no idea of its destination and finds himself swept away by a traveling circus. As in the novel by Sara Gruen, the adventure is recounted through the memories of the main character’s older self in the musical adaptation, which brings the circus to life through choreography by Jesse Robb and Shana Carroll (who also acts as circus designer). Opens March 21 at the Imperial Theatre. waterforelephantsthemusical.com.

The post 9 Performances on Our Radar This March appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Edited by Anna Schneider and featuring contributions by a slew of top scholars, as well as collaborators and artists who have been inspired by Monk’s work, the book includes photography, drawings, notations, conversations with the artist, and previously unpublished archival material.

Its release is in conjunction with a career-encompassing exhibition by the same name currently on view at Munich, Germany’s Haus der Kunst and at Oude Kerk Amsterdam, together making up the first all-inclusive deep dive into Monk’s multifaceted and multidisciplinary work. The exhibitions run until March 3 in Munich and April 14 in Amsterdam, and the book, which will feature photos from the exhibition, is currently slated for release in May.

The post An Upcoming Book Continues Celebrations of Meredith Monk’s 80th appeared first on Dance Magazine.

CADD encouraged expansive awareness of space, of one’s body, of who dances, of what dance is for and what it can do—all grounded in Black diasporan experience and values. Binahkaye Joy’s presentation intrigued me the most. The Washington, DC–based force of nature identifies as “spatial architect, dancing mother, visionary space activator, fertility priestess, midwife, sacred nourishment practitioner, afrofuturist bush mother, ringshout synergist, and radiant superconductor of divine creation intelligence.” That’s not all: “…a budding astronomer…fascinated by the correlation between the birthing of stars and the creation of our fertility codes, Mother Mother is also a writer, sacred storyteller, communiographer, soft-time practice portal developer, fertile soundscape artist” and many other head-spinning descriptors.

What caught my breath, and my heart, was Joy’s uncomplicated pride in her body—“at the center of my labor”—as a place of generous size and overall generosity. Raising five children— her “munchkins,” with names like Jubilee and Luminous Glory—she regularly welcomes them into her dances. The film of her installation performance Elemental, features her either breastfeeding while dancing or wearing a baby pouch as she moves. No “solo” ever goes unvisited by a kid or two tripping through it, and the privacy of a bedroom, with its “birthing altar,” opens to public view as space for “honoring abundance and finding agency in it.”

Joy told us that as a child, she felt self-conscious because of her dark skin: “Am I beautiful enough?” What’s beautiful today—aside from, yes, that skin—is the way she opens minds and possibilities for dance artists and those of us who witness.

Scholar, educator, and artist Halifu Osumare, who offered the concluding keynote, advised us to “go beyond a limited consciousness,” citing cultural icons such as Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols, musician Sun Ra, novelist Octavia Butler, painter Kerry James Marshall, and filmmaker Ryan Coogler. “Never forget our life blood is the ancestors,” she said. We must press ever forward with Black imagination and ingenuity in the spirit of hope.

“It’s important to creatively design our future,” Osumare said. “Black dance can be anything…that we are called to do.”

The post Place Matters: Exploring the Geography of the Body at the 2024 CADD Conference appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Four years of pandemic impact have wreaked havoc on the lives of professional dancers like Jaramillo, a member of Sydnie L. Mosley’s New York City–based collective SLMDances. Most dance organizations, whether commercial or nonprofit, have been on a financial roller-coaster ride, too, whose tracks parallel ups and downs in the U.S. economy as a whole. Multiple reports published since last summer have shed long-awaited light on the fiscal health of the country’s dance sector. What those numbers say isn’t simple to summarize.

“Part of each organization’s story is, How nimble was that organization and how able has it been to adapt?” says Kellee Edusei, executive director of national service and advocacy organization Dance/USA. Companies and schools willing and able to move activities outdoors, stream video performances, and offer virtual classes had likely restored at least a portion of their earned income by summer 2021. Meanwhile, those who waited until studios and theaters could reopen might’ve gone a full fiscal year—or more—without any ticket sales, tuition fees, or paid arts education contracts. Pandemic restrictions, which varied from state to state, tied the hands of some organizations’ leaders more tightly than others.

SMU DataArts, a primary source of research on trends in the nonprofit cultural sector, collected and synthesized information about more than 120 U.S. dance organizations from a four-year period, 2019 to 2022. One takeaway from its longitudinal observations is that, even when the changes in dollar amounts appear positive, adjustments for inflation erase most gains (and deepen losses).

“When organizations geared up for the return of regular levels of programming in 2022, their expenses were 2 percent higher than they were in 2019, but their real buying power was 11 percent lower,” says Dr. Zannie Voss, the Dallas-based research center’s director and a professor at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business and Meadows School of the Arts. “Inflation doesn’t just have a very real impact on the core cost of producing or presenting,” she adds. “It also creates the kind of economic uncertainty that makes people not want to, or unable to, spend as much money as they once did.”

Along similar lines, percentage-based calculations might paint a rosier picture than is warranted of the financial health of dance organizations centering and led by people of color. “The average budget size of a non-BIPOC dance organization was three times that of a BIPOC organization in 2019,” says Voss, “and two and a half times that of a BIPOC organization in 2022. Those two cohorts had neither the same starting place nor the same endpoint, so any notion of a ‘leveled playing field’ is not the reality.”

The economics of touring and presenting, in particular, have changed significantly in recent years. Indira Goodwine-Josias, senior program director for dance at the New England Foundation for the Arts and director of its National Dance Project, says inflation, continued COVID-19 testing protocols, questions of access and inclusivity, and other factors have made touring more complicated for ensembles large and small. Unpredictable, sometimes painfully long waits for the U.S. government to approve visa petitions further complicate international travel, whether planned and paid for by presenters or dance companies themselves. “We have seen, for a lot of the presenters who don’t only present dance, some contractions,” says Sara Nash, dance director at the National Endowment for the Arts. “If, before the pandemic, they were bringing in five or six dance presentations a year, some of them pulled away from dance. And some have come back, but to fewer dance presentations than before.”

The U.S. government provided more than $50 billion to arts and entertainment entities through emergency, relief, and recovery programs, like the American Rescue Plan, Paycheck Protection Program, and Shuttered Venue Operators Grant. Now that those initiatives have largely run their course, Lane Harwell, senior program officer at the Ford Foundation, anticipates “further contraction of the dance field. Groups will continue to close, cut productions and staff, relocate, or pause operations.”

At the same time, Harwell says, financial pressures can foster innovation and prompt collaboration, at times within philanthropy, and “may create the conditions for new groups and artistry to emerge.” With responsive plans and agile leadership, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, Deeply Rooted Dance Theater in Chicago, LEIMAY in Brooklyn, ODC/Dance in San Francisco, and Rosy Simas Danse in Minneapolis became bright spots, sources say, on the U.S. dance map—organizations that weathered well the economic and social turmoil of recent years. The Ford-led America’s Cultural Treasures program, implemented alongside eight regional funding collaboratives, raised more than $275 million for nonprofits in dance and other creative fields beginning in 2020. The International Association of Blacks in Dance has had a numerically smaller but similarly distributed impact on the capacity of groups centering people and practices of African ancestry or origin.

Melanie George, assistant professor at Rutgers University and associate curator at Jacob’s Pillow, says that the coming months and years will be revealing. “There were a lot of public conversations like, ‘When we come back from this lockdown, we’re gonna do things differently,’ ” she says. “Institutions were saying it. Presenters were saying it. Funders were saying it. Artists took that to heart and are now like, ‘You said you wanted to do it differently? Well, here’s what it actually takes and costs for me to do what I would’ve compromised on before.’ ”

High-volume programming is expected of international festivals like Jacob’s Pillow, George says. But greater productivity is not necessarily the answer to every question. “We have not returned to what we were,” George says, “and certain very thoughtful organizations are talking about doing less and going deeper.”

Case Study: J CHEN PROJECT

How artist Jessica Chen’s company is making it work.

J CHEN PROJECT, primarily a vehicle for the creative work of New York City–based artist Jessica Chen, crossed a significant financial threshold at the start of 2024: its first annual operating budget with income and expenses greater than $50,000.

Chen says the company survived the past three years in part by being flexible about how its work is experienced. “We can’t go into the red renting theaters for every performance, so maybe we’ll work with a museum to perform in the lobby instead,” she says. “That’s not always ideal for my work, but I’ve tried to step back and ask myself, ‘What is the company’s mission? What is our role in this moment?’­ Let’s lean in to the unknown, which I think is what the pandemic forced all of us to do.” Chen adds that, because the company’s shows are now more frequently presented than self-produced­, more expenses are covered through commissions.

Inspired by the response from the audience, Chen has remounted her sold-out premiere from last March, AAPI HEROES: MYTHS AND LEGENDS, as an ongoing, once-monthly show. That long-term commitment has opened new fundraising doors and allowed Chen to guarantee her company members more pay and workweeks in advance. “My number-one priority is paying the dancers,” she says.

Data Points

Key findings from recent economic research on dance in the U.S.

SMU DataArts compiled information provided annually from 2019 to 2022 by 127 dance nonprofits based across the U.S. and found that:

• Private philanthropic support for dance fell 17% over that four-year period by dollar amount, and fell 27% once adjusted for the concurrent rate of inflation
• Dollars paid to performers exceeded the rate of inflation by 5% while dollars paid to administrative personnel exceeded the rate of inflation by 12%
• Ticket-sales revenue, adjusted for inflation,
  decreased 32% over the four-year period for dance organizations, versus a 66% decrease for theater organizations
• Donations from individuals comprised 30% of private support in 2022 versus 40% in 2019

Visit culturaldata.org to learn more.

Dance/NYC surveyed more than 1,600 dance workers and nearly 400 organizations in the New York City area and found that:

• Individuals made an average of $22 per hour, and 54% also held nondance jobs in order to make ends meet
• 56% of respondents had no savings or cash reserves and entities’ average budget size decreased 4% by dollar amount from 2019 to 2022
• Individuals worked an average of four jobs per year and 31% earned less than $25,000 per year
• 37% of individuals were salaried employees and 41% had worked without pay in the last year
• 64% self-financed and/or spent their own money to fund their dance work

Visit dance.nyc to learn more.

Dance/USA compiled the results of financial surveys completed annually from 2019 to 2023 by 12 member organizations—mostly major ballet companies—and preliminary results found that:

• The organizations earned 23% fewer dollars in 2023 through dance education and training programs than they did in 2019
• Total government support peaked in 2022 at 26% of total revenue, yet in 2023, it fell back to 4%—versus 3% in 2019
• Dollars earned through performance programs in 2023 were approximately 90% of 2019 levels, even with
  15% fewer performances, and continue to increase

Visit danceusa.org to learn more.

The post The Economics of Dance—Dance’s Future According to the Numbers appeared first on Dance Magazine.

“It opened us up to a whole different realm of people,” says Robin Edwards, executive director of the Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center and Hiplet Ballerinas. “People know about Hubbard Street. People know about The Joffrey Ballet,” but they don’t necessarily know CMDC, Muntu Dance Theatre, or Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, she adds, naming just a few companies that have participated in the Legacy Project’s first and second cohorts. “Ravinia was an oppor­tunity to lessen that equity gap.”

Aptly titled Metamorphosis, the show offered a glimpse at the transformation the Legacy Project hopes to foster in Chicago and beyond. The future it envisions is one where Black dance is recognized, celebrated, and preserved for posterity, and historical inequities in funding and operational support have been rectified. For now, the Legacy Project has stepped in to bridge the gap, drawing on the university’s plentiful resources and connections to help participating companies thrive.

Filling the Gap

The need for such an initiative was made stark in the 2019 report Mapping the Dance Landscape in Chicagoland, which found that only 9 percent of funding targeted communities of color even though people of color made up nearly half the population and more than half of dancers and choreographers (with 31 percent of dancers and choreographers identifying as Black or African American). The report called out the disparity, flagging, albeit gingerly, that the disproportionate allocation of resources “may perpetuate inequities.”

“To me, I know it exists. But I think it just shocked a lot of people,” says Legacy Project director Princess Mhoon, who grew up steeped in Chicago’s Black dance community and trained with several of the institutions she now works with.
The Legacy Project was born in the wake of that report when Tracie D. Hall, then director of the Joyce Foundation’s Culture Program, reached out to Logan Center leaders to discuss developing a program to bolster the organizations performing and celebrating Black dance—and see if they’d be willing to become its home.

It was an easy yes, according to the Logan Center’s executive director Bill Michel. The University of Chicago was simultaneously having discussions about how to support an increasing demand for dance offerings on campus. In addition to serving as a center for artistic practice for students, faculty, and staff, a core part of the Logan Center’s mission is “to create real opportunities for the incredible artists and arts organizations on the South Side of Chicago and across the city to be part of our community, and for us to be part of their community,” says Michel.

Cultivating Community

The Legacy Project’s cohort model brought together eight companies in its first round between 2019 and 2022 and 10 companies for its second beginning in 2023. A testament to its early success is the fact that six of the eight companies from the first cohort returned—including the aforementioned along with Joel Hall Dancers & Center, NAJWA Dance Corps, and Forward Momentum Chicago. They were joined by newcomers M.A.D.D. Rhythms, Move Me Soul, The Era Footwork Collective, and Praize Productions.

Leaders from each of the companies meet monthly for workshops—such as leadership development sessions run by experts and peer-led tutorials where each company shares hard-won knowledge—and discussions that foster a meaningful bond. “We got to work together. We got to talk with each other. We got to hear about other people’s struggles,” says Edwards, reflecting on the first cohort and the no-brainer decision to return for round two. The burgeoning community became a lifeline during the pandemic and beyond. “​​It was comforting to know that you’re sitting there amongst people that are going through the same thing,” she says. “We’re fighting for the solutions together. We’re not alone in this.”

Building Four Pillars

The companies and Legacy Project rely on UChicago resources and partners and other institutions and organizations across the city in addressing four pillars. First is capacity building, and second is advocacy, which undergirds everything else. The third pillar is archiving, and the fourth is presenting, which involves access to rehearsal and performance space on campus for each company, as well as joint programs like the one at Ravinia.

For capacity building, each dance company works closely with consultants and grad students through the UChicago Office of Civic Engagement’s Community Programs Accelerator. They identify high-priority areas of development and customize projects that will bolster growth, like crafting a fundraising plan or finding the right board members.

“We want them to not have to walk the journey alone,” says Sharon Grant, executive director of the Community Programs Accelerator. “We’re not a ‘One-and-done, go do a course, here’s some information, and then go back to figure it out on your own.’ ” Instead, they roll up their sleeves and help get things done.

The archiving component puts the “legacy” in the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project. Through partnerships with the Newberry Library and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and help from a student intern turned staff member, companies consider options for cataloging and housing their artifacts.

Edwards recalls poring over piles of old programs and photos CMDC sent to the Newberry Library. “What we’re saying is that we consider this to be so important that these things need to be archived,” Edwards says. Creating the collections that will tell the stories of Black artists and companies to the next generations is about preserving their legacies, to be sure. But it’s also about leaving behind something to build on into the future.

The post How Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project at the University of Chicago is Working to Bridge the Local Dance Scene’s Equity Gap appeared first on Dance Magazine.

“Through the early decades of modern dance in this country, The 92nd Street Y became a safe haven for many artists who were not being presented anywhere else in New York City,” says Alison Manning, co-executive director of the Harkness Dance Center and director of the Harkness School of Dance at 92NY. Dance legends like Erick Hawkins, José Limón, Sophie Maslow, Pearl Primus, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn all performed on 92NY’s stage. Although the organization also had classes and concerts in other dance styles, it was a hotspot for modern dance in particular just as the genre was beginning to take off in the U.S.

This year, as 92NY celebrates its 150th anniversary, honoring those dance roots is at the top of the list of priorities. The organization is installing a major exhibit called “Dance to Belong: A History of Dance at 92NY,” from March 12 to October 31, in 92NY’s Weill Art Gallery. It kicks off with a one-night-only performance on March 12 meant to connect the venue’s illustrious past to the promise of what’s ahead. The Limón Dance Company will perform José Limón’s beloved There is a Time, paired with Omar Román De Jesús’ Like Those Playground Kids at Midnight. The Martha Graham Dance Company will perform Appalachian Spring Suite, paired with an excerpt from Jamar Roberts’ We The People. And Ailey II will perform a series of excerpts from Ailey classics, including The Lark Ascending, Streams, and Blues Suite, plus a premiere by Hope Boykin.

“We are highlighting that, in the moment when modern dance was wrestling into relevance in this country, The 92nd Street Y played a pretty critical role in opening doors for artists who needed space and support,” says Manning.

The programming for the upcoming performance began with Limón’s There Is a Time, she says. “The piece represents such an important message about our own 92NY history. There have been ups, there have been downs,” she explains. “And we as an institution have weathered both times of great challenge and of joy, but that we were at the forefront for many overlooked artists, during this important period in modern dance history, in providing support, time for joy, time for grief, whatever they needed to make their work.” 

The one brand-new work on the bill is a premiere by Boykin, who says it’s an expression of her gratitude to the legends who paved the path before her. Creating it for this concert was a “no-brainer” she says, since 92NY not only gave some of those legends a platform, but offered her one too: Her first full-evening show of her own took place there in 2021. “This work is a thank-you,” says Boykin. “A thank-you for the lessons, and paths made clear. This work will be a celebration of who I have become as a result of the work so many did before me.”

Putting together the March 12 program has brought home for Manning just how pivotal a role 92NY has played in the story of modern dance, and her role in stewarding that forward for the next generation. “My vision centers around trying to make sure that artists who need a platform and haven’t had an opportunity have it,” she says, “and artists who already have substantial support and known work can lift up these younger, less established artists simply by sharing the space and being presented on these same stages.”

Román De Jesús points out that this is precisely what this particular program is doing for him. The emerging choreographer has recently been racking up fellowships and awards, like the Dance Magazine Harkness Promise Award, yet he still struggles to find resources and venues to showcase his work. “To me, standing on the same stage as legendary companies and alongside fellow emerging artists symbolizes representation, inclusivity, and hope,” he says.

92NY’s long tradition of inclusivity is ongoing, and it will continue to be a place where dance history is made for many more decades to come.

The post 92NY Celebrates Its Rich Dance History as a Birthplace of Modern Dance appeared first on Dance Magazine.

How are you working to stabilize and re-instill confidence in the company?
I’m bringing feelings of positivity to it. There was a lot of uncertainty before. Looking at the company’s dancers in the studio now, you can see the relief and joy they have. Also, I am getting rid of the restrictive policies that were in place before regarding dancer schedules, and promoting open communication between the dancers and staff.

The investigation revealed significant financial concerns. What changes do you expect you will have to make?
With the tight budget we have, it’s going to be a roller coaster ride, and some sacrifices will have to be made. Of the company’s 33 dancers, a handful will not be returning when their contracts are up. However, we may need to tighten up the company even further and reduce the dancers’ contracts by a few weeks.

What is your longer-term vision for the company?
One of my goals is to have everyone on the same page in terms of the look of the company. We don’t have that now stylistically, but we will get there. I also want to challenge the dancers more with the ballets we perform. I want to build a repertory of ballet classics such as Giselle, The Nutcracker, and Romeo and Juliet. I would love to bring in more Balanchine ballets, and those of Jerome Robbins and Twyla Tharp, as well as newer choreographers, especially female choreographers.

You are also a choreographer. Will we see the company performing some of your ballets?
Yes. It will be a necessity now to save the company money.

At some point, you will need to hire dancers. What do you look for in a dancer?
Someone with strong classical technique who is also able to move freely in contemporary dance styles. Someone who is open to taking risks. If a choreographer tells you to fall on the ground and roll, you need to be able to do so.

What are some of your other goals for the company?
To find a new facility with larger studio space for the company and our new Academy. I would also like to expand the number of productions we do in a season from three to four or five in the next few years, and have the company tour more.

The post Cleveland Ballet Reset: A Conversation With New Artistic Director Timour Bourtasenkov appeared first on Dance Magazine.

At its most profound, ethics asks how we should live. Where is the line between right and wrong? What does it mean to be a good human being and create a good society? The question is one of ought versus is. Just because something has been a certain way for hundreds of years is not a justification for its continuance.

In the case of the dance field this is especially relevant. While dance is an exciting and vast domain with many different facets, the field writ large has not always grown from a deep consideration of the ethical dimensions of its prevailing practices and values. As dance educator Susan Stinson noted in 1984, “When it appears so obvious that dance can either enhance or diminish our humanness, [why] do we seem to use it so frequently for the latter and so infrequently for the former?”

Studying ethics provides perspectives and possibilities for making the dance world more humane. The specific realm of normative ethics is the study of what is good and bad, right and wrong. However, normative ethics is not monolithic, and the different perspectives are helpful to understand the problems that exist. Virtue ethics focuses more on the character of persons in determining what is good/bad. Deontological ethics concentrates on rules, rights, and responsibilities. And consequentialist ethics centers on results or consequences of behavior. Research shows that the Western dance world functions according to a pseudo-consequentialist perspective that can seriously undermine people’s rights.

The strong tendency in Western dance—as practiced initially in Europe and Russia and then the United States, especially since the dawn of the twentieth century—is to present honorable-sounding statements as rationalizations (often poorly conceived) for how the field functions. Whether intentionally or not, moral-sounding (vs. morally sound) perspectives have come to mask a broad spectrum of questionable behaviors across a variety of styles, from ballet, modern, and theatrical jazz dance to the commercial dance field. These include­ everything from a choreographer appropriating another culture’s sacred practices to an agent working with one of their presenter friends to ensure a company they represent is in a coveted festival showcase, and even to an atmosphere of fear dominating an entire dance institution.

The main underlying narrative driving this set of practices is that results are what are most valued. For many in dance, everything comes down to the work itself, because great dance can provide a deep spiritual benefit. This belief can lead to the following conclusion: One should do all one can to get the work made and seen. Everything taken together—choreographers, dancers, contracts, funding, etc.—contributes to the manifestation of something outstandingly good: the uplift experienced by viewing great dance.

While seemingly harmless and even inspirational, revering the experience a masterpiece evokes has been used to instill a dangerous, unquestioning reverence for choreographic geniuses­ and the pedagogical practices they employ. It can mean that it is ethically permissible (and often actually condoned) to be an oppressive choreographer, for example, because the good of providing a superior aesthetic experience outweighs the bad that might arise from being a choreographic­ bully. It can mean placing inappropriate and ultimately damaging value on mutually supportive, sacrosanct products (rather than processes)—namely, genius choreographers, choreographic masterpieces, major presenting venues, and elite institutions. It sets up a situation where the valued “ends” can easily involve some form of abusive behaviors causing suffering, severely limiting individuals’ rights and compromising decent, humane conduct.

What the field of ethics offers us are ways to challenge such problematic assumptions and actions. We can draw inspiration from the deontological realm, such as the idea that all human beings regardless of context should be treated with dignity and respect—as ends in themselves and never solely as a means to an end. We can also look to virtue ethics, especially an ethics of care and the degree to which it encourages individuals to consciously cultivate traits such as compassion, patience, generosity, fairness, and sensitivity to others.

From a dance perspective, considering rights and virtues means looking at the dance field in a very different light from what has too often been the norm. Dancers, administrators, choreographers, teachers, students, and parents would be encouraged to work collaboratively to determine common values, principles, rights, and responsibilities for any studio, school, program, class, or company. Doing so would help to provide greater clarity and a sense of shared responsibility, moving us toward a more humane dance world.

Naomi M. Jackson, PhD, is a professor in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre at Arizona State University.

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Anita and Chita’s other early dazzlers—Rose in Bye Bye Birdie and Anyanka in the mostly forgotten 1964 musical Bajour—were known to me from guest spots on TV variety shows, and it seemed I’d been watching Chita be indelible my whole life. Whether she was flipping her skirt for Robbins or cocking her head for Fosse or just extending an arm for any of the other choreographers she worked with, her technique was impeccable, her energy ferocious. Her dancing had both elegance and directness, qualities not often found in combination. And it wasn’t just when she had larger-than-life roles like Claire to bite into. In Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life, she was just Chita, a hard-working member of the ensemble who’d lucked into some fabulous shows and worked with some fabulous people. Yet you couldn’t take your eyes off her.

When Chita was among the recipients of the 2002 Kennedy Center Honors, Hal Prince, in his introduction, described her as one of those people who “carry around their own spotlight.” And that spotlight illuminated everyone Chita played, whether the far-from-glamorous owner of the title arena in The Rink or the embodiment of showbiz razzle-dazzle in Kiss of the Spider Woman—both of which won her Tony Awards.

Speaking of awards, you may have noticed that I’m calling her Chita instead of the more journalistically formal Rivera. It’s not because we were pals. (According to her memoir, her pals called her Cheet.) But in 2017, the Fred and Adele Astaire Awards, which every year honored New York City theater dancers and choreographers chosen by a committee I chaired, morphed into the Chita Rivera Awards; for the first time, I got to see her offstage and off-script. The powerhouse charisma didn’t need a script. The remarkable amalgam of elegance and directness that had struck me when she performed was not a performance. It was her.

The post A Lifetime of Watching Chita Rivera appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Comings & Goings

Kim Chan has joined Jacob’s Pillow as associate artistic director.

César Morales has been appointed artistic director of Santiago Ballet, beginning in March.

Timour Bourtasenkov has been named artistic director of Cleveland Ballet after the company severed ties with co-founder Gladisa Guadalupe. Larry Goodman has been named CEO, succeeding Howard Bender, who had served in the role on an interim basis following the suspension and subsequent resignation of Guadalupe’s husband, Michael Krasnyansky. The cofounders’ departures come in the wake of a misconduct investigation.

Andrea Just has been named associate director and Rebecah Goldstone dramaturge of Ate9, leading the company’s new Europe team.

Charlotte St. Martin will retire from The Broadway League effective February 16. Jason Laks will serve as acting president.

David Nixon has been appointed artistic producer at Cape Town City Ballet.

Anna Hainsworth has been named Birmingham Royal Ballet’s in-house producer.

Edward Watson has been named guest répétiteur at The Royal Ballet.

Yuan Yuan Tan will retire from San Francisco Ballet after a farewell performance on February 14.

Pacific Northwest Ballet principal James Yoichi Moore will retire at the end of the season. His final performance is scheduled for June 9.

Awards & Honors

Recipients of 2024 United States Artists Fellowships, which come with a $50,000 unrestricted grant, include Mythili Prakash, Sean Dorsey, Jerron Herman, Petra Bravo, Marjani Forté-Saunders/7NMS, and Erin Kilmurray.

At the Primetime Creative Arts Emmys, Jon Boogz won Outstanding Choreography for Scripted Programming (“Blindspotting”), and Derek Hough won Outstanding Choreography for Variety or Reality Programming (“Dancing with the Stars”).

The International Association of Blacks in Dance honored the Bluff City Cluster of the LINKS Incorporated with its Distinguished Leadership Award; the Jenkins Family Foundation with the Reginald Van Lee Philanthropy Award; and Tommie-Waheed Evans with the Charles Augins Inspirational Artist Award.

Orlando Pabotoy will receive the 2023–24 Joe A. Callaway Award for excellence in choreography from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society for his work on The Half-God of Rainfall at New York Theatre Workshop.

Karen Kain has been named the 2024 Dance in Focus Awardee by Dance On Camera.

The Martha Hill Dance Fund will present Lifetime Achievement Awards to Joan Myers Brown and Jim May and Mid-Career Awards to Jacqulyn Buglisi and Ronald K. Brown at a ceremony on February 26.

Brenda Way will be inducted into the California Hall of Fame in February.

New Funding Opportunities

CUNY Dance Initiative is accepting applications from New York City–based choreographers and companies for its 2024–25 residency cycle until February 15. More information here.

Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Digital Accelerator Program will award up to 50 qualifying non-profit cultural organizations with funding and support to strengthen their digital infrastructure. Application deadline is March 13, more information available here.

Applications for the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowships, which award Minnesota and New York City–based artists $60,000 over three years to support the creation of new work and/or artistic development, are open until April 15. More information here.

The post News of Note: What You Might Have Missed in January 2024 appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Whim W’Him had been looking for studios—roomy, open spaces in a good location—to lease since before the pandemic. But with the costs of state-of-the-art flooring, lighting, and sound systems easily totaling over $140,000, Wevers says, “investing in a space you don’t own seems very perilous.” When the company began looking to buy, a church was an obvious choice. In addition to the architectural benefits, “many churches were on the market after the pandemic,” Wevers says, “and they’re also in family neighborhoods that would attract students” to Whim W’Him’s school. 

While the remodel, overseen by architect Owen Richards,­ kept the space’s lofty ceilings, it required removing some walls and adding others to create a 2,000-square-foot studio and another half that size, as well as office space, a kitchen that doubles as a meeting room, a lobby, and storage areas for costumes and sets. The company participated in planning the half-million-dollar renovation, with the dancers designing their own lounge and changing room. There is also a space on site for them to work with a physical therapist, who is available to them after rehearsals.

The new building also boasts a school for all ages and abilities with contemporary, improvisation, hip hop, repertory, and body therapies among the initial class offerings. “It’s about dance for all ages, all levels,” Wevers says. “Dance for all without a professional hook.” Wevers also plans to offer highly subsidized or free space for local artists, as well as full scholarships for BIPOC dancers to classes and programs.

The center is an impressive accomplishment for a relatively­ small and relatively new independent contemporary dance company—but maybe not all that surprising given the consistency with which Whim W’Him has made new work and carved out an artistic niche in Seattle. Wevers, who celebrates 25 years as a choreographer this year, enjoyed a huge following as a Pacific Northwest Ballet principal before starting his own company. Since its 2009 founding, Whim W’Him has premiered 88 pieces and commissioned 45 guest choreographers in just 14 seasons, including an entirely virtual 2020–21 season that was successful enough to ensure increases in dancer salaries and benefits at a time when pandemic mitigations left most companies facing significant financial challenges.

Reaching this point “took years of consistent work,” says Wevers, “proving we could maintain our core mission of creativity as well as our ideal of elevating standards of company care for better ethical contemporary dance employment.”

Whim W’Him’s track record has helped its fundraising efforts for the center. To fund the purchase and remodel, the company received a hefty loan from an anonymous donor and a gift of $250,000 from the Jolene McCaw Family Foundation, as well as good financing. A Fall Fete early this season saw 200 people contribute over $250,000. The company has also encouraged smaller gifts through its “Butterfly Effect” capital campaign, through which donors can fund specific line items, like mirror installation, one square foot of flooring, or a single lightbulb (the cheapest option, at $6), “making it fun and affordable for everyone to participate,” says Wevers.

The first event in the completed building happens this month—an open house that will feature free community classes, workshops, performances, lectures, and building tours. Before then, “the company was just camping—the building still looked very much like a church, complete with a choir balcony and dais,” says Wevers. “Now, it’s a world-class center for dance.” 

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Upon graduating from high school in 1951, Rivera booked her first performing job in a national tour of Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam. Less than a year later, she made her Broadway debut as a principal dancer in Guys and Dolls. But the role that made her a star came in 1957 when, at age 24, she drew upon her Puerto Rican heritage as Anita in West Side Story. Dance Magazine put her on the cover for the first time that November. Inside the issue, writer Leo Lerman declared, “Here is a performer of enormous individuality with a dance approach quite uniquely her own.”

Her career took off, and held steady. In 1961, she received her first Tony Award nomination for her portrayal of Rosie in Bye Bye Birdie; in 1976, she got another for originating the role of Velma Kelly in Chicago. Rivera was quick to acknowledge that she greatly benefited from working with iconic choreographers like Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Michael Kidd, and Gower Champion. They created the steps; she made them sizzle.

When a car crash in 1986 crushed her left leg, doctors told her she would never dance again. They clearly didn’t know Rivera. Within a year, she was performing in cabarets, wowing audiences with her signature irrepressible energy (even if the kicks were a little lower). She even returned to Broadway in 1993, in the title role of Kiss of the Spider Woman—for which she won a Tony for Best Actress in a Musical. In total, she appeared in more than 20 Broadway productions over the course of seven decades, receiving 10 Tony Award nominations and winning three.

In 2017, when the Astaire Awards—which honor dance in theater and film—needed to be rebranded, they were swiftly renamed the Chita Rivera Awards for Dance and Choreography. Today, a Chita Rivera Award is one of the highest honors for a musical theater dancer or choreographer. On the red carpet before the first ceremony under Rivera’s name, former Dance Magazine editor in chief Wendy Perron asked Rivera for her advice for young dancers. Rivera responded: “Keep caring. Keep dancing. Keep working hard. But most of all, keep loving, loving to dance.”

Rivera’s own love stayed strong until the end. When her memoir was released last year, Rivera told “CBS Sunday Morning”: “If I come back, I want to come back a dancer. That will be my second life.”

The post Remembering Chita Rivera, 1933–2024: “I Wouldn’t Trade Being a Dancer for Anything” appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Romeo and Juliet and Couples Therapy

STANFORD, CA  What if Romeo and Juliet, instead of dying as star-crossed teens, lived to grow up and had to learn how to deal with each other? Ben Duke’s Juliet & Romeo shows the couple, now roughly 40 years old, putting on a dance theater performance for a live audience to confront their relationship troubles and the pressures of being the overgrown poster children for romantic love. Lost Dog’s critically acclaimed duet makes a rare appearance stateside at Stanford Live Feb. 1–3. live.stanford.edu. —Courtney Escoyne

Raise It Up

MEMPHIS  Hope Boykin contributes a premiere to Collage Dance Collective’s RISE program. Also on tap are the ballet that lends the program its name—artistic director Kevin Thomas’ Rise—and Amy Hall Garner’s Saint Glory, which was inspired by her grandparents’ Catholic and Baptist roots. Feb. 3–4. collagedance.org. —CE

Desert Rose

ON TOUR  ZooNation hits the road, beginning a North American tour of the Kate Prince–choreographed Message In A Bottle this month. Set to songs by Sting newly arranged by Alex Lacamoire, the dance theater work follows a displaced family as three separated siblings venture out on their own. The tour kicks off in Los Angeles Feb. 6–11 and wraps up in Philadelphia May 14–19, with stops in Denver, Chicago, Montreal, Toronto, Boston, Charlotte, Washington, DC, and New York City. sadlerswells.com. —CE

The Jilted Bride

MIAMI  To commemorate happy vows, save a piece of wedding cake. But after a jilting, what could a wronged woman do? Freeze the betrayal scene and keep wearing the bridal gown—the wounding of others to follow. Redemption, though, awaits. That’s the premise of Havisham!, Dance NOW! Miami’s site-specific reimagining of the most Gothic character from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Miss Havisham. Here she gains an expiatory backstory—two dancers portraying her at different periods, enamored then broken—seen from company co-director Hannah Baumgarten’s feminist perspective. To South Beach Chamber Ensemble’s pop and classical selections, Pip, Estella, and the brutish Drummle weave in and out as audiences traipse through North Miami Beach’s Ancient Spanish Monastery. Feb. 7– 8. dancenowmiami.org. —Guillermo Perez

Curated by Camille

NEW YORK CITY  Gibney’s DoublePlus continues this month with a pair of premieres by film and theater choreographer Mayte Natalio and multidisciplinary experimental artist Maleek Washington, who were selected for the program and mentored by Camille A. Brown. Feb. 8–10. gibneydance.org. —CE

Movin’ It On

DALLAS  For this year’s iteration of Dallas Black Dance Theatre’s Cultural Awareness program, company member and co-rehearsal director Hana Delong premieres Post Mortem. Joining it are His Grace, a tribute to Nelson Mandela by Christopher L. Huggins, and Matthew Rushing’s ODETTA, set to songs by songwriter and civil rights activist Odetta Holmes. Feb. 9–10. dbdt.com. —CE

New Works in Nashville

NASHVILLE  For its annual Attitude program, Nashville Ballet will debut commissions from resident choreographer Mollie Sansone, Kidd Pivot dancer Jermaine Spivey, and Camille A. Brown & Dancers member Yusha-Marie Sorzano, all with music performed live by local musicians. Feb. 9–11. nashvilleballet.com. —CE

Bach as Blueprint

NEW YORK CITY  In The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker uses one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s most well-known compositions as the blueprint for an evening-length solo. De Keersmaeker performs through the aria and 30 variations alongside pianist Pavel Kolesnikov for the North American premiere of the work at NYU Skirball. Feb. 22–24. nyuskirball.org. —CE

Liberating Lilith

SAN FRANCISCO  In Lilith, flamenco artist Fanny Ara uses the mythological figure—Biblical Adam’s first wife who abandoned Eden, variously interpreted as a force for evil or a symbol of female independence—to consider the weight of expectations imposed by herself and others, and her journey toward liberation. The evening-length solo work, premiering at ODC Theater Feb. 23–25, sees Ara joined by musicians Gonzalo Grau and Vardan Ovsepian. odc.dance. —CE

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What does it mean to you to make a ballet for New York City Ballet, where you’ve danced for almost 20 years?

I feel a huge responsibility because not many dancers in the company get asked to choreograph, especially female dancers. I’m excited that the dancers have someone at the front of the room who really knows what it means to be on pointe. Mira Nadon and I were working on her solo, and she said, “I have never been in a studio with someone who was choreographing in pointe shoes.” We were figuring it out together. I also really want to make the dancers dance. 

Can you separate your dancing self from your choreographing self?

Not really. I choreograph things that I would like to dance. I want people to enjoy the steps, and if they don’t, I can’t like the choreography, even if they’re good steps. I told them, “I want this to be something you are excited to dance.”

What music will you be using?

I’m using the Poulenc concerto for two pianos. When I told [NYCB music director] Andrew Litton I was thinking of using that music, he said, “Yes, please!” because that’s something the orchestra will be really excited to play. It’s big music, so I’ll be using a large cast, 19 dancers. It’s all about the music, and the story in the music.

Did you plan your new ballet in advance?

I didn’t really have time to plan. I sat at home with the music and the score and wrote out all the counts. I don’t need to prepare much more than that. I like to create on the people who are in the room. 

How long have you been making dances?

I’ve always kind of made dances, but my first official one was for the Vail Dance Festival in 2018. I had just gone through a divorce and I thought, Well, nothing can be as bad as that, so I might as well try! I thought it would just be one and done. But Damian Woetzel [director of the festival] kept pushing me to do more, which helped my confidence. And I think each one got a little better.

In the last few years, you’ve really taken control of your own career, like the Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends performances. What drives you?

The longer I’ve been in the company, and the more I feel like I see where my career is going and have a sense of how many years I have left, I’ve realized that I don’t want to wait until I stop dancing to figure out what to do next. It’s been happening very organically because these shows are about wanting to work with certain people I never would have gotten to work with otherwise. I don’t sit around waiting for something to challenge me or help me grow artistically. I make it happen myself. I’m not scared—I’ll try anything. Playing it safe gets you nowhere.

This past fall season, you were dancing challenging repertory throughout a very difficult period, with your father in the hospital. You were traveling back and forth from California almost every week. What was that like?

Dancing was the one thing I had control over. It felt like home. One night when things were really bad, I spent the whole night on the phone with the doctors, and then I had to go onstage for the matinee. But I enjoyed every minute onstage, and I knew my father would have been so proud of me. We were taught to never quit, and to do everything 150 percent. And I think what I was feeling brought out something really beautiful in my dancing. The things that happen to us make us richer artists.

Is your love of dancing as strong as ever?

Yes. My dad, when he was at the hospital and I was doubting whether I should go back or stay with him, would say, “You were born to dance. You have to go back.” I didn’t want him to worry about me not being able to dance, or to put that extra stress on him. He was so proud. He would tell all the doctors, “You should see her dance.” 

The post Tiler Peck Choreographs Her First Work for New York City Ballet appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Built on years of research, the new biography paints a well-informed portrait of the iconic artist, infused with anecdotes from Graham’s life and bolstered by Jowitt’s own expertise from years as a dancer, choreographer, and writer.

The post A New Martha Graham Biography from Deborah Jowitt appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The post Jeanette Delgado on the Making of Justin Peck’s <i>Illinoise</i> appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The workshops are part of Bridge Live Arts’ ongoing Dancing Distributed Leadership project, a collaboration between the organization’s director of arts leadership Cherie Hill, director of operations and development Rebecca Fitton, and 2023 affiliate artist Hope Mohr. Dancing Distributed Leadership will culminate with a virtual and in-person evening-length performance, premiering in March.

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As they matured, they were known as the Hines Brothers, and then—joined by their father, Maurice Hines Sr., on drums—as Hines, Hines and Dad. In the 1960s, they toured Europe, performed in Las Vegas with Ella Fitzgerald, and were regulars on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” a feat for African American entertainers at that time.

When the family act broke up in 1973, Gregory moved to California to pursue music and Maurice found his place in musical theater. In 1978, Maurice joined the Broadway cast of Eubie!, a tribute to composer Eubie Blake—and insisted the producers also hire Gregory.

To expand his repertoire beyond tap, Maurice studied ballet, African, and modern, and retrained his body by working with jazz choreographer Frank Hatchett. The two later founded the Hines-Hatchett dance studio, which went on to become Broadway Dance Center.  

And he got the chance to show off his 6 o’clock high kicks when he traded places with Gregory as leading man in Sophisticated Ladies in 1981.

“Everyone expected me to dance like Gregory, but he told the chorus, ‘Get ready. Maurice is on another level. Tempos will be faster!’ ” Maurice told Dance Magazine.

With Balletap USA, a dance fusion troupe he formed in 1983 with Mercedes Ellington, Maurice continued to push boundaries and find his voice as a choreographer. In 1986 he created, directed, choreographed, and starred in the Broadway show Uptown…It’s Hot!, for which he received a Tony Award nod for Best Actor in a Musical.

The highlight of his career, however, was reuniting with Gregory in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1984 film The Cotton Club, where art imitated life as they played a loving but bickering tap dance brother duo.

“To be with Gregory again was like heaven,” he said in John Carluccio’s 2019 biopic, Maurice Hines: Bring Them Back. Executive-produced by Debbie Allen and Randolph-Wright, the award-winning documentary followed Maurice while he was in his 70s and still touring and inspiring young dancers.

Duane Lee Holland Jr.—a featured dancer and assistant choreographer for Maurice’s second Broadway musical, 2006’s Hot Feet—learned firsthand that honing young talent was one of Maurice’s greatest gifts.

“As a mentor, Maurice taught me to stay true to myself, and to my artistry,” Holland wrote in an email. “He cultivated a sense of class, integrity, fearlessness, and passion that influenced me as a man, artist, and educator. As a choreographer, he loved to feature the innovation, brilliance, and funkiness of the continuum of Black American dance.”

Maurice was predeceased by Gregory, who died in 2003 of cancer. His survivors include Cheryl Davis, his adopted daughter with former partner Silas Davis.

“Uncle Maurice was the best dad a girl could have,” Cheryl said at the memorial service. “I have so much respect for [him] as a performer.”

The post Maurice Hines, 1943–2023, Had Something Extra appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Originally announced as a straight-to-streaming release, the new flick features choreography by the always-booked Kyle Hanagami and performances by Reneé Rapp (reprising the role of “Queen Bee” Regina George after her Broadway turn), Angourie Rice, Auli’i Cravalho (Moana), Jaquel Spivey (A Strange Loop), and, of course, Mean Girls mastermind Tina Fey, who returns as Ms. Norbury.

The post <i>Mean Girls</i> the Movie, the Musical, the Movie-Musical appeared first on Dance Magazine.

What role does humor play in your work? 

When you introduce humor, you offer a better understanding of the sheer tragedy of it. There’s something really cruel about dark humor. I use a Brechtian mode of: me seeing you seeing me. It’s a kind of process of estrangement and distanciation that’s happening with one’s own body and within relationship to others. It’s about the impossibility of coming together.

How does the idea of practice manifest in this new commission, study now steady? 

I’m mobilizing studies that appear in my stage works. It never appears the same, but the work is always on a loop. The audience comes into what’s otherwise like a studio space, and they observe us going through these scores. There’s a kind of intimacy that can be enacted just by the sheer fact of proximity.  

What have you discovered through that process of transforming your stage works into film? 

You’re able to be more concrete. I rely so much on people imagining with me—to try to take them imaginatively through this space. Just by the sheer fact of being in another medium, people are more willing to enter into this fiction. 

Your work A Plot / A Scandal draws on stories about your great-grandmother Lolón Zapata. Did you hear many of these stories growing up?  

I didn’t hear enough about her, but she would appear occasionally. And my mother would make jokes with me, because my mother considers me to be the wild one of her four kids. And she would suggest that I was always a bit like Lolón. She would tell us fantastical stories about her running with a chicken’s head cut off in the village and cursing. She was a figure that my mother would refer to in reverence, but also in fear of a little bit because she did practice Dominican Palo, and she was performing these kinds of rituals at night with the community in the southern part of the Dominican Republic, which was an anti-Black government. In a way she was a kind of deviant. The way that my family talks about her still to this day—they love her and have tremendous respect for her, but they were also scared of her because they would watch her go into these really intense states as she was leaving these ceremonies. Out of respect for my great-grandmother, I don’t actually do Palo in the performance.

Is there a way you sort of have to protect it? 

Oh, completely. It’s a religious practice. The whole thing is about the impossibility of performing Palo. My desire for rebellion, that’s what draws me to Lolón—her rebellious nature, the rebellion, of coming together and performing this communal dance at a time when it was not permitted. 

Do you aim to create political change through your art form? 

I don’t know how to not engage politically, even if it’s not in the most legible way. My work is deeply, deeply political. I just don’t know how to move otherwise. 

The post Ligia Lewis on Her First Solo Exhibition, the Roles of Humor and Politics in Her Work, and Drawing Inspiration From Her Great-Grandmother appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Comings & Goings

Leanne Benjamin has been named artistic director of Queensland Ballet, succeeding Li Cunxin in mid-January.

At Cleveland Ballet, Cynthia Graham stepped down as interim artistic director, a role she had taken on after the suspension of artistic director Gladisa Guadalupe. Howard Bender is serving as interim CEO after co-founder Michael Krasnyansky resigned. The company has also severed ties with the Cleveland School of Dance, which was cofounded by Guadalupe, and has announced the launch of the Academy of Cleveland Ballet as its official school, beginning in mid-January.

At The Australian Ballet, Marcus Morelli and Jill Ōgai have been promoted to principal; Yuumi Yamada to senior artist; Cameron Holmes, Misha Barkidjija, Katherine Sonnekus, Aya Watanabe, and Maxim Zenin to soloist; and Sara Andrlon, Saranja Crowe, Hugo Dumapit, Adam Elmes, Evie Ferris, Lilla Harvey, Larissa Kiyoto-Ward, and Montana Rubin to coryphée.

Tiffany Rea Fisher has been named National Dance Institute’s 2024 artist-in-residence.

Abigail Reeve has been named CEO of Rambert Grades.

Chicago Dancers United has rebranded as Chicago Dance Health Fund.

Soham Dance Space will close at the end of September.

Awards & Honors

In the New Year 2024 Honours List, Chitraleka Bolar, Betsy Gregory, and Solange Urdang were named Officers of the Order of the British Empire; Carl Campbell, Morag Deyes, Julie Felix, and Carolene Euleata Sargeant (Carolene Hinds) were named Members of the Order of the British Empire; and Norah Button-Brookwell, Shendl Hastings Harvey (Shendl Russell), and Pamela Mary Joyce Scull (Pamela Wingfield) were named Medalists of the Order of the British Empire.

The post News of Note: What You Might Have Missed in December 2023 appeared first on Dance Magazine.

What code have these dancers cracked to achieve viral fame? Is it true that being big on TikTok is the key to getting cast in a sought-after show these days? And are there any downsides to having hundreds of thousands—maybe even millions—of people watch your videos? Five #BroadwayTok stars break it down.

Big Theater Energy

Every dancer has heard some version of the same advice: Perform for the person sitting in the very last row, all the way up in the balcony. Paula Leggett Chase, who goes by @antiqueshowgirl, thinks that charisma and enthusiasm are what’s drawing people to Broadway performers in the very different environment of TikTok. “You see the energy coming out of their pores,” she says. “They’re storytellers, and I think that speaks to people.” JJ Niemann, who with his one million followers is one of #BroadwayTok’s biggest stars, agrees: “We know how to sell it to an audience,” he says.

In 2023, Niemann happened to become a member of the original Broadway cast of Back to the Future alongside another TikTok phenom, Amber Ardolino. Like a lot of other Broadway performers, Niemann and Ardolino share funny glimpses behind the scenes of their show, like backstage shenanigans and jokes about the grueling reality of an eight-show-per-week lifestyle. “I often get comments like, ‘Oh, so being on Broadway is just like grownup theater camp?’ ” says Ardolino. “For me to show people that live theater is chaotic and fun and a mess—I love that people are getting to see that.”

Musical theater performers have also created their own TikTok-specific trends to appeal to a niche but enthusiastic audience of current and aspiring performers. Series like “roles I auditioned for versus roles I got,” or “soprano line versus alto line” have helped make TikTok a theater nerd’s paradise.

And #BroadwayTok performers give their audiences a chance to see parts of the business they don’t typically know as much about. Take Gerianne Pérez, who is currently starring as Catherine of Aragon in the national tour of SIX. She peppers in tour-specific content for her followers, like mini-vlogs about travel days and recaps of the tour’s stops in different cities. Niemann, who is a member of the ensemble in Back to the Future as well as a cover for two lead roles, gives his followers a look at what it’s like to play that kind of pivotal but under-recognized role in a show.

Fun or Career?

So is TikTok a career stepping-stone or just for fun? That depends. Niemann says he and Ardolino sometimes get more attention at the stage door than the show’s leads, and Ardolino notes that TikTok has given her the opportunity to meet other artists she admires and collaborate with them. “But I still have to go in for the same auditions as everyone else,” she says with a laugh. “Broadway is hard enough. If I didn’t love doing this, I wouldn’t add it to my plate.”

For veteran dancer Brian Ust, known as @theatredancebrian, TikTok did bring at least one unexpected opportunity to audition for a popular TV series. “TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have become my stage,” he says. Chase, a Broadway veteran whose credits include A Chorus Line, Bye Bye Birdie, and Tootsie, says that her TikTok presence hasn’t earned her opportunities, but it has made younger performers “more open” to her. At 62, “my age group is a little invisible,” she says. “But now when I walk into something with a young cast, they know me.”

Though Niemann agrees that TikTok hasn’t really changed his stage career, it has become a business for him. And in the feast-or-famine life of a performer, that’s a gift. “TikTok genuinely is just as fruitful for me financially as my acting career and Broadway career,” he says. “And it’s really nice to have another creative outlet and passion.”

Building Community

TikTok does have a dark side: nasty comments, which aren’t unique to TikTok but which Gerianne Pérez, of SIX, says can be “outlandishly mean.” Dancer Brian Ust, for example, experienced a barrage of negative comments after a celebrity reposted one of his videos. “That was one of the worst experiences I have had,” he says.

Pérez likes to remember that trolls are often reacting to theater performers’ quirkiness—which is also what makes them good at what they do. “We have always been a little strange. It’s because we are something special,” she says. And despite Ust’s negative experiences, he still refers to his followers as a “family.” His good experiences on the platform outweigh the bad, he says.

Other #BroadwayTok performers echo that sentiment. Some of performer Paula Leggett Chase’s followers have told her that her videos inspired them to go back to dance class—or to try dancing for the first time. Amber Ardolino, of Back to the Future, adds that she meets people at the stage door who say they came to the show because they learned about it from her TikTok.
“They feel like they know us, like they’re watching a friend onstage,” she says. “It’s such a strong and special connection.”

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Downtown Breakdown

NEW YORK CITY  The Perelman Performing Arts Center continues its inaugural season with the Motion/Matter: Street Dance Festival. Kia LaBeija premieres the commissioned P is For Pop and D is For Dip, honoring the legacy of voguing and ballroom culture, on a program with Korea National Contemporary Dance Company in Lee Kyungeun’s BreAking. It’s later joined by Nicolas Huchard’s The Barefoot Diva, after Oulouy and Supa Rich Kids present Afrikan Party for three evenings to open the festivities. In between is an all-styles dance battle, with Rennie­ Harris, Princess Lockerooo, Ken Swift, and Omari Wiles set to adjudicate, and a dance party deejayed by DJ Spinna and Rimarkable. Jan. 5–14. pacnyc.org.

Moving and Grooving

NEW YORK CITY  The return of the Works & Process Underground Uptown Dance Festival is studded with familiar names. After kicking off with Kayla Farrish’s still in process Put Away the Fire, dear (in conjunction with the Guggenheim’s “Going Dark” exhibition), double bills will showcase excerpts and complete works by Pontus Lidberg, Princess Lockerooo, Music From The Sole, and Francesca Harper as well as works in progress from Lloyd Knight, Stefanie Batten Bland, Taylor Stanley and Alec Knight, Preeti Vasudevan and Amar Ramasar, and Ryan McNamara. Ladies of Hip-Hop premieres SpeakMyMind ahead of a “Behind the Groove Rotunda Party” led by Kwikstep and Rokafella on Jan. 13. Plus, Works & Process takes over Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall the evening of Jan. 12 with social dancing, works by Ephrat Asherie, It’s Showtime NYC!, Les Ballet Afrik, and more, culminating in the late night Underground Uptown Ball. Jan. 10–16. worksandprocess.org.

Spanish Flair

ON TOUR  The Madrid-based Compañía Nacional de Danza, led by former New York City Ballet star Joaquín De Luz, starts a rare North American tour this month. After kicking off in Detroit with La Sylphide (Jan. 11–13), the company heads to New Orleans (Jan. 20), Seattle (Jan. 25–27), Chicago (Feb. 10), and Los Angeles (Feb. 15) with a triple bill of Nacho Duato’s White Darkness, Sol León and Paul Lightfoot’s Sad Case, and De Luz’s Passengers Within, and brings Johan Inger’s acclaimed reimagining of Carmen to Toronto (Feb. 1–3). cndanza.mcu.es.

Wish Upon a Star

COLOGNE, GERMANY  In her new work, Pupo, choreographer Sofia Nappi takes a hard look at the story of Pinocchio, drawing on commedia dell’arte as she questions what the wooden doll really gives up by conforming to society’s norms in order to become a real boy. Jan. 13–14. tanz.koeln.

Objects of Power

SAN FRANCISCO  KULARTS will give the culminating performance of Alleluia Panis’ AntingAnting Project at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco this month. Named for anting-anting, a talismanic occult practice that predates the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, the two-year project seeks to form a contemporary, community-centered framework—in part through this multidisciplinary ritual performance—for the objects that have lost the context of their traditional cultural practices by being held within a museum. Jan. 27–28. kularts-sf.org.

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Clarissa Rivera Dyas

Freelance dancer and choreographer

Clarissa Rivera Dyas thrives most in collaboration with other artists, and layers different art forms with sophistication. She created Something Remains, her 2022 evening-length choreographic debut, with visual artist and composer Jakob Pek. In it, Dyas and her three dancers pushed the boundaries of physicality as they danced with long rolls of paper and paint, serving as both brushes and canvas. Her dynamic movement, which defied predictability as it showcased both strength and vulnerability, served as the perfect counterpoint to Pek’s experimental score.

Dyas, a sought-after performer for artists like Robert Moses, prioritizes disrupting norms, challenging expectations, and embracing the raw, vulnerable, and even sloppy in her work. “How can we involve the idea of failure?” she asks. “As a Black queer artist, there is little room for failure. How can we allow for failure?”

In 2021, after recurring experiences of being tokenized in the largely white-led Bay Area dance scene, she co-founded the nonhierarchical artist collective RUPTURE alongside fellow queer Black artists jose e. abad, Stephanie Hewett, Gabriele Christian, and Styles Alexander. “It’s about being in process with collective rest, play, and somatic experimentation as resistance,” she says, “challenging what it means to be in dance and performance.” A RUPTURE event might include dance, live sound design, spoken word, visual art, multimedia elements, community engagement, improvisation, and play. In June, the cohort will present a new work at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.

—Rachel Caldwell

Danielle Swatzie

Freelance dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker

If any contemporary dance artist captures the spirit of Atlanta’s up-and-coming generation, it’s Danielle Swatzie. Take her solo The Fleeting Serenade. In the section set to Ella Fitzgerald’s rendition of the jazz standard “Angel Eyes,” Swatzie whirls across the stage, her legs slicing arcs, arms gesturing in staccato bursts as she embodies the emotional turmoil churning beneath the song’s smooth surface.

A graduate of Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, Swatzie is equally compelling in front of or behind a camera. She creates an aura of honesty, thoughtfulness, and fearless compassion combined with a drive to unpack­ inner emotional landscapes. Her dance films, which illuminate a vision of a more equitable world, have been garnering increasing attention. META, a solo reflecting on family, generational trauma, and feminine empowerment, received the 2021 BronzeLens Film Festival Award for Best Music/Dance Video. Her growing roots through concrete was selected for American Dance Festival’s 2023 Movies By Movers festival. The film features seven young women artists, Black and white, who join together in precarious group counterbalances to confront individual experiences with racism and find wholeness as a community—as Swatzie says, through “radical connection and radical love to manifest radical change.”

—Cynthia Bond Perry

Grace Rookstool

Soloist, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre

Last season, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s statuesque Grace Rookstool made a pair of major debuts. The then–corps-member embodied emotional resilience as Mina in Michael Pink’s Dracula and showed off her commanding stage presence and technical prowess as Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty. She dances with an assuredness that artistic director Adam McKinney says got her promoted to the rank of soloist for this season. “She is a consummate professional, a classicist, and has a natural sensibility to embody music,” he says of the 23-year-old.

Born and raised on Whidbey Island, Washington, Rookstool trained at Pacific Northwest Ballet School and in its Professional Division Program. While there, she was selected for an exchange program with Dresden Semperoper Ballett and danced in its production of La Bayadère. She joined PBT’s corps de ballet in 2019.

A truly versatile dancer, Rookstool says she most enjoys high-flying jumps. Expect her career to soar in 2024.

—Steve Sucato

Erina Ueda

Dancer, Giordano Dance Chicago

Erina Ueda’s breakout moment with Giordano Dance Chicago came last April in Kia Smith’s Luminescence. With a cast of 22 dancers filling the cavernous Harris Theater, the piece starts and ends with Ueda completely alone, in a solo showcasing her unbridled facility and unflappable joy. Giordano’s dancers are known for their silky jazz technique balanced with razor-sharp precision. Ueda has that and more, bringing honesty and authenticity to the company’s rep. 

Ueda earned a BFA in dance with a minor in psychology from the University of Arizona, not too far from her hometown of Chandler, Arizona. Born in Japan, she was the first Asian woman to join the 60-year-old Giordano company. She’s upped its digital game, too, as the company’s social media manager and video content producer since her arrival in 2022.

—Lauren Warnecke

Donovan Reed

Dancer, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham

Nature metaphors spring to mind as you watch A.I.M by Kyle Abraham’s Donovan Reed. They seem driven by wind, buoyed by water, licked by fire. They might stop a liquid phrase cold with a thorny angle—not breaking the spider’s thread of movement, but rather snapping it taut. They can make the unlikeliest shapes look organic. (Though these qualities never feel less than authentic to Reed, they are very Abraham-esque: Reed, who’s danced with A.I.M since 2018, can channel the choreographer with uncanny precision.)

But Reed is an unmistakably human performer, too. In Abraham’s MotorRover—a duet that responds to Merce Cunningham’s 1972 work Landrover—they temper Cunningham’s signature formality with playfulness and wit, carrying on a danced conversation with partner Jamaal Bowman that seems full of little inside jokes. Reed’s a force of nature with a soul.

—Margaret Fuhrer

Kaitlyn Sardin

Irish and hip-hop dancer

You might know her as @kaitrock: the artist whose one-of-a-kind, Irish-dance-meets-hip-hop mashups have earned her an avid following on Instagram and beyond. While traditional Irish dance, with its strict verticality, might seem at odds with more full-bodied and grounded ways of moving, Kaitlyn Sardin finds their common thread: rhythm. Through drumming feet, swiping arms, or swiveling knees, she can tease out the intricacies of whatever sound is fueling her. (Beyoncé, Tinashe, and Victoria Monét are a few current favorites.) In every aspect of her short-form solos—including her colorful fashion choices—she is unabashedly herself.

A former competitive Irish dancer with a foundation of razor-sharp technique (she grew up training at the Watters School in Orlando), Sardin broadened her dance horizons as a student at Hofstra University, where she began adding forms like dancehall and vogue to her vocabulary. She has toured with the Chicago-based Trinity Irish Dance Company and is gearing up for new projects in 2024. From February 14–March 3, you can find her performing in Jean Butler’s What We Hold at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan. 

Being Black and queer in the mostly white, sometimes culturally conservative world of Irish dance, she’s aware that younger dancers who break with convention might see themselves in her. Her advice for them? “Just go for it. Don’t be afraid, and the world will embrace you.”

—Siobhan Burke

Jake Roxander

Corps member, American Ballet Theatre

Watching Jake Roxander as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet last July, it was hard to believe that he was making his Metropolitan Opera House debut in the role. Without a trace of nerves, the 21-year-old American Ballet Theatre corps member fully inhabited the character—cocky, loveable, magnetic, with flashes of hot-tempered recklessness. Then there was his dancing: Each solo was thrillingly virtuosic and highly musical, with pirouettes that paused momentarily on relevé—just enough time for him to give an impish grin before he was on to the next feat. 

Roxander comes from a family of dancers; he and his brother Ashton, a principal with Philadelphia Ballet, were trained by parents David and Elyse Roxander at their studio in Medford, Oregon. He spent a season with Philadelphia Ballet’s second company before joining ABT’s Studio Company in 2020, where he stood out in Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes and a duet from Twyla Tharp’s Known by Heart.

ABT has wasted no time pushing Roxander to the forefront since he joined the main company in 2022. This fall he danced principal roles in Harald Lander’s Études and Alexei Ratmansky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and debuted in the role of Puck in Sir Frederick Ashton’s The Dream. With his powerful, unforced technique and boy-next-door charm, he is making a name for himself, and fast. 

—Amy Brandt

Jindallae Bernard

Choreographer, filmmaker, and corps member, Houston Ballet

Jindallae Bernard’s portrayal of the jealous Lady Rokujo in Nao Kusuzaki’s Genji, an Asia Society Texas Center commission, exuded chilly charm and understated, seductive sensuality. Her quiet authority and stoic elegance also served her well in Stanton Welch’s neoclassical Tu Tu at Houston Ballet, though she proved equally capable of turning up the voltage in Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes. And her talents extend to choreography and filmmaking, too.

Bernard joined Houston Ballet’s corps in 2022. She’s been with the organization since she was 6 years old, rising through the Academy and Houston Ballet II before landing an apprenticeship in 2021. During her training, she took on several choreographic opportunities. Her whimsical short dance film Phase, created in 2020 during a virtual summer program composition class, so caught the eye of artistic director Stanton Welch that the company showcased it during its first live performance after the pandemic pause. “Her work feels so high-end, from the story to her use of color and light, and her directorial insight,” says Welch. He selected her to premiere a new ballet in December for the company’s annual Jubilee of Dance, for which she created Parodie de l’histoire du ballet. Says Bernard: “My goal is to contribute in as many ways as I can.”

—Nancy Wozny

Kia Smith

Executive artistic director, South Chicago Dance Theatre

Last year’s premiere of Memoirs of Jazz in the Alley proved a perfect showcase for choreographer and director Kia Smith. The evening-length “dance opera” exemplified her choreographic voice—note-by-note precision, fluid torso movement, unexpected gesture, powerful unison—and marked the debut of her 7-year-old company, South Chicago Dance Theatre, at the Auditorium Theatre, its largest venue to date. The work paid homage to Smith’s childhood experiences at her musician father’s weekly Jazz in the Alley gatherings. That background surfaces in the way her dances feel born out of the detail and nuance of jazz music.

Smith’s success lies not only in her artistic acumen but also in the way she considers dance and the business of it on a large scale. The Chicago native is both artistic and executive director of SCDT, which has expanded its presence at home through the South Chicago Dance Festival and abroad with its Choreographic Diplomacy international exchange program. Amidst a growing list of outside commissions—notably including the rousing Luminescence for Giordano Dance Chicago’s 60th anniversary last spring—this year Smith will bring her company on tour to Seoul, South Korea, and return to the Auditorium Theatre with another world premiere.

—Maureen Janson

Hohyun Kang

Sujet, Paris Opéra Ballet

A morbid teenager involved in a murder-suicide isn’t exactly an easy first major role. Yet from the moment South Korea’s Hohyun Kang, who joined Paris Opéra Ballet in 2018, stepped out as Mary Vetsera in Mayerling last season, she found logic and purpose in Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography. As she draped herself around Paul Marque, her Prince Rudolf, her lines sizzled with dramatic tension.

It was an arresting breakthrough for the 28-year-old, who had been on balletomanes’ radar for her easy, radiant musicality and technique in ballets such as Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco. A graduate of Korea National University of Arts, she was noticed by William Forsythe shortly after joining POB and landed a soloist role in his Blake Works I, before quietly making her way up the ranks and becoming a sujet (soloist) last season. She is already slated for a Kitri debut in April—and may well follow in the footsteps of Paris’ first South Korean étoile, Sae Eun Park.

—Laura Cappelle

Karla Puno Garcia

Musical theater choreographer

When last year’s Tony Awards had to go without a script and instead lean on dance to set the scene, host Ariana DeBose knew just the choreographer who could pull it off: Karla Puno Garcia. The resulting opening number brought viewers on a danced journey through the United Palace theater, using Garcia’s spunky, sassy movement to amp up excitement for the night. Later, Garcia’s unapologetically feminine flair and super-satisfying musicality showcased DeBose and Julianne Hough in a duet that felt both timely and timeless.

Garcia was the first woman of color to choreograph the Tonys. But it’s far from her only brush with the event. A Broadway vet who’s been dancing on the Great White Way since her college days at New York University, she previously performed with the casts of Gigi and Hamilton at the Tonys and was a dancer and associate choreographer in 2021 when Sergio Trujillo choreographed the opening number. Soon, she may even be up for a Tony herself: She’s making her Broadway choreographic debut this January with Days of Wine and Roses, which she co-choreographed with Trujillo.

For his part, Trujillo thinks she’s “unstoppable” as a choreographer: “Karla’s like a musician that can play all the instruments with her feet and arms and body,” he says. “She comes across as incredibly gentle, but she’s a force to be reckoned with.”

—Jennifer Heimlich

Kuu Sakuragi

Soloist, Pacific Northwest Ballet

With a raw physicality matched with bighearted sensitivity, Kuu Sakuragi is quickly heading toward rockstar status at Pacific Northwest Ballet. He creates electrifying spectacles onstage, delivering one jaw-dropping performance after another. His big technical jumps look as if he’s floating on air, an impression only heightened by his gravity-defying turnin David Parsons’ Caught, while his warmth and humility come through as deference to the other dancers onstage, as in Alexei Ratmansky’s Wartime Elegy. A PNB DanceChance student and Professional Division graduate, Sakuragi joined the corps in 2020 after dancing with Alberta Ballet for three years and was promoted to soloist in November. “Certain dancers live more completely in the moment when they’re dancing,” artistic director Peter Boal says. “Nureyev, Wendy Whelan, Carla Körbes come to mind. Kuu is one of them.” 

—Gigi Berardi

Sydnie L. Mosley 

Founding executive and artistic director, SLMDances 

In the spring and summer of 2020, conversations about racial equity and social justice erupted across the dance field. How could exclusionary systems be transformed? How could imbalances of power be corrected? How could people better care for one another?

For the choreographer, performer, educator, and writer Sydnie L. Mosley, these questions were nothing new. The Baltimore-born Mosley has been envisioning a future free from oppression—with dance as one way to get there—at least since 2010, when she founded her Harlem-based collective SLMDances. For people just beginning on that journey, she and her collaborators became a guiding light.

A self-described “creative home for trans, cis, nonbinary, queer, disabled, fat, masculine presenting, Black women and femmes of many generations,” SLMDances takes seriously the term “collective,”operating through a model of shared leadership and responsibility. Their community-engaged, joyfully interactive works have tackled issues like street harassment (The Window Sex Project, 2012) and the economics of dance (BodyBusiness, 2015). Their latest, PURPLE: A Ritual in Nine Spells, honors the Black feminist playwright, poet, and dancer Ntozake Shange, whose legacy Mosley extends through her own intertwining of movement and language. Premiering at Lincoln Center last summer, PURPLE marked a turning point for Mosley in its visibility and scale. Her vision persists; what’s changed, perhaps, is the world’s readiness to join her.

—Siobhan Burke

Laila J. Franklin

Independent dance artist

Contradictions power Laila J. Franklin’s charisma. She can shift from sly comedy to earnest sincerity over the course of an eight-count. She moves with disarming frankness, making even complex gestures look straightforward and open; she also seems to keep part of herself closed to the audience, protective of her own mystery.

That sense of unknowable-ness sits right at the center of choreographer Miguel Gutierrez’s I as another, which Gutierrez and Franklin performed in New York City last spring. The intimate, probing duet suggests we can never truly know each other, or even ourselves—but we can try. In I as another, Franklin showed a kind of virtuosic empathy, living fully inside Gutierrez’s creative vision without erasing herself. Forget walking in someone else’s shoes—she can dance in their feet.

Franklin, who earned a BFA from Boston Conservatory in 2019 and an MFA from the University of Iowa in 2021, is also a choreographer, teaching artist, and writer. Maybe over time we’ll get to know her better through her own work. Maybe she’ll always keep part of herself a mystery. Either way, she’ll be holding our attention.

—Margaret Fuhrer

Lucy Fandel

Independent dancer and choreographer

In the semi-improvised, place-based dance Lucy Fandel creates, the land is something alive, not just a backdrop. “The inhaling clouds, quivering blades of grass, swarms of gnats, or the occasional romping dog pulled us in,” she writes of her and Bailey Eng’s creative explorations during a residency in Spain. In a section of their filmed field notes, Fandel responds viscerally to these movements in the environment while dancing atop a rocky outcropping, at once fluid and angular as she articulates through her hands, rib cage, pelvis. 

A dance artist, writer, and arts outreach worker, Fandel grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, and Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France. “Switching languages forces you to think differently,” she says. She later crossed borders yet again, moving to Montreal to study contemporary dance and sociology at Concordia University. Fandel’s attachment to sociology field work influenced her dance perspective and, today, she’s at the forefront of the burgeoning sustainable eco-dance movement in Canada. She’s right at home engaging with the landscape during her outdoor research (“conversations,” as she calls them), examining the vectors of science and dance while sensitizing people to the natural environment in all its ambiguity and transformation.

—Philip Szporer

Miguel Alejandro Castillo

Choreographer and freelance performing artist

Onstage, Miguel Alejandro Castillo emanates a warmth and wit that creates instant connection. An incredibly committed performance in Faye Driscoll’s whirlwind ensemble work Weathering last April highlighted this generosity. As part of a precarious flesh sculpture that teetered off the edges of a spinning raft, Castillo maintained an active, intense bond with his fellow performers, even as his ponytail swept the ground and it became increasingly unclear whether he was being supported or smothered.

Castillo brings a bright presence and big love into the studio, Driscoll says, alongside an impressive conceptual curiosity. “He’s embracing the full range of human experience,” she says, “connecting the light and the dark.” In his own choreography, the Venezuelan artist, who started in theater, explore­s his native country’s diaspora, blending forms to forge a kind of future folklore.

Castillo recently completed a New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks residency and acted as movement director for the David Lang opera Prisoner of the State. He’ll keep building on that momentum in 2024: In addition to choreographing John Adams’ opera The Gospel According to the Other Mary for Volksoper in Vienna and touring Weathering, Castillo will be a choreographer in residence at both PAGEANT performance space in Brooklyn and Abrons Arts Center in lower Manhattan. 

—Candice Thompson

Naomi Funaki

Tap dancer and choreographer

During the in-person debut of Ayodele Casel’s Chasing Magic, Japanese tap artist Naomi Funaki commanded attention with her clear, confident sounds. She modulated her tones and phrasing to cover a broad emotional spectrum, from contemplative to exuberant, as she floated through a duet, in a role originated by Casel, with joyful ease. “Her technical prowess and rhythmic voice are dynamic and contain so much depth and nuance,” says Casel, who invited Funaki to make her choreographic debut last April during Casel’s Artists at the Center engagement at New York City Center.

Casel is not alone in her sentiments. Funaki was the recipient of a 2023 Princess Grace Award and is an apprentice with Dorrance Dance. She performed in the December premiere of Caleb Teicher’s reworked Bzzz, a tap-meets-beatbox show for which she also served as assistant choreographer, and in January will show off her range in Leonardo Sandoval’s samba-inflected I Didn’t Come to Stay with Music From The Sole.

Ultimately, Funaki’s goal is to bring the spirit and professionalism of the New York City tap community back to Japan. Casel has every faith that she will, and along the way inspire a whole new generation of tap dancers.

—Candice Thompson

Olivia Bell

Corps member, New York City Ballet

Some dancers demand your attention. New York City Ballet’s Olivia Bell politely requests it. But the elegantly understated dancer is no wallflower. A fervent musicality powers her fine-grained technique, giving it a lush, romantic sweep. 

Bell, who only joined New York City Ballet’s corps in May, still has surprises in store. At last summer’s Vail Dance Festival, she danced Balanchine’s Tarantella, a mile-a-minute showstopper that must have been nearly impossible to survive at Vail’s one-and-a-half-mile elevation. Bell handled the challenge with not just polish but sparkle, nailing the work’s witty musical phrasing and showing off the prodigious pirouettes that most of us had previously only seen on her Instagram page. Here’s to more surprises, and soon, on NYCB’s stage. 

—Margaret Fuhrer

Pauline Casiño 

Commercial dancer

Pauline Casiño booked her Broadway debut without an in-person audition. She learned about casting for Once Upon a One More Time, directed and choreographed by Keone and Mari Madrid, after the first round of auditions had already concluded and asked her agent to help find a way in. “I always knew of Keone and Mari,” she says. “As a fellow Filipino, I wanted to be part of something they’re creating.” Even though she had never taken class with the Madrids, let alone worked with them before, she landed the part of Esmeralda through a video submission. Onstage, she brought the ensemble character to life with her unforgettable fluidity, powerful femininity, and magnetic presence.

Casiño, who moved to the Bronx from the Philippines at age 12, grew up thinking dance was extracurricular. While studying chemistry in college, she danced in commercial choreographer Candace Brown’s The Soul Spot and BTS’ Love Yourself: Speak Yourself New Jersey concert, but it wasn’t until she graduated in 2020 that she fully embraced dance as her profession. Since then, she has performed with Anitta and Doja Cat at MTV’s Video Music Awards, as well as choreographed and directed her own dance visual. Only three and a half years into seriously pursuing a dance career, Casiño has already proved she has star quality. 

—Kristi Yeung

Rafael Ramírez

Flamenco dancer and choreographer

With fluid arms, deep, effortless lunges, supple contractions, and rapid, complex footwork, Rafael Ramírez spellbinds. But it is his old soul, which adds sensual vulnerability to his performances, that leaves an indelible impression.

Ramírez’s prowess in both traditional and contemporary flamenco captivates across venues, from Spain’s most prestigious tablaos to international theaters with the companies of famed choreographers such as David Coria and Rafaela Carrasco. He’s also garnered critical recognition: In 2021, he won the highly coveted Desplante Masculino at the International Cante de las Minas Festival and, last year, received the 2023 Best New Artist Award from the prestigious Festival Jerez for his Entorno. He carried that momentum into the 2023 Bienal de Málaga, where he premiered Recelo, a collaborative work with prize-winning dancer Florencia Oz exploring the primal emotion of fear, and into a 10-city U.S. tour of his solo show, Lo Preciso, this past fall. With more performances of Recelo ahead, Ramírez enters 2024 on the road to international recognition.

—Bridgit Lujan

Yuval Cohen

Corps member, Philadelphia Ballet

An elegant carriage and genteel demeanor make Yuval Cohen an ideal storybook prince. But behind that refinement lies impressive power. His explosive, elastic leaps and strong, centered turns had everyone buzzing at last summer’s USA International Ballet Competition in Jackson, Mississippi. The 21-year-old Israeli dancer, a newly promoted Philadelphia Ballet corps member, was the first from his country to medal, taking home the senior bronze.

Cohen’s USA IBC coach was his longtime mentor, Nadya Timofeyeva, with whom he trained at the Jerusalem Ballet School. In 2018, she took him to a competition in Russia, where he won first prize and a spot at the Vaganova Ballet Academy. After becoming the school’s first Israeli graduate in 2021, Cohen joined Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet. But the pandemic created visa complications, forcing him to return home that summer. 

Cohen joined Philadelphia Ballet II in October 2021 and became a company apprentice the following season. He’s already gained notice in a range of featured roles, including a Stepsister in Cinderella, the Gold variation in The Sleeping Beauty, and Escamillo in Angel Corella’s new production of Carmen, which premiered this fall.

—Amy Brandt

Sean Lew 

Commercial dancer and choreographer

In viral YouTube videos, two seasons of NBC’s “World of Dance,” performances with stars from Janet Jackson to Justin Bieber, and his own hour-long dance film, II, Sean Lew has won over millions of fans with his articulate athleticism, honest storytelling, and undeniable charisma. The 22-year-old is far from new to the industry, but he’s still taking his career in new directions. In 2023, he conquered his biggest fear: battling. “It’s not just if you’re good at dancing, then you can battle,” Lew says. “People live, breathe, and eat battling.” He amped up his fitness training and studied freestyle genres such as house and krumping, and, after a humbling early-round loss at his first battle, he went on to win the Red Bull Dance Your Style Los Angeles regionals in April. He then brought home the national title in May and represented the U.S. at the global competition in November.

Despite his newfound commitment to the competitive freestyle scene, Lew continues to grow his career in other areas. Over the last year, he launched his first fitness and dance intensive, Artist Range, with trainer Karl Flores; was a first-time creative director for Jackson Wang’s Coachella performance; and was a first-time co-producer on a Dermot Kennedy music video. “The beauty and curse of my life,” he says, “is I just want to do everything.”

—Kristi Yeung

Solal Mariotte

Independent choreographer and dancer, Rosas

In EXIT ABOVE — after the tempest, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s typically minimalistic world suddenly seemed looser and brighter. The reason? A new generation of dancers, led by French newcomer Solal Mariotte, who got his start in hip hop. The curly-haired 22-year-old acted as a mercurial leader, shifting easily from floor work to the air, launching himself into arresting dives to the floor.

At 18, looking for a challenge, Mariotte applied to P.A.R.T.S., the school founded by De Keersmaeker in Brussels, where he immersed himself in contemporary dance while co-founding a breaking crew, Above The Blood, on the side. In addition to joining Rosas in 2023, he is also developing projects with his crew and as a choreographer. In January, a new version of his solo Collages/Ravages will premiere at the prestigious Suresnes Cités Danse festival in France. With his influences now cross-pollinating­ in captivating ways, a shape-shifting career beckons.

—Laura Cappelle

Kamala Saara

Dancer, Dance Theatre of Harlem

Midway through William Forsythe’s Blake Works IV last April, Kamala Saara transfixed the audience in a soulful, introspective solo. She stretched her long limbs expansively, pulling every inch out of them before retracting dynamically into the next phrase. She seemed to be lost in a dream, her arms sweeping through an unseen atmospheric viscosity. And while the solo is deeply internal, Saara invited the audience at Dance Theatre of Harlem’s New York City Center season into her world. 

Saara, 21, grew up studying at the Yuri Grigoriev School of Ballet in Los Angeles, spent two summers at the Bolshoi Ballet Intensive in New York City, and at 16 was invited to Moscow to perform at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy’s annual gala. She moved to New York in 2019, training first with Andrei Vassiliev before entering the School of American Ballet. SAB’s focus on speed and lightness, she says, made her more versatile.

Meanwhile, then-DTH artistic director Virginia Johnson had had her eye on Saara since Chyrstyn Fentroy invited her to take company class at age 15. Saara joined DTH in 2020, shining in Stanton Welch’s Orange and Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante. This season, she takes on the principal role in Balanchine’s Raymonda-inspired Pas de Dix, adding a glamorous ballerina part to her repertoire. 

—Amy Brandt

Water Street Dance Milwaukee 

Contemporary dance company

In Milwaukee, ballet is king. But funders, dancers, presenters, and audiences are all sitting up and taking notice of Water Street Dance Milwaukee, giving the city the top-shelf contemporary company it deserves. The company, which rehearses in a suburban Milwaukee enclave, launched just as the pandemic hit, but still managed to build a roster of impeccable dancers, create a dance festival, and form pre-professional programs. The city’s dance community is mobilizing around Water Street’s momentum as the company produces new festivals, outdoor pop-up performances, and shared auditions. It performs all over the Midwest, but directo­r Morgan Williams’ goal is to take Water Street international. He sprinkles up-and-coming choreographers, like Kameron­ N. Saunders, Madison Hicks, Braeden Barnes, and Leandro Glory Damasco, Jr., into the rep alongside his own choreography. At just 33, he is a savvy director and choreographer with support from some of the region’s sharpest dance leaders and a long runway ahead.

—Lauren Warnecke

Header collage photo credits, left to right, top to bottom: Ryoko Konami, courtesy Naomi Funaki; Michelle Reid, courtesy Kia Smith; Todd Rosenberg, courtesy Giordano Dance Chicago; Laura Irion, courtesy Karla Puno Garcia; Rosalie O’Connor, courtesy American Ballet Theatre; Angela Sterling, courtesy Pacific Northwest Ballet; Kat Stiennon, courtesy Water Street Dance Milwaukee; Erin Baiano, courtesy New York City Ballet; Jay Spencer, courtesy Miguel Alejandro Castillo; Isabella Herrera, courtesy Kaitlyn Sardin; Julien Benhamou, courtesy Paris Opéra Ballet; Nir Arieli, courtesy Dance Theatre of Harlem; Steven Pisano, courtesy A.I.M by Kyle Abraham; Lawrence Elizabeth Knox, courtesy Houston Ballet; Alex Harmon/Red Bull Content Pool, courtesy Sean Lew; Robbie Sweeny, courtesy Clarissa Rivera Dyas; Anne Van Aerschot, courtesy Rosas; Bailey Bailey, courtesy Laila J. Franklin; C-Unit Studio, courtesy Pauline Casiño; Anita Buzzy Prentiss, courtesy Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre; Nicole Mitchell Photography, courtesy Danielle Swatzie; Gabriel Asensio, courtesy Rafael Ramírez; Camille Augustyniak, courtesy Lucy Fandel; Arian Molina Soca, courtesy Philadelphia Ballet; Travis Coe, courtesy Sydnie L. Mosley.

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Research has shown that just one engagement with art per month is associated with an additional 10 years of life, and that engaging in art for 45 minutes can lower the stress hormone cortisol. The arts can offer an emotional release. They can provide children with life skills like communication, self-reflection, and self-expression, and help those with chronic illnesses find relief and healing.

Susan Magsamen, the founder and executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University­ School of Medicine’s Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics, explores these benefits of the arts and more in her recent book, Your Brain on Art, with co-author Ivy Ross. She’s often asked if she could pick a specific art form to recommend. For Magsamen,­ it’s actually an easy answer: dance.

“It does it all,” she says. “It brings all of this physiology and psychology and multiple biological systems together simultaneously.”

With its unique brain–body connection, dance is at the very center of neuroaesthetics, or the science of how the arts affect our brains, and therefore our bodies. Early findings of this still-emerging field are confirming what dancers and dance lovers have long known implicitly: that experiencing dance—whether doing it ourselves or watching it—has profound effects on our physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

Studying the Dancing Brain

Neuroscientists are fascinated by dance because studying it can unlock mysteries not just about the arts and the brain, but about human movement itself. And yet, dance poses unique challenges for researchers.

For one, monitoring the brain while the body is in motion is complicated. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), one of the most popular techniques for mapping brain activity, requires lying in a scanner with the head completely still, says Olivia Foster Vander Elst, who studies the neuroscience of dance as a PhD student at Aarhus University. Some researchers have gotten around this problem by having dancers move only their legs while lying in a scanner, or having them just watch dance or imagine dancing. These results, however, probably don’t capture the full scope of what’s happening in the brain while actually dancing.

But other options for monitoring the dancing brain are emerging. For the past several years, butoh choreographer Vangeline has been partnering with three neuroscientists on The Slowest Wave, a project that uses electroencephalography—in which electrodes placed on the scalp measure electrical activity in the brain—to record five dancers’ brain waves as they perform. “When we go very slow in butoh, we reach a place like when we’re about to fall asleep, when we get a little drowsy,” says Vangeline. “But the difference is that we’re actually moving through that and being quite present.”

Though the first-of-its-kind study came with its own logistical challenges—dancers ended up wearing both electroencephalography caps and customized airline pillows to hold various hardware—it was made more feasible by the extremely slow movements often employed by butoh artists, says Sadye Paez, one of the scientists on the project. And while electroencephalography can monitor brain activity in real time down to the millisecond, it isn’t great with spatial resolution. Constantina Theofanopoulou, another scientist on the project and director of the Neurobiology of Social Communication lab at Rockefeller University, notes that it can only monitor a specific number of spots—in this case 32—where the electrodes are placed.

Another reason it’s hard to confidently say what is happening in the brain when we dance is because so much is happening. Dance isn’t only an artistic pursuit: It’s also usually a form of exercise, often a social experience, and sometimes a cultural one, too. Though this makes it more difficult to figure out how dance is impacting the brain, Corinne Jola, a choreographer and a senior lecturer at Abertay University studying cognitive neuroscience and the performing arts, encourages scientists to see dance’s multiplicity as its strength.

“I think the benefit is from a holistic approach,” she says. “Research often works by dissecting [dance] to be able to pinpoint which factor causes which effect. But maybe we should change the way we approach it.” In other words: Trying to pick dance apart into its many pieces may prevent us from seeing the full scope of what it can do.

What We Know About Dance and the Brain

There may still be more questions than answers about what goes on in our brains while we dance. But we do know that dance lights up multiple areas of the brain, likely increasing neural activity between brain hemispheres and developing new neural connections as it does so.

Some of the areas of the brain involved in dance are obvious: The motor cortex, basal ganglia, and cerebellum, for instance, which are all involved in coordinating motor activity. But dance and other art forms have also been found to activate the limbic system, which is involved in emotion and memory and is, evolutionarily speaking, located in an older area of the brain. “This has led people to the idea that art is very embedded in our bodies and brain,” says Julia Basso, director of the Embodied Brain Laboratory at Virginia Tech.

Other ways dancing can impact our brains and bodies: It’s been found to help alleviate headaches, build strong spatial cognition, improve mood, release feel-good chemicals like sero­tonin, dopamine, and oxytocin, and much more. It’s widely, though not universally, believed that dancing increases neuroplasticity in the brain, or the brain’s ability to change and adapt, which is especially important later in life to stave off degeneration. Studies of the popular Dance for PD program, which offers dance classes for people with Parkinson’s disease, have found that dance can improve motor control and balance while reducing tremors and rigidity. Research has also shown benefits for those with brain injuries, cognitive impairment, cerebral palsy, and dementia. Dancing with others can multiply its positive effects, says Magsamen, by helping to build stronger social ties and create a sense of belonging and trust.

You don’t have to be a “good” or even an experienced dancer to reap the benefits of dance. Still, the brains of proficient dancers show significant differences. Research has shown that brain activity—specifically the engagement of the corticospinal tract, which controls voluntary motor function—while watching dance varies based on how much experience the viewer has with that style, whether that experience comes from dancing that style themselves or just being very familiar with viewing it, says Foster Vander Elst. She says one study of ballet dancers even found that there is more activity in certain regions of the brain when dancers watch movement traditionally performed by their own gender (so movement they regularly do themselves) than there is when they view movement traditionally performed by another gender (so movement they regularly watch). Dancers’ brains have also been found to respond more quickly to certain changes in music than those of nondancers and even musicians.

Beyond Neuroscience

Though we need more research to be able to speak definitively about what dancing does to the brain, Jola says that we shouldn’t have to rely on knowing how these benefits occur when we know for sure that they exist. “You don’t necessarily need to know what happens in the brain if we have other sources of evidence that dance is good for us,” she says. “It’s good to understand the brain to explain mechanisms of improvement for people with Parkinson’s or mental health issues. But if we know other evidence of people’s improvement, we don’t need to have evidence in the brain to be sure that it helps.”

Joseph DeSouza, a professor of neuroscience at York University, agrees. Many people “feel that dance helps,” he says. “They don’t need a neuroscientist like me to tell them that they should do it.”

The post What Neuroaesthetics, a New Field of Research, Can Tell Us About What Dance Does to Our Brains and Bodies appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Dr. Cuan! Who are you and what do you do? 

I’m a choreographer, dancer, engineer, and researcher. I make robots dance for a living. I’m currently a postdoctoral scholar in computer science at Stanford University, an artist-in-residence at the Exploratorium and Jacob’s Pillow, and I’m starting a company at the intersection of AI, robotics, and dance. Many of our technologies constrain our human movements in order to use them. This has a functional purpose—being able to type on a small keyboard on a constrained airplane, for example. 

At the same time, though, we have such multifaceted, expressive bodies. I am excited by how robots present a three-dimensional interface for humans. The ways that robots move—and especially how they move relative to humans—are deeply choreographic questions. Choreorobotics has exploded in recent years as robots move out of industrial and research settings and into everyday ones.

You were recently awarded a PhD in mechanical engineering. How did that come about? 

In 2017, I met Dr. Amy LaViers and then became the inaugural artist-in-residence at her Robotics, Automation, and Dance Lab. Years before, my dad experienced a stroke that revealed to me how physically alienating technology can be. It made me wonder why artists are not more involved in the development of new technologies that move and make noise. Through these two experiences, I realized I wanted to dance with robots for the rest of my career. I was admitted to Stanford, and transitioned from using robots exclusively in my artistic work to a fully research context. I also spent three years of grad school as the inaugural artist-in-residence at Everyday Robots, which was Google X/Alphabet’s robotics initiative at the time. This allowed me to work towards my PhD while also making artwork.

Where did the idea for your National Sawdust show come from?

Ken Goldberg, an artist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and I started with a simple idea. I would dance, we would run my movements through the motion-capture program, OpenPose, and then convert my motions into robot ones. We played those back on a UR5 industrial robot arm, so it could effectively imitate my motions. I would then improvise alongside the robot arm’s motions. 

We discovered surprising synergy between rhythmic robot motions and my own movement in response. Ken and I refined the concept, and, just before graduating from Stanford, I suggested to Ken that I could perform this as a durational work where I would dance with the robot for eight hours. The durational nature of this piece fomented ideas about labor and the future of work. Ultimately, our goal is to highlight the poetry of labor and motion, and how humans may tire over time but are capable of much more nuance and expression than a robot. 

What does a successful show look like to you? 

I would love for people to examine their own movement capabilities, how rich and varied they are. The contrast between the human and the robot highlights just how remarkable our bodies are. I want people to witness the inherent beauty of a moving body—and how labor, as a storied, perennial manifestation of that movement, can be challenging, fraught, and glorious. 

The post Choreographer and Engineer Catie Cuan Shares the Ideas Behind Her Eight-Hour Duet With an Industrial Robot Arm appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Timothée Chalamet leads an all-star cast in this musical comedy prequel inspired by the whimsical chocolatier at the center of Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Music by frequent Christopher Wheeldon collaborator Joby Talbot and choreography by Tony-winning dancemaker Christopher Gattelli, with associate Lou Castro and assistant Brenda Newhouse, animate the musical numbers as Chalamet’s Willy Wonka seeks to establish himself as an upstart young chocolate-maker. In theaters December 15.

The Color Purple

Following a critically acclaimed Broadway revival in 2015, which took home the Tony for Best Revival, the musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel gets the Hollywood treatment. Commercial dance icon Fatima Robinson provides choreography for a heavy-hitting cast that includes Taraji P. Henson, Halle Bailey, Ciara, and more. In theaters December 25. 

The post Two New Movie Musicals Hitting Theaters This Month appeared first on Dance Magazine.

But in a vast field consisting of thousands of mostly gig workers performing many jobs throughout the course of one year, concrete data about what it’s like to be a dance worker has been challenging, if not impossible, to come by.

Soon, that will change: After a robust six-month effort to survey at least 25 percent of the dance workforce about their pay, work conditions, needs, experiences, and more, Dance/NYC will release its State of NYC Dance report later this month.

The report will contain findings from the Dance Industry Census, including an extensive survey completed by more than 1,600 individual dance workers and entities—broadly defined as anyone whose work intersects with dance—plus qualitative findings from roundtables held across the New York City metro area, during which participants could respond to the data collected thus far and share their own experiences. It will also include suggested action items based on the report’s findings.

“We’ve done some deep thinking with the data to offer the field: Here are the numbers, here’s what we think they mean, and here are the levers of power you can weigh on if you’re interested in changing some of these realities,” says Candace Thompson-Zachery, Dance/NYC’s director of programming and justice initiatives. 

Dance/NYC is not new to extensive research studies: In the past, the organization has published reports on immigrant artists, small-budget dancemakers, the impact of COVID-19, and more. It has also done previous State of NYC Dance reports as recently as 2016, but those were more focused on dance organizations than individuals. “We landed on the fact that in order to make change and really strengthen the ecosystem, we had to look more closely at individual dance workers,” says Thompson-Zachery. 

Though the final report won’t be public until mid-December, Dance/NYC has released some preliminary data and takeaways from the census—like that most dance workers earn limited income from their work in dance, have jobs outside of dance, and believe they are not paid fair wages. These findings and more will come to life at a performance event and gathering December 12 at Chelsea Factory, where Sydnie L. Mosley Dances and Ladies of Hip-Hop “will help us create the space and interpret the data,” says Thompson-Zachery. The event, which will also include a community meal, is free and open to the public.

“We want people to show up and to prioritize looking a bit more critically at the dance community,” says Thompson-Zachery. “We’re hoping we get real-time connections between people that can further galvanize us towards taking action and advancing the kind of change we’re looking for.”

Moving forward, the report will live on the DWR (Dance. Workforce. Resilience.) Hub, a new digital tool created partly in response to needs expressed in the survey and roundtables. Dance/NYC sees it as a one-stop shop for any resource a dance worker could want, from contract templates to racial justice recommendations to an interactive compensation chart. 

Thompson-Zachery hopes the report will empower dance workers and give them a broader context for the challenges they’re facing. “We run into pain points, and we don’t quite know what to do with them,” she says. “We talk in the hallway outside rehearsal, but we don’t quite understand how all the pieces fit together.”  

And now, when Dance/NYC—and whoever else wants to take advantage of the data they’ve amassed—makes the case that dance workers need more financial support or resources, they’ll have receipts. “It provides ammunition,” says Thompson-Zachery. “Because now we have numbers that we can pull to support the kind of claims we’ve been making around what the sector needs.”

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Originally published in 2009 for the Nintendo Wii console, Just Dance has since sold 80 million copies and engaged more than 140 million players all over the world. And while the game, which released its 2024 edition at the end of October, aims to make dance fun and accessible for anyone who picks up a remote, there are dozens of professional dancers and choreographers who help to make it happen.

Real Dancers, Really Dancing

For every Just Dance song and its attendant choreography, players follow along with at least one “coach,” digital avatars with unique character design. You might assume these coaches are computer generated, but the routines that unfold in each Just Dance “map” start out as videos of dancers performing the choreography in full costume and makeup on a green screen. Though animation is added in postproduction, what you’re watching in the final game are real dancers, really dancing. The 2024 edition worked with 38 dancers and 17 choreographers, 7 of whom performed their own routines as coaches, to create the 40 new maps.         

Finding the Right Choreographer

Estelle Manas, Just Dance’s director of choreography, began working at Ubisoft four years ago after over 20 years as a professional dancer in France’s commercial and musical theater scenes. She’s one of the creative leads involved in the process of creating each map from inception. “My role is to make the bridge between all the production needs and the artists,” she says.

Once the number of characters, mood, and story for a given song are determined, Manas puts together a brief with that information, as well as the planned difficulty (easy, medium, hard, or extreme), whether there are any accessories or props to be integrated, and an initial storyboard breakdown with the music. She then references Just Dance’s go-to list of freelance choreographers and finds the best fit. The selected choreographer goes into the studio with Manas and her assistant to create and film a prototype of the choreography.

Unique Choreographic Constraints

The choreography for a Just Dance map has to work within unique constraints. Because the console remote, which tracks the players’ movements to produce their final score, is held in the right hand, the choreography has to ensure that the right hand is always visible and actively involved in the dance. The movement has to be oriented to the front and be easily legible; keeping players facing the screen makes it easier for them to mirror the 2-D avatar’s moves, and makes for clearer pictograms, which scroll across the bottom of the screen in time with the choreography to cue players on which positions and motions are being scored for accuracy. Player ease is also why the choreography unfolds in relatively straightforward patterns: lots of repetition, fairly square musicality. Adjustments to accommodate the needs of other departments—from costume design to video artists to level design—also have to be seamlessly incorporated into the final version.

Casting “Coaches”      

Just Dance has a roster of dancers primarily found through periodic open-call auditions. Manas and her team consider the style of dance and the personality and look of the “coach” when deciding who to tap. Across the board, the dancers have to be not just good, clean technicians but also excellent at emoting, projecting energy, and conveying a story in a three-minute routine. Most important to the rehearsal process: “We need the dancer to have a really good memory, because we change the steps, the energy, the eye contact, all the time,” Manas says. They have, at most, four three-hour rehearsals in which to master the choreography as it’s being workshopped to accommodate notes from other departments.

What’s New in 2024

One new feature that will be beta-tested this winter is camera scoring, which will allow players to set up their smartphone to track them as they perform the routines from 15 tracks and score them based on their full body movement, rather than tracking just the remote in their right hand. (This gets at an early criticism of Just Dance: Couldn’t you just sit on the couch and wave your right arm around, rather than attempting the choreography?) The grading for this mode is based on an artificial-intelligence model trained on team members performing the choreography.

Another first for the 2024 edition: Collaborating with Baroque-dance expert Pierre-François Dollé for a new map set at the Palace of Versailles. Brought about thanks to the Cultural Olympiad program ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, “A Night in the Château de Versailles” celebrates a location that looms large not just in the popular imagination (Marie Antoinette, anyone?) but also in the history of Western classical dance. (Remember Louis XIV and Ballet de la Nuit from dance history class?) When Manas interviewed Dollé at the start of the collaboration, she was surprised to learn that Baroque dances like the minuet were not unlike the Macarena or Cupid Shuffle of their time, albeit for courtiers: “It was a really fun and sharing space, like: ‘I’ve heard this song, I know this choreography, let’s go!’ ”

The final result, set to a remix integrating a pair of contemporaneous compositions, evolves from a fairly straightforward homage to paired Baroque dances into a syncopated, hip-hop–inspired riff on the genre as the onscreen coaches move through the grounds and halls of the opulent palace. And the new Versailles map is a tidy encapsulation of what Just Dance is all about: taking something that might seem elite and out of reach—a Baroque dance performed by aristocrats, or, more broadly, dance as an art form—and transforming it into a contemporary, accessible, fun experience.

The post Real Dancers, Really Dancing: The Making of Just Dance 2024 appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Comings & Goings

Robert Battle has resigned as artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Associate artistic director Matthew Rushing will lead the company until a successor is found.

Garth Fagan has stepped down as artistic director of Garth Fagan Dance, shifting to the role of founder and distinguished artistic director emeritus. He has been succeeded by Norwood “PJ” Pennewell as artistic director and Natalie Rogers-Cropper as executive director and school director.

Christopher K. Morgan has been named artistic director of Malashock Dance, effective in January. John Malashock will transition to the position of founding artistic director.

Patricia Guerrero has been named artistic director of Ballet Flamenco of Andalucia.

Mariinsky Theatre director Valery Gergiev has been named general director of the Bolshoi, replacing Vladimir Urin. Gergiev will reportedly continue to lead the Mariinsky concurrently.

Former dancer Maria Seletskaja has been named music director at English National Ballet.

At Pacific Northwest Ballet, Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan has been promoted to principal, Clara Ruf Maldonado and Kuu Sakuragi to soloist.

At Paris Opéra Ballet, Inès McIntosh and Florent Meylac have been promoted to premier dancers. Through the annual concours de promotion, Nina Seropian, Hortense Millet-Maurin, and Célia Drouy have been promoted to sujet, Saki Kuwabara, Camile de Bellefon, Seehoo Yun, Elizabeth Partington, and Ambre Chiarcosso to coryphée.

Awards & Honors

Duke Dang received the Dance Advocate Award and Linda Murray the inaugural Dance Catalyst Award from Dance/NYC.

Courtney Spears and Révolutionnaire cofounders Justice Faith Betty and Nia Faith Betty were named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30 2024” list.

Aaliyah Christina, Helen Lee, Nora Sharp, and Phree have been named 2024 Lab Artists by Chicago Dancemakers Forum. Each will receive a $25,000 grant and a year of additional tailored support.

Mickey Davidson, Jordan Deal, and Aya Shabu have been awarded New Dance Alliance’s Black Artists Space to Create residencies, which includes studio access, living space, and a $2,000 stipend for the one-week residencies.

New Funding Opportunity

Applications for the MAP Fund’s 2024 grant cycle, which will award selected artists $25,000 for the creation and development of a new live performance project, $5,000 unrestricted operating funds, and $1,000 to redistribute to another artist in the grantee’s community, are open until 5 pm ET on December 19. More information here.

The post News of Note: What You Might Have Missed in November 2023 appeared first on Dance Magazine.

All About Ailey

NEW YORK CITY   Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater takes over New York City Center for the month of December as the company celebrates its 65th anniversary. Following an opening-night gala on Nov. 29 honoring artistic director emerita Judith Jamison, the five-week season features premieres by former artistic director Robert Battle, former Ailey dancer Elizabeth Roxas-Dobrish (Me, Myself and You, a duet set to “In A Sentimental Mood”), and new Ailey artist-in-residence Amy Hall Garner (CENTURY, inspired by the choreographer’s grandfather). Also in the mix are fresh productions of Ronald K. Brown’s Dancing Spirit, Alonzo King’s Following the Subtle Current Upstream, Jamar Roberts’ Ode, and Hans van Manen’s Solo; programs highlighting the legendary women of the company and featuring live music performed by the Future of Jazz Orchestra; and, of course, a healthy helping of Ailey classics. Nov. 29–Dec. 31. alvinailey.org. —Courtney Escoyne

Seven and Seven

NEW YORK CITY   Seven dancers, seven violists, three collaborative works. Tiffany Mills Company and contemporary music troupe Ensemble Ipse converge at National Sawdust for a program of live music and dance theater, inspired by texts exploring exile, the human cost of war, and the literal and metaphorical power of sight and being seen. Dec. 2–3. nationalsawdust.org. —CE

Dreamy Duets

NEW YORK CITY   A dreamy collection of current and former dancers from Bruce Wood Dance, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, The Joffrey Ballet, Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, New York City Ballet, and San Francisco Ballet come together for Lar Lubovitch at 80: Art of the Duet, a special Works & Process program featuring performances of some of the choreographer’s favorite duets alongside a conversation about their creation. Dec. 3. guggenheim.org. —CE

Snapshots of Love

SAN FRANCISCO   In Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s–1950s, Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell presented hundreds of previously unpublished vintage photographs of gay couples from their collection. Following a two-month developmental residency at 836M Gallery, RAWdance co-artistic directors Wendy Rein and Ryan T. Smith premiere a series of duets inspired by those images, Loving Still. Select photos are being reproduced in a larger format for display in the space; additionally, audiences attending the free performances can catch an abbreviated version of Shawn Sprockett’s Unspeakable Vice walking tour, which unearths Jackson Square’s queer history, ahead of the show. Dec. 8–10. rawdance.org. —CE

Undercurrents

DRESDEN   Contemporary choreographer Johan Inger has a knack for delving into the psychology and dark undercurrents of the subjects he tackles, particularly when he takes a more narrative bent. His latest: A Swan Lake for Dresden Semperoper Ballett, which uses the oft-performed classic to question how violence, manipulation, personal freedom, and respect intersect and impact personal relationships. Dec. 9–Jan. 14. semperoper.de. —CE

Happily Ever After?

WORCESTER, MA   Why is it that in so many fairy tales, female protagonists can only attain happiness by enduring sacrifice and violence? That’s the question animating For you, I dream of me, a new evening-length from Kristin Wagner. Developed in part through workshops reconsidering those stories with local young adults of all gender identities, some of whom will perform alongside Wagner’s Bodies Moving company, the work has its first public showings at the Jean McDonough Arts Center BrickBox Theater Dec. 15–16. bodiesmoving.com. —CE

Fresh Nutcrackers

Two new takes on the holiday classic premiere.

Orlando Ballet

ORLANDO   Drawing from his experience working in children’s theater, artistic director Jorden Morris frames Clara’s dream as a journey through a life-sized snow globe. Steering away from the Land of the Sweets’ potential for cultural insensitivity, Tchaikovsky’s “Chinese” dance is reinterpreted as a pas de deux between Drosselmeyer and a yellow-and-black heron, and the Arabian divertissement features a dancer—premiering with a female soloist but choreographed to be non–gender-specific—defying gravity in an acrobatic Cyr wheel. Tapping the Orlando community, Morris collaborated with Disney puppeteers to bring sets and costumes by Robert Perdziola to life. Dec. 8–24. orlandoballet.org. —Hannah Foster

Milwaukee Ballet

MILWAUKEE   Artistic director Michael Pink says that his 2003 Nutcracker production is still “bloody good,” so much so that much of its choreography is being retained for The Nutcracker: Drosselmeyer’s Imaginarium. With the reconceptualization, Pink seeks to continue the protagonists’ narrative journey into the second act, featuring them prominently in the dancing throughout. Whimsical new costumes, sets, and music transitions between scenes create a seamless flight into imagination and wonder. Dec. 8–26. milwaukeeballet.org. —Steve Sucato

The post Two New <i>Nutcrackers</i> and a Half Dozen Other Performances Worth Catching This December appeared first on Dance Magazine.

This year, 14 new Rockettes were welcomed from nine states—New York, New Jersey, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah—through the Rockettes Conservatory, the company’s no-fee, week-long intensive training program that serves as an inclusive talent pipeline for the group.

From now through January 1, 2024, you can watch the Rockettes live in action at the beloved Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

The post Here’s What It Takes to Be Rockette-Ready appeared first on Dance Magazine.

I call the second room the “performance room.” You have these ballet dancers in these beautiful costumes, embodying perfection, but once you walk around, you realize that there’s something going on—and that’s where you encounter the injured ballerina, and the ballerina smoking in the corner. I hope people feel like they’re walking through a narrative.

Can you discuss your use of white plaster, which is a trademark of yours, and its context within the historically white world of ballet?
I want to put into the world what I don’t see all the time, and that is Black sculptures. For me, there is no color—instead, it’s in the gesture, and the face, and the structure that you see it. And with this exhibition, there is also the added layer that the ballet world is a white, elite, European environment, and Black dancers have to conform and sacrifice to thrive in it.

What are the biggest takeaways you hope visitors will have?
Pay dancers more! Support your local dancers, or your local dance schools. A career in dance requires so much money—a single pair of pointe shoes can cost you $100! I think there needs to be more knowledge around these details. I want people to walk away with a deeper appreciation for dancers and everything that goes into the final product you see onstage.

The post Artist Karon Davis’ New Exhibition Grapples With the Physicality and Grit of Ballet appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Hi! Who are you, and what is the International Museum of Dance?
My career in dance began with training and performing in San Francisco and New York City. My graduate thesis at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy laid the foundation for IMOD, an organization dedicated to safeguarding and surfacing global dance forms through education, archives, and exhibitions. We’re reimagining both museum and dance experiences by prioritizing service over accumulation, and empowering artists to act as curators. We’re also planning for physical locations, starting with a modular space in San Francisco.

How is IMOD different from other museums? There seems to be a lot of emphasis on collaboration.
The foundation of IMOD is cultural exchange. Our network includes academic researchers and institutions, as well as technology companies. We’ve connected with dance theorists like Kate Elswit and Harmony Bench, who have contributed valuable insights to how we understand the history of dance. We’re in relation to the legacies of Gene Kelly, Eiko Otake, and the Diné/Navajo. We present in spaces and museums such as SITE Santa Fe, the Center for Contemporary Arts of Santa Fe, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Performance Santa Fe, and The Santa Fe Symphony.

Can you talk about your approach to archiving, which is radically different from most museums?
We’re focused on meeting the researched needs of the global dance community, digitizing and democratizing archives. Our online platform, which debuts in 2024, will be made available to both individuals and institutions at a low cost. We have collaborated with Microsoft and Adobe to enhance the digital experience, while copyright protections ensure artists’ work is respected and safeguarded. We plan to celebrate physical archives through exhibitions in IMOD’s future spaces, as well.

I’ve been super-interested in how you approach emerging technologies for a long time, especially vis à vis labor equity. What are you working on in terms of tech, and why?
IMOD views emerging technologies as tools, not replacements. In archiving, our platform safeguards personal collections in the cloud. In education, we leverage HoloLens in 3D for immersive learning experiences. Our tech focus is on creating engaging and dynamic interactions while ensuring proper credit and recognition for dancers. We strike a balance between expansive engagement and ensuring the dance community thrives by acknowledging and rewarding contributors.

The post The International Museum of Dance Considers Dance’s Past, Present, and Future appeared first on Dance Magazine.

As a dancer who identified as a lesbian for a five-year chunk of my past life, I’ve watched how attitudes have changed. Sara Wolf wrote in a 2003 article titled “Lesbian Choreographers Redefine Motion” that “prior to Stonewall, the cutting-edge downtown dance scene was not open or hospitable to lesbians.” But even after Stonewall, it took women longer than men to come out.

In 2011, dancer-choreographer Pat Catterson wrote an essay in Attitude titled “Can You Tell I Am a Lesbian When I Dance?” She basically spent the first 30 years as a dance artist hiding her identity. “I wanted to stay in the closet professionally,” she wrote. “I didn’t think it would be advantageous to my career to talk about it. . . . Partly it is that we choose to be invisible. Gay men in dance do not. Visibility is possibly more of a liability for us.”

Maybe it’s just a matter of numbers—that a certain mass is necessary before there can be a sense of community. It seems that queer women dancers tend to be isolated, whereas gay men dancers are part of a social swirl.

Your question was about queer women in dance history, so let’s go back. The American Loie Fuller, slightly older than Isadora Duncan, took Paris by storm in the 1890s, not by exhibiting her body, but by covering up her body with fantastic imagery—a lily, a butterfly, a flame. Considered one of the mothers of modern dance, she invented lighting devices that, along with yards and yards of silk, created these images as a stunning theatrical coup. She had a long-term relationship with a woman; in Dancing Women: Female Bodies On Stage, Sally Banes describes La Loïe as an openly identifying lesbian. (For a deeper dive into Fuller’s sexuality and the surrounding homophobia, see Ann Cooper Albright’s book Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller.)

Jill Johnston, the renegade Village Voice dance critic of the Sixties, was out, very far out. Her collection of dance reviews, titled Marmalade Me, is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the rebellious Judson Dance Theater. Staging her own rebellion, around the same time as the Stonewall Riots, she shifted from writing dance reviews to writing essays about queer women, which were gathered in her 1973 book, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution. (We’ll all be able to read more of her writing next year, when Duke University Press will publish a new collection of Johnston’s writings—edited by Clare Croft, whom you mentioned.)

The Wallflower Order Dance Collective, a feminist troupe formed in 1975, morphed into the Dance Brigade a decade later. They are a mix of gay and straight women in San Francisco’s Mission District. Co-founder Krissy Keefer is quoted as saying, in this 2011 article by Keith Hennessy, that they were probably the first dance company “to express explicit lesbian sensibilities and concerns.”

The feminist Seventies brought out Pat Graney, a Seattle choreographer devoted to social justice issues. She is out and dedicated to supporting the lesbian community. She mentored many dancers, including Gina Gibney, the choreographer and entrepreneur who created the Gibney spaces that have done so much for the New York City dance community. In 2016, Out magazine named Gina Gibney one of its OUT100.

In the 1980s, things started getting more interesting. A group of downtown Manhattan dancers including Lucy Sexton, Jennifer Monson, and Jennifer Miller were gloriously frank about their sexuality. I remember, in the mid-1980s, Johanna Boyce’s Ties That Bind, featuring a beautiful duet in which Miller and Susan Seizer talked openly about their relationship in a funny, poignant way. Decades later, in 2007, at a Movement Research gala honoring Yvonne Rainer at Judson Memorial Church, Monson and DD Dorvillier suddenly dashed to the altar for an impromptu, outrageously caressing makeout session. That was just the tip of the iceberg of Monson and Dorvillier’s long, wild ride as rambunctiously out lesbian dancemakers.

(A side note: You also asked, “Why, when I learned about Yvonne Rainer, was her sexuality never mentioned?” The reason is probably that she was in heterosexual relationships during the time she was making history with her ground-breaking danceworks of the Sixties. It was only around 1990, while making feminist films, that she developed a relationship with another woman.)

I think the new acceptance of lesbian artists is partly due to the shift from modern dance to postmodern: Choreographers in the latter mode tend to be less gendered. While the portrayal of women in Graham, Limón, and Ailey was always fairly traditional, the gender presentation of postmodern choreographers like Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, Mark Morris, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar are less gendered (or, rather, multi-gendered), therefore more likely to attract gay women. Not only is the presentation of women less femmy in postmodern dance, but there’s less dramatic tension between men and women. I think this is also true in current versions of tap and flamenco.

In her 2003 article, Wolf contends that lesbian dancemakers “re-conceptualize the female body in motion.” Case in point: Elizabeth Streb, whose slam-bam athletics transcend gender expectations. “When you’re out of that box, it allows you to break out in other ways, make different choices, ask other questions,” Streb told Wolf. “You’re much more able to discard the tools that have already been invented.”

The post Searching for Dance History’s Queer Women? Start Here appeared first on Dance Magazine.

We stand in stunned silence. I grew up in a performing arts family and had never once correlated being gay with being bad. My director’s tone, however, tells me a very different story. My brain files the conversation under the heading “Being a Lesbian Dancer Is Not Okay.”

I wish I could say that after high school, my world opened up wide, and I saw an abundance of representation within the dance world. I didn’t. Though I had out-and-proud peers, they were the subjects of frequent whispers. I still didn’t see any female or female-identifying professionals out. I didn’t have my first queer female teacher until graduate school. I went through multiple dance history courses without so much as a mention of a queer female. 

I came out publicly after completing my MFA. As I continued to study dance history, it felt odd not to see myself in anything I was reading and watching. It really seemed as though queer women were just absent from the dance history canon. In contrast, queer men were widely acknowledged—we know about Alvin Ailey, Bill T. Jones, Merce Cunningham, the complicated history around Vaslav Nijinsky. We have records of queer men in dance even if they lived in eras when homosexuality was punishable by law or shunned by society. 

Why does the dance world celebrate the queerness of men while simultaneously suppressing its queer women? It drove home my internalized feelings that queer women were, in fact, not welcome in the dance community.

In 2019 I began to teach dance to high school students, and the more time I spent with them, the more I wanted better for them. I wanted them to see themselves in our history. I wanted them to see themselves represented, to see career paths beyond what I had chosen. Statistically, there had to be queer women in dance’s narrative—so where were they? Was their absence a fault in my education or memory, or in the field of history itself? 

This year, I began to search in earnest for the queer female dancers of the past. (I’m nowhere near the first person to probe for similar answers in queer dance history; Clare Croft and Peter Stoneley are two trailblazers that spring to mind.) I had expected to unearth communities, modern greats who had “special friends” or “roommates” or “fellow spinsters with whom they lived their entire lives.” Instead, I found very little. And what I have seen, I’m baffled by. Why, when I learned about Yvonne Rainer, was her sexuality never mentioned? Though I do not believe we should “boil people down” to their sexual orientation, are we not considering representation for those in our classrooms? Why do we strip women of the same identities we applaud or at least acknowledge in men?

It feels like both a society-at-large and a dance-community problem. The dance world is so gendered. Its treatment of people according to their gender identities is painfully unequal. And we have historically gone through periods of acceptance, tolerance, and oppression of the LGBTQIA+ community, with no linear timeline. The side effect is that we have figures of dance history who could not come out, regardless of their wants and desires. 

As I continue my research, I ask two things of the dance world: Can we create space for queer women to be out, celebrated, and acknowledged? And can we work together to find and recognize our queer female dance ancestors? When we root ourselves in our past, we give ourselves something to grow from.

If you have information about queer women in dance history to share with Wesler, please get in touch via her website: sammwesler.wixsite.com/sammwesler

The post Queer Women Are Disconcertingly Absent From the Pages of Dance History. Where Are They? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

It only feels right that the two powerhouses’ first collaboration is a love letter to New York City. Hell’s Kitchen, a coming-of-age story loosely based on Keys’ own adolescence, with music and lyrics by Keys (featuring­ both original songs and existing favorites)­ and choreography by Brown, opens off-Broadway at The Public Theater this month. 

What kind of relationship did you have with the music of Alicia Keys prior to coming onto Hell’s Kitchen? 

I love Alicia Keys’ music. I mean, I’m originally from Queens. So the fact that she has a song dedicated to New York City and her being from New York—I immediately had a connection to her music and to the person she is. 

What’s it been like collaborating with her?

It’s really exciting and thrilling and also scary to create something to someone’s music and actually have that person sit in the room and watch. You want them to dig what you’re creating, of course, so the nerves are there. But she’s so down-to-earth and so encouraging.

What has your process of creating the movement been like? What influences are you pulling from?

I’m pulling from my own experience being from New York. There’s not much research that I have to do in terms of knowing New York, so it’s more about getting inside the music. That’s really been the goal: What does “Empire State of Mind” feel like, as a movement, as a dance? The exciting thing about the show is that it’s both music that we know and new music. There’s one number that I can’t wait until it’s released because it’s out of sight. I had so much fun choreographing it. 

There’s always the one song in a show that I’m like, What am I gonna do with this? It was the kind of thing that, as a choreographer, you can go several ways: You can lean into hip hop, you can lean into contemporary. I decided to lean into everything. It’s fun because I get to show my contemporary-modern dance side and I also show what I do with social dances. 

What’s it been like to choreograph to such iconic songs that you’ve known for so long? Is it hard to approach them with fresh eyes?

When you ask me that question, I immediately think of revivals. What does it mean to take a show and to give it a new take and reimagine it? I feel like it’s the same with her music. It’s so well-known, and she’s been on the map for decades now. And I know that there have been so many people that have created to her music. So what take am I going to have? And how is this music supporting the story? Because what’s beautiful about the layering of the music is that it’s positioned to support the story. So how can I lean into what the story is asking of me? And what are the ways that I can reimagine it for myself? I didn’t necessarily think of “Empire State of Mind” as a dance piece. But here I am creating a dance piece for it. 

What in the show are you most looking forward to audiences getting to experience?

The new songs. I listen to them to and from rehearsal, because they’re that good. It’s gonna be exciting to have people react to the songs they know—the way they come in is really smart—and the new songs.

The post Camille A. Brown Talks Collaborating With Alicia Keys on <i>Hell’s Kitchen</i> appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Do you recall when you first encountered Betty Boop?
I saw her when I was a kid. My aunts had Betty Boop this and Betty Boop that. I did see a lot of the shorts, not when I was young but when I was in college.

Are you borrowing any movement from the original cartoons?
Not really. The opening number is a gigantic tap routine. It starts as if you’re watching a black-and-white short, and then you go from watching it to being on the set where the short is being made. So it comes to life, so to speak, but it stays in a black-and-white world and it stays kind of two-dimensional.

I noticed BOOP! is being marketed as a family-friendly show, which surprised me. The promotional images suggest the early-1930s, pre–Hays Code Betty, with the garter belt and the hoop earrings. Is she the blueprint for this show’s Betty?
That, in my opinion, is the Betty. Betty was always the strong, sexy girl. She was never afraid of that.

Dozens of performers have portrayed Betty Boop in voice or image since she first appeared. Does the show nod to the many artists who are part of her lineage?
Though I think people will make those connections and find those reference points, none specifically were intended. I went looking for the character in the story that was written, and finding out how best to portray that character was how I came up with what’s in the show.

BOOP! also features a marionette by Phillip Huber, whose work on Being John Malkovich is extraordinary. What can we expect from the puppetry?
You can expect to see [Betty Boop’s dog,] Pudgy. [Laughs] Phillip and I have known each other for quite a long time. When BOOP! came along I thought, Do I call [theatrical animal trainer] Bill Berloni and get a real dog? And then I thought, No—I call Phillip and get a marionette.

I think of most choreography as some balance of attention to steps and to movement qualities. My impression, based on shows I’ve seen and interviews you’ve given, is that you want the choreography to serve the storytelling.
It’s almost always that way for me: story first, steps and style second and equally. I worked with Jerry Robbins and Michael Bennett: two great examples, right? There aren’t many similarities between the steps in West Side Story and the steps in Fiddler on the Roof, or the steps in The King and I, other than the fact that they were done by the same choreographer. Style is the last thing Jerry thought of, story was the first thing he thought of, and humor was right up there at the top, too. Michael? Same thing. Fosse was quite the opposite. Everything had his distinct style.

You’re experienced in historic dance reconstruction, through your work on Jerome Robbins’ Broadway and other projects. Has BOOP! been an opportunity to tap into those skills?
Those skills never leave me. They’re in the room with me every time I work on a show. I go home after every rehearsal and I go, What would Michael [Bennett] have thought? What would Jerry [Robbins] have thought? What would Ron Field have thought? What would Onna White have done? Right? I mean, these are all people I worked with and collaborated with and assisted when I was a dancer myself.

Is there anything else that you’d like to share about the show?
Rachelle Rak and Jon Rua are my associate choreographers who are laying it down fast and thick. We have some of the greatest dancers in a musical that I’ve had in a long time, which is important because there’s a lot of dance, particularly in the first act. It’s gonna be fun.

The post Jerry Mitchell on Bringing Betty Boop From the Past to the Present appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Skybetter, perhaps the dance field’s favorite futurist, founded CRCI at Brown in 2015. He’s since hosted several gatherings for artists and scholars interested in the risks and creative possibilities of art and computational systems. Considerable research and planning went into the podcast’s first season, which Skybetter calls “flippin’ bonkers.” Here are his thoughts on the new project and what happens when bodies meet technology.

Why was this the right time to start a podcast?
I came of age through podcasts, but it never would have occurred to me that the kinds of conversations we were having at CRCI would be of interest to others. It wasn’t until Ariane said “I think we should have a podcast” that things started to organize. Also, the community around CRCI has grown sufficiently large, nuanced, and complex enough that a podcast is a natural extension of what we have been doing.

Can you give us a snapshot of CRCI?
It’s a community of dance practitioners, technologists, critical theorists, scholars, and improvisers who share a common interest in where bodies meet emerging technologies. We specifically emphasize choreographic practice as we are exploring the complexities of these collisions. Dance is central, even if we are intensely collaborative and interdisciplinary.

How do you see this podcast as an extension of CRCI’s mission?
We are interested in bringing the equitable consideration of bodies to all places where performance and emerging technologies coincide. What we tried to do in the podcast was represent the kind of prismatic discourse, conversations, and stories that the individuals who came to CRCI would offer. We don’t foreground technologists or put them on a pedestal.

How did you structure the podcast?
Each of the stories we tell in the podcast is a result of Ariane’s and my research. We have been in dialogue with an international rolodex of dance nerds who have been telling their stories to us through our programming for years.

What have you learned about the intersection of dance and tech from teaching choreo-robotics at Brown?
We talk about just how multifaceted and reciprocal the experience of teaching choreo-robotics is in the podcast. Our hypothesis was that we would be able to create a course environment that allowed burgeoning technologists and young artists to collaborate with one another for performance projects. Through this class we had to unpack why in American culture technologists are often the highest paid, while dancers and artists are the opposite. A lot of it had to do with stereotypes and expectations around these different forms of expertise and labor. Ultimately, we are trying to figure out how to work together equitably.

Let’s get to the dancing robots. What can they do?
Choreography is a way to start conversations about how bodies make meaning, whose bodies matter, how bodies interface with technologies. Dance is a way of demonstrating how agile, how kinesthetically intelligent, how capable today’s robots are. Making robots dance is astonishingly hard. In a way it is an illumination of the kinds of capacities that robots will have in the future. They will inevitably be used in elder care—in fact, episode seven focuses on this question of care. Those robots will need to be extraordinarily dexterous and massively more intelligent than they are presently. They will require a level of kinesthetic awareness that they currently lack, and that dancers could provide.

Are robots coming for choreographers’ jobs?
What labor are you replacing, and who values it? I’m not saying we shouldn’t be concerned, but on the other hand the Western dance tradition has always existed in relation to disruptive technologies. The stage, the pointe shoe, and fire proofing were all disruptive technologies. I have no doubt that the dancers and choreographers of today and the future will be able to work with and alongside and through robots, virtual reality, and AI. The challenge has been to create spaces that are conducive to that kind of investigation.

Will there be a Season 2?
Flippity-doo-da, yes there will!

The post <i>Dances with Robots</i>: A New Podcast Explores What Happens When Bodies Meet Technology appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The post Remembering Pioneering Ballerina Delores Browne, 1935–2023 appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Comings & Goings

Edwaard Liang has been named artistic director of The Washington Ballet. He’ll remain artistic director of BalletMet until the end of the 2023–24 season.

Alessandra Ferri has been named the next artistic director of Vienna State Ballet, succeeding Martin Schläpfer in September 2025.

Jessica Lang has been named artist in residence at Sarasota Ballet for a three-year period beginning with the current season.

Stephanie Lake has been named resident choreographer of The Australian Ballet, effective in January.

At New York City Ballet, Gilbert Bolden III and Davide Riccardo have been promoted to soloist.

At Houston Ballet, Eric Best and Danbi Kim have been promoted to soloist.

At Sarasota Ballet, Anna Pellegrino and Daniel Pratt have been promoted to first soloist, Evan Gorbell to soloist.

At Stuttgart Ballet, Henrik Erikson and Gabriel Figueredo have been promoted to soloist, Mizuki Amemiya, Christopher Kunzelmann, Daniele Silingardi, and Satchel Tanner to demi-soloist.

Shimon Ito has joined Carolina Ballet as a soloist.

Britannia Morton has been named co-CEO of Sadler’s Wells.

Michael McStraw has been appointed executive director of Chicago Dance History Project.

Elena Tupyseva has been named executive director of Royal Winnipeg Ballet, beginning November 6.

London City Ballet has relaunched, with Christopher Marney as artistic director, Kate Lyons as rehearsal director, and Sean Flanagan as general manager.

Greenwich Dance will close at the end of 2023.

Verb Ballets has rebranded as Ohio Contemporary Ballet.

Awards & Honors

Hula choreographer and teacher Patrick Makuakāne has been named a 2023 MacArthur Fellow, which includes an $800,000 unrestricted grant.

Recipients of the Mertz Gilmore Foundation Dancer Award, which includes a $14,000 unrestricted grant per year for three years, are Benjamin Akio Kimitch, Maria Bauman, Roderick George, Brandon Kazen-Maddox, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, zavé martohardjono, and Soles of Duende (Brinda Guha, Amanda Castro, and Arielle Rosales).

At the 2023 Industry Dance Awards, Shirley MacLaine received the lifetime achievement award, Allison Faulk the Dance Innovator Award, Jennifer Jones the Dance Role Model Award, and Art and Nancy Stone the Trailblazer Award.

The post News of Note: What You Might Have Missed in October 2023 appeared first on Dance Magazine.

“We weren’t really polished dancers per se, but Rudy utilized all of the strengths of each individual so that it wasn’t about putting any kind of movement vocabulary on anybody that they could not do,” says former ensemble dancer Ian Cousineau, who began working with Perez in New York in 1977. The late choreographer emphasized a performer’s presence, making it “almost as important as whatever movement you were doing,” Cousineau says.

In a 2013 PBS interview, Perez intimated that he moved to the West Coast because he felt like he had done everything he could in New York. He needed a place to spread his wings, literally and figuratively.

“I think things really opened up for Rudy as a choreographer, and as a person, when he relocated to Los Angeles,” Cousineau says. “It was very, very liberating for him.”

Over the course of his career, Perez received numerous grants and awards, including National Endowment for the Arts Choreography Fellowships, the Irvine Fellowship in Dance, and the ¡Viva Los Artistas! Performing Arts Award for distinguished Latino artists.

In 2015, the UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts presented Perez with a Lifetime Achievement Award. During the evening, Perez presented the world premiere of his last work, Slate in Three Parts. In her opening remarks, dance critic Sasha Anawalt described Perez’s movement: “There is something melancholy about it. Something dark in that edge, that in-between and ‘mostly negligible’ place that is so elemental to our survival.”

Friends and collaborators have paid their respects on a memorial page created on Perez’s website.

“Rudy Perez was an artist with a capital ‘A’—an old-school diva in the truest sense, one who understood that he had to fight for everything he got and that it might never be enough,” choreographer Stephen Petronio wrote on the page.

Cousineau kept in touch with Perez until the choreographer’s death. “At the end of every call,” Cousineau says, “he expressed so much gratitude for his life, the sheer level of creativity that he had been able to experience and all of the people that were part of that creative arc.”

Perez is survived by his brother Richard and longtime partner James Kovacs.

The post Remembering Postmodern Dance Pioneer Rudy Perez, 1929–2023 appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Most significant among them: the likely closure of the idyllic Petronio Residency Center, located a few hours north of New York City amongst the Catskill Mountains and designed as an early-stage choreographic development center for dance artists. Purchased in 2016 and officially opened in 2018, the center became financially unsustainable during the pandemic. 

“I borrowed a lot of money to make it through the pandemic,” says Petronio. “I began bringing people up because they needed to work. And I thought, I’ve been raising money for 40 years. I’ll borrow this money, we’ll get through this, and then I’ll raise the money. And then the funding fell off a cliff.”

Now, with a large Small Business Administration loan to repay, lagging funder support, and earned-income streams severely down post-pandemic, the company has listed the 178-acre property for sale. While this probably means the end of the center, Petronio hasn’t given up entirely and is still attempting­ to fundraise to save it. “Who knows what’s going to happen,” he says. “I wanted to put it up for sale before it got scary, and before it became, Oh, my god, we have to sell. I look at it like I’m cooking a meal, and I’ve got several pots simmering, and one of them is going to turn into a dish.”

With property values in the Hudson Valley having skyrocketed in the past several years, Petronio hopes that, should the center sell, the liquidation will put the company and its other programs on solid financial ground for the future, and allow it to continue to support the research and development of new work. It’s a story similar to that of Lumberyard, which also listed its upstate residency center for sale earlier this year, citing funders’ shifting priorities and the opportunity to put earnings from the sale towards other impactful programs.

The decision to list the property was a heartbreaking one for Petronio, who also lives next to the site and had long dreamed of a space where he could pamper artists as they make work. (The residencies came with a 6,500-square-foot house with mountain views and a private chef.) His balms during a challenging time: getting back in the studio to create and the music of violinist Jennifer Koh. The fruit of both will be on display in his new work, Breath of the Beast. “I felt that with the closing of the retreat, it was crucial we come out with something big,” he says of the evening-length piece. For Petronio,­ the “beast” of the title “is that creative, intuitive person that lives in you, that goes into that trance that’s required to make work that’s irrational and nonnarrative.” Breath of the Beast will feature guest artist Jerron Herman, along with members of Petronio’s company, and live improvisation by Koh. 

It’s not a traditional anniversary retrospective—Petronio says that may be coming later—but, in a way, celebrating the “beast” feels like an homage to Petronio’s last 40 years of creative process. 

And while the loss of a center devoted to that process will be deeply felt, Petronio will still be leaving a lasting legacy upstate:­ With the help of the Doris Duke and Howard Gilman­ foundations, 77 acres of the property will remain a “forever wild” preserve, protected from development indefinitely. “When I’m long gone, one or two of my works might move forward—who knows?” says Petronio. “But my legacy is that the Stephen Petronio Company saved a little part of the Catskill Mountains, with the help of many people. And I’m very proud of that.” 

The post Stephen Petronio Company’s 40th Will Bring an Evening-Length Premiere—and the Likely Closure of the Petronio Residency Center appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Remeeting Mowgli

ON TOUR  In Jungle Book reimagined, Akram Khan recasts the protagonist of the well-loved (if dated) stories by Rudyard Kipling as a refugee child displaced by the climate crisis. Mowgli’s journey of learning to listen to the natural world is charted through video design, animation, and projection and set to an original score by Jocelyn Pook. Following its U.S. debut in Los Angeles Oct. 26–28, it tours to Montreal (Nov. 1–4), Chicago (Nov. 9–11), New York City (Nov. 16–18), and Stanford, CA (Dec. 2–3). akramkhancompany.net. 

Sticking Point

NEW YORK CITY  2nd Best Dance Company makes its Gibney Center debut with the premiere of The Myth of Forward Motion (or, The Box Dance). With “very serious play,” the cast examines the feeling of being stuck—physically, mentally, emotionally, existentially—and what creates it. Nov. 2–4. gibneydance.org.

Houston’s Histories

HOUSTON  For Lands—Portrait of the City of Houston, choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh and filmmaker Jocelyn Cottencin interviewed a range of Houstonians to capture their understandings of the city’s history. Engaging with the anthropological concept “the end of modernity,” the longtime collaborators used those interviews—troubling the notion that there’s a singular, progressive viewpoint of the city’s development—as the basis for a performance installation and film, premiering this month at DiverseWorks as part of Villa Albertine’s­ fall season. Nov. 7–9. diverseworks.org.

The Mind of Madame Bovary 

TORONTO  Following her well-received adaptation of The Crucible for Scottish Ballet, Helen Pickett turns to another literary classic for her first ballet for National Ballet of Canada: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Focused on the mind of the 19th-century novel’s titular character, Emma Bovary features an original score by Peter Salem and is co-directed by opera and theater director James Bonas. The new work shares a program with the Canadian premiere of James Kudelka’s Passion, which will mark longtime principal dancer Piotr Stanczyk’s retirement from the company. Nov. 11–18. national.ballet.ca. 

Recording a Golden Age

NEW YORK CITY  The Buena Vista Social Club and its eponymous 1997 album revitalized interest in Cuban music, spawning tours, two critically acclaimed documentaries, and now a stage musical. Tony Award–nominated director Saheem Ali helms a heavyweight creative team for the premiere at Atlantic Theater Company, including Drama Desk–winning book writer Marco Ramirez, Tony winner David Yazbek, and—most thrillingly—choreography by ballet-and-theater “it” couple Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck. Nov. 17–Dec. 31. atlantictheater.org.

Worlds Collide

FAIRFIELD, CT  Michael Keegan-Dolan’s bleak, astonishing Swan Lake/Loch na hEala was met with a rapturous reception when it toured the U.S. in fall 2019. The Irish dancemaker’s penchant for rigorous, theatrical, often absurdist dance theater finally returns stateside this month with the U.S. premiere of MÁM, named for a Gaelic word that can mean “mountain pass,” “yoke,” or “handful.” A dozen dancers from Teaċ Daṁsa share the stage with European music collective s t a r g a z e and virtuoso concertina player Cormac Begley in an evening-length work that toys with the ways seeming polarities—soloist and ensemble, modernity and tradition—can sometimes coexist and resolve. Nov. 17–18. quickcenter.fairfield.edu.

Glass Pieces

NEW YORK CITY  It’s rare to see such disparate and accomplished choreographers as Lucinda Childs, Chanon Judson, Justin Peck, Leonardo Sandoval, and Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber share a single evening. The occasion? Dancing with Glass: The Piano Etudes, a program celebrating popular minimalist composer Philip Glass with fresh choreographic responses to his Etudes, played live by Maki Namekawa. Runs at The Joyce Theater Nov. 28–Dec. 10 as part of the Dance Reflections festival. joyce.org.

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