2023

Antoine Hunter

Alicia Graf Mack

Norton Owen

Bijayini Satpathy

Maria Torres

Chairman’s Award: Jody Gottfried Arnhold

Harkness Promise Awards: Amadi “Baye” Washington and Sam “Asa” Pratt of Baye & Asa, and Omar Román De Jesús

Posthumous Awards: Syvilla Fort, Gregory Hines, Pearl Primus, and Helen Tamiris

2022

Kyle Abraham

Lucinda Childs

Herman Cornejo

Brenda Dixon-Gottschild

Dianne McIntyre

Chairman’s Award: Jim Herbert

Harkness Promise Awards: Johnnie Cruise Mercer and Kayla Farrish

2021

Robert Battle

Andy Blankenbuehler

Dormeshia

Akram Khan

Tamara Rojo

Chairman’s Award: Works & Process

Special Citation: Dr. Wendy Ziecheck

Harkness Promise Awards: Alethea Pace and Yin Yue

2020

Carlos Acosta

Debbie Allen

Camille A. Brown

Alonzo King

Laurieann Gibson

Chairman’s Award: Darren Walker

Harkness Promise Awards: Marjani Forté-Saunders and Kyle Marshall

2019

Masazumi Chaya

Angel Corella

David Gordon and Valda Setterfield

Sara Mearns

Chairman’s Award: Linda Shelton

Harkness Promise Awards: Bobbi Jene Smith and Caleb Teicher

2018

Ronald K. Brown

Lourdes Lopez

Crystal Pite

Michael Trusnovec

Leadership Award: Nigel Redden

Harkness Promise Awards: Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie and Raja Feather Kelly

2017

Rennie Harris

Marika Molnar

Linda Celeste Sims

Diana Vishneva

2016

Carolyn Adams

Lynn Garafola

Lar Lubovitch

Tiler Peck

2015

Soledad Barrio

Marcelo Gomes

Karen Kain

David Vaughan

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

2014

Brenda Bufalino and Tony Waag

Misty Copeland

Luigi

Wayne McGregor

Larissa Saveliev

2013

Martha Clarke

Mats Ek

Philip Glass

Yuan Yuan Tan

Patricia Wilde

2012

Julie Kent

Anna Kisselgoff

Renee Robinson

Dianne Walker

2011

Dr. William Hamilton

Alexei Ratmansky

Kathleen Marshall

Yvonne Rainer

Jenifer Ringer

2010

Deborah Jowitt

Pilobolus Dance Theatre

Irina Kolpakova

Matthew Rushing

2009

Allegra Kent

Ohad Naharin

Sara Rudner

Jason Samuels Smith

2008

Pina Bausch

Lawrence Rhodes

Ethan Stiefel

Sylvia Waters

2007

Bettie de Jong

Bebe Neuwirth

Desmond Richardson

Wendy Whelan

2006

Todd Bolender

Eiko & Koma

David Howard

Gelsey Kirkland

Joan Myers Brown

2005

Clive Barnes

Alessandra Ferri

Donald McKayle

Jimmy Slyde

Christopher Wheeldon

2004

Jose Manuel Carreño

Chuck Davis

Anna Halprin

Chita Rivera

2003

William Forsythe

Susan Jaffe

Jock Soto

Charles and Stephanie Reinhart

2002

Nina Ananiashvili

Frank Andersen

Jack Mitchell

Tina Ramirez

2001

Terese Capucilli

Michael M. Kaiser

Susan Stroman

Damian Woetzel

2000

David Parsons

Ann Reinking

Ben Stevenson

1999

Barbara Horgan for the Balanchine Trust

Al Pischl for Dance Horizons

Jacques d’Amboise

Martin Fredmann

Kevin McKenzie

1998

Jeraldyne Blunden

Julio Bocca

Suki Schorer

Dame Ninette de Valois

1997

Claude Bessy

Anna-Marie Holmes and Bruce Marks

Dudley Williams

Hernando Cortez & Dancers Responding to AIDS

1996

Peter Boal

Savion Glover

Francia Russell and Kent Stowell

Ann Barzel*

1995

Susan Marshall

Carla Maxwell

Fayard and Harold Nicholas

1994

Christine Dakin

Kate Johnson

Jirí Kylián

1993

Bill T. Jones

Pierre Dulaine and Yvonne Marceau

Beatriz Rodriguez

1992

Darci Kistler

Meredith Monk

Helgi Tomasson

1991

Virginia Johnson

Mark Morris

Jennifer Tipton

1990

Garth Fagan

Eliot Feld

Hanya Holm

1988

“Dancing for Life”

Moscelyne Larkin and Roman Jasinski

P. W. Manchester

Kyra Nichols

1987

Merrill Ashley

Trisha Brown

Liz Thompson

David White

Doris Hering*

1985

Charles “Honi” Coles

Richard Cragun

Frederic Franklin

Heather Watts

Walter Sorell*

1984

Alexandra Danilova

Robert Irving

Donald Saddler

Tommy Tune

Dance Masters of America, Inc.*

1983

Jeannot Cerrone

John Neumeier

Michael Smuin

Martine van Hamel

1982

Fernando Bujones

Laura Dean

Arnold Spohr

Lee Theodore

1981

Selma Jeanne Cohen

Sir Anton Dolin

Twyla Tharp

Stanley Williams

1980

Patricia McBride

Ruth Page

Paul Taylor

Herbert Ross and Nora Kaye*

1979

Aaron Copland

Jorge Donn

Erick Hawkins

1978

Mikhail Baryshnikov

Raoul Gelabert

Bella Lewitzky

1977

Murray Louis

Natalia Makarova

Peter Martins

1976

Michael Bennett

Suzanne Farrell

E. Virginia Williams

1975

Alvin Ailey

Cynthia Gregory

Arthur Mitchell

1974

Gerald Arpino

Maurice Béjart

Antony Tudor

1973

The Christensen Brothers (Lew, Harold, Willam)

Rudolf Nureyev

1972

Anthony Dowell

Judith Jamison

1970

Sir Frederick Ashton

Carolyn Brown

Ted Shawn

1969

Erik Bruhn

Katherine Dunham

Carla Fracci

1968

Eugene Loring

Alwin Nikolais

Violette Verdy

1967

Carmen de Lavallade

Sol Hurok

Wesleyan University Press

1966

Edwin Denby

Margaret H’Doubler

Maya Plisetskaya

1965

John Butler

Peter Gennaro

Edward Villella

1964

Gower Champion

Robert Joffrey

Pauline Koner

1963

Isadora Bennett

Margot Fonteyn

Bob Fosse

1962

Melissa Hayden

Anna Sokolow

Gwen Verdon

1960

Merce Cunningham

Igor Moiseyev

Maria Tallchief

1959

Dorothy Alexander

Fred Astaire

George Balanchine

1958

Alicia Alonso

Doris Humphrey

Gene Kelly

Igor Youskevitch

1957

Lucia Chase

José Limón

Alicia Markova

Jerome Robbins

1956

Agnes de Mille

Martha Graham

1955

Jack Cole

Gene Nelson

Moira Shearer

1954

Dance on TV: Adventure (CBS)

Tony Charmoli (NBC)

Max Liebman (NBC)

Omnibus (CBS)

*Special award

The post Dance Magazine Award Recipients appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The evening kicked off with the Harkness Promise Awards, presented by Harkness Foundation for Dance executive director Joan Finkelstein. Awarded to dance artists within the first decade of their choreographic career, Promise Awards include an unrestricted $5,000 grant and 40 hours of studio space (funded by the net proceeds from the Dance Magazine Awards) with no requirement for a final product. “I will ask the people in the front row to make sure your legs are close to your chairs,” Finkelstein warned with a smile before recipients Baye & Asa (Amadi “Baye” Washington and Sam “Asa” Pratt) took to the stage to perform an intense, athletic, arresting duet from their Collective Bargain. This was followed by filmed excerpts of recipient Omar Román De Jesús’ choreography performed by his company Boca Tuya, Bruce Wood Dance, and BalletCollective, showcasing slippery partnering and theatrical, offbeat imagery.

Finkelstein praised Baye & Asa for their work in which they “create political metaphors, interrogate systemic inequities, and contemporize ancient allegories,” as well as “for building theatrical contexts that simultaneously celebrate, implicate, and condemn the characters onstage, and for your courage and heart in confronting our contemporary reality of violence while communicating the absolute necessity for empathy.” During their acceptance speech, Pratt reflected, “In a contemporary world, there’s a lot of pressure to put yourself into a camp, to distill, succinctly and uncompromisingly, what you believe and where you stand. I think dance is uniquely positioned as an art form that can liberate thought into indeterminacy and to widen toward multiplicity instead of narrowing towards one singular thesis. Art remains one of the most advanced pieces of technology we have as a species.”

Presenting to De Jesús, Finkelstein said he was being recognized for his choreography “that blends virtuosity and naturalism to mine issues of identity, love, queerness, injustice, Latinidad, and the quest for community and agency, and for articulating and implementing Boca Tuya’s mission to create visibility for, support, and uplift emerging Latinx dance artists and choreographers.” In accepting the award, De Jesús said, “As artists, it is vital that we hold on to the hope of our own promise. As we strive for visibility and the capacity to dream without boundaries,” he hoped that we would continue to ask each other the questions that he said have granted him his success and visibility: What do you need? What do you want? How can I help you?

The evening moved from looking to the future to looking to the past, as editor at large Wendy Perron spoke about the dance artists who were recognized with the first posthumous Dance Magazine Awards. “I’ve been so immersed in dance history, in both my teaching and my writing,” Perron said, “that the four people I’m about to tell you about are very much alive for me.” While tracing their biographies, Perron lovingly illuminated lesser known connections of these well known figures—Syvilla Fort’s collaboration with John Cage when she was a student leading to Cage’s innovation of prepared piano; Gregory Hines’ influence on Savion Glover, Dianne Walker, and Jason Samuels Smith (all Dance Magazine Award recipients); Pearl Primus being pointed to the New Dance Group by a fellow student at Hunter College—Perron’s mother; Helen Tamiris choreographing the 1946 revival of Showboat, in which Primus had the top dancing role—and the impact they had in the words of their contemporaries and biographers.

Harlem Stage managing director Eric Oberstein spoke in honor of Bijayini Satpathy after a video excerpt of her Call of Dawn, which showcased the Odissi artist’s marriage of imagination with technical mastery and seemingly effortless musicality. Oberstein, who began working with Satpathy when he worked at Duke Performances and she was a principal at Nrityagram, recalled being stunned when a few years later, she chose to leave Nrityagram, and was unnerved to see a hint of nervousness from such a preternaturally calm person. He recounted the subsequent process of producing Satpathy’s critically acclaimed solo show ABHIPSAA: A Seeking, concluding, “She has taught me that it’s okay to not always know what lies beyond the horizon, but to trust in what you can bring to this world that is uniquely you.”

Satpathy was unable to attend the ceremony, but recorded an acceptance speech from her home in India. “Odissi, to me, now belongs to the world,” she said. “Like any other dance, it has its specific cultural roots. What is very precious and beautiful about Odissi, even though it is deeply rooted in its tradition, is it offers an expanded capacity of imagination, beyond time, beyond borders, beyond its cultural specificity. To have worked with its expanded capacity in education and training, in choreography and performances, has been a great, great blessing and privilege.” She accepted the award on behalf of all practitioners, gurus, custodians, scholars, and architects of Odissi of the past and present.

A half-dozen dancers turned up the temperature with a high-energy performance excerpted from Maria Torres‘ The Pan-American Nutcracker Suite—Reimagined, showing off rapid-fire footwork and gleeful partnering. Tony nominated actress Daphne Rubin-Vega was on hand after to present to Torres. Rather than run through the groundbreaking choreographer’s career and accomplishments (“You can Google who Maria Torres is,” Rubin-Vega drawled), she shared that when she and Lin-Manuel Miranda were doing promotion for In the Heights, an interviewer asked Miranda about what impact Rubin-Vega had on him, as the first Latina performer he saw on Broadway. “Lin said, ‘Well, Daphne was not the first I saw on Broadway. It was Maria Torres,’ ” Rubin-Vega said. “It made me fizz up with joy, to know that we stand on the shoulders of those that came before. In no uncertain terms, when all doors were closed, this is a sister who created jobs and opportunities for others who looked like me, and who didn’t look like me. I am here on purpose. And that is because of Maria Torres.”

After taking to the podium, Torres said, “I’m reminded of the journey that brought me to this moment. A journey that filled me with dreams, challenges, and the unwavering belief that dance can transcend barriers and transform lives.” She recalled eagerly paging through Dance Magazine as a teenager, imagining herself at a podium like this one, “speaking about my heritage, and my body type, which did not conform to the norm.” She showed off her sparkly, curve-hugging dress, which she had selected for the occasion for just that reason. Torres also credited her husband with rekindled her love for dance and her career at a point where she was ready to walk away, and late Ailey School director Denise Jefferson for supporting and comforting her when she was struggling with the death of her mother. She concluded with a pledge “to continue my lifelong commitment to dance education, to strive for excellence in all that I do, and to inspire and empower future generations of dancers,” and noted that her mother had made her promise two things: to teach, and, when she made it up to that podium, to speak Spanish—which Torres did.

Antoine Hunter PurpleFireCrow performed his Beat of Earth alongside members of his Urban Jazz Dance Company, standing downstage to sign Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song” while five dancers embodied the epic, emotional track. President and CEO emerita of the International Association of Blacks in Dance Denise Saunders Thompson, presenting Hunter his award in a poetic, deeply felt speech, said, “Dance runs deep in his body. Dance has served him well. It has been a vehicle that has opened doors, broken down barriers—probably put some into place as well—and provided a language to communicate beyond the spoken word. His choreography transcends his persona: Black, Indigenous Blackfoot and Cherokee, Deaf, disabled, two-spirited. Antoine Hunter listens with his body and his heart. Antoine frees us with his rhythm, his style, his sensuality, his musicality, his fullest self—that’s his superpower.” Saunders Thompson invited the audience to imagine the life he has led in a hearing world, concluding, “We can learn so much more from Antoine Hunter.”

Hunter’s acceptance speech, interpreted from American Sign Language by Rorri Burton (who shared ASL interpretation duties with Selena Flowers throughout the evening), began with the dance artist thanking Thompson for her support. “You have welcomed me in the Black family. We all need a home. Thank you for being that home.” He reintroduced himself by teaching the audience his sign name before explaining how dance saved his life. “When you can’t express yourself,” he signed, “you can feel like you’re losing your mind. You’re not able to make those connections. When someone is finally able to listen to you, you find a place where you feel at home.” He continued that, “Just because you have the ability to hear, does not mean you know how to listen. You have to learn to listen. It happens with your heart, with your spirit. It happens when you’re understanding where someone is coming from. Open your mind. Open your heart. Open your spirit.” He encouraged everyone watching and listening to know that everyone has a story worth telling, and if you don’t see other people like you out in the world, to create the space you want to see so others can find you and build a home together. “Folks in the Deaf community and in the disabled community bring more power to the dance community as a whole. We don’t want to be a token, we don’t want to be here and gone. We want to build family.”

In honor of Alicia Graf Mack, recent Juilliard graduates Rachel Lockhart and Waverly Fredericks—both from the first class admitted by Graf Mack after she took the helm of the school’s dance division five years ago—performed River, choreographed by Lockhart. Before beginning to list Graf Mack’s many accomplishments, the indomitable Judith Jamison asked wryly, “How many things can you do in the short time you’ve been on this earth? It’s amazing.” The artistic director emerita of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater recalled, laughing, how Graf Mack came to her shortly before she was meant to sign a contract to dance with Ailey and told her that her heart was still with Arthur Mitchell and Dance Theatre of Harlem.

But when she finally joined Ailey, Graf Mack didn’t rest on her laurels, throwing herself into modern dance technique so she could dance everything from Hans van Manen to Rennie Harris. “If any challenge threatens to stop her all-encompassing trajectory,” Jamison said, “she comes in and out of it stronger, daring you to get in the way of her traveling 32 fouettés.” Jamison praised Graf Mack’s grace and grit, and how she embodies caring about dance, its future, and transmitting that it’s about more than just steps. “I wish I could be around for another hundred years and see what else you’ll do.”

Graf Mack thanked “the queen diva” Jamison for being her north star and for welcoming her into Ailey, which “reminded me daily that we represent something larger than ourselves.” She remembered telling her parents, “I want to dance professionally so badly that if Arthur Mitchell wants me to be a tree in the background for the next 10 years, I am going to be the best dang tree he has ever seen.” She also recounted being a painfully shy child, “but I knew even then I had a superpower. I could move people, touch them, transform their hearts, engage their imagination, and transform a moment with movement.” She recalled the teachers and mentors who said “yes” to her, and her thought that she would never teach herself because she knew the dedication it takes to raise a dancer. “I thought performing was my purpose, my calling. Nope,” she giggled. “Now I know being a teacher or a mentor behind a young person’s inspired performance, or just seeing an ounce of your spirit living in them, is the most enduring affirmation of purpose. I now have the opportunity to pass all of the yeses I received on to the next generation.”

Frances Lorraine Samson brought a breath of fresh air into the theater with a deceptive sense of ease in a windswept, joyful performance of the “Primavera” section of José Limón’s 1971 Dances for Isadora.

Martha Graham Dance Company artistic director Janet Eilber laughed, “So many hard acts to follow tonight,” as she took to the microphone. “But when I was asked to introduce Norton Owen, I said yes, that’s so easy, everyone knows and loves Norton, with his warm, welcoming manner, his humor, his curiosity, and how you always leave a conversation with him feeling smarter than when you started.” She spoke warmly of his long history with Jacob’s Pillow and how his interest in and devotion to the site’s archives and history led him, at a moment when American dance was finally beginning to acknowledge its own past, to define a job that didn’t exist at the time, eventually becoming the organization’s director of preservation. The Pillow’s Norton Owen Reading Room, she said, “is where they house their best interactive offering: Norton. He’s always there, ready to welcome you and to help you dive into the latest archival discovery. His work has been so inspired, and so welcoming, that he has helped the entire field celebrate and embrace its past.”

Owen shared that the Dance Magazine Awards had been on his radar since he began reading the magazine as a teenager in Alabama, and that he first attended them with his friend Bessie Schoenberg to see Hanya Holm receive her 1990 award. As he told it, Holm was at the end of the evening, which stretched quite late, and when the 97-year-old finally had her turn at the podium, he recalled, “Perhaps mindful of how long the evening was running, she got up from her seat onstage, approached the microphone with her little old lady steps, and said, ‘Thank you.’ And went back and sat down.” Owen shared how, with his mother, he got to see Natalia Markarova and Margot Fonteyn perform in Alabama, and also how Dance Magazine “captured my imagination and gave me a window on a world that existed beyond my life in Birmingham.” Jacob’s Pillow, a “dance utopia,” is every bit as magical to him today as it was when he first arrived there so many years ago. “To end on a note of gratitude,” he concluded, “as Hanya Holm said: Thank you.”

The last performance of the evening featured bassist Eduardo Bello, Music From the Sole’s Leonardo Sandoval, and 13-year-old 92NY School of Dance student Mikaylah Arce in a mesmerizing, musical melding of contemporary and tap dance. At its conclusion, Frederic Seegal presented the final award of the evening: the Chairman’s Award, which was given to dance educator, dance education advocate, and philanthropist Jody Gottfried Arnhold. “Without Jody,” he said succinctly, “I don’t think there would be dance education the way it is in New York. She is the mentors’ mentor.”

Arnhold, who received a standing ovation when she stepped onstage, said being honored in such company was “humbling. As a young dancer, waiting for the monthly delivery of my Dance Magazine was everything. I never dreamed I would one day stand here. Life is full of surprises.” She accepted the award on behalf of the 500 certified dance teachers currently teaching in New York City public schools, teaching artists, and all dance artists who find themselves working with young people. “I hear this all the time: Where is the next Alvin Ailey? Martha Graham? Paul Taylor? José Limón? I know where they are. They’re in our preK-12 public schools right now, and they deserve a dance teacher.” Sharing her journey to advocating for dance for every child in every school, she left the audience with a plea to remember one key, oft-repeated phrase: “There is no dance without dance education.”

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Syvilla Fort

Later, her name would be associated with the brightest stars of Hollywood, Broadway, and concert dance—Marlon Brando, James Dean, Jane Fonda, Eartha Kitt, Chita Rivera, Geoffrey Holder, Alvin Ailey, Chuck Davis, Yvonne Rainer. Yes, dance educator Syvilla Fort taught them all and more. But her influential teaching career started more modestly while she was still a youth in her native Seattle.

Born in 1917, Fort learned early, as a Black girl eager for ballet, that race and class could be impediments to professional training and a career pathway. Local dance schools refused to admit her, and this bitter lesson inspired her to open her own door to marginalized students in her community. She started to teach at age 9, and her commitment to education and access held steady through a lifetime of accomplishments.

Offered a full scholarship to Seattle’s Cornish School of Allied Arts (now Cornish College of the Arts), Fort became its first Black student and created work in collaboration with avant-garde composer John Cage. She also danced for several years in the legendary company of Katherine Dunham, absorbing the breadth of Dunham’s knowledge of African and Afro-Atlantic culture and movement. After a knee injury cut her performing career short, she served as chief administrator and instructor in the Katherine Dunham School of Dance, later opening her own school and teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University.

When we note the lasting contributions of Black artists to ballet and postmodern dance, fields previously dominated by white bodies, we must also remember Syvilla Fort’s pioneering efforts and her outspoken advocacy for inclusion and social justice in dance.

Gregory Hines

A consummate artist and much-loved entertainer, Gregory Hines would have turned 77 this year had he survived the cancer that took him in August 2003.

When artists master more than one skill, they are often called “double threats,” even “triple threats.” With Hines, you could lose count. Since toddlerhood, Hines steadily built his career in the arts, growing to light up the worlds of stage, film, and television as dancer, choreographer, actor, singer, musician, director, and teacher. His star blazed as the near-forgotten art of tap enjoyed its first major revival and newfound popularity. With his creative skill, irrepressible zest, and charisma, Hines served as a bridge between two great eras of tap dance—old-school veterans like Charles “Honi” Coles, Bunny Briggs, and Sandman Sims, and crusading innovators like Savion Glover and Jane Goldberg, followed by today’s superstars, like Ayodele Casel and Dormeshia. Hines was there to catch the torch and pass it on just as he said his friend, the multitalented and world-renowned Sammy Davis Jr., had passed it along to him.

Fans of tap thank Hines also for his advocacy in lobbying the U.S. Congress to create the annual National Tap Dance Day (May 25), which launched in 1989 and has since gone international. And, like one of many recent honors awarded to Ms. Casel, in 2019, Hines received the distinction of becoming the face of a United States Postal Service Forever Stamp.

An ambassador of tap, Hines continues to be cited, year after year, as a mentor, friend, and inspiration to many. By giving tap an elevated place among his many talents, Hines assured not only that historic and contemporary Black rhythm tap would get more exposure but that dance, overall, would reach more hearts across the U.S. and beyond.

Pearl Primus

A native of Trinidad, Pearl Primus built her long, distinguished career in choreography and education on immersive research into African and African-diasporic cultures. As she wrote in a 1979 statement, dance became her vehicle and language; her freedom and her world; her medicine and strength; her scream and fist; her teacher.

In 1941, discouraged by racism in academia, Primus shifted from biology/premed studies and took up with the artist-activists of New York City’s New Dance Group, becoming its first Black student. The influence of Sierra Leone–born musician and dance artist Asadata Dafora helped this young scholarship recipient define her life’s work. Primus’ later anthropology field studies, choreography, and innovative staging of traditional dances would have significant impact on the world’s appreciation for the dances of Africa and the Caribbean and the experiences of Black people in the American South. Her work reached historic and illustrious concert stages—from her 1943 debut at 92nd Street Y to Carnegie Hall, Broadway, Jacob’s Pillow, and many international venues. Primus earned a doctorate in anthropology from New York University in 1978 and was awarded the National Medal of the Arts in 1991.

An electrifying performer, Primus was also notable for thrilling stagecraft. Rather than approach source cultures and communities in exploitive, extractive ways to merely entertain, Primus opened an intellectual and emotional gateway for audiences, rooting her work in authentic contexts, technical excellence, and political meaning.

Primus was not content to dream up dances in her studio. She sought to move hearts towards compassion and social justice. To develop Hard Time Blues (1945), for example, she labored alongside Southern sharecroppers, gaining direct understanding of their struggles. Some of her most notable works deal forthrightly with racist violence—lynchings (Strange Fruit, 1943) and the bombing of a Black church in Birmingham, Alabama (Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore, 1979). Her profound influence continues in the progressive, community-focused aims and methods of dancemakers today, such as Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Zollar’s Urban Bush Women lineage of artists, and Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr. and Ricarrdo Valentine of Brother(hood) Dance!

Helen Tamiris

Helen Tamiris lived an exemplary New York story. Daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side—different sources give her birth year as 1902, 1903, or 1905—Helen Becker renamed herself Tamiris, aligning with the ancient warrior queen of a nomadic Persian people.

A brief, unhappy stint in the corps de ballet of the Metropolitan Opera’s ballet troupe followed early training in Isadora Duncan–inspired modern dance at the historic Henry Street Settlement Playhouse. In the 1930s, she discovered her own voice as a choreographer and educator, eventually partnering with Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman to found and direct Dance Repertory Theatre, an early example of an artist cooperative in dance. She also launched the School of American Dance and her own first ensemble.

During the Great Depression, concerned about widespread unemployment in her field, Tamiris successfully lobbied the Works Progress Administration, part of FDR’s New Deal initiative, to build an employment program for dance artists, comparable to what the WPA offered the theater industry. The Dance Project ran for four years, with Tamiris as its chief dancemaker. In 1939, the WPA fell victim to growing political polarization, similar to what we face today, as fiscal and social conservatives cut further Congressional funding. In the 1940s, Tamiris moved on to Broadway, finding success making dance for musicals like Annie Get Your Gun and Touch and Go, for which she won a Tony.

Her courage in addressing poverty, discrimination, antisemitism, and war in her works and to train and employ Black dancers likely led her to be less celebrated than other giants of modern dance of her time. But we can consider Helen Tamiris a courageous progenitor of today’s dance artists grappling with similar issues of representation, culture, and conscience.

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The same energy that crackles in Maria Torres’ choreography is present whether she is in the classroom, the director’s chair, or gazing toward future projects. Alongside that energy is a technical precision and fierceness that mark her work as grounded, clear-eyed, and vital. And she’s excited to keep sharing those gifts. “I’ve always been everybody else’s secret weapon,” she says. “I’m gonna be my own secret weapon now.”

Torres’ career spans a wide range of media, though all her projects are united by an undercurrent of joy. Following appearances in the 1998 film Dance with Me and the 1999 Broadway musical Swing!, she emerged as an in-demand creative voice, choreographing the off-Broadway production Four Guys Named Jose… (2000) and contributing to the choreography for films like Enchanted (2007) and Idlewild (2006) and Broadway’s On Your Feet! (2015). Torres gained wider recognition working on “So You Think You Can Dance” and with Latin music icons Don Omar and Enrique Iglesias.

Torres has been instrumental in shaping more than one globally practiced dance technique. Drawing on her Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban roots, she pioneered Latin jazz, fusing Latin rhythmic movement with jazz fundamentals; the style is now taught around the world. She was also an important voice in the spread of Latin hustle, and is a frequent advocate for the genre. Recently through a residency with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, she has been documenting her experiences with the hustle in its heyday as a club dance and throughout its subsequent transformations.

Beyond her impressive array of credits, Torres has deeply influenced a rising generation. She has inspired countless students with her classes and workshops. She has stepped out of the choreographer’s chair to direct and co-conceive projects centering Latine voices. Her Maria Torres Emerging Artists Foundation has helped train and create space for up-and-coming artists, especially those who have too often been excluded.

“As an educator, a producer, a choreographer, a director, somebody who’s an advocate for our people and the performing arts in general, for me, it’s been a lifelong journey of always giving back, never forgetting where I’m coming from,” Torres says. “I’m only going to be doing more now that I have the opportunity to spread joy, and also spread knowledge.”

The post Celebrating Dance Magazine Award Honoree Maria Torres appeared first on Dance Magazine.

For Norton Owen, the director of preservation at Jacob’s Pillow, archives activate a place where the past is in dialogue with the present. Owen’s efforts have helped dance feel like a bigger place, and dance history like an evolving story that unites us all. “We are connected to what happened before, especially at the Pillow, where we are soaking in our history,” Owen says.

Whether someone is wandering into the Jacob’s Pillow archives out of curiosity or researching an upcoming book, Owen and his staff offer a warm welcome. He regularly holds court in the newly expanded space that bears his name, The Norton Owen Reading Room, named in honor of his 40th anniversary. Owen particularly enjoys the thrill of a first-time visitor. “When I hear people say, ‘It feels so welcoming here,’ it’s music to my ears,” he says.

Owen himself wandered into the Pillow after college in 1976. During his first decade at the organization, he worked in almost every department, from the box office to the press team. In 1990, then-director Sam Miller named him director of preservation, where he now oversees the scholar-in-residence program, PillowTalks, pre- and postshow talks, and exhibitions. Carrying on Pillow founder Ted Shawn’s drive to document, Owen has prioritized video and continually upgraded the quality of the organization’s performance recordings, from three-camera shoots to live mixing. “It’s about paying attention to what people want and need, and capturing the audience experience,” says Owen.

Creating Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive, the Pillow’s acclaimed digital archive, is his ongoing passion project. It started with free-standing kiosks at key locations on campus, where viewers could access 50 videos via a touch screen. Today,­ the digital archive includes hundreds of videos, essays, and playlists organized by theme, as well as the “PillowVoices” podcast series. “It’s limitless,” says Owen, “and we aim for that same welcoming spirit.”

Owen’s dance life has extended beyond Jacob’s Pillow. His longtime association with the Limón company includes directing the Limón Institute for 14 years. He has served as an exhibition curator for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Harvard Theatre Collection, and the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, New York. And his tireless work has not gone unnoticed: He has been honored by Dance/USA, the Martha Hill Dance Fund, Dance Films Association, the José Limón Dance Foundation, and the Theatre Library Association. “I’m a citizen of the dance world,” he says.

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A review of Alicia Graf Mack’s first five years at the helm of The Juilliard School’s dance division—she is its youngest and first African American head—reveals that her 2018 appointment was an undeniably historic event. It has signaled a paradigm shift both in terms of race and representation and the school’s pedagogical philosophy. “On a macro level, what she is doing is influencing the very future of dance,” says Juilliard president Damian Woetzel.

“I’m very lucky to have come into the school at a time when my personal values align with the institutional values,” Graf Mack says. Those core values include diversity, equity, and inclusion. But Graf Mack has added “belonging” to that list. “While an institution can think about diversity, equity, and inclusion, only the individual can tell you if they feel like they belong,” she says. “Even students who aren’t part of an underrepresented group need to have a sense of belonging.”

That sentiment is rooted in Graf Mack’s experience taking company class with Arthur Mitchell during her first year as a member of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, one of the two companies, along with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, where she spent most of her time as a critically acclaimed professional dancer. “It’s a different type of feeling, stepping into a room where you don’t feel you have to fight against something or prove yourself because you look different,” she says. “That general sense of belonging helped me to grow and be my authentic self.

Transformation is at the center of Graf Mack’s vision for Juilliard. Creating an institution that is “a reflection of the world we want to see,” she says, requires engaging with a broader and more diverse community. It also means making space for dancers who identify as nonbinary in bathrooms, dressing rooms, and beyond.

And there’s been a change in that aesthetic hierarchy called “the canon.” Choreographers once ignored or marginalized are being elevated and celebrated. Dance styles such as hip hop and West African dance, once electives, are now part of the core curriculum. Acknowledging the changing nature of the field, and the fact that a dancer’s professional life is often all too short, the department has integrated the majority of its required classes into the first three years of study, so the fourth year can be “an on-ramp into the field,” Graf Mack says. Students in the class of 2024 have been able to accept jobs with companies including Ailey, Cincinnati Ballet, and Batsheva Ensemble while remaining fully enrolled at Juilliard and able to graduate on time.

In the final analysis, Graf Mack says simply, “You’re going to see the excellence and the magic of it all.” The future of the dance world is in her hands, and she carries the weight of that responsibility with amazing grace.

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“Dance saved my life,” says Antoine Hunter PurpleFireCrow. Growing up in Oakland as a deeply creative Black, Indigenous, DeafDisabled person, he experienced artistic frustration and social isolation. Some parents wouldn’t let their kids play with him, while Deaf kids thought he was “too weird,” Hunter recalls.­ “I was all alone. I was in a dark place.” Then, in his teens, Hunter’s mother took him to see Oakland Ballet’s Nutcracker. “I realized that dance and body movement has the ability to tell a story. I can tell a story,” he said in a 2018 TEDx talk.

At first, dance didn’t seem more promising than other avenues he’d tried. In his first class at Oakland’s Skyline High School, none of the students wanted to be his partner. But with the teacher’s encouragement, he performed a solo about his longing for connection, set to Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” When he was done, the class burst into applause.­ In that moment, Hunter found a voice and a calling to elevate Deaf culture, challenge stereotypes, dismantle barriers, and empower marginalized people to claim dance for themselves.

In his choreography, Hunter melds ballet, modern, jazz, and African forms with ASL to tackle topics from ableism and racism to incarceration. “The first time I took his class was the first time I had a Deaf dance teacher,” says Zahna Simon, who joined Hunter’s award-winning Urban Jazz Dance Company in 2014 and is also its assistant director. “I felt my two worlds coming together, and it felt like home.” Hunter’s far-reaching work spans dance classes, lectures, grant-writing support, volunteering in schools, the online talk-show “#DeafWoke,” and leadership roles in organizations like the California Association for the Deaf and Bay Area Black Deaf Advocates, and much more. In 2013 he founded the Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival, which brings Deaf artists to the area for workshops, panels, museum tours, mentorship, and performances enhanced by: interpretations in multiple languages, including American Sign Language and international sign language; audio descriptions for Blind and Low-Vision audiences; and technology, such as Deaf lead devices, that allows Deaf and DeafBlind attendees to feel the music.

One of Hunter’s most compelling performances was his depiction of an incarcerated Black man in Dying While Black and Brown with San Francisco’s Zaccho Dance Theatre. “Antoine brought a humanity to the role that disarmed the audience,” says Zaccho­ artistic director Joanna Haigood. “He demonstrates that Deafness is not a lack of something, but a way of experiencing the world.” Hunter’s great power is channeling that lived experience into art. “Deaf people remain invisible and unheard,” he says. “Let’s listen with our heart. The bottom line is: Save lives with art.”

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When Bijayini Satpathy dances, the air around her changes. It is something about the intensity of her focus. Everything beyond the world she creates onstage seems to dissolve.

Her specialty is the Indian classical dance form Odissi, which has roots in the centuries-old temple art of the eastern state of Odisha and in ancient Sanskrit writings, but was adapted for a new audience in the early 20th century. Satpathy grew up in Odisha and began training at a young age. Later she joined the company and school Nrityagram, near Bangalore, where she grew up as an artist, often performing breathtaking duets alongside the choreographer Surupa Sen.

As an independent solo artist since 2019, she has been expanding and transforming this ancient art form in ever bolder ways, using music from different traditions, responding to contemporary art, and playing with abstraction. With this expansion of mind has come an expanded movement palette. As she told Dance Magazine in 2021, “I’ve been so surprised to discover that there are so many more ways of speaking through Odissi.”

None of this would be possible without her extraordinary technical mastery, a fluidity and power that binds all of her movements into a seamless stream. This coordination stems in part from an extremely rigorous conditioning program she
has developed for herself and her students. Every morning before beginning her rehearsal day, along with the basic Odissi movements, she does a series of exercises, drawing from yoga, Pilates, and the Natya Shastra, a 2,000-year-old Sanskrit primer of the arts.

“Until recently there was no attention given to conditioning in Indian dance,” says Satpathy. “And I saw so many injuries, bad knees, bad hips, bad backs.” She has set out to change that. In her 25 years at Nrityagram, she combined these training practices, along with an expanded Odissi training pedagogy and method of practice, into a codified system, which she taught at the school. Now, as a solo practitioner and teacher, she shares this system with dancers around the world, at workshops and residencies, as well as with her own private students, whom she works with at her home studio near Bangalore and online.

Teaching and sharing her knowledge about the body and its expressive potential has become an integral part of her contribution to the art of Odissi and to Indian dance in general. “A lot of my inquiries get resolved and fall into place when I teach,” she said recently. “I have found and learned more about Odissi from teaching. It is like taking someone to a secret vista point.”

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The awards honor the artistry, integrity, and resilience that dance artists have demonstrated over the course of their careers. They feature several changes for 2023, including the addition of an annual theme, the establishment of criteria for the selection committee, and the inclusion of posthumous honors to recognize some of the many artists active since 1954 who were not given awards during their lifetimes.

A ceremony to recognize the 2023 honorees will be held in New York City at Buttenwieser Hall at The Arnhold Center, 92NY, on Monday, December 4 at 7 pm Eastern, with performances and presentations for each recipient. For ticket information, visit dancemediafoundation.org.

Here are the artists we’re celebrating at this year’s awards, which have a theme of education.

Antoine Hunter

Oakland native Antoine Hunter aka Purple Fire Crow is an award-winning internationally known Black, Indigenous, Deaf, and Disabled choreographer, dancer, actor, instructor, speaker, producer and Deaf advocate. This Two-Spirit creates opportunities for Disabled, Deaf, and hearing artists, produces Deaf-friendly events, and founded the Urban Jazz Dance Company in 2007 and Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival in 2013. Awards include the 2022 Disability Futures Fellowship, 2021 Dance Teacher Award, 2019 National Dance/USA fellowship, 2018 inaugural Jeanette Lomujo Bremond Humanity Arts Award, and 2017 Isadora Duncan (Izzie) for Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival. In 2020, Hunter founded #DeafWoke, an online talk show that amplifies BIPOC Deaf and Disabled stories as a force for cultural change.

Alicia Graf Mack

Alicia Graf Mack was named dean and director of dance at The Juilliard School in 2018. A former dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Dance Theatre of Harlem, and Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Graf Mack also danced with Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, Beyoncé, John Legend, Andre 3000, Alicia Keys, and Jon Batiste. Graf Mack graduated magna cum laude with honors from Columbia University and holds an MA in nonprofit management from Washington University in St. Louis. She has been an assistant professor at Webster University and adjunct faculty at the University of Houston and Washington University in St. Louis. She is the co-founder of D(n)A Arts Collective, and host and co-producer of the podcast Moving Moments.

Norton Owen

Norton Owen is a curator, writer, and archivist with more than 50 years of professional experience in dance. Since 1976, he has been associated with Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, where as director of preservation he oversees projects involving documentation, exhibitions, audience engagement, and archival issues, as well as extensive online archives, podcasts, and more. In 2000, Dance/USA selected him for its Ernie Award, honoring “unsung heroes who have led exemplary lives in dance,” and he has also received awards from the Martha Hill Dance Fund, Dance Films Association, the José Limón Dance Foundation, and the Theatre Library Association.

Bijayini Satpathy

Considered a foremost master of Odissi, Bijayini Satpathy has four decades of intensive practice as a performer, teacher, and research scholar. Her journey in choreography began four years ago with ABHIPSAA—A Seeking, commissioned by Duke Performances, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and NEFA’s National Dance Project. She was the artist in residence with Live Arts at the Metropolitan Museum from 2021 to 2022. Satpathy is currently a resident fellow at NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts and was a New York Dance & Performance Award (“Bessie”) Honoree in 2020. Satpathy’s Odissi practice began in her motherland, Orissa, India, and flourished for a quarter of a century at Nrityagram until 2018.

Maria Torres

Maria Torres has sculpted a diverse career spanning direction, choreography, education, and production. Torres pioneered the dance technique Latin jazz, now taught worldwide. She has worked extensively on Broadway (Swing, On Your Feet!, Summer: The Donna Summer Musical), in film (Dance with Me, Enchanted), and on television (“So You Think You Can Dance”). Torres has participated in the Dance Oral History Project at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and is now helping document the style of social dance she grew up with, the Hustle. She is a trustee of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation and on the board of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society and the League of Professional Theatre Women.

Chairman’s Award: Jody Gottfried Arnhold

A Chairman’s Award, chosen by Dance Magazine Awards Chairman Frederic M. Seegal to honor distinctive leaders behind the scenes, will go to Jody Gottfried Arnhold, MA, CMA. A luminary in dance education and an advocate for dance, she founded the Dance Education Laboratory (DEL) at 92NY in 1995 in response to the need for a practical and focused dance pedagogy program. She continues these efforts as executive producer of the NY Emmy nominated documentary, PS DANCE!: Dance Education in Public Schools, to raise awareness and advocate for her mission, Dance for Every Child.

Harkness Promise Awards: Baye & Asa and Omar Román De Jesús

Amadi “Baye” Washington and Sam “Asa” Pratt, of Baye & Asa, and Omar Román De Jesús are the recipients of the two Harkness Promise Awards, which offer a grant and rehearsal space for innovative young choreographers. These awards, conferred in partnership with the Harkness Foundation for Dance, are funded by net proceeds from the Dance Magazine Awards ceremony.

Posthumous Awards

Posthumous Dance Magazine Awards will be given for the first time ever in 2023, paying tribute to dancer, choreographer, and teacher Syvilla Fort; dancer, choreographer, actor, musician, and teacher Gregory Hines; dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, and educator Pearl Primus; and choreographer, dancer, and teacher Helen Tamiris.

Stay tuned for Dance Magazine‘s December issue to learn more about each of these artists and how they have shaped the dance field.

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This year’s event was held at Chelsea Factory, where the first choreographic offering of the evening—Andrea Miller’s liquid, interconnected Pearls, performed by Harrison Ball and Patricia Delgado—was created. It was a particularly fitting tribute to Chairman’s Award recipient Jim Herbert, who not only founded Chelsea Factory but also, as Joyce Theater executive director Linda Shelton noted in her presentation, had recommended the song (“Pearls” by Sade) to Miller, one of the many dance artists he has supported and championed through his role as founder and executive chairman of First Republic Bank. “I asked, did she have a budget?” Herbert joked about meeting Miller for the first time 15 years ago, shortly after she founded Gallim. “She pulled out two little receipts. It worked out well.” In his speech, Herbert reminisced about not knowing what ballet was until 1966, when one of his colleagues invited him to attend a performance: “I fell in love that night,” he said, and his support for New York City’s varied dance scene has been unwavering since.

The theme of supporting nascent choreographic talent carried over into the presentation of this year’s Harkness Promise Awards, which grant two choreographers in their first decade of work $5,000 unrestricted grants and 40 hours of rehearsal space without expectation of a final product, funded by the net proceeds from the Dance Magazine Awards. Raja Feather Kelly, one of the inaugural recipients back in 2018, introduced Harkness Foundation for Dance executive director Joan Finkelstein, quipping, “You do have incredible taste.” Of the 2022 recipients, Kayla Farrish and Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Kelly said, “I cannot wait to be in community with you and see what you do.” Finkelstein also reflected on the last five years of Promise Award recipients: “All of them are continuing to make stunning work that opens up our field to new modes of expression.” She presented Farrish and Mercer with their awards after a video showcasing excerpts of their choreographic work. “I want to see what’s possible,” Farrish said in voiceover—a sentiment that felt ripe with (yes) promise.

A filmed interview with Brenda Dixon-Gottschild (courtesy of PBS WHYY), interspersed with performance footage, showed the dance artist and scholar in every decade from her 20s to her 70s. “Here,” she concluded proudly after the video, “you see Brenda-Dixon Gottschild as an 80-year-old.” But first, Rennie Harris paid tribute to his “dance mother,” who he first met as a teenager. “There was something about the way you spoke that made me pay attention more than I would have to any other adult,” he said. “You inspired me to think critically about street dance—Black dance. Hers is not only the voice of her generation and my generation, but of generations to come. To quote Brenda, ‘I aim to perform corrective surgery on the historical record.’ Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, I am here to tell you your corrective surgery was successful.”

Harris proceeded to surprise the audience by dancing a brief solo with all his signature precision, cleverness and intention to a song he played from his phone—bringing down the house as he danced onstage for the first time in five years. In lieu of a more traditional acceptance speech, Dixon-Gottschild movingly performed a poem by Tracy K. Smith, “We Feel Now A Largeness Coming On,” with verve and gesture that was instinctively echoed by Harris (“my wonderful aesthetic son,” Dixon-Gottschild called him) as he stood listening beside her.

In paying tribute to ballet star Herman Cornejo, outgoing American Ballet Theatre artistic director Kevin McKenzie noted that one of the pleasures of directing the company has been getting to “witness great dancers before, during and after they discover what great dancing actually is,” as was the case with Cornejo, who proves that consistency is the secret to longevity. “If he was ever afraid of anything, I never knew it,” McKenzie said. “He would in essence walk out onto the edge of a cliff, hang his toes over and revel in the feel of the wind in his face. That’s what it felt like to watch him in his full glory. Now, to see him revisit roles 20 years later, it’s astonishing that he delivers them with the same clarity of his youth.”

While Cornejo was unable to attend the ceremony, he delivered his acceptance speech in a pre-recorded video. “I’m not retiring anytime soon,” he reassured the audience with a smile, drawing laughter with the story of how he got his first contract with ABT: He was hired as an apprentice and was soon after cast in a soloist role in La Bayadère during the company’s tour to Japan; on the day of the performance, already in full makeup, he was informed by a union representative that “as an apprentice, I couldn’t do a principal role. So they brought a corps contract backstage for me to sign. So I did.” He concluded, “Nothing is impossible. Stay positive. Keep doing what you love to do.”

Kyle Gerry and Caitlin Scranton performed Lucinda Childs’ spare, luminous Étude 18, a work set to music by Philip Glass that just premiered in September—and which stood in stark contrast to Carnation, a solo of Childs’ from her Judson Dance Theater days, which Yvonne Rainer described in her presentation.

“This dance, I would say, is very exceptional in that it is not characteristic of anything she’s done since then,” Rainer said. She described Childs sitting at a table with one leg encased in a garbage bag and proceeding to put “a lettuce strainer upside down on her head, and already there’s an incredible drama and incongruity there because there is this utterly beautiful woman who is about to do some very ridiculous things.” Rainer moved to and from the microphone to gesture and mark space as she continued to describe Childs using hair curlers and kitchen sponges to create a particular image, dumping the materials into the garbage bag, and doing a handstand to cause all of the objects to come tumbling out. “This dance blew me and others who saw it away, and she never did anything like it again,” Rainer concluded before welcoming Childs to the stage to receive the “heavy object” that was her Dance Magazine Award.

Childs, reflecting on meeting Rainer and following her to Judson Dance Theater, said, “I thought it was so fantastic, but I thought it was especially fantastic to be invited by Yvonne. I think that the most important thing, then and now, has been the whole spirit of collaboration, that we work together, that we shared ideas.” After thanking her collaborators, presenters, supporters and dancers from over the years, she concluded, “Everything that makes this art form has to happen in the way it’s supposed to happen—in the way we learned at Judson: What you do with what you’re doing is just as is important as what you’re doing. So what we did with what we do, is what we did.”

Dianne McIntyre’s tribute began with a performance of an excerpt from her Love Poems to God, a soulful and surprising duet for dancer Demetia Hopkins and singer Tina Fabrique, to poetry and music by Hannibal Lokumbe. The interconnectedness of the movement and music made the feedback Jawole Willa Jo Zollar recalled receiving from McIntyre as a young choreographer all the more vivid: “She said, You’re dancing to the music, now you gotta get inside the music,” Zollar recounted. “From there I knew I was gonna follow this woman.” She described the space McIntyre created for her Sounds in Motion company in Harlem as a place that “profoundly centered the community of Harlem and Black folks from all over,” which in the ’70s and ’80s was, “a free space for us Black folk where we could create without being concerned about the white gaze. All of these people whose names I had read about, or music I had listened to, were all there in the studio and passing through.” But McIntyre had done even more, and continues to do so; Zollar shared how McIntyre had recently shown a work in progress that Zollar’s students at Florida State University talked about through the end of the semester. “She continues to be an artist that is pushing, that is exploring, that is questioning, that is supporting and nurturing new generations of artists all across this country.”

“My talk is mostly thank yous,” McIntyre admitted as she took the stage. Amidst her family (“My parents just said, ‘Go ahead, you wanna dance? Well…I don’t know…’ My mother said that, but my father said, ‘Yes! Whatever you want to do!’ “), mentors, collaborators and supporters, she made a particular point of saluting the dance writers who “didn’t put us in a box,” (among them Jennifer Dunning, Deborah Jowitt, Julinda Lewis, Sarah Kaufman and Wendy Perron) and her dance ancestors, particularly those who “did not have the fortune that I am having this evening: H.T. Chen, Eleo Pomare, Rod Rodgers, Viola Farber, Gregory Hines, Geoffrey Holder, Helen Tamiris, Jeff Duncan, Talley Beatty, Louis Johnson, Mary Hinkson, Baba Olatunji, Blondell Cummings, Pearl Primus, Charles Moore, Joan Miller, Billy Wilson, Louise Roberts, Janet Collins, Syvilla Fort…to name a few.” She concluded, “Now, I’ll soar even higher.”

While Harrison Ball and Jonathan Fahoury performed a silken excerpt from Kyle Abraham’s Love Letter (on shuffle), the choreographer’s most recent entry in New York City Ballet’s repertory, presenter Charmaine Warren took us all the way back to her first encounter with Abraham: New York Theatre Workshop, 2006, in his solo Inventing Pookie Jenkins. Warren helped make introductions to Brad Learmonth and Ellen Dennis, which led Abraham to Harlem Stage’s E-Moves and the inaugural Fall For Dance festival, respectively; both, in messages that Warren shared on their behalf, were united in praising not only Abraham’s abilities as a performer and dancemaker, but also (and primarily) his humility and warmth. “Kyle will make time for you,” Warren said. “I promise you that.”

Those qualities were at the forefront as Abraham accepted his award, giving a speech that was primarily concerned with giving thanks: to the childhood friend who got him into the performing arts, to his teachers—in particular those “who when I couldn’t afford class, couldn’t afford to eat, couldn’t afford even transportation to get to class, who let me take their classes for free”—to the companies who have commissioned him or let him restage his works and to his A.I.M family, who he invited onto the stage, as “This is not an award that I could say that I should be receiving single-handedly.”

“I moved to New York summer of 1996,” Abraham reflected, “around the time that Ulysses Dove passed away. As someone who likes making work in both the ballet and contemporary worlds, and comes from a social dance background, I always wished that I could have a conversation with him. I still wish that to this day. I still wish I could have learned from him as I’ve tried to learn from his videos. I always wish I could say thank you to him.

“We’ve lost so many artists over the years. I just want to make sure I can continue to acknowledge them and say thank you for the brilliance that you’ve created and shared with our entire world, and for inspiring me. I want to thank all the recipients tonight for all the brilliance and inspiration you’ve shared with all of us over the years.”

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Kyle Abraham

It’s hard to throw around a phrase like “voice of a generation” without feeling hyperbolic. Yet it comes to mind when thinking about Kyle Abraham. No matter whether he’s tackling old-fashioned topics like love or bringing a contemporary take to issues like identity and community, this 45-year-old choreographer captures something exceptionally current in his work. Moments of all-out hustle might dissolve into soft introspection or a sexy, badass strut as he seamlessly sews together movement from the studio and the street, confirming the legitimacy of artistry from both sources. What might stand out most is how poignantly he uses the body to portray vulnerability—the vulnerability of forced machismo,­ of being Black in America, of life today. 

Abraham first became a talk-about with Inventing Pookie Jenkins, a hip-hop–inflected solo he performed decked out in a romantic tutu at New York City Center’s 2007 Fall for Dance festival. Once he formed his own company, now called A.I.M by Kyle Abraham (an abbreviation of the former name, Abraham.In.Motion), he made a splash with 2010’s Bessie Award–winning The Radio Show, looking at the loss of communication and his father’s Alzheimer’s through the lens of the closing of Pittsburgh’s only hip-hop radio station. A couple years later, Pavement, inspired by the movie Boyz n the Hood and W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, cemented his reputation as a true original. More awards and raves steadily followed. Commissions from ballet star Wendy Whelan and others led to a series of creations for New York City Ballet, starting with the jaw-dropping The Runaway, bringing Pookie Jenkins’ swagger to Balanchine’s house with hauntingly beautiful solos for principal Taylor Stanley in particular. It’s no surprise that top companies like Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, The Royal Ballet, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and others have all clamored for their own Abraham premieres. 

Meanwhile, he continues to create moving pieces for his company while investing in more than just his personal choreography. Many of the dancers who’ve worked with Abraham at A.I.M are proving to be fresh, nuanced dancemakers on their own—so much so that last summer, a festival at Lincoln Center titled “Reunions” consisted entirely of choreography by talented A.I.M alumni, like Kayla Farrish and Rena Butler. Not just an icon, but an inspiration and mentor, Abraham is paying it forward to fill this generation with several strong voices, and making the dance field richer for it.

—Jennifer Heimlich

Lucinda Childs

The name Lucinda Childs brings to mind elegance, precision and complexity born from simplicity: a crystalline minimalism so focused yet free, it approaches the spiritual. Think of her work, and you might envision the plain yet exalted figures of Dance, her landmark 1979 collaboration with Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt, inexorably gliding and turning across the stage and the scrim in front of it; or the stark celestial beings of her 1983 Available Light, guarding the tiers of Frank Gehry’s towering set with their quietly exacting steps.

From her experiments in the 1960s as a founding member of Judson Dance Theater to her current creations and restagings of past works, Childs has indelibly shaped the course of modern and postmodern dance, her influence continuing to ripple out across genres and generations.

Childs, who grew up in New York City, studied modern dance with Hanya Holm and Helen Tamiris, then at Sarah Lawrence College and the Merce Cunningham Studio. As a Judson renegade, she put everyday objects to absurdist use, perhaps most memorably in her 1964 solo Carnation, in which she wore a colander as a hat, adorned with hair curlers, and fashioned kitchen sponges into a kind of beak. Recalling the work in Patrick Bensard’s 2006 documentary, Lucinda Childs, her fellow Judsonite Yvonne Rainer said, “The power of that solo was that this completely glamorous persona was doing these ludicrous things.”

In her work of the 1970s, documented in the invaluable online resource “A Steady Pulse” (from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage), Childs turned her attention to geometry and repetition, often deploying a spare ballet vocabulary in silence. She reunited with music as the choreographer of the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach, directed by Robert Wilson and composed by Glass, in which she also performed. Of her mathematical sensibility, the dance scholar Sally Banes, in Terpsichore in Sneakers, observed: “Repetition and shifting contexts make a world of detail come alive, as the act of dancing provokes a conscious act of seeing.”

With an avid European following, Childs holds the rank of Commandeur in France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and received the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion award in 2017. Look around, and you’ll see traces of her aesthetic everywhere, from the work of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Sarah Michelson—modern dance titans in their own right—to younger artists just starting out. In recent revivals at the Museum of Modern Art and The Joyce Theater, her older works have kept revealing new layers of brilliance.

—Siobhan Burke

Herman Cornejo

What more is there to say about Herman Cornejo? It seems that every superlative has been used when it comes to this dancer. It is hard to think of another male dancer, or another dancer period, who is so universally lauded and admired. “His jump is like something out of a Warner Bros. cartoon,” Joan Acocella wrote about him in The New Yorker in 2004. “His speed is altogether abnormal….But what is most remarkable about him is clarity.” And it’s all true.

Cornejo has been a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre since 2003. Next year will be his 24th with the company, where he has now danced more or less every leading role in the classical canon. He is also a favorite of choreographers, from Martha Clarke and Twyla Tharp to Alexei Ratmansky, Mark Morris and Wayne McGregor. He is as at ease in fast, teasing roles, like Puck in The Dream, as he is when called upon to suffer, as in Manon; he can do cabrioles with a wink and a smile as Basilio in Don Quixote or be noble and touching as Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake.

It’s easy to forget that Cornejo had to fight for these roles. There was a time when, according­ to ballet’s rather confining ideas about type, he was considered too short to embody them convincingly. Like Baryshnikov before him, he convinced the higher-ups and the audience otherwise. The minute he stepped into the role of Count Albrecht in Giselle, everyone could plainly see he belonged there. Because, in addition to possessing dance chops, Cornejo projects charisma, charm, intensity and intelligence. “I see him as a hero,” Tharp once said of him, “something that’s out of vogue these days.”

Tharp is right. There is something timeless about Cornejo’s approach to dance. Even before he began training in his native Argentina at age 8, his mother would wake him at 4 in the morning so they could drop his sister Erica off in time for her own classes at Teatro Colón. He became a professional dancer at 14. From that very young age, he took his profession, and his gift, very seriously, and worked extremely hard at it. At 16, he won the gold medal at the International Ballet Competition in Moscow—the youngest winner in the contest’s history.

And perhaps because of this discipline and grit, learned at such a young age, his dancing has an honesty and purity of intention that still ring through every step he takes in the studio and on the stage. He’s a prince, through and through.

—Marina Harss

Brenda Dixon-Gottschild

A scholar, performer, choreographer and anti-racist cultural worker, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild­ holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University, is professor emerita at Temple University and is a writer for Dance Magazine, composing features on a range of topics, like “Decolonizing Flamenco Through Exploring Black Influences” and “The Power of Dance as Political Protest.” Throughout her nearly 50-year career as an author and cultural warrior, her writings, lectures, artistic presentations and intellectual charm have reminded us that we too have a responsibility to activate our activism, ebbing and flowing as we embrace Black movement influences. Her critical performance essays and post-performance reflexive dialogues serve as survival tactics with healing functions for readers, existing as glorious disruptors in both academic and concert spaces.

By expanding the discourse on values in dance, two of her seminal texts, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts and The Black Dancing Body: A Geography From Coon to Cool, encourage some readers to embrace parts of themselves they may have been taught to hate. She’s a winner of multiple awards, including the Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research (2008), and awards and fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Her research blossoms from a kind of radical resistance and remembrance, as she archives her explorations with her powerful voice, body and pen. Dixon-Gottschild coined the phrase “choreography for the page,” using her writings and her dances to express and question essential truths. Her choreographic works are often in collaboration with her husband, dancer/choreographer Hellmut Gottschild, with whom she has created and performed Stick it Out (1993), Frogs (1996) and Tongue Smell Color (2000).

A fundamental facet of Dixon-Gottschild’s brilliance is her advocacy. She empowers her audiences to legitimize their ownness…their uniqueness and, for many of us, our Blackness. Dixon-Gottschild’s tactical teachings exist at the intersection of her artistic influence and historical knowledge, thereby offering a rubric for reading, contextualizing, understanding and celebrating dance that is not necessarily Eurocentric.

Engaging with the scholarship of Dixon-Gottschild warrants reflection on larger social constructs of race and gender. Her body of work reminds us that while some of us may be vulnerable to the work that burdens us, the histories our bodies hold can also free us from that burden. Dixon-Gottschild’s work continues to be the beating heart of many emerging Black scholars’ research, as they navigate all spaces, reveling in their Blackness and understanding that their Black feet, Black butts and Black skin are symbols of unapologetic beauty, bliss and brilliance.

—Gregory King

Dianne McIntyre

This year, Dianne McIntyre celebrates the 50th anniversary of Sounds in Motion, the company she founded and directed from 1972 to 1988, and its premiere concert. McIntyre started dancing at age 4 with teacher Elaine Gibbs, and by 7 she was choreographing on neighborhood kids in her first production, presented at a local library in her hometown of Cleveland. At 25, with New York City as her dance home, her company’s debut at the Cubiculo Theatre made it official. For 16 years, McIntyre’s deep understanding that dance and music must coexist was passed on to the gifted dancers and musicians of her company. After closing the company and its school, she began making and performing works as an independent choreographer.

McIntyre’s performances, choreography, collaborations and teachings are insightful, and invariably raise the consciousness about Black people’s stories. Watching her dance and create these stories are lessons in enlightenment. McIntyre’s body is its own instrument, and one can “hear” the sounds as they are realized. She can shepherd musicians to match or follow her arms as they sweep the air, her toes as they test the floor, the swirling, spinning and tilting of her torso and the sprinkling of the imagined through her fluttering fingers. Some memorable solo performances, choreography or collaborations are: If You Don’t Know, as part of “FLY: Five First Ladies of Dance” by 651 ARTS, with McIntyre, Germaine Acogny, Carmen de Lavallade, Bebe Miller and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar; we carry our homes within us which enables us to fly, as part of New York Live Arts’ music series; and myriad choreo-poems­ alongside her longtime friend, the late Ntozake Shange. McIntyre choreographed Change for Dance Theatre of Harlem, Porgy and Bess for the English National Opera, and the films Beloved and Miss Evers’ Boys, to name a few.

There is not a single descriptor that is Dianne McIntyre. But we know that over these 50 years she cultivated the careers of many dancers, including Zollar, Marlies Yearby, Bernadine Jennings and Carole Anne “Aziza” Reid, all of whom were integral parts of Sounds in Motion before assuming leadership roles in dance, social consciousness and service. McIntyre is as effervescent in an impromptu phone call as she is cogent when planning an upcoming event. She has been honored with a Teer Pioneer Award and an American Dance Festival Award; and by Dance/USA, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Harlem Arts Alliance, and the Bessies; and has received an Emmy nomination, and fellowships from John S. Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. It’s a long time coming, but now as a capstone for her 50 years of creating and giving, Dianne McIntyre is rightfully being honored by Dance Magazine.

—Charmaine Warren

The Chairman’s Award: Jim Herbert

A Chairman’s Award, chosen by Dance Media CEO Frederic M. Seegal to honor distinctive movers and shakers behind the scenes, will go to Jim Herbert, the founder and executive chairman of First Republic Bank. A longtime supporter of dance, Herbert is the founder of Chelsea Factory, as well as a board member with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and San Francisco Ballet.

Harkness Promise Awards

Funded by net proceeds from the Dance Magazine Awards ceremony, the Harkness Promise Awards offer a $5,000 grant and 40 hours of rehearsal space for innovative young choreographers. This year’s awardees are Kayla Farrish and Johnnie Cruise Mercer.

Kayla Farrish is a New York City–based dancer, choreographer, director and photographer. “My work questions a range in human and societal experiences,” says Farrish, founder of Kayla Farrish/Decent Structures Arts. “As an African American woman from the South, with no records beyond American soil and inquiring identity, I [create] in order to see myself.” She recently collaborated with Brandon Coleman on the duet Broken Record and with Melanie Charles on Roster, co-directed a film with Charles, choreographed for Saul Williams’ Motherboard Suites, and created the dance theater feature-length film Martyr’s Fiction. Farrish is currently a rehearsal director at Sleep No More in New York City and an adjunct faculty member at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Johnnie Cruise Mercer is a queer, Black choreographer, educator, impresario and social entrepreneur based in New York City. “Led by my curiosity for embodied philosophy, my work takes action as movement responses, practices that support and acknowledge history, memory and space,” says Mercer. He works within the New York Public School system through The Leadership Program, a mentorship-based organization that uses art to cultivate leadership qualities, and is the founding producer and company director of TheRedProject/NYC. “To me, making is about embracing reality, listening, releasing and preparing for a communal, metaphysical, revolution.”

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The Dance Magazine Awards ceremony, including performances and celebratory speeches, will take place in person at Chelsea Factory in New York City on Monday, December 5, 2022, at 7 pm EST, with net proceeds supporting the Harkness Promise Awards. For ticket information, visit dancemediafoundation.org.

We’re thrilled to announce the honorees for the 2022 Dance Magazine Awards:

Kyle Abraham

Choreographer Kyle Abraham—recipient of a 2013 MacArthur fellowship, 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award and 2018 Princess Grace Statue Award, among many other recognitions—makes deeply powerful dance works that often speak to the Black American experience. In addition to creating for his own ensemble, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, he has choreographed for companies around the world, including The Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Lucinda Childs

Postmodern choreographer and dancer Lucinda Childs started her career as a member of the Judson Dance Theater and founded her own company in 1973. Her rich and varied career encompasses concert works such as Available Light and Dance, her seminal 1979 collaboration with Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt; operas including Mozart’s Zaide, Glass’ Akhnaten and John Adams’ Doctor Atomic; and more than 30 works for ballet companies around the world.

Herman Cornejo

An acclaimed principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre since 2003, Herman Cornejo has danced most of the leading roles of the classical canon and created more than a dozen new ballets with the leading choreographers of today. A frequent national and international guest star, Cornejo has also pursued his own artistic endeavors to foster the creation of new works. His accolades include the Gold Medal in the VIII International Moscow Competition, a New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Award for Outstanding Performer in 2013, and the 2014 Prix Benois de la Danse for Best Male Dancer. He has been appointed a Messenger of Peace by the United Nations and was recently recognized as one of America’s Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Brenda Dixon-Gottschild

Esteemed artist-scholar Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, PhD, is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, lecturer, performer and professor emerita of dance studies at Temple University. She is the author of four books centering Black dance artists and forms: Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts; Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era; The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool; and Joan Myers Brown & The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance.

Dianne McIntyre

Choreographer Dianne McIntyre is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Doris Duke Artist awardee and a three-time “Bessie” Award winner whose work is rooted in research and explores the intersection of history, culture, personal narrative and the human experience. Her five-decade career encompasses Broadway, television and film, commissions for Dance Theatre of Harlem and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and projects for her own company, Sounds in Motion, such as the adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. She had a longtime collaboration with the late playwright and poet Ntozake Shange, creator of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. McIntyre choreographed the 1998 film Beloved, based on the novel by Toni Morrison.

Chairman’s Award

Jim Herbert, the founder and executive chairman of First Republic Bank, will be given a Chairman’s Award, chosen by Dance Media CEO Frederic M. Seegal to honor distinctive movers and shakers behind the scenes. 

Harkness Promise Awards

Johnnie Cruise Mercer and Kayla Farrish are the recipients of this year’s Harkness Promise Awards, which offer a $5,000 grant and 40 hours of rehearsal space to innovative choreographers in their first decade of professional work. This award, conferred in partnership with the Harkness Foundation for Dance, is funded by net proceeds from the Dance Magazine Awards ceremony.

The 2022 Dance Magazine Awards Selection Committee

The selection committee for the 2022 Dance Magazine Awards included Dance Magazine editor at large and Dance Magazine Awards chair Wendy Perron, master teacher Sheila Barker, Dance Magazine contributor Joseph Carman, The Dance Edit editor in chief Margaret Fuhrer, Dance Media president Joanna Harp, MoBBallet (Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet) founder Theresa Ruth Howard, incoming American Ballet Theatre artistic director Susan Jaffe, New York City Center vice president for programming Stanford Makishi, Pointe managing editor Lydia Murray and former American Dance Festival director Charles L. Reinhart. The committee considered nominations from the editorial staff and advisors of Dance Magazine as well as from the dance public.

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One of my favorite things about the Dance Magazine Awards has always been the sense of worlds colliding—the way luminaries from different corners of our industry who you’d likely never see sharing a stage or a program come together for this celebration of dance’s living legends. This year’s edition, which combined pre-recorded and live, in-person speeches and performances, was no different. (Seeing 2021 Honoree Andy Blankenbuehler chatting with 1991 honoree Mark Morris before the ceremony was a particularly wonderful sort of surreal.) But more than ever, I was reminded that our field can be—and is—one big community held together by our shared devotion to dance.

This year’s event was held at the Guggenheim Museum, so a pre-show panel with past honorees Lar Lubovitch, Wendy Whelan and Mark Morris, moderated by Dance Magazine editor in chief Jennifer Stahl, fittingly centered on the relationship between dance and the visual arts. Morris pointed out that dance is a visual art (the first of his many quips throughout the evening), a sentiment Lubovitch echoed when he praised Whelan as a tremendous graphic artist in her own right “because of the exactitude of the drawings that she made” with her body as a dancer. Whelan noted that understanding what kind of brush you are as a dance artist (“A felt tip pen? Or a big, fat paintbrush?”) is an important part of being able to work well with choreographers.

In closing, Lubovitch remarked: “The biggest difference, and why our art is so precious, is because it’s the only art that really only exists while it’s happening, and that gives it a special kind of magic, as far as I’m concerned. The grace and integrity that it requires to commit yourself to something that is basically invisible except when you’re doing it requires a kind person and a kind character.” Leave it to Lubovitch to deliver a mic drop with such eloquence.

Sean Jones, Malik Kitchen, Adrian Lee and Thayne Jasperson in Andy Blankenbuehler’s Possibilities. Photo by Christopher Duggan

The importance of not just what our honorees have accomplished but how they’ve conducted themselves as they did so proved to be a key theme of the evening. Susan Stroman, presenting to Tony Award–winning choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, recalled encountering him first as a performer who was always interested in what was happening on both sides of the table, a curiosity that has served him as both a choreographer and a director: “Regardless of where Andy is in the rehearsal room, he is a true collaborator. Always fearless, always approaching from a place of love, and always there to serve the work.”

Andy Blankenbuehler. Photo by Christopher Duggan

Blankenbuehler in turn thanked Stroman for leading by example, saying, “Choreographers have a tendency to turn into a mad scientist, tunnel vision person. Darkness can come easily because of the fear of not being able to make the sculpture move. My single hugest takeaway from my time with Stro is that she leads with generosity every step of the way. If there’s ever a time where I am good to the people around me, it is because there’s a Susan Stroman on my shoulder saying there is a better way to do it than to fall victim to the fear.” He continued to speak about how movie musicals and Dance Magazine were his sources of inspiration growing up in Ohio, giving him “a window to dream” of the possibilities of a life in dance. The piece he choreographed for the occasion was, fittingly, named Possibilities.

Tamara Rojo. Photo by Christopher Duggan

A video excerpt of Dormeshia in And Still You Must Swing drew whoops of delight from the audience. As Dianne Walker told the tap star in her presentation, “You swing like no one else.” She praised Dormeshia for the generosity of her teaching and the integrity she brings to the numerous artistic roles she fulfills, as well as in the rest of her life, where “her beautiful character and strength as a woman shines through.” She spoke of how they came from the same tap lineage, the importance of which was echoed by Dormeshia in her acceptance speech as she dedicated the award to the artists who paved the way for her. “This dance has truly been a blessing,” she said. “A blessing because it’s been everything I needed, when I needed it. It’s my friend, my therapy, my voice, my passport. The dance has always been there for me, so I do my best to show up for it.”

Alethea Pace and Richard Rivera in Pace’s Here goes the neighborhood… Photo by Christopher Duggan

The recipients of this year’s Harkness Promise Awards let their dancing do the talking. Alethea Pace performed a smart, exacting excerpt from her Here Goes the Neighborhood… with Richard Rivera, while Yin Yue showed a piece of her FoCo, dancing in sweeping unison with Grace Whitworth. Harkness Foundation for Dance executive director Joan Finkelstein presented each with their awards, which include grants and studio space (funded in large part by the net proceeds from the Dance Magazine Awards), and announced that the two of them would be back at the Guggenheim for a shared evening through Works & Process in March.

Grace Whitworth and Yin Yue in Yue’s FoCo. Photo by Christopher Duggan

Presenting to Akram Khan, Wendy Whelan spoke of how his work directs attention to finding shared humanity through collaboration: “He is a choreographer built for questioning and reinventing classical dance traditions for the 21st century.” The removing of cultural silos was echoed in his acceptance speech, during which Khan mused, “Something that my mother always told me as a child was, If some of us are unwell, then all of us are unwell. That is the context I apply to the themes I work on. I’m very interested in stories of the other, the ones that happen in the shadows. It’s really special for me that there is a recognition, to put a spotlight on the stories that are in shadow.”

Yannick Lebrun in Robert Battle’s In/Side. Photo by Christopher Duggan

Robert Battle. Photo by Christopher Duggan

Battle’s wide-ranging, laughter-inducing speech (“You know he can preach,” Jamison drawled) was dedicated to the unsung heroes of his career. He told the story of his childhood piano teacher who was diagnosed with cancer while he was studying at Juilliard, and how he would help her with errands and chores when he was home on break. One day she took him to a department store and bought him five suits; when his mother asked her why, she said, “Someday he’ll be meeting kings and queens and presidents, and that boy’s going to need a suit.” He shared that all he could think of when, years later, he was at President Obama’s White House, was his fortune in being there: “What did I have? Courage and a suit. I don’t feel that much different tonight.”

Duke Dang and Caroline Cronson. Photo by Christopher Duggan

Virginia Johnson joked that Battle was “a tough act to follow” when she presented our Chairman’s Award to Works & Process. Johnson praised the presenter for how it “bursts with a sense of adventure” and continues to lead the way for dance performance through the pandemic. Works & Process producer Caroline Cronson and executive director Duke Dang used their acceptance speech as an opportunity to announce a new facet of its support for dance artists: LaunchPAD, a new initiative that will put $2 million towards providing “process as destination” fully-funded residencies over the next two years. As Dance Media CEO Frederic Seegal put it in his opening remarks, “I can’t imagine anyone has done more for dance than Duke and his team.”

Dancer-turned-medical-professional Dr. Wendy Ziecheck was also on hand to receive a special citation for her groundbreaking work in helping Works & Process develop safety protocols for its “bubble residencies” to allow dance artists to safely gather and work together during the course of the pandemic. She closed her speech with a plea for the leaders of the dance field, as experts in what they do, to look to the experts in medicine and science as we continue to navigate the challenges of COVID-19: “One of the themes that I’ve noticed in tonight’s program is, None of us are safe until everybody is safe.”

Nicholas Van Young (right) in an excerpt from his and Michelle Dorrance’s 2017 Works & Process Rotunda Project. Photo by Christopher Duggan

The evening closed with the fruits of a pre-pandemic Works & Process initiative: an excerpt from Michelle Dorrance and Nicholas Van Young’s 2017 Rotunda Project, which made clever (and humorous) use of the sonic possibilities of the museum’s famous architecture.

The joy of sharing that performance with the audience scattered around the rotunda’s ramp brought to mind a remark made by Judith Jamison earlier in the evening: “How precious this is, this thing we call dance. Sometimes you need that space to know how valuable your presence is in the world—not just to fulfill your ego, but to do it for others.”

Missed the livestream? Get access to the 2021 Dance Magazine Awards on demand
here.

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Robert Battle once told an interviewer on PBS, “Something about movement, very early on for me, signified life.” As a youngster, it wasn’t likely that he would become a dancer; Battle’s legs were so bowed he had to wear braces at night. However, once he no longer needed them, he made up for lost time by dancing every chance he could. When he wasn’t dancing, he liked to don a bathrobe and pretend to preach, sharpening the oratorical skills that he now puts to regular use as artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Today, the warmth and charm of his pre-curtain speeches and interviews make not just Ailey but modern dance feel more accessible for all of us.

Diligent and talented, Battle trained at Miami’s New World School of the Arts, then Juilliard. He danced with Parsons Dance before starting his own company, Battleworks. His choreography, including the iconic Takademe and The Hunt, tends to be challenging, powerful, intriguing and sometimes offbeat. Many works are punctuated by movements evocative of his martial arts training.

When Judith Jamison passed the Ailey torch to Battle in 2011, the then-38-year-old became just the third artistic director of the historic dance company. Since then, Battle has forged several pathways for other choreographers to flourish. Right away, Battle established the New Directions Choreography Lab, giving emerging artists the resources to create new works. Under his leadership, Ailey has also expanded its storytellers to include dynamic choreographers, such as Kyle Abraham, Aszure Barton and Wayne McGregor. Outstanding dancemaker Jamar Roberts became the company’s first resident choreographer in 2019. A year earlier, Battle had hired Rennie­ Harris as Ailey’s first artist in residence; through Harris’­ works, such as the now-signature Lazarus, the Ailey company has further delved into the richness and diversity within African-American culture, and broadened the vocabulary with which it does so.

Battle often quotes Alvin Ailey, stating, “Dance comes from the people and should always be delivered back to the people.” During Battle’s tenure, the Ailey brand has remained synonymous with authenticity, artistic integrity, inclusive storytelling and culture of the highest quality. Through his steadfast grace, humility, wit and assiduousness, Battle has helped the Ailey company, 60-plus-years on, to continue evolving, flourishing and growing ever more popular.

Join Dance Magazine in celebrating Robert Battle at the December 6 Dance Magazine Awards ceremony. Tickets are now available here.

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Akram Khan shows us what it means to be a global citizen of dance. Growing up in London in a Bangladeshi family, he studied the North Indian form kathak, and began melding it with contemporary dance almost 30 years ago. His solo works have built vivid worlds ranging from the delightfully quizzical Desh to the terrifying landscape of war in Xenos.

Driven by curiosity, he has collaborated with artists steeped in other traditions, leading to a new alchemy each time. Whether matching the furious rhythms of flamenco improviser Israel Galván in Torobaka or overhauling Giselle for English National Ballet, he has found humor in difference, as well as emotional common ground.

His boundless imagination helps fuel works of great theatrical power. For example, zero degrees, his collaboration with Belgian-Moroccan dance artist Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui,­ is loosely based on a haunting excursion into their lives as cross-cultural artists. Critic Deborah Jowitt wrote that“It’s about deep, soul-shaking performing, in which every move seems to flow from a wellspring of feelings and experiences…­. Everything is clear; everything is mysterious.”

Just as he crosses boundaries culturally, Khan crosses boundaries in terms of genre. He has choreographed for the movies (Desert Dancer), for a pop star (Kylie Minogue) and for a kung fu musical (Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise). He considers himself to be part of a new breed of crossover dance artists. “Artists like Hofesh Shechter, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, myself and Crystal Pite—we’re not afraid of other genres,” he said in these pages in 2019. “We’re already out of the box. We don’t belong only to the dance world anymore.”

More than a global citizen, Khan is a global leader. He believes that the world’s problems can only be solved by people of different cultures working together. His next work for Akram Khan Company, Jungle Book Reimagined, sees Kipling’s original story from the view of a child trapped in our climate-devastated world. As it tours Europe next spring, this new work promises to “help us listen to the natural world.” Perhaps only an artist with an international perspective could conceive such a large vision: a dance performance that honors the earth, art and children—”our future storytellers.”

Join Dance Magazine in celebrating Akram Khan at the December 6 Dance Magazine Awards ceremony. Tickets are now available here.

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If you ask a tap dancer who their favorite hoofers are, it’s not likely they’ll omit Dormeshia. Her popularity even spreads by word of foot, so to speak: Some dancers have used the term “DSE”—the initials of her full name, Dormeshia­ Sumbry-Edwards—to refer to a phrase she often executes: a grab-off variation followed by a shuffle pullback and a flap.

It’s a tight, crisp, elegant bar of music that can be graceful and enunciated, ending on the count of 4, or a rapid, machine-gun rhythm that ends on 3. She could probably come up with five other variations on the step that the rest of us would never think of—and all with impeccable clarity and unwavering gusto.

Even when improvising in her suede Pumas, as she sometimes does in short videos on Instagram, every intricacy is as clear as if she were wearing her silver heels. No matter the tune or tempo, Dormeshia nails every rhythm with ease and aplomb, transforming even a simple groove into a transfixing melody.

A protégé of Paul and Arlene Kennedy, she made her Broadway debut at age 12 in Black and Blue, later joining Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk as the show’s first and only female dancer. Defining a woman’s place in tap has become a central part of Dormeshia’s career. This past spring saw the third annual iteration of Ladies in the Shoe, a workshop she hosts during Women’s History Month, each week featuring class and conversation with a different female hoofer.

She’s been the muse of many a choreographer—such as Derick K. Grant and Jason Samuels Smith—and garnered acclaim in recent years for her own creations. With her choreography for Michelle Dorrance’s The Blues Project and her own show And Still You Must Swing, she’s shown a deep respect for, and intimate knowledge of, tap’s ties to jazz music and Black culture. We often hear tap described as a uniquely American dance form, and Dormeshia—who can now be seen on a U.S. postage stamp—fully explores that statement in her work, plumbing tap’s power as a uniting force during divisive times.

The Viola Davis of her art form, Dormeshia is a lifelong student of her craft who has won an Astaire Award, a Princess Grace Award, a Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award and two Bessie Awards. She has her peers and admirers alike at the edge of their seats, eagerly awaiting her next move and hoping that the show never ends.

Join Dance Magazine in celebrating Dormeshia at the December 6 Dance Magazine Awards ceremony. Tickets are now available here.

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A former star of The Royal Ballet, Spanish ballerina Tamara Rojo is known for her spotless technique and impassioned performances that are—to quote a review by dance critic Judith Mackrell—”etched in raw emotion.” Despite her magnificent performance career, however, it is as a leadership figure that Rojo has had the most influence on the ballet world. Since 2012, she has straddled stage and office in the dual role of artistic director and lead principal of English National Ballet.

Under Rojo’s leadership, ENB has shed its reputation as a lesser cousin to The Royal Ballet. Instead, it has become the epitome of an innovative, forward-thinking ballet company equipped for the 21st century. Based in a new award-winning, state-of-the-art home, Rojo’s ENB presents classical repertoire alongside premieres by contemporary choreographers, and now digital creations via the company’s bespoke streaming platform.

Some of Rojo’s boldest moves over the past 10 years have included commissioning a reimagining of Giselle by celebrated British-Bangladeshi choreographer Akram Khan and staging surprising pieces of repertoire, such as Pina Bausch’s inimitable Le Sacre du printemps. She’s also brought in international ballet stars—such as lead principals Isaac Hernández and Jeffrey Cirio—and brought back Maria Kochetkova, making the company a major player on the global dance scene.

Throughout her tenure, Rojo has been a staunch advocate of female choreographers. Motivated by the shocking fact that she never danced in a work by a woman during her 20-year performance career prior to joining ENB, Rojo has now commissioned more than 40 works by women across the company’s programming. One of the most outstanding is Broken Wings, created by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa in 2016. With Rojo in the lead role, the ballet brought to life the colorful, surreal narratives of Frida Kahlo’s paintings, alongside emotional scenes depicting her struggles with debilitating health conditions.

Rojo has also been instrumental in shifting how female narratives are presented onstage. The lack of depth in many classical female roles recently motivated her to restage Petipa’s Raymonda, which will be her choreographic and directorial debut. Set to premiere in January 2022, Rojo’s version will depict a heroine in charge of her own destiny, recasting Raymonda as a nurse who runs away to support the Crimean War.

It’s no wonder that Rojo holds Spain’s three highest honors and a CBE, from the Order of the British Empire. Yet despite a career in the spotlight, Rojo is now preoccupied with shining it on others: She’s in the process of setting up a new ENB pipeline project aiming to help young dancers from underrepresented communities get professional ballet training, and is encouraging female artists to apply for ENB’s Dance Leaders of the Future program. “Enabling other dancers and artists to reach their potential is the most beautiful thing I could have chosen to do with my life,” she says.

Join Dance Magazine in celebrating Tamara Rojo at the December 6 Dance Magazine Awards ceremony. Tickets are now available here.

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Andy Blankenbuehler got into dance as a 3-year-old tapper in Cincinnati, but theatergoers don’t associate him with showstopping tap routines. Nor do they identify him with cheerleader formations, swing-dance extravaganzas or hip-hop blowouts, even though his shows have had them all. It’s because Blankenbuehler numbers don’t actually stop shows—they push them forward, vibrantly, relentlessly, ingeniously. They exist in a specific moment of a specific musical.

He came to New York City in 1990 to make a career as a Broadway dancer, absorbing choreography from contemporary masters Susan Stroman and Christopher Chadman,­ and studying the work of two of his idols, Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse. Their influence pervades his work in visible and invisible ways—Fosse’s tensed line, Robbins’­ perpetual-motion machine—and he readily admits to leaning on the work of Gene Kelly and Michael Jackson.­ But, to borrow a word from one of his assistants, he Blankenbuehlerizes­ familiar dance vocabulary and makes it feel contemporary.

An obsessive researcher, Blankenbuehler immerses himself in the period and music and lyrics of each show he does. He collects all the information he can from the relevant idiom—it could be salsa, it could be ballet, it could be stepping—until he’s absorbed and understood it. Despite­ all the prep, the exacting, meticulous results are never derivative, because he thinks so rigorously about every word in every song. He likes to say that he’s not interested in dance steps on their own, that he cares only about how they reveal the character or the story. And he’s never afraid to stop the dancing cold if that will heighten the drama or bring home a moment. When the orphans of Annie or the soldiers of Hamilton freeze in the middle of a phrase, it’s not because he’s run out of ideas. It’s because he’s had one that he wants us to notice.

And notice we do. The Tony, Drama Desk, Olivier, Chita Rivera and Lortel nominations and awards he’s collected for In the Heights, Bring It On, Bandstand and, of course, Hamilton, attest to the way his work speaks to today’s audiences. The restless energy that drives his choreography also drives him to explore: choreographing for film (Cats), directing (Bring It On: The Musical and Bandstand) and dreaming up new shows (Only Gold). With his enormous store of both brains and heart, he’s showing Broadway how to make musicals that move with a 21st-century beat—pulling this 20th-century form into the current moment and beyond.

Join Dance Magazine in celebrating Andy Blankebuehler at the December 6 Dance Magazine Awards ceremony. Tickets are now available here.

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Works & Process at the Guggenheim, conceived by the philanthropist Mary Sharp Cronson, has been at the heart of New York City’s cultural life since its creation in 1984. For nearly four decades, it has offered a peek at the creative process, inviting composers, choreographers, actors, dancers, musicians, designers and others to talk about and show the work that goes on behind the scenes of a new creation.

As enlightening as it has been, Works & Process’ impact on the performing arts (and especially on dance) has grown even further in recent years, as the series has focused increasingly on commissioning new work. Some of the most innovative and interesting artists of our time, often at a formative point in their careers, have developed work at Works & Process, including Pam Tanowitz, Michelle Dorrance and Jamar Roberts.

COVID-19 proved to be a galvanizing moment. Just weeks into the pandemic, general director Duke Dang pivoted the series to virtual commissions. In all, Works & Process commissioned 85 digital works, helping artists to not only survive but, just as importantly, to sustain their sense of purpose.

The series also developed a protocol, in consultation with Dr. Wendy Ziecheck, for creating work in person during the pandemic, through the use of “bubble” residencies. A small group would quarantine and rehearse together in a remote spot, subject to frequent testing. Out of this painstaking process emerged the basis for over two dozen new live and digital works, many of which have already appeared­ or will premiere at the Guggenheim in the months to come.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Works & Process came to the rescue of the performing arts, swooping in when help was desperately needed. Out of that support emerged a wave of creativity, one that reflects the regenerative power of art in a time of crisis.

Special Citation: Dr. Wendy Ziecheck

Along with presenting the Chairman’s Award to Works & Process, Dance Magazine is also recognizing Dr. Wendy Ziecheck, who helped create and supervise protocols for the bubble residencies that kept so many dancers working throughout the pandemic. A former ballet dancer herself, Ziecheck was the medical director of the Rockettes for nine years, and is currently an internist in private practice.

Join Dance Magazine in celebrating Works & Process and Dr. Wendy Ziecheck at the December 6 Dance Magazine Awards ceremony. Tickets are now available here.

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A partnership between Dance Magazine and the Harkness Foundation for Dance, the Harkness Promise Awards recognize choreographers in their first decade of professionally presenting their work. The net proceeds from the Dance Magazine Awards ceremony­ fund the Harkness Promise Awards, which include a $5,000 unrestricted grant, along with 40 hours of studio space and ongoing mentorship with Joan Finkelstein, the Harkness Foundation’s executive director. This year’s awardees, Alethea­ Pace and Yin Yue, will be featured in a shared evening as part of the 2022 Works & Process season.

Alethea Pace creates deeply compelling multimedia works. Her creative practice draws upon embodied knowledge, collective memory and historical study using a hybrid of movement forms ranging from contemporary modern dance to dances of the African diaspora. Raising social justice issues around history, identity and geography, her work uplifts the stories of Black and brown communities and resists attempts to erase marginalized bodies. A true artist-citizen, she creates spaces where the imaginary “we” is transformed into an actual “we” as a tool of activism.

Yin Yue, artistic director of New York City’s YY Dance Company, has extended the physical possibilities of dance by creating FoCo Technique, an innovative approach to movement blending ballet, contemporary modern dance, and Chinese classical and folk forms. Sweepingly extended, fluidly pulsing and earthily grounded, the technique underpins her highly kinetic, full-bodied choreography.

Join Dance Magazine in celebrating Alethea Pace and Yin Yue at the December 6 Dance Magazine Awards ceremony. Tickets are now available here.

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As this year like none other finally draws to a close, I’ve noticed a familiar sentiment popping up: Everything that we’ve lost since COVID-19 hit has made many of us that much more appreciative of all that we have. For me, I might have felt this most potently with the Dance Magazine Awards.

Putting together our ceremony amid the unique turmoil of 2020—and the deep reflections it’s inspired—forced us to take a fresh look at not only how we do this, but why. And it comes down to this: The Dance Magazine Awards are about celebrating the icons among us, declaring that these are our living legends whose work we are honored to experience in our own lifetimes.

This year, the selection committee decided to make a statement with whom we chose to name as those legends. Selecting all Black honorees was meant to reckon with Dance Magazine‘s history of awarding primarily white artists over the past seven decades. At the same time, this lineup has also served to highlight the undeniable influence Black dance artists have had on this art form. “All of us together makes a statement of where we are today in the dance world,” said Debbie Allen in her acceptance speech.

For me, as I gathered all the videos and speeches leading up to the event, and watched each draft come together in the careful hands of Nel Shelby Productions, I got a chance to really look at how much this year’s honorees have enriched our field.

I remain in awe of the poetic and elegantly gooey movement of the “philosopher king” Alonzo King; the bold creativity Laurieann Gibson brings to pop stars and TV shows; the boundary-bending storytelling of Camille A. Brown; the physical brilliance and innovative ideas of Carlos Acosta; the iconic inspiration of Debbie Allen; the way Chairman’s Award recipient Darren Walker has reshaped the Ford Foundation’s philanthropy with an eye to social justice; and the indeed promising choreographic talent of Harkness Promise Award recipients Marjani Forté-Saunders and Kyle Marshall.

Although we were unable to gather in person to celebrate this incredible group, in a gleeful plot twist, holding our ceremony virtually offered new possibilities. We were able to expand our reach of who participated and who was invited, including people who may not have been able to make it to a New York theater like in a traditional year. An exuberant live chat on YouTube took the place of our typical cocktail reception, with dancers, directors, presenters, writers and others virtually mingling and celebrating together in real time. We’re now able to make the main ceremony available on demand for anyone who missed it live; you can purchase a pass to watch it on your own time here.

Going digital also allowed us—for the first time ever—to share toasts from several past honorees to this year’s cohort in a special preshow celebration. In what was by far the most star-studded Zoom room I’ve been in during the pandemic, we got to hear personal stories about and well wishes to our 2020 awardees from people like Judith Jamison, Susan Stroman, Alessandra Ferri and many others.

And for an additional online bonus, we hosted a separate Zoom conversation earlier in the day with our two Harkness Promise Award recipients Marjani Forté-Saunders and Kyle Marshall, hearing about their work and what inspires them as engaged artist-citizens.

In his acceptance remarks, Darren Walker quoted Alvin Ailey: “Making dances is an act of progress; it is an act of growth, an act of music, an act of teaching, an act of celebration, an act of joy.” Our honorees have proved that statement to be true over and over again.

I’d like to give a big thank you to our sponsors First Republic and Freed of London for helping to make the Dance Magazine Awards happen in these exceptional times. When so much of the dance field remains on hold, it’s an honor to be able to lift up the greats among us.

Thank you for celebrating this year’s incredible Dance Magazine Award honorees with us. Watch on demand
here.

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So for 2020, in order to reckon with and take a step toward repairing that history, the committee chose an outstanding group of all Black artists. A ceremony to celebrate this year’s Dance Magazine Award recipients will take place virtually on Monday, December 7, with performances and presentations for each honoree. For ticket information, visit dancemediafoundation.org. I’m delighted to announce our incredible honorees for 2020:

Carlos Acosta

In addition to dancing with some of the world’s most prestigious companies, including The Royal Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and Houston Ballet, Carlos Acosta has choreographed productions of Don Quixote and Carmen, plus Guys and Dolls for the West End. Acosta established his own dance company, Acosta Danza, in 2016 in his native Cuba, and opened a dance academy there through the Carlos Acosta International Dance Foundation a year later. He also became artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet in January 2020, and currently leads both organizations on either side of the Atlantic.

Debbie Allen

An internationally recognized director, choreographer, teacher, dancer and actor, Debbie Allen first made her mark on Broadway in revivals like West Side Story, for which she was nominated for a Tony. She became a household name with the movie-turned-television-classic “Fame,” and has since directed and produced several TV series including “A Different World,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “Scandal.” Allen has been artist in residence at the Kennedy Center for over 15 years. She founded the Debbie Allen Dance Academy in Los Angeles, mentoring and inspiring hundreds of students. She is currently an executive producer, director and actress on ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Camille A. Brown

Camille A. Brown
‘s prolific choreography merges her modern dance foundation with elements of African, social dance and musical theater to highlight deeply personal and complex Black experiences. In addition to being artistic director of Camille A. Brown & Dancers, she has been commissioned by companies like Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Urban Bush Women, Complexions Contemporary Ballet and Ballet Memphis. Her Broadway choreography credits include Choir Boy (for which she was nominated for a Tony) and Once On This Island. She also choreographed Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert on NBC, as well as The Metropolitan Opera’s Porgy and Bess. Netflix’s soon-to-be-released Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, directed by George C. Wolfe, will mark her feature film debut.

Laurieann Gibson

After training in Dunham, Horton and Graham at The Ailey School, Laurieann Gibson began her career dancing for Mary J. Blige. As a choreographer and creative director, she went on to work with such artists as Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Michael Jackson, Diddy and Katy Perry. She also choreographed the Universal feature film Honey, which was based partly on Gibson’s personal experiences. In 2005, she was the on-air choreographer of MTV’s hit show “Making the Band.” Most recently, Gibson has appeared as a choreographer and judge on “So You Think You Can Dance.”

Alonzo King

Contemporary ballet choreographer Alonzo King is founder and artistic director of San Francisco’s Alonzo King LINES Ballet. In 1989, he opened the San Francisco Dance Center, offering weekly classes for professionals and community members alike. With more than 160 works to his name, his choreography appears in the repertoires of companies such as Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, The Royal Swedish Ballet, The Joffrey Ballet and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. He’s collaborated with BaAka Nzwba Lela dancers and musicians from the Central African Republic, Shaolin monks, vocalist Lisa Fischer and many other artists from all over the world.

Chairman’s Award: Darren Walker

A Chairman’s Award, chosen by Dance Media CEO Frederic M. Seegal to honor distinctive leaders behind the scenes, will go to Darren Walker. As president of the Ford Foundation, Walker has been an instrumental leader in philanthropy, supporting the arts with an eye to social justice.

Harkness Promise Awards: Kyle Marshall and Marjani Forté-Saunders

The Harkness Promise Awards, which offer a $5,000 grant, 40 hours of rehearsal space and ongoing mentorship for innovative young choreographers in their first decade of presenting professional work, will go to Kyle Marshall and Marjani Forté-Saunders. These awards, given in partnership with the Harkness Foundation for Dance, are funded by net proceeds from the Dance Magazine Awards ceremony.

Marshall has presented his company Kyle Marshall Choreography at BAM New Wave Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out, Joe’s Pub, and NYC Summerstage. Forté-Saunders, a former member of Urban Bush Women, is currently collaborating with her partner, composer Everett Asis Saunders, as 7NMS; the pair also directs ART & POWER, an emerging platform for artists, writers, scientists, spiritualists and scholars, dedicated to Black purpose and innovation.

Check out Dance Magazine‘s December issue to learn more about each of these incredible artists. A ceremony to celebrate them will take place virtually on Monday, December 7, with performances and presentations for each honoree. For ticket information, visit dancemediafoundation.org.

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Media Contact: Nicole Buggé

nbugge@dancemedia.com

(New York, NY) September 21, 2020—Dance Media Foundation (dancemediafoundation.org) in conjunction with Dance Magazine, announced today the honorees for the 63rd annual Dance Magazine Awards: Carlos Acosta, Debbie Allen, Camille A. Brown, Laurieann Gibson and Alonzo King. The Chairman’s Award will go to Darren Walker. The Harkness Promise Award recipients are Kyle Marshall and Marjani Forté-Saunders.

A tradition dating back to 1954, the Dance Magazine Awards have long celebrated living legends who’ve made a lasting impact on dance. A list of past recipients can be found here.

Given the deep reflections on racial equity that have taken place this year, the selection committee interrogated the bias in the choices for the Dance Magazine Awards: Over the past seven decades, the list of honorees has been overwhelmingly white. This year, to reckon with and start to take a step toward repairing that history the committee chose to honor all Black artists and leaders.

“In this challenging environment nothing is more important than recognizing the extraordinary careers of our awardees,” states Frederic M. Seegal, CEO/Chairman of Dance Media.

The esteemed event will take place virtually on December 7, 2020, at 6 pm Eastern, produced by Nel Shelby Productions. Tickets are now on sale at dancemediafoundation.org, starting at $50 for general admission plus a one-year subscription to Dance Magazine; a $125 ticket also includes a pre-show experience with special guests; and a $1,000 ticket includes the above plus a donation to the Dance Media Foundation to fund the 2021 Harkness Promise Awards.

Previous Dance Magazine Award ceremonies have included superstar names such as Misty Copeland, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Tommy Tune, Alvin Ailey, Wendy Whelan, Ohad Naharin, Philip Glass, Chita Rivera, Fred Astaire, Bob Fosse, and more.

CARLOS ACOSTA

In addition to dancing with some of the world’s most prestigious companies, including The Royal Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and Houston Ballet, Carlos Acosta has choreographed productions of Don Quixote and Carmen, plus a production of Guys and Dolls for the West End. Acosta established his own dance company, Acosta Danza, in 2016, in Cuba, and opened a dance academy there through the Carlos Acosta International Dance Foundation a year later. He became artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet in January 2020.

DEBBIE ALLEN

An internationally recognized director, choreographer, teacher, dancer and actor, Debbie Allen first made her mark on Broadway in revivals like West Side Story, for which she was nominated for a Tony. She became a household name with the movie-turned-television-classic “Fame,” and has since directed and produced several series including “A Different World,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “Scandal.” She has been artist in residence at the Kennedy Center for over 15 years. She founded the Debbie Allen Dance Academy in Los Angeles, and is currently an executive producer as well as a director and actress on ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.”

CAMILLE A. BROWN

Camille A. Brown’s prolific choreography merges her serious modern dance foundation with elements of African, social dance and musical theater to highlight deeply personal and complex Black experiences. In addition to being artistic director of Camille A. Brown & Dancers, she has been commissioned by companies like Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Urban Bush Women, Complexions and Ballet Memphis. Her Broadway credits include Choir Boy (for which she was nominated for a Tony) and Once On This Island. She also choreographed Jesus Christ Superstar Live on NBC as well as The Metropolitan Opera’s Porgy and Bess. Netflix’s soon-to-be-released Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, directed by George C. Wolfe, will mark her feature film debut.

LAURIEANN GIBSON

After training in Dunham, Horton and Graham at The Ailey School, Laurieann Gibson began her career dancing for Mary J. Blige. As a choreographer and creative director, she went on to work with such artists as Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Michael Jackson, Diddy and Katy Perry. She also choreographed the Universal feature film Honey, based partly on Gibson’s personal experiences. In 2005, Gibson was the on-air choreographer of MTV’s hit show “Making the Band.” Most recently, she has appeared as a choreographer and judge on “So You Think You Can Dance.”

ALONZO KING

Contemporary ballet choreographer Alonzo King is founder and director of San Francisco’s Alonzo King LINES Ballet. In 1989, he opened the San Francisco Dance Center, offering weekly classes for professionals and community members alike. With more than 160 works to his name, his choreography appears in the repertoires of companies such as Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, The Royal Swedish Ballet, The Joffrey Ballet and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

CHAIRMAN’S AWARD: DARREN WALKER

A Chairman’s Award, chosen by Dance Media CEO Frederic M. Seegal to honor distinctive leaders behind the scenes, will go to Darren Walker. As president of the Ford Foundation, Walker has been an instrumental leader in philanthropy, supporting the arts with an eye to social justice.

HARKNESS PROMISE AWARDS

The Harkness Promise Awards, which offer a $5,000 grant and 40 hours of rehearsal space for innovative young choreographers in the first decade of professional work, will go to Kyle Marshall and Marjani Forté-Saunders. This award, conferred in partnership with the Harkness Foundation for Dance, is funded by net proceeds from the Dance Magazine Awards ceremony.

Kyle Marshall
received the 2018 NY Dance and Performance “Bessie” Jury Award, is a NJ State Arts Fellow, and is presently a 92nd Street Y resident artist. He was the 2019 Harkness Artist in Residence at the BAM Fisher. His dance company, Kyle Marshall Choreography, sees the dancing body as a container of history, an igniter of social reform and a site of celebration.

Marjani Forté-Saunders
toured for five years with Urban Bush Women. Forté-Saunders’ artistic practice is informed by years of anti-racist organizer training and her experience as a lead facilitator with UBW Builders, Organizers and Leaders through Dance. Currently, she collaborates with her partner, composer Everett Asis Saunders, as 7NMS. The two direct ART & POWER, an emerging platform for artists, writers, scientists, spiritualists and scholars.

The selection committee for the 2020 Dance Magazine Awards includes Dance Magazine contributor Joseph Carman, The Dance Edit editor in chief Margaret Fuhrer, Dance Media publisher/CFO Joanna Harp, MoBBallet founder Theresa Ruth Howard, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre artistic director Susan Jaffe, Dance Magazine editor at large Wendy Perron, former American Dance Festival director Charles L. Reinhart and Dance Magazine editor in chief and Dance Media content director Jennifer Stahl.

For more information on the Dance Magazine Awards or to purchase tickets, please visit dancemediafoundation.org. For sponsorship opportunities, media access, or interviews, please contact Nicole Buggé at nbugge@dancemedia.com.

ABOUT DANCE MAGAZINE

Dance Magazine
was first published in June 1927 under the name The American Dancer. Produced by a Hollywood-based team of editors under the leadership of Ruth Eleanor Howard, it cost a quarter and was dedicated to readers who “love the dance.” In the 1920s and 30s, the magazine offered monthly news of the changing dance world in Europe and America. Today, under editor Jennifer Stahl, the brand reaches students, professionals and dance lovers around the world through its many channels, spanning print, digital, social and more. Written by accomplished journalists and active dancers, Dance Magazine tells the stories behind today’s most exciting artists and gives readers essential information on how the field is evolving and growing. Dance Magazine is owned by Dance Media, which also publishes Dance Spirit, Pointe, Dance Teacher, The Dance Edit and Dance Business Weekly. For more information, visit dancemagazine.com.

ABOUT THE HARKNESS FOUNDATION FOR DANCE

The Harkness Foundation for Dance is a private grant-making foundation dedicated to invigorating and supporting the dance art-form, predominantly in New York City. Since 1959, the Harkness name has been synonymous with dance philanthropy. The Foundation carries forward the lifelong dedication to the dance art form of the great American dance patron Rebekah Harkness. Over many decades, this support has taken the form of funding, rehearsal and theater space, technical assistance, and guidance—an unrivaled legacy that has touched countless dance artists and companies in all dance styles and genres. With a broad focus that spans dance creation, presentation, education, medicine and other vital services to the dance field, from 1986 to the present the Harkness Foundation has contributed over $30 million to more than 590 organizations across the industry. For more information: harknessfoundation.org

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This year’s Harkness Promise Award recipients are Marjani Forté-Saunders and Kyle Marshall.

Kyle Marshall sees the dancing body as a container of history, an igniter of social reform and a site of celebration. In collaboration with his company of diversely brilliant artists, he is creating a unique body of work that addresses both personal and collective experience within racialized and stratified systems, challenging us to access our common humanity for change. A dedicated teacher of both high school and college students, he seeks to introduce them to new ways of questioning through the art of dance.

Marjani Forté-Saunders‘ artistic practice, informed by years of anti-racist organizer training and her experience as a lead facilitator with Urban Bush Women’s Builders, Organizers and Leaders through Dance program, is committed to effecting liberation and justice through choreography, performance, teaching and cultural community organizing. Her compelling work encompasses the depths of human experience in search of a world in which true freedom elevates us all. She is the epitome of an engaged artist-citizen. —Joan Finkelstein

Join
Dance Magazine in celebrating Marjani Forté-Saunders and Kyle Marshall at the December 7 virtual Dance Magazine Awards ceremony. Tickets are now available here.

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Although Camille A. Brown has been well praised by fans, colleagues and critics, although the sheer number of awards, commissions and other honors she has received over the past two decades is exceptionally high, she remains one of those successful artists with no time for ego. She’s not driven by it. Rather—as performer, maker, educator and advocate—she’s motivated to highlight the complex histories and lived experiences of people of the Black diaspora and to celebrate, especially, our outstanding creativity in music and dance.

For many, awareness of Brown’s brilliance goes back as far as her early days with Evidence, the renowned company of Ronald K. Brown. (The two artists share a surname but are not related.) In a troupe full of luminaries—each dancer steeped in Ron’s musical sensitivity and spiritual passion—this dazzler caught every eye. Then, as now, she exuded belief in the power of her expressivity and her independence as a Black woman.

Clearly, Brown would step out on her own and make her mark as a choreographer and company director. But no one could have anticipated how handily her work would conquer not only concert dance stages but also Broadway and off-Broadway theater, opera, network television and now the world of Netflix. From Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Philadanco and Urban Bush Women to Shakespeare in the Park and The Metropolitan Opera, Brown’s choreography—at once rigorous in research and execution, accessible, socially aware and deliciously appealing—has made this modest artist into the go-to dancemaker of her era.

If dance is the poetry of the body, Brown not only takes a line for a walk, she extends it backwards, forwards and 360 degrees in space, articulating every level, every dimension, every rhythm, responsive to the holy moment like jazz improv, church and Mardi Gras. She is a griot of dance, carrying the lore of how dance urges humans towards freedom, celebration and unity. She even illustrates this in her 2016 TED Talk, a capsule history of African-American social dances, arguably the most influential dances worldwide.

Without a doubt, if any artist can finally persuade America of dance’s essential value, it will be Camille A. Brown.

So, what’s left? We will soon need to cook up another medium or venue for Brown to tackle. A site-specific gig at the International Space Station might do the trick. For sure, she’ll find a way to excel!

Join
Dance Magazine in celebrating Camille A. Brown at the December 7 virtual Dance Magazine Awards ceremony. Tickets are now available here.

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From legendary icons to early-career choreographers we can’t stop obsessing over, the Dance Magazine Awards, presented by the Dance Media Foundation, recognized a wide spectrum of our field.

And with more performances than ever before, the night was an incredible celebration of the dance community. As host Wendy Perron pointed out, in many ways, we doubled the usual fun this year: Some honorees had two performances, some had two presenters, and David Gordon and Valda Setterfield were themselves, well, two awardees.

We saw two sides of Sara Mearns

The performance started off with the grand, opulent dancing of Sara Mearns in George Balanchine’s Walpurgisnacht Ballet, which was amazing to witness up-close in the intimate black box theater. As presenter Jodi Melnick put it, Mearns is known for her fierce, abundant beauty in ballet. Presenter Marc Happel, director of costumes at New York City Ballet, shared that even in rehearsal when many dancers are marking, Mearns gives 110 percent, making it feel like an opening night.

But we also got to see the new side of Mearns, as her curiosity has led her to investigate other dance forms. In Harp Etude, choreographed by Lori Belilove after Isadora Duncan, Mearns showcased an earthy, flowing musicality. As soon as she finished, pianist Cameron Grant, who accompanied her live onstage, was the first to shout, “Bravo.”

Mearns said the evening felt like the Oscars for her, and she shared her gratitude for all of the opportunities she’s had. She confessed that she feels “like the luckiest dancer in the world” to have Jonathan Stafford and Wendy Whelan as her directors at NYCB. “Sometimes I just go into the theater and sit and stare and can’t believe I get to dance there,” she said.

But she also admitted that she never thought she’d be able to escape the ballerina bubble and try other kinds of movement, both with choreographers like Justin Peck and Alexei Ratmansky at NYCB, but also with everyone from Belilove to the Martha Graham Dance Company.

We felt the love of David Gordon and Valda Setterfield

Christopher Duggan

Wally Cardona and Karen Graham performed a version of David Gordon’s Close Up. In this tender, intertwined duet, the dancers support each other and slip out of one another’s grasp, their movement in conversation with a series of projected videos and photos of the duet performed by other couples (including Gordon and Valda Setterfield) as well as clips of couples in old Hollywood movies. It was incredibly touching—you could feel the love that went into creating it.

As presenters Eiko & Koma put it, Gordon and Setterfield have continuously proven that two people can create art and love throughout a lifetime.

Setterfield, in her acceptance, hilariously told the story of her love affair with dancing and with the audience. It started with her first solo at age 4, performed at a garden party. The choreography called for her to run around in a circle, then, when the music changed, to perform some impressive steps. Except when she got onstage, she forgot the steps, so she just kept running. And running. She could feel the audience reacting to her nonstop running, and she thought, “They’re supporting me! They’re interested in what I’m doing!” So she just kept running, and eventually ran offstage “to tremendous applause.”

Setterfield added that today, people still stop her in the street to tell her about performances they’ve seen her in. “I am thrilled all over again,” she said. “We are living in a ghastly time. But I feel useful. You, the audience, tell me I help.”

We saw proof of Bobbi Jene Smith and Caleb Teicher’s promise

Christopher Duggan

Joan Finkelstein, executive director of the Harkness Foundation for Dance, proclaimed, “I love this field so much,” as she stood up to present the Harkness Promise Awards to Bobbi Jene Smith and Caleb Teicher.

Funded by the net proceeds of the event, the Harkness Promise Awards grant $5,000 and 40 hours of studio space to innovative choreographers in their first decade of professional work. We’re especially grateful to our corporate sponsors American Express, First Republic, Pennsylvania Ballet and Beautiful Planning Marketing PR in helping us meet our goals to fund another round of awards for next year.

We learned about Linda Shelton’s lifelong business savvy

Six powerful dancers from Evidence, A Dance Company performed Ronald K. Brown‘s exuberant, driving Gatekeepers in honor of Linda Shelton, who was given our Chairman’s Award.

In presenting to her, Christopher Wheeldon highlighted how the art she supports through her work at The Joyce Theater brings us all a little closer together. (She was instrumental in bringing his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to New York City.) For her part, Shelton recounted her lifelong passion for dance—and how as a kid she took over her brother’s paper route on Wednesday mornings in order to pay for her own dance classes.

We grew jealous of Angel Corella’s cheese diet

Rounding out the night, first soloist Albert Gordon channeled the onstage elegance and effervescence of his artistic director Angel Corella in Ali’s variation from Le Corsaire.

Presenter Michael Kaiser spoke of Corella’s magical presence as a dancer, of his pirouettes which somehow sped up with each revolution and his leaps that “made life worth living.” Kaiser was American Ballet Theatre’s executive director when a prodigious 19-year-old Corella joined the company, and he related how as talented as Corella was, he was still a bit naive: At one point he went on a diet that mainly consisted of cheese in an attempt to lose weight.

In his accepting his award, Corella spoke of how lucky he felt to have been a dancer. He thanked many people who had helped him in his career, but his biggest smile came out when talking about his team at Pennsylvania Ballet (many of whom were in the audience) and his dancers. “Albert Gordon does that a lot better than I used to,” Corella proclaimed.

Like many of the honorees, even in accepting his own honor, he used it to celebrate the dance community that surrounds him.

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For 47 years, Chaya has been a constant force in the Ailey studios: first as a dancer for 15 years, then as choreographic assistant to Ailey, a rehearsal director and, most recently, associate artistic director alongside Judith Jamison and Robert Battle. Quietly guiding hundreds of AAADT dancers to find their own artistic voices has sustained his unwavering work ethic for decades.

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Misty Copeland started off the celebration. A self-professed “Dance Magazine connoisseur from the age of 13,” she not only spoke about how excited she was to be in a room full of dancers, but also—having just come from Dance Theatre of Harlem’s memorial for Arthur Mitchell—what she saw as their duty: “We all in this room hold a responsibility to use this art for good,” she said. “Dance unifies, so let’s get to work.”

That sentiment was repeated throughout the night.

Dance Magazine Awards 2018
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He is the son of an American diplomat and grew up moving from place to place—Cyprus, Israel, Canada, Italy—until eventually setting of for Yale to study Art History. After visiting the Spoleto festival in Italy as a young man, and working there while he was still an undergraduate, he very quickly realized what he wanted to: direct festivals. And that’s what he has done for most of the last quarter century.

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Trusnovec can simultaneously make choreography sexy and enlightened, and he can do it within one phrase of movement. Refusing to be pigeonholed, he has excelled in roles as diverse as the tormented and tormenting preacher in Speaking in Tongues; the lyrical central figure—one of Taylor’s own sacred roles—in Aureole; the dogged detective in Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal); and the corporate devil in Banquet of Vultures.

“I brought a whole bunch of things in my bag of tricks that Paul was able to dig through and find things I didn’t even know were in there,” says Trusnovec, who has danced with the Paul Taylor Dance Company for more than two decades.

Spotlight On…Michael Trusnovec
www.youtube.com

“If Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had a baby, it would be Michael Trusnovec,” says fellow PTDC dancer Parisa Khobdeh. “He can make anything look ‘right.’ The world could be in utter turmoil, but onstage with him, it all melts away.”

One of Trusnovec’s most valued experiences was the creation of the Whitmanesque poet in Beloved Renegade, a figure—perhaps symbolic of Taylor’s own mortality—who reconciles himself with the dying light of life as he is shepherded by the angel of death. The piece’s hushed dramatic impact is singular, and its genesis hard to imagine without Trusnovec.

Now also working as both director of worldwide licensing and associate rehearsal director, Trusnovec, who had 26 Taylor dances created on him, will retire in June.

“I love being able to share the experiences I’ve had without ever putting those on someone and saying, ‘This is the way it should feel,’ because that’s never how I’ve been treated,” he says. “If I can steer somebody toward a path that might be as rich and rewarding for them as for me, I’m happy to do that.”

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“I just want good dancers and a good company and good rep and an audience and a theater—let us do what the art form is supposed to be doing,” she says. “I don’t mean that in a flippant way. It’s just how I’ve always approached it.”

For Lopez, her current position has been a homecoming. Born in Havana in 1958, she was raised in Miami before training at the School of American Ballet. At age 16, she joined New York City Ballet, dancing for George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins (a footnote that is becoming increasingly rare).

Who Cares – I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise – Lourdes Lopez 1993
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“I’ve taken a lot from both of them,” Lopez says. “Balanchine was a teacher, and in the classroom he taught you how to dance. You went back to your basics. In rehearsal, it was very different: He wanted to see what you did with it.”

Lopez has followed his example as a teacher; her rehearsal approach is different. “Balanchine said very little,” she adds. “There wasn’t a conversation about what the work meant. I do believe that information and coaching is very important to dancers. So that is more Jerry than Mr. B.”

She brings a wealth of other experience to the job, too. After retiring from NYCB, Lopez was a cultural arts reporter for WNBC-TV, as well as the executive director of the George Balanchine Foundation and the co-founder, with Christopher Wheeldon, of Morphoses. In the end, the role of artistic director feels right. “It’s everything I know,” she says. “I truly love ballet, and here I’m surrounded by every aspect of it.”

Exploring Points of Departure with Lourdes Lopez
www.youtube.com

And she’s beginning to grasp just what she’s been able to create in Miami, from the repertoire—Lopez has introduced more than 20 new works—to the skill of her dancers, many of whom started with her.

“Maybe we’re not a national company or maybe we almost are. Does it matter? We’re dancing well and the dancers are excited,” she says. “When the curtain goes up, I have a sense that it’s a cohesive unit all under the same aesthetic value, all headed on that same road. They dance like a company.”

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Her globally popular Emergence, for instance, was provoked in part by science writer Steven Johnson’s hypotheses; The Tempest Replica refracts and reimagines Shakespeare. Recently, her reading list includes essays by fellow Canadian Robert Bringhurst, likewise driven by a ravenous, wide-ranging curiosity.

The two categories into which most of her creations fall—intimate shows for her own company and large-scale guest premieres—have proven to be mutually beneficial. Kidd Pivot, founded in 2002 in her native British Columbia, is a “long-term relationship,” she says, with a small cohort of trusted partners. One of those is director-playwright Jonathon Young, with whom she has deepened the narrative, theatrical and character-driven aspects of her work. (Revisor, their second collaboration, premieres in early 2019.) Meanwhile, Pite experiments with elaborate stagecraft through high-profile commissions from major companies, sometimes with casts of three dozen dancers or more, introducing her work to new audiences worldwide.

Crystal Pite & Jonathon Young – Betroffenheit – Trailer (Sadler’s Wells)
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No matter what she’s creating, she’s prone to coaching her material by explaining its physics or how it should employ specific parts of the body. Yet even her straightforward notes ring with a keen sense of the poetic.

“See if you can fight for that moment,” she told dancers in rehearsal for Flight Pattern, her 2017 premiere for The Royal Ballet. It was at once just encouragement about a simple step and a reminder of every artist’s lifelong test. Another observation, given to the same group within minutes—”Because of that tension, your head has no choice but to change”—spoke not only to the physical logic of Pite’s choreography, but also to the shifts in our perspectives prompted by extreme circumstances.

The Royal Ballet in Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern. Photo by Tristram Kenton, courtesy Royal Opera House

In conversation, Pite can slide effortlessly from one idea into its opposite, not unlike how torsion and oppositional force provide equilibrium within her movement. “I’ve been interested lately in old-school truths of choreography,” she says. “Shifts in scale, unison, canon, entrances and exits, and so on. I’ve been enjoying thinking of the need for traditional ways, and also the need to subvert them. It’s good to push against the conventions that you know, against the things that are familiar.”

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Fast-forward to today: Evidence has become a mainstay in the modern dance world and Brown is now considered a vanguard among choreographers fusing Western contemporary dance with movement from the African diaspora, including popular dance and traditions from West African cultures like Senegalese sabar.

The fusion comes naturally to Brown. “I just use this reservoir in my body and whatever comes out, comes out,” he says. “I’m playing around now for an Ailey piece (The Call) and yes, there’s an arabesque and some passés in there, but it’s still coming out with my movement. I just let it flow.”

Evidence, A Dance Company | BK Stories
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Brown’s trademark style has garnered legions of fans in addition to numerous accolades. His relationship with the Ailey organization, for example, extends back more than 20 years, and the company calls his 1999 work Grace one of the most popular in its repertoire.

Other companies who have performed Brown’s works include Philadanco, the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble and Ballet Hispánico. Brown has also choreographed for theater including for Regina Taylor’s play Crowns, for which he earned an AUDELCO Award; and for Broadway’s The Gershwins’ Porgy & Bess, for which he received an Astaire Award.

“A lot of Ron’s work is about loss, how losing somebody brings people together,” says Arcell Cabuag, who’s been dancing with Brown for 21 years. “Ron wants us to be completely open, where we’re not thinking about steps. There’s a huge amount of humility you have to have, where you just let everything go.”

Brown says, ultimately, he tries to find ways to reflect what lies beneath people and their lives. “When I hear my audience say it feels real, that’s the key.”

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press Contact: Jonathan Marder + Company

Eve Hodgkinson | 212.271.4285

Eve.Hodgkinson@gsmltd.net

New York, NY (September 2018)
– Misty Copeland will open the 61^st annual Dance Magazine Awards. The evening will honor Ronald K. Brown, Lourdes Lopez (presented by Darren Walker), Crystal Pite, and Michael Trusnovec (presented by Patrick Corbin). A special Leadership Award will be presented to Nigel Redden. Since 1954 the Dance Magazine Awards have recognized outstanding men and women whose contributions have left a lasting impact on dance. This year’s Awards will take place on Monday, December 3, 2018 at The Ailey Citigroup Theater at 7:30 pm. Tickets start at $50 and can be purchased by emailing dmawards@dancemedia.com.

A new award, The Harkness Promise Award, will shine a light on two emerging young artists for the promise of their artistic work. The inaugural awardees are Raja Feather Kelly and Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie. The Harkness Foundation For Dance received proceeds from last year’s Dance Magazine Awards for this grant. The award showcases innovative thinking and how to be an effective artist-citizen who positively impacts dance and the broader community through performance, education, organization and activism. Proceeds from this year’s Dance Magazine Awards will be applied to next year’s Harkness Promise Awards.

“All of us at Dance Magazine are excited to partner with The Harkness Foundation For Dance for a second year and to benefit these two deserving artists. This year’s Dance Magazine Awards has once again chosen a stellar group of honorees and we are thrilled to have Misty Copeland join us. We are confident that the 61^st Dance Magazine Awards will be our best yet.” – Frederic Seegal, CEO/Chairman Dance Media

About The 2018 Dance Magazine Honorees

Ronald K. Brown
– At only 18 years old, Ronald K. Brown founded Evidence, A Dance Company, out of a desire to tell the stories of the communities around him. Thirty-three years later, Evidence is now a mainstay in the modern dance world and Brown is a vanguard among choreographers fusing Western modern dance with movement from the African diaspora. In addition to running his own troupe, he’s choreographed on such companies as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (including 1999’s much-beloved Grace) and won an Astaire Award for his choreography on Broadway’s Porgy & Bess in 2012.

Lourdes Lopez
– Since becoming artistic director of Miami City Ballet in 2012, Lourdes Lopez has successfully built upon its Balanchine legacy while also embracing Miami’s unique cultural identity. She first rose to prominence as a principal dancer with New York City Ballet, performing featured roles in works by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Her wide-ranging career has also included stints as a cultural arts reporter on WNBC-TV, a faculty member at such institutions as Barnard College and Ballet Academy East, the executive director of The George Balanchine Foundation, and a co-founder of The Cuban Artists Fund and of Morphoses.

Crystal Pite
– Since creating her company Kidd Pivot in 2002, choreographer Crystal Pite has become a critical darling for her dark, mysterious works that powerfully explore the human condition. Her increasingly ambitious productions, some featuring more than 60 dancers, span dance theater to contemporary ballet. A former dancer with Ballet British Columbia and William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt, Pite has created more than 50 works for companies like Paris Opéra Ballet, The Royal Ballet and Cullberg Ballet. Today, she is an associate choreographer of Nederlands Dans Theater, associate dance artist of Canada’s National Arts Centre and associate artist at Sadler’s Wells in London.

Michael Trusnovec
– As a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company for 20 years, Michael Trusnovec has commanded the repertory with authority and artistry. He has excelled in roles as diverse as the tormented and tormenting preacher in Speaking in Tongues; the lyrical central figure in Aureole; the dogged detective in Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal); and the corporate devil in Banquet of Vultures. His work has been honored with a Bessie Award and he was named the Positano Premia La Danza Dancer of the Year in 2016. Having created 26 roles in Taylor premieres, he now serves as company rehearsal director in addition to being one of PTDC’s central performers.

Nigel Redden
– Nigel Redden’s expansive, globalist vision has guided performing arts institutions across the country. At only 25, he became director of the performing arts program at the Walker Arts Center in Minnesota, where he launched a festival called New Dance America. From 1991 to 1995, he served as executive director of the Santa Fe Opera. For two decades (1998-2017), Redden served as the director of New York City’s wide-ranging Lincoln Center Festival. Today, he continues to direct the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, which he has led since 1995.

About the 2018 Harkness Promise Award

Created by the Harkness Foundation for Dance in a unique partnership with Dance Magazine, the Harkness Promise Award recognizes talented choreographers for the quality of their innovative work and for their demonstrated commitment to being an involved artist-citizen. The grant will directly benefit the awardees during the first decade of their creative careers.

Raja Feather Kelly
will be honored with the inaugural 2018 Harkness Promise Award for his innovative dance-theatre works which mine popular culture to examine assumptions related to gender, race, and our shared contemporary experience; for consistently challenging performative norms; and for his efforts to build a community of radical artists through his work with large ensembles of collaborators and through his thoughtful teaching.

Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie
will be honored with the inaugural 2018 Harkness Promise Award for her experimental but accessible choreography, which investigates the complexities and narrative qualities inherent in various street and club dance styles to arrive at new modes of expression; for her support of women’s unique contributions to house dancing; and for her commitment to teaching as a form of collaborative creativity and community-building.

About The Harkness Foundation for Dance

The Harkness Foundation for Dance is a private grant-making foundation dedicated to invigorating and supporting the dance art-form, predominantly in New York City. Since 1959, the Harkness name has been synonymous with dance philanthropy. The Foundation carries forward the lifelong dedication to the dance art form of the great American dance patron Rebekah Harkness. Over many decades, this support has taken the form of funding, rehearsal and theater space, technical assistance, and guidance—an unrivaled legacy that has touched countless dance artists and companies in all dance styles and genres. With a broad focus that spans dance creation, presentation, education, medicine and other vital services to the dance field, from 1986 to the present the Harkness Foundation has contributed over $30 million to more than 560 organizations across the industry. For more information: harknessfoundation.org

About
Dance Magazine

Dance Magazine
was first published in June 1927 under the name The American Dancer. Produced by a Hollywood-based team of editors under the leadership of Ruth Eleanor Howard, it cost a quarter and was dedicated to readers who “love the dance.” In the 1920s and 30s, the magazine offered monthly news of the changing dance world in Europe and America. In 1942 New York publisher Rudolf Orthwine purchased both The American Dancer and another publication, Dance, which had begun in 1936, and combined the two into what would become Dance Magazine. The magazine expanded internationally under Lydia Joel, editor from 1952 to 1970, and enjoyed continued success under long-time editors William Como, Richard Philp and Wendy Perron.

Today, under editor Jennifer Stahl, the magazine reaches dance students, dance professionals and dance lovers around with world with its monthly print and digital editions, and its website. Written by accomplished journalists and active dancers, Dance Magazine tells the stories behind the most exciting dance artists working today and keeps readers up to date with news on the buzziest projects in the field. Dance Magazine is owned by DanceMedia, which also publishes Dance Spirit, Pointe, Dance Teacher and Dance Retailer News.

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We had the privilege of honoring four legends of our field—Rennie Harris, Marika Molnar, Linda Celeste Sims and Diana Vishneva—in a ceremony that was filled with inspiration and beauty.

Joshua Culbreath in Doubt & Dolo. Photo by Christopher Duggan.

The night opened with an incredible performance by Rennie Harris Puremovement in The Word, plus Doubt & Dolo, a gripping solo that Harris said he choreographed for his mother, who had just passed.

Harris went on to thank all of the surrogate mothers who still look out for him: Brenda Dixon Gottschild (who presented his award with an adorably awesome rap), Joan Myers Brown, and his “sister” Charmaine Warren.

Rennie Harris. Photo by Christopher Duggan

Although Diana Vishneva wasn’t able to fly in from St. Petersburg due to illness, she sent a lovely video sharing that, “New York lifted me up; Marcelo lifted me higher.”

That Marcelo she was referring to was of course Marcelo Gomes, her former partner at American Ballet Theatre. He presented Vishneva the award with a hilarious speech recounting their first time dancing together: She’d requested Gomes partner her in Manon—with just four days notice. But their first rehearsal together ended up being one of the best hours of his career. Gomes learned that Vishneva’s “magical, intense stillness” is one of her greatest gifts. “She’s a professional pauser,” he joked. “That’s her job.”

To honor Marika Molnar, her daughter Veronika Jokel sang live to accompany New York City Ballet star (and long-time Molnar patient) Tiler Peck, in a solo she choreographed for the event.

Veronika Jokel and Tiler Peck. Photo by Christopher Duggan.

In presenting Molnar with her award, Miami City Ballet artistic director Lourdes Lopez thanked her for not only helping dancers to perform, but for helping them to keep moving and demonstrating long after they retire from the stage, so that they can pass everything on to the next generation.

Molnar then told the story of how she became NYCB’s physical therapist: When she was fresh out of school, Balanchine was one of her first patients. Mr. B hated doing PT exercises like squats and heel raises, so, at his suggestion, they danced the exercises by waltzing together—three times a week around his living room!

Lopez presenting to Molnar. Photo by Christopher Duggan

The night wrapped up with a searing performance of Alvin Ailey’s Cry by honoree Linda Celeste Sims, who showed off her ability to be equal parts “a Sherman tank and rose petals” as presenter Judith Jamison put it. “She’s like steel, but then there’s that heart and vulnerability.”

Co-presenter Robert Battle playfully compared Sims to her famous pernil recipe: “She seasons it perfectly with salt and garlic and sazon; marinates it for three days. It’s the kind of thing where you savor it, and the next day you say, ‘Mmm, I can still taste it!’ ” said Battle. “Well, that’s what her dancing is.”

Linda Celeste Sims. Photo by Christopher Duggan.

A huge “thank you” to everyone who traveled from near and far to help us celebrate. With so much joy, talent and love for dance, the Dance Magazine Awards was something we know we’ll be savoring for many days to come.

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“Marika has always answered all my (sometimes ridiculous) questions with the patience and respect that can only come from a deep love of us patients and what we do,” says New York City Ballet principal Ashley Bouder. “Without her help during and after my pregnancy, I would never have been able to come back to the stage at full capacity.”

Molnar’s extensive expertise, genuine love for the art form and relentless ambition to make life better for dancers, make her one of the most respected professionals in her field. Sometimes known as the mother of dance medicine, she witnessed its birth: When Balanchine first asked her to become the physical therapist for NYCB, it was unheard of for an American ballet company to have a PT on staff. Today, she oversees a whole team of them as the director of physical therapy services to NYCB and its School of American Ballet, as well as the founder and president of Westside Dance Physical Therapy.

Marika Molnar working with Ana Sophia Scheller. Photo by Rachel Papo for Dance Teacher

She’s seen the culture mature since the ’80s, when injuries were simply accepted as part of the professional terrain like a badge of honor. “Now dancers are taking care of themselves. Longevity is something they like,” says Molnar. “Younger dancers strive to be healthy and older ones can finish their career and still move and demonstrate.”

Molnar brings a wealth of knowledge to help them accomplish that, with her PT training from Columbia University, a master’s degree in dance education from New York University, a certificate in nutrition from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, training in acupuncture, and experience as a dance student and teacher. For her, it’s not enough to be working in the office. “Observation is key,” she insists. “I urge my peers to watch rehearsal and class. I learn so much from watching.”

For example, when she saw that dancers were always gripping the floor with their toes, she had an aha moment about the frequency of flexor hallucis longus tendon injuries. She realized that standing with weight too forward never allows the tendon to rest. A little retraining to get dancers to put their weight on the center of the foot—with the help of a tool she invented, the Parasetter Mini—has made a remarkable reduction in FHL injuries at NYCB.

Molnar’s Parasetter Minis. Photo via physicalmind.myshopify.com

Molnar realizes that her field is still young, but it’s growing thanks to the work of the International Association of Dance Medicine & Science, where she has served as president, a board member and committee chair. Molnar is delighted that a number of her former patients have gone on to become physical therapists themselves, perpetuating knowledge in the field.

Molnar is grateful for two people in particular who helped her become a leader in dance medicine: “Orthopedic surgeon Dr. William Hamilton, my mentor all these years, and George Balanchine, who had confidence in my skills, allowing me to make New York City Ballet the first major ballet company in the U.S. to care for the health of its dancers. In a funny way, you could say that we three were the pioneers of the dance medicine of today.”

For information about the Dance Magazine Awards ceremony on December 4,
click here.

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Harris remembers that when he started in the ’90s, it was rough; a lot of his work was direct, so picketing and policing RHPM shows was the norm. But that time also harkened the birth of his well-thought-out launch of street dance onto the concert stage. There was the politically charged March of the Antmen, the pointed look at brotherhood and neighborhoods in P-Funk, and the tour de force Students of the Asphalt Jungle. His chilling solos, Lorenzo’s Oil and Endangered Species, screamed chaos, contradiction and culture. In the 2000s, Rome & Jewels, his first evening-length work, garnered a Bessie Award. Facing Mekka followed, celebrating women of hip hop.

Always with one foot in the streets and the other on the stage, time spent teaching in the studio has been an extension of his ongoing hip-hop ministry. With his signature cap, and a towel hanging from his shoulder, before any movement, he guides his classes in a fact-filled discussion on tradition, the elders, and then he breaks down the choreography (aka “routines”). This is where Harris makes all of us rethink the possibilities of bridging the streets and the stage. As he puts it, “At the end of the day it’s not just street dance, it’s a culture.”

He’s Dr. Rennie Harris now, his Illadelph Legends of Hip-hop Festival, begun in 1997, is ever strong, and he heads four companies: RHPM; the youth-driven RHAW (Rennie Harris Awe-Inspiring Works); Rennie Harris Grass Roots, with mixed-level and polycultural dancers; plus the all-female THIS WOMAN.

For his unwavering efforts he has received numerous accolades, including three Black Theater Alliance Awards for best choreography, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, a Philadelphia Rocky Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pew Fellowship, and a Governor’s Awards for the Arts Artist of the Year nod, to name just a few. Harris’ cultural cipher is alive and well.

Courtesy Harris

For information about the Dance Magazine Awards ceremony on December 4,
click here.

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“I don’t feel tired,” she says. “I don’t feel like I hate it. I don’t feel like it’s redundant. I can express different things. I can see what’s happening in a more mature way, and I’m intrigued by this moment.”

It’s not that she isn’t aware of her aging body. “I’m not as quick and as fast as I used to be,” Sims says. “It’s a challenge, but how can I express movement in a new way?”

Born in the Bronx, Sims trained at the Ballet Hispánico School of Dance and graduated from the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. While dancing with Ballet Hispánico, she attended an audition at the Ailey company on a whim. She got the job and, in the end, even more—Ailey is where she met her dancer-husband, Glenn Allen Sims.

She thrives in works by Ailey: Like him, she understands theater and doesn’t overpower the stage, but pulls you in with her simmering dramatic power. “I think I was probably born to be an actress and just fell into dance,” she says, with a laugh.

But she’s also left her mark in the works of others, namely the choreographer Ronald K. Brown, whose mix of African and modern dance is potently served by Sims—she slips inside of his steps with such ease and litheness that it seems as though music is coursing through her veins. She credits Brown for encouraging her to be softer. “He has a vision of women being powerful, but they don’t have to show their power,” she explains. “I’ve had to learn how to be this woman.”

Sims in Ronald K. Brown’s Grace. Photo by Paul Kolnik, courtesy AAADT

While she has no plans to stop dancing, Sims is the assistant to Ailey’s rehearsal director. She recently oversaw Paul Taylor’s Piazzolla Caldera, and she also coaches individual dancers.

“When I feel I’m done, I’m going to be done,” she says. “But I don’t feel done. How can I be so efficient in using less energy yet touch people’s hearts and change your mood in the seat? How can I do this and still touch you and reach you and make you feel what I feel? That’s really a goal.”

For information about the Dance Magazine Awards ceremony on December 4,
click here.

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Vishneva got her start at the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg. Seven years later she won the Prix de Lausanne, and in 1995, she joined the Mariinsky Ballet, with whom she gave her first major performances in New York City. In 2001, she began her guest artist career, performing with La Scala Ballet, the Paris Opéra Ballet, Staatsballett Berlin and others over the years.

For dancers today, guesting is a common practice, but Vishneva, 41, was among the first of her generation to do so. Even so, that was never part of a master plan.

“I was dancing a lot with Vladimir Malakhov in Europe and Russia, and he opened me to thinking how important and great it is to be able to be a guest star,” she says. “Right now people move around so much easier, but back in the day it was very exclusive.”

Presently Vishneva is back in Russia working on CONTEXT, her dance festival that aims to both present contemporary choreography and to encourage new talent. She also recently opened CONTEXT Pro, a dance studio in St. Petersburg.

With Marcelo Gomes in Onegin. Photo by Batya Annadurdyev, courtesy Vishneva.

Vishneva says she will continue to perform with the Mariinsky and as a guest artist. Even now, she wants her dancing to move people, to make them think about who they are and what is happening in their lives. “It’s the way I use my instrument to deliver to the audience what I’m exploring,” she says. “I’m not just ‘Diana Vishneva,’ a big name. I work hard and I never stop, and I hope I’m going forward. It’s not because I am talented.”

She pauses. “Yes—there is some of that. But talent doesn’t work if you’re not a hard worker and through this, it opens something. Little by little. It’s like flowers. And you want more. You want to open more flowers to find a different way. There’s no limit. For me, it’s important if I feel the limit. That’s the end.”

Has she ever felt it? She laughs. “That’s why I continue.”

For information about the Dance Magazine Awards ceremony on December 4,
click here.

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For the first time ever, the proceeds from the awards ceremony will go to The Harkness Foundation for Dance to create a new grant for choreographers in their first decade of our work. It’s our way of not only honoring those who have made dance what it is today, but investing in artists who will help shape what it becomes tomorrow.

To purchase tickets, please email dmawards@dancemedia.com or call (212) 979-4872.
Performance and post-awards cocktail party tickets are $250. Performance-only tickets are $50. Opportunities to participate at a leadership level of $1,000 are available and include a VIP pre-performance champagne reception.

The post 2017 Dance Magazine Awards appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Contact: Nicole Buggé

Media Manager

Dance Media Publications, LLC

nbuggé@dancemedia.com 212-979-4862

Dance Magazine
is pleased to announce that the annual Dance Magazine Awards, the most prestigious awards event in dance, will make the Harkness Foundation for Dance the beneficiary of the proceeds from the event, which will be held on Monday, December 4, at the Ailey Citigroup Theater (405 West 55th Street) in Manhattan. The Harkness Foundation for Dance, a leading donor to dance, will in turn designate the proceeds to a newly created award to assist choreographers in their first decade of professional work.

”I am thrilled that we are able, in partnership with the Harkness Foundation, to provide tangible support to the
dance community. I could think of no better way to leverage the power of
Dance Magazine, now celebrating its 90th anniversary.”—Frederic M. Seegal, owner and CEO, Dance Media Publications, LLC

The Dance Magazine Awards recognize outstanding men and women whose contributions have left a lasting impact on dance. The tradition dates back to 1954. The new Harkness Promise Award seeks to shine a light on the other end of the spectrum, recognizing emerging young artists for the promise of their artistic work, and also for their innovative thinking about how to be an effective artist-citizen who positively impacts dance and the broader community through performance, education, organization, activism or other means. From 1986 to the present, the Harkness Foundation has contributed over $30 million to more than 560 organizations across the industry.

The Harkness Promise Award will include a $5,000 unrestricted grant, up to 40 hours of studio space within the grant year, and ongoing consulting and mentorship with Joan Finkelstein, the foundation’s executive director. A performance project may result from this support, but is not a condition of the award. The first recipient(s) will be announced in June 2018.

“The Harkness Foundation for Dance is honored to partner with the dance field’s indisputable magazine of record,
Dance Magazine. The Foundation is excited about this new initiative, which will extend our ability to support the future of the dance field.” —Joan Finkelstein, Executive Director, The Harkness Foundation for Dance

The winners of the 60th annual Dance Magazine Awards will be announced in the October 2017 issue of Dance Magazine. To facilitate the success of the awards event and fundraising for the Harkness Promise Award, a gala committee is in formation.

Tickets to the performance and post-awards cocktail party and buffet are $250. Opportunities to participate at a leadership level of $1,000 are available and include a VIP pre-performance champagne reception. Performance-only tickets are $50. To order, email dmawards@dancemedia.com or call 212-979-4872.

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About Dance Magazine:

For 90 years, Dance Magazine has provided insight and practical information, as well as news, interviews and beautiful, original photography. Dance Magazine illuminates the art form on a global scale, often breaking ground with fiercely personal accounts of life as a dancer. Dance Magazine is published by Dance Media Publications, LLC, whose properties also include: Dance Spirit®, Dance Teacher®, Pointe® and Dance Retailer NewsTM, plus associated websites and apps.

About The Harkness Foundation for Dance:

The Harkness Foundation for Dance is a private grant-making foundation dedicated to invigorating and supporting the dance art-form, predominantly in New York City. Since 1959, the Harkness name has been synonymous with dance philanthropy. The Foundation carries forward the lifelong dedication to the dance art form of the great American dance patron Rebekah Harkness. Over many decades, this support has taken the form of funding, rehearsal and theater space, technical assistance, and guidance—an unrivaled legacy that has touched countless dance artists and companies in all dance styles and genres. With a broad focus that spans dance creation, presentation, education, medicine and other vital services to the dance field, from 1986 to the present the Harkness Foundation has contributed over $30 million to more than 560 organizations across the industry. For more information: harknessfoundation.org

The post Press Release: Dance Magazine Announces a New Partnership With The Harkness Foundation for Dance on Emerging Choreographers Initiative appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Today, we are thrilled to announce the four honorees for 2017:

Hip hop icon Rennie Harris

Dance medicine pioneer Marika Molnar

Ailey phenom Linda Celeste Sims

International ballerina Diana Vishneva

Keep your eyes peeled for our December issue to learn more about the extraordinary accomplishments of each of these leaders in our field today.

And join us to celebrate with live performances and special guests at New York’s Ailey Citigroup Theater on December 4. For the first time, this year’s event will donate proceeds to the Harkness Foundation for Dance to fund a newly-created award for choreographers in their first decade of professional work.

Click here
for the official press release.

Tickets to the performance and post-awards cocktail party and buffet are $250. Opportunities to participate at a leadership level of $1,000 are available and include a VIP pre-performance champagne reception. Performance-only tickets are $50. To order, email dmawards@dancemedia.com or call 212-979-4872.

The post Meet Our 2017 Dance Magazine Awardees appeared first on Dance Magazine.