But Mims refused to give up. Drawing on her years of experience creating work at the intersection of art, abolition and social justice, she decided to advocate for her uncle in a new way: through dance.

As part of a 2022 multidisciplinary installation called Uncle Ronnie’s Room, Mims mined her family history to transform an old cell in Los Angeles’ Chuco’s Justice Center—a former juvenile detention center turned community space—into a re-creation of her uncle’s childhood bedroom, with the space between the cells becoming the site-specific stage for the dance portion of the work. Her goal was to inspire audiences to get involved by showing them who Coleman is as a person, the impact incarceration has had on his family and—had he not been imprisoned for the last two decades—the alternate possibilities for his life.

Mims, a 2019 graduate of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance and a Dance Magazine 2022 “25 to Watch” pick, joins a growing array of artists using dance to shed light on issues surrounding incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline and the justice system as a whole. Some are teaching dance and choreography directly to inmates. Others are using their personal experience as the foundation for concert works addressing these complex, and sometimes controversial, themes. And others still are channeling their frustration towards the justice system into something more hopeful: a dance-based imagining of a different, more just future.

Movement as Liberation

“When you think about imprisonment or the justice system, you think about the ways our bodies are under attack,” says Ana Maria Alvarez, founder and artistic director of CONTRA-TIEMPO Activist Dance Theater in Los Angeles. “Our access to liberation and our access to power is through our bodies.”

Alvarez’s work joyUS justUS takes on the justice system’s disproportionate impact on communities of color and, instead of dwelling on hardship and deficit, focuses on the joy emanating from these communities as the root of freedom. The dancers don’t move only to music, but they also dance to the cadences of spoken text that incorporates elements of the U.S. justice system, like poetry derived from the Miranda rights and courtroom discourse.

For Alvarez, combining strong, full-bodied movements with these emotionally and politically charged words underscores why embodied performance is such an apt medium for this kind of work. “Dance is such a powerful tool because it’s rooted in our bodies, in our movement, in our connection with one another and in the ancestral wisdom of continuing to move in the face of incredible struggle and violence,” she says.

Choreographer and prison abolition activist Suchi Branfman, who works with incarcerated men in the California Rehabilitation Center (CRC), a medium-security facility in Norco, California, explains that the same idea applies to her work. Plus, she says, dance is just a whole lot of fun. “To witness and be with people who are dancing while living in a cage is a direct antithesis to confinement,” she explains. “We laugh a lot. There’s deep joy and community-building in dance, which is amplified when you’re dancing with folks inside prison.”

Going Beyond the Personal

Choreographer Kyle Abraham’s 2016 work for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Untitled America, dives into the ripple effect imprisonment has on the families of the incarcerated. Abraham has an uncle who served time in prison, and the family’s lived experience informed the work. But he looked beyond those connections during the creative process. “I wanted to focus primarily on the humanity of the situation,” says Abraham, whose interviews with previously incarcerated individuals played a large role in the development of the work and the stories that were told onstage.

Mims, too, drew from her own experiences, family memories and the stories of her ancestors when creating Uncle Ronnie’s Room. At the beginning of her choreographic process, she looked to her great-grandparents’ legacy as organizers in the South during the Civil Rights Movement. For the score, Mims asked her grandmother for suggestions from her great-grandparents’ music library. “I just sat with the songs for a long time and really let them get into my body and my spirit,” she says. “After doing that for a bit, I went into the studio and started moving to them.”

Community Behind Walls

While some dance artists are using the stage as a platform for change, others are going inside to create it. Patrick Makuakāne, an innovative hula artist and the director of Nā Lei Hulu i ka Wēkiu in San Francisco, has been the spiritual advisor at San Quentin State Prison since 2016. In this position, Makuakāne now leads the Native Hawaiian Religious Spiritual Group, which, before the pandemic, was a gathering of San Quentin men from Hawaiian and Polynesian cultures—as well as several Vietnamese, Filipino and white members—that met once a week to learn about Hawaiian culture and dance.

“ ‘Spiritual advisor’ is the term that prison officials use, but I think of myself as a community builder,” Makuakāne says. “And that’s what the men really responded to. They learned that hula is more than a dance, it’s about taking care of one another in community.”

Branfman made a similar discovery through her choreography project at CRC, which, prior to the pandemic, had been meeting weekly since late 2016. “When you make a big circle in a gym in a prison and turn on good music, everybody dances,” she says. “The root of the work that we do is understanding that dance is a way of being together in community and thriving and sustaining ourselves.”

After COVID-19 restrictions made in-person gathering impossible, Branfman pivoted in an effort to maintain the community she and the CRC prisoners had created. Using written packets, she invited the dancers to continue choreographing. What they wrote and sent out became Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls During a Pandemic, a series of works directed by Branfman which continues to be performed in person, virtually and via other forms of media by dance artists on the outside.

Reclaiming the Ripple Effect

Branfman’s and Makuakāne’s work reverberates beyond prison walls too. Makuakāne says that it’s not uncommon for members of his group to reach out to him after they’ve been released to thank him for the skills they learned through hula. Branfman’s work presents a great deal of food for thought for audiences, as they witness stories told from the inside.

Abraham, too, kept the lessons Untitled America could teach his audiences in mind, specifically those viewers who haven’t directly experienced the impacts of incarceration. “Something that I was really drawing on in a lot of ways was my mother being in the hospital and knowing that she wasn’t able to leave,” he explains. “People who may not have someone in prison can connect with being in a space they don’t want to be in or thinking about how hard it might be when they can’t see a loved one.”

And, in addition to using the visceral nature of dance to convey the difficult emotions surrounding incarceration, artists like Alvarez are using movement to put a new future on the table, showing by example what a reimagined justice system could look like. “How do we use joy, community, dance, music and power to build a system that is thinking about our health and well-being?” she asks. “It’s going to take rethinking the entire model of how the justice system works. JoyUS justUS is a proposal on how we can imagine a future that’s full of more love and more justice.”

The post How Dance Artists are Addressing the U.S. Prison System in Their Work, Both Onstage and on the Inside appeared first on Dance Magazine.

It wasn’t until June 12, 1967, six months before the film was released, that interracial marriage was legalized. That court case, Loving v. Virginia, took place in the state where Archibald was commissioned to make a ballet.

“It started with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” says Archibald. “I wanted to pay homage to this historic film through a ballet, as a step toward changing the narratives seen on stages. The spine of the story is about love, and the music for the ballet binds together themes of compassion, love and civil rights history. Singers’ voices inspire dancers to respond physically and to explore vulnerability as part of loving relationships. The ballet’s duets reflect the highs and lows that are part of unconventional relationships, historically and today.”

The score includes music by Sam Cooke, a central figure in the civil rights movement, who imbues the ballet with a soulful and poignant acoustic landscape.

Archibald has distinguished herself as a courageous choreographer who can uncover difficult histories and make strides towards greater understanding and connections among people. In 2021, her commission for Tulsa Ballet, called Breakin’ Bricks, examined the city’s past and future, acknowledging the horrific massacre of 1921 while making space for a city that can “build together, and create a community that can listen to and support one another,” says Archibald in a video about the process of making Breakin’ Bricks that is subtitled “Finding Spirit Through Ashes.”

The ballet was selected as one of the best events of 2021, with Tulsa World critic James D. Watts Jr. writing, “Jennifer Archibald’s Breakin’ Bricks … is a work that left the audience with an unspoken but inescapable question: Now that you’ve seen how racism both subtle and gross has permeated our past and present, what will you do to remove it from our collective future?”

In Richmond, a city that was the capital of the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865, and, in 2020, home to protests about Confederate monuments, Archibald was inspired by the dancers. “Richmond Ballet is made up of a group of artists who are diverse, thoughtful, and reflective,” she says. “While making this ballet, we had many conversations about the city’s history, and its future. I talked about my own parents and what life was like for them as an interracial couple who got married in 1969 in Canada. I am hopeful that it’s the current generation of dancers and choreographers who are making ballet a place to share stories that are relevant to everyone.”

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner premieres on November 1 and will be performed in Richmond until November 6, as part of the company’s Studio 2 program. The ballet will also be included in Richmond Ballet’s January 27 performance at the Virginia Wesleyan University Susan S. Goode Fine and Performing Arts Center in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

The post Jennifer Archibald’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” Premieres at Richmond Ballet appeared first on Dance Magazine.

DM: Could you talk about your beginnings as a dancer?

Bararian: I was born in Iran, in a small city called Babol, in the north. I was born after the 1979 revolution, which completely changed everything in the country. The Iranian National Ballet was closed down; all the dance schools were closed down. Dance, for the government, is seen as a cheap art, as seductive. Growing up, people from my generation did not have the chance to have a dance class.

My dance journey started when we first immigrated to Australia, when I was 11. I was given a free platform for the first time, and at the end of our year at the school, we were told we could perform whatever we wanted. At that time, I was obsessed with Michael Jackson. I mean, the resources we had [in Iran] were so limited, but we did have an international cable TV. Now, if the government knew that we had these international TV sets, they would come into your house, imprison you, take away the TV, you might have gotten lashes, I don’t know. When I was three, they walked into our house and my dad had to go on the roof: He fell off and broke his leg trying to dismantle the cable.

In Australia, my dad was working on his degree in physiotherapy, my mom was working all the time, so I was alone a lot of the day. One of the things that got me through the day was dancing, and I liked dancing to Michael Jackson. I decided to perform it for the school show and I got so much great positive feedback and I was like, ‘I never knew that this was something I could do!’ When I was 14, we immigrated to Canada and my mom said, ‘why don’t you take ballet classes?’ I really owe my dance journey to my parents, because they were my main supporters, and they were the ones who pushed me to continue and to not give up.

Why did you start Dancers of Iran?

I used to travel to Iran, and I really wanted to do something for the dance world. Now, compared to when I was growing up, there are classes, there are dance schools, they do have performances. It’s just that it could get canceled at any time, if the government officials want to come and cancel it. It is not a free platform. While I was travelling, I wanted to do something for the dancers there, but a lot of them were scared, which I understand, because if they publicly show a dance video of themselves, they might get imprisoned.

When the pandemic hit, [at first] I didn’t feel like I was capable of doing anything. This site was so they could feel like they can be seen. So that’s how it started. Dance performances have been illegal in Iran for the past 40 years, but people are still dancing—you can’t suppress it.

What do you hope to accomplish with Dancers of Iran?

In Iran, we really don’t have a dance community. I wanted to create a community. I want this platform to say, ‘you’re all being supported; you all have talent.’ I think that’s what kept it going, and dancers feel more comfortable now to share their videos. Basically, it’s like a free marketing platform. I also have a YouTube channel for Dancers of Iran where I started to offer more information about what I know about the dance world. I use my own portfolio—my resume, my reference letters—as examples. I have done workshops [via Zoom] for them as well.

How do you feel with Iran and Iranian women being at the forefront of global news? What role do you feel dancers play in this struggle?

What happened to Mahsa Amini, every person, especially every woman, could relate to. She was an ordinary woman, walking down the street, who got killed for nothing.

We are dancing for, hopefully, the next revolution. I feel very proud of Iranians and Iranian women right now. I’m trying to support them in any way I can. I can use my platform to be a voice, so now the page is more focused on what’s going on right now and responding to that. When I started Dancers of Iran, I really tried not to be political because I was mindful of the dancers who are inside Iran. I wanted the dancers to feel safe. But now, it’s not a time for that. Now you have to pick a side, and we’re going to pick the right side.  

The post A Q&A with Tina Bararian, Who Is Connecting the Dancers of Iran appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Just in time for the most-watched sporting event in the country, Riley successfully spearheaded a movement (on behalf of as many as 400 performers) to ensure that all dancers for the halftime show got fully compensated for their time and energy. For dancers in the community and supporters of the movement who helped spread the issue far and wide, this news felt like a game-winning touchdown—the type that calls for a celebratory dance! But the work doesn’t end there. It’s just one part of a continuous conversation.

Speaking up about the mistreatment of professional dancers is nothing new for Riley, a self-proclaimed dancer artist-athlete who, since the early quarantine days, has sparked some important conversations about the realities of the industry on social media. “We need to start educating people on the state of our community, in addition to being clearer with dance jobs about how our time, energy and influence should be valued,” says Riley, who uses she/he/they pronouns.

Along the way, Riley shared their own experiences in a way that pretty much every dancer can relate to. Now they’re building an entertainment company, TKO Quarantainment Inc., and developing a multitude of creative projects. Riley has put their own career dancing with some of the world’s top music artists to the side to “leap into the unknown” in pursuit of a better future, where dancers are valued and the dance community as a whole is elevated.

Riley recently spoke to Dance Magazine about some of the inequities that dancers have faced on set, from unreasonably low wages to questionable contracts and the absence of credit. “Yes, some of these production companies may be trying to undermine us, but I’m starting to discover that most of them just don’t know, or are following previous patterns,” they say.

The message is now en route to millions of people worldwide as Riley continues to use their voice and platform to heal, inspire and empower the dance community to see the worth of its members, so that the rest of the world can too.

What Sparked the Action:

Having worked with a long list of prominent names like Janet Jackson, SZA, Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez, Riley has experience to pull from when addressing industry issues. Despite the great experiences that they’ve had throughout their career, it was the few bad experiences—and the normalized fear of speaking up about them—that inspired the action Riley is taking today.

Feeling the need to walk out on a dream job in 2011, due to their moral standards being tested, helped Riley to understand the deeper implications of how dancers were viewed in the industry and led them to focus on redefining those standards. “I expressed my concerns with some of the other dancers on set, and there were multiple that felt the same way,” they say. “I was in a state of shock,” but eventually Riley pulled the choreographer aside to express appreciation, and kindly let him know that they weren’t willing to compromise who they were. “In this moment, when I was asked to do choreography that I felt went against my faith, the way that I viewed the dance industry completely shifted, and it actually latched onto my love for dance,” they add.

As a second-generation entertainer, Riley had always viewed themself as a business, and that’s part of the reason they’re fighting so hard for dancers to understand the importance of honoring the craft while honoring personal boundaries.

On Dancers Viewing Themselves as a Business:

“Do you have a mission statement? When you’re working, do you have a vision or a purpose for why you’re there? As a dance professional, that’s what you stand on. That’s your foundation. Who you are can then be broken down into concepts and statements, which can help you organize your value and the definition of your product, which is your likeness.”

These are crucial factors to take into consideration so that dance artists can stand firmly on what they believe in while on the job, and easily discern what they’re willing to stand for, fall for or sacrifice when it comes to certain dance jobs.

Tuning In to “TAJTV”

Riley plans for TKO Quarantainment’s debut television program series, “TAJTV,” to serve as a resource to help uplift the dance community. It’s a unique talk show that’ll feature a number of special segments featuring an elite cast of mainstream entertainers, and tap into topics of concern within the industry, while discussing how to build solutions. “I want to be able to show the great parts of the dance industry, as well as touch on some of the things that need more awareness.”

“We’ve already shot some of the pilot, and I’m so thankful to all of the donors to the GoFundMe! We would love to finish it so that we can pitch it for up-fronts.” You can find updates on Riley’s GoFundMe page as they inch toward the $15,000 goal to get the show off the ground and onto television screens. 

The Day-to-Day of a Dance Activist:

As someone who’s working to improve the reality of dance artists, daily life is “unpredictable,” Riley says. “Some days are very empowering, productive and triumphant, and other days feel very sad and draining.”

“There’s also the physical work and outreach, like contacting media, and a long to-do list for projects in progress: The continual development, executive producing, going out to get people on board, contracting, developing, templating, creating, reading, amending and delegating to the team. Then, of course, there’s leaving space for my emotional work, which I find in my dance training, and even horse training! Awakening myself dance-wise has been crucial for grounding myself during this process. ”

Riley feels the busy schedule is worth it because they’ve focused on the bigger picture: impacting the dance community—and beyond. Inspired by the openness of Oprah Winfrey, Riley is hoping that this movement can have the same impact for dance as major media figures and publications of that level have had on other fields.

On Memes and Bringing Humor Into the Mix:

Many of the memes on Riley’s Instagram page use humor to shine a light on some seriously shady issues that dancers face. “I think that the best way to heal is to laugh and cry,” they say. “Being a part of meme culture is being able to captivate the subconscious of the alter egos inside of you in a way that feels relatable.”

How Others Can Get Involved:

“We must unify! We have so much power, and we’re so much stronger together,” Riley says. “When you read this article, go talk to someone about it. Bring it to your parents, your dance teacher, your dance peers, and have a discussion about it.”

Making Dance History:

The bottom line is that despite the popularity that dance artists have helped make possible for so many brands and music artists over the years, they are often still grossly underappreciated. Riley believes that professional dancers should be treated and paid equally to professional athletes and musicians. For a lot of folks, such drastic change just isn’t fathomable, but Riley continues to push the vision forward and unapologetically highlight the mistreatment of dancers, so that positive change can be applied within the industry little by little.

Riley is inspiring dancers to move past unethical traditions just because “that’s the way things have always been.” Questioning is the new cool. Respect is a must. Dancers are artists and athletes, and should be treated as such. And Riley reminds us of the need to continue the fight for progress: “This whole movement is just beginning.”

Grow Your Knowledge:

• The Ins and Outs Podcast

• DanceSpeak Podcast

• Pro Cheerleading Podcast

The post Beyond the Super Bowl: Dance Artist-Athlete Taja Riley Is Demanding Better Treatment for Dancers appeared first on Dance Magazine.

2016: I was asked to create a duet for RAWdance (Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein) in San Francisco at a time when my heart was caught in a perpetual state of reeling from the constant murders of African Americans by law enforcement, most recently the murder of Walter Scott, who was shot in the back in South Carolina after being stopped for a nonfunctioning brake light. I knew I had to address the killings, but I didn’t know how. I felt incompetent, my work felt inadequate. So after a career dedicated to the intersection of choreography and social activism, I created Enough?, a piece that asks whether dance can meaningfully address social movements like Black Lives Matter.

1991: I was finishing Urban Scenes/Creole Dreams, my first commission for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a work juxtaposing the early 1900s stories of my sharecropper Creole­ grandmother in the swamps of Louisiana with my own stories as a gay African American in New York City’s East Village at the apex of the AIDS pandemic. The work called out the sexism, racism and homophobia that extended from my grandmother’s era into my own. One night after rehearsal I participated in ACT UP’s (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) takeover of Grand Central Terminal at rush hour in order to bring that evening’s commute to its knees and force attention to America’s anemic response to the AIDS pandemic.

And take over we did. Being part of hundreds of screaming protesters taking up space in Grand Central turned an act of desperation into an act of empowerment. AIDS received the attention we demanded. What AIDS did not receive was empathy. We were hated by the understandably livid commuters; they spat at protesters, shouted AIDS-phobic slurs, and the event was one step from erupting into violence. Our protest was necessary and I was honored to be there. But I wondered what the impact might be if the commuters could deeply feel the enormity of the grief that propelled us into this takeover?

Creating this empathy was not the purpose of our takeover. But it became the purpose of my art-making. Without losing the political urgency of my work, I now wanted to create those bridges of empathy that would better transcend the boundaries of difference and allow the disenfranchised to shout tales of their personal and political histories while also allowing viewers to see themselves in the lives of these very disenfranchised. As a politics major at Princeton, I understood that a necessary first step in oppression of any kind is to dehumanize the oppressed. At that protest, my mission consciously became to “re-humanize.” Urban Scenes remained an urgent calling out of racism, sexism and homophobia, but the piece became less about those “isms” and more about the eternality of devastating loss due to those “isms.”

1991–2016: I created a body of work with this new mission at its expressive core. These works often contained text that told the nonlinear narratives of marginalized BIPOC and LGBTQ people. But it was dance’s ability to speak deeply through an abstract metaphoric language that gave these works their emotional wallop and potential to jump the boundaries between us. I knew how to speak most accessibly through text, but I knew how to speak most deeply through dance. If the goal was to create bridges, then abstract kinetic languages were the stepping-stones to those bridges. And making work in this way was enough.

Until it was not.

2022: With the advantage of time, I look back at the creation of Enough?. I had entered the studio filled with both the despair of watching the slaughter of Black bodies and the hope of watching the response by millions that became BLM, as if life were a roller coaster plummeting between heaven and hell. That roller coaster became the core of Enough?.

The piece begins with the first in a series of projected tweet-like text passages: “I have been thinking a lot about what a dance can ‘do’.” We see the performers, Ryan and Wendy, in stillness as Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “A Change Is Gonna Come” begins, a recording that is lushly beautiful even as it calls for deep change. The dancers begin one long single phrase of sumptuous movement that matches the lushness of the music. As Aretha hits a gospel-inflected high note and bends it as only Aretha can, the text passages read “YUUUUUUMMM!!” “Did your heart jump like your toes were skipping ’cross the clouds?” The intersection of words, music and dance feels sublime. The dancers repeat the same exact phrase over and over, all the while dancing faster and faster; the swirling curves of lushness slowly transform into a jagged thrashing frenzy. At the apex of this superhuman speed the intersection of words, music and dance feels like a whirlwind of despair. Media coverage of Walter Scott being shot by law enforcement is projected into the work as the core of Enough? is revealed to be a searing indictment of the murder of African Americans. The text reads “A dance can show you how my heart feels when I see that video.” “Because that video makes my heart feel like Ryan and Wendy are dancing.” “Right now.” “A dance can tell you how quickly life moves from toes touching clouds to hearts mired in hell.” Aretha’s voice ends. The only sound is the dancer’s gasping breath as Ryan and Wendy fall to the ground exhausted. The final passages of text read, “Yep, dance can do all that.” “But when I see that video, I am left to wonder…is it enough?”

Enough? altered again my choreographic tactics towards­ creating socially engaged choreography. The text asks whether­ we can act while its deeper undercurrents—the movement—insists that we must act. The “narrator” (assumedly­ the choreographer) is less someone to identify with than a neutral voice to propel the conversation forward. Questioning the adequacy of my own response invites you to question the adequacy of your response; our viewing the news footage “together” asks whether your heart also feels like Ryan and Wendy are dancing when you view an assault on Black bodies. Enough? does not seek empathy towards a character. It seeks empathy towards a political movement; it seeks to spur you into action not because you care about the narrator, but because you care about Walter Scott, because you care about humanity.

I went to protests. I made donations. But when I was truly lost I did the one thing I could rely on: I made a dance. Was that Enough? That is for the viewer to decide. But tapping into the immense power of performance to provoke, to prod, to move, to have heartfelt conversations in a seemingly heartless time—that felt like the most important thing I could do.

Choreographer/writer/director/filmmaker David Roussève has created 14 full evening works for his company David Roussève/REALITY.

The post Is Dance “Enough” to Meaningfully Address Something Like Black Lives Matter? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Writing about anti-racism work is a fraught endeavor because, as a white person, I’ll always have blind spots. For example, the book includes a list of “25 Practices for Decolonizing Dance (and finding your Poetic Nerve).” In retrospect, I should have used different language.

“Decolonize” has become a ubiquitous term because colonialism is everywhere. Colonial legacies exist not only outside of us, in sociopolitical power dynamics, but also in our bodies. Colonial legacies pervade dominant cultural notions of time, value, space and language.

But Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s article “Decolonization is not a metaphor” criticizes use of the term in contexts other than the repatriation of Indigenous land, saying that decolonization “is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies.” Holding Tuck and Yang’s article in mind, I want to be more specific with my language when I talk about reorganizing the field to resist complicity with legacies of oppression. We can ask many questions that interrogate power and privilege in the field: How can we compose bodies in space and time without asserting power over those bodies? How can we resist monolithic meaning in dance? How do we disentangle authority from authorship? How can dancemaking be liberatory for everyone involved? How can we anchor dancemaking in authentic community and in trust? How can we dismantle white supremacy in the field? These questions are related to the important economic and political work of decolonization, but not synonymous with it.

I want to talk about aligning choreographic practice with commitments to mutual liberation. This is necessarily both structural and personal work. We must reorganize the underpinnings of art practice: our organizations, agreements with collaborators and relationships in the studio. We must democratize arts leadership, demand equitable contracting, train arts workers in cultural competency, add Indigenous representation to boards and staff, center BIPOC artists in programming, honor Indigenous protocol by acknowledging Native land, and advocate for reparations for the displacement of Indigenous peoples.

And politics don’t stop at the studio door. How can we integrate political commitments into our dances, our bodies?

With this context in mind, I offer this revised list of prompts from Shifting Cultural Power: “25 Practices for Aligning Choreographic Practice with a Commitment to Mutual Liberation.”

1. The space should not be white-dominated. Indigenous people and people of color should be fully integrated, engaged, empowered, acknowledged and respected in the cast, crew and artistic staff.
2. Practice sustained listening.
3. Encourage imperfection and doubt (yours and others).
4. Slow down. Value pause. Waste time. Wander.
5. Value pleasure.
6. Invite excess, kitsch, camp, sentimentality and overmuchness.
7. Orient the dance and its systems outward. Make in relationship. Make dance in the mess of the world.
8. Allow the dancing to be invisible, ambiguous and illegible.
9. There is no original, truest version of movement. Movement material is collectively owned and authored.
10. Allow edges to be a part of the landscape of the dance. Refuse a fixed front.
11. Be transparent about your needs and your fallibility as an artist. Be clear about the terms of the work with yourself and your collaborators. Name collaborative periods of work. Name when you need to author or edit.
12. Acknowledge and credit sources of movement, both in the studio (“This is a phrase that Jane made.” “I pulled this idea off of YouTube.”) and in promotional materials (“This dance was co-created by…”).
13. Allow for multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple variables, multiple vocabularies. Develop a vocabulary of inclusion sourced from multiple bodies. What does it mean to express authorship amidst multiplicity?
14. Acknowledge and pay attention to how everyone in the room works at different processing speeds. Orient the process to different people’s sense of time.
15. Explore what it might mean for the dance to be porous. What can you let into the space of the dance?
16. Practice making without a show in mind. Hold the creative process lightly while still staying engaged,
    accountable and supportive of others in the space.
17. Allow improvisation to take over the process. Maintain a state of radical uncertainty about what the dance might become.
18. Allow for sustained movement research outside of the task of making. Find creative modes beyond composition and mimicry.
19. Collaborate with people and places that destabilize and challenge authorship.
20. Question your choices. Question instinctual preferences. Work with a palette you despise. Stay with an idea much longer than you think is appropriate.
21. Invite other people’s emotional lives into the work.
22. Invite other people to hijack the process.
23. Practice financial transparency about artist pay, project budget and funding sources.
24. Show up with no agenda. Work with what and who is in the room.
25. Be vulnerable.

If I were to implement all of the above prompts, I might not end up making a dance at all. But there’s value in putting ourselves in a destabilized space and listening for what comes next. These are prompts for locating your political and poetic nerve. Poetic nerve does not necessarily mean surrendering authorship. It means going beyond yourself, and then back within again, and then again out past yourself, and so on, in a constant conversation between the dance and the world.

Doing the Work

These ideas are not mine. Throughout the vast and violent span of colonial history, dance artists, especially Native artists and artists of color, have been doing and continue to do this work. There’s Sydnie L. Mosley, advocating for liberation of dance pedagogy through practices such as acknowledging that “all dance forms are specific cultural practice and should be acknowledged and specifically named as such”; Mar Parrilla’s cultural exchange projects with Puerto Rico–based artists and members of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe to explore colonial legacies; Emily Johnson, whose decolonization rider calls on presenter partners to commit to the “living process” of decolonization, including compliance with Indigenous Protocol, acknowledgment­ of host Nations in all press, and engagement with the Indigenous community. There are countless other examples.

Why am I, as a white person, even trying to talk about decolonization? Because for too long, Indigenous people and people of color have shouldered this work. In the words of feminist writer Judit Moschkovich, “it is not the duty of the oppressed to educate the oppressor.” White people must do this work too.

Q&A: What tools or tactics are you using in the studio to liberate your choreographic practice?

David Herrera, artistic director and choreographer for David Herrera Performance Company:

“I channel movement through emotional recall and muscle memory to return to a time when studio teachings did not dictate how I performed or danced. I swayed, gyrated, stomped, shook my hips, pranced and spun before I ever stepped into a modern dance class. Through this approach, I am actively shedding the heavily calloused, conditioned layers of white modern dance technique. It’s a slow and arduous process; a relearning of feeling, instinct and physicality. I aim to liberate myself from the burden of aesthetics that were not inherent to my cultural upbringing or my brown body.”

Yayoi Kambara, dancer, choreographer, teacher and director of KAMBARA+:
“I dismantle systems of oppression, colonization and power by creating space to liberate our imaginations. I build artistic teams that value curiosity and mistakes. I confront my intentions behind each movement. Ballet is associated with whiteness, but it’s part of my training. When I’m making movement that twists, curves, quirks and springs, something from ballet often appears. I love a good à la seconde. But à la seconde has no inherent value. When à la seconde shows up in my choreography, it can be anything: honest, strong, vulnerable. No two bodies do it identically. Often I pause inside a ballet position and then fall out of it. Just as I consider the values behind my movement, my dances invite audiences to consider their own values.” —As told to Hope Mohr

The post 25 Prompts to Liberate Your Choreographic Practice appeared first on Dance Magazine.

We’ve all had those same hushed thoughts before, but this past year, Goodwin has brought them out into the open. Through short videos on his Instagram account—usually a close-up of him acting out two sides of an awkward conversation—he riffs on real-life dance situations and uses humor to offer relatable takes on auditions, creative processes and more. With a career spanning from Sleep No More to Broadway’s Fiddler on the Roof and Netflix’s Tick, Tick… Boom!, the Juilliard-trained dancer certainly knows the ins and outs of the industry. And thousands of likes, shares and comments later, the laughs he provides have sparked important conversations and united the community in a much deeper purpose.

What was your personal inspiration to make these videos?

I think we’re in such a strange, wonderful and sometimes kind of awful industry that people don’t really understand. And I thought a way to help people understand, and also to help other dancers connect about the personal things we hold on to, was to make everyone laugh at it.

But there’s a larger conversation happening too, and I think the pandemic has allowed dancers to sit back and really look at their experiences and see the way we’re often treated. A lot of us have had our jobs literally ripped away from us, and if we’re freelancers, we’re left with no protection. I don’t always want to be hypercritical of the dance industry because I’m obviously a part of that community and it’s a community I love and have great respect for. But I think we’ve had an opportunity to look at the systems that are not working. And to look at our experiences with choreographers, with schools, with bodies…to see the way we fit ourselves into this mold that really is not healthy in some ways. It can be a relief to feel like “Oh, my god. I’ve done that. I’ve been there. That’s happened to me or that’s happened to someone that I know.”

In your ideal world, what changes do you hope these videos could bring about?

I hope people can start asking for things that would allow someone who pursues dance as a career to really have a livelihood without holding multiple jobs at the same time. We want to be able to start families and buy homes and pay off our student loans. I hope to have more support from the government, from each other. I want dancers to not be afraid to ask for what they deserve. What they really deserve. I think we so often dismiss it all because we really want the job. But you can want the job and also ask for the things you deserve as a human being.

For example, I hope to have a dialogue about dancers generating material and recognizing the creative contributions that they’re not given credit for. How can companies look at that process and pay their dancers accordingly? And if those pieces are then remounted elsewhere, how can royalties be implemented? Even if it’s just a small royalty. It’s still the act of doing it that shows care and respect.

Whenever I watch your videos, I can’t help but wonder what else is going on in the room around you at that moment.

It’s usually just my partner, Paul, sitting in the kitchen, watching me go off on a tangent.

But sometimes he’s the cameraman, and we often have to start over because he’ll just laugh hysterically to the point where we both end up in fits, unable to move on.

But that must be so therapeutic for you!

Oh, that’s a huge part of why I do it. Some of the videos are based on things I’ve really been through, and being able to find humor in them has been fun but also incredibly healing.

So how can humor help us stay grounded during difficult times?

Right now it’s scary. It’s emotional. Everyone is carrying around a lot of anxiety. There’s political turmoil, environmental distress. And everyone is having their own personal awakening, whether they’re talking about it or not. In this pandemic, we’ve been forced to look at ourselves straight on, and I think humor allows us to do that and to unite with other people in the process. Everything is funny in some way. It helps. It keeps us in check. Humor brings empathy. And at the end of the day, if you can find a way to laugh at it, you can get through it.

Check out a few of Austin’s greatest hits:

Dance process

Dance Auditions

Dance Auditions pt.2

When a dancer sees a doctor for a cold

Dancer interviews for a tech job

The post Austin Goodwin Uses Humor to Tell It Like It Is appeared first on Dance Magazine.

This month, Tulsa Ballet premieres her multimedia Breakin’ Bricks after a yearlong creative process. Made for the company plus eight Black dancers hired for the project, Breakin’ Bricks reflects upon—and responds to—the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which terrorized the city’s prosperous Black community of Greenwood. The piece is, Archibald says, “one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever done.”

You’ve called Breakin’ Bricks a “documentary-format ballet.” What does that mean?

I went into the field with a videographer, Guy de Lancey, to interview people about what life in Tulsa is like today from a racial perspective. I put myself in a journalist’s shoes, in a way. What was challenging was getting people to talk transparently. It was hard to peel back the layers and get answers to “What’s the difference between North and South Tulsa? Do you cross the tracks? Will Greenwood be prosperous again?”

When Marcello [Angelini, Tulsa Ballet’s artistic director] approached me, the only ways I could see this being authentic and successful were, one, if we hired Black dancers and, two, if we brought local voices into the story. I didn’t think I would be able to honor the spirits and authentically commemorate Black people if I didn’t have film and audio sharing space with the movement onstage. That’s why documentation has been so attractive to me, because I feel like, when we watch ballets, they can be so abstract. We don’t usually know who these people in front of us are.

There was an audition in June to hire Black dancers for Breakin’ Bricks. What were you looking for?

Initially, I wasn’t sure if I wanted ballet versus contemporary movers, so I said, “Let’s keep it general and see who’s interested.” What was great about that process were the dancers who reached out to say, “Listen, I’m really interested in this, but I’m concerned about” this or that. It was eye-opening in terms of my responsibility to make sure the Black dancers I chose felt supported.

All while ballet itself is reassessing and metabolizing its relationship to white supremacy culture. How will you bring this history and this art form into meaningful dialogue?

I do not have a black-and-white answer, but it is something that has kept me awake numerous nights. It’s important that we all know that, in this process, we can make mistakes and make amends and learn from it. I’ve tried to be as transparent as I can be with all of the dancers, who sometimes email me questions about this process in the middle of the night. It’s a learning curve that extends to how we’re going to market the show, and how we’re going to do outreach during the residency for these Black artists, because they’re interested in teaching workshops and reaching the community that never shows up to the ballet. I really, really want to make sure the audience is diverse and that we’re not just presenting to a predominantly white audience, which is what I do all the time.

Ideally, it’s a productive process.

That’s the thing: The company has to realize this is not like any other commission, and all of the departments need to realize they are included in that transformation. These dancers can’t come in, as guests, and feel isolated. The residency for the Black dancers we’ve hired is just five weeks. That in itself is a testament to why ballet companies need to be more diverse, so these stories can live for more than just three or four nights.

The post Jennifer Archibald Responds to the Tulsa Race Massacre With a Multimedia Premiere for Tulsa Ballet appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Yes, stereotypes and tokenism remain an issue. But burlesque performers often find an outlet they never imagined in formal dance studios. “It really fills my cup,” says Marcy Richardson, who marries aerial dance, opera and pole dancing in her nightlife act, and also performs with the burlesque troupe Company XIV. “I get to be my most authentic self and let go of any expectations that people have.”

Burlesque’s history in the U.S. has deeper roots than modern dance or even ballet. It grew out of Victorian music hall, Victorian burlesque and minstrel shows in the second half of the 19th century. Today’s version of burlesque best resembles that of the early 1900s, when vaudeville reigned supreme. The form flourished during prohibition, and, pushed partially underground, the striptease took center stage. A wave of censorship shut down shows in the late ’30s, but burlesque came roaring back in the ’40s and ’50s, thanks to female trailblazers like Lili St. Cyr and Tempest Storm.

An entrepreneurial spirit remains firmly embedded in 21st-century burlesque. Like concert-dance choreographers, burlesquers often wear many hats: dancemaker, costume designer, self-promoter, makeup artist. “Generally, we’re independent artists,” says Jeez Loueez, a New Orleans–based burlesque performer who started out in musical theater. “It’s up to you to seek out the jobs—and get your own rehearsal space, edit your own music and design your own costumes.”

One of the most rewarding differences from a formal dance career is how often you get to perform, says burlesquer Dirty Martini. Burlesque acts translate well to myriad venues with the capacity to pull together a show quickly. “When you’re rehearsing for a contemporary-dance work, it takes, what, six months to get a concert together, and maybe you can perform for one weekend,” says Martini. “In nightlife, there are shows four or five times a week. You can take an idea you have, and in a week it’s onstage.”

The need to constantly market yourself in order to generate an audience and a loyal following feels similarly exhausting to the hustle demanded of independent contemporary choreographers, however. For most of Loueez’s burlesque career, she’s had to get enough butts in seats to turn a profit for herself. “Say there’s a bar that wants to have a burlesque show,” she says. “You might reach out to a producer, who’ll say, ‘Great. It’ll cost me $2,000 to produce this event.’ Now you have to sell tickets and match that cost before getting a cut of the door.” Loueez likes to joke that if she worked at Walgreens, she wouldn’t need to constantly post on social media that everyone should come visit her at a certain time. “I wish I could just go to work without having to shout about it every day on social media.”

Despite burlesque’s hustle culture, the transition into nightlife for most dancers-turned-burlesque-performers feels like taking a big gulp of fresh air. “Before burlesque, I would go to auditions, and I could see that I was a better dancer, but I wasn’t getting the job because I looked a certain way or I wasn’t the right height,” says Michelle L’amour, known colloquially as The Most Naked Woman. While she was dancing for an industrial glam-rock band, the front man, whom she was dating, asked her if she’d like to create a burlesque show as an opening act. L’amour said yes (“even though I had no idea what that was,” she says with a laugh). When she did her first striptease, she knew this was going to be her life. (And that front man is now her husband.)

For Zelia Rose, a burlesque performer who is also a swing in Australia’s production of Hamilton, the absence of needing to look or perform better than someone else is a big draw. “Sure, there’s always going to be competition,” she says, “but there’s never a sense of ‘Oh, I’m comparing myself to this person, the way my body looks.’ There’s more of a celebration of coming together.”

Burlesque offers a particular performance haven for plus-size women, who are weary of concert-dance companies that seem to uniformly hire a highly specific body type: thin. When she graduated from Purchase College—a program she says she entered on weight probation—Martini knew the odds of finding a contemporary-dance gig were small. “I auditioned for everyone, and I knew no one was going to hire me, because I was a size 14 or 16,” she says.

Carving a space for herself and helping to shape the nascent burlesque scene in New York City in the 1990s was thrilling. “It’s exciting for me to present a body that people get excited about,” says Martini, a past winner of burlesque’s version of the Olympics, the Miss Exotic World pageant. “It’s not just men being excited because it’s titillating—the majority are women who are so excited to see a body that’s not reflected in magazines or in television or the movies. They’re like, ‘Oh, thank God! Somebody’s representing the majority of women in the U.S. who are over a size 12.’ “

Of course, stereotyping still exists. “When you look at the ways shows are cast, it might be five thin white girls and a brown girl and a fat girl,” says Jezebel Express, a burlesque dancer who recently began performing out of a specially outfitted school bus. “You still see some idea that people are welcome, but only if they’re achieving at a super-high level.” It’s common for plus-size performers to feel relegated to comedic routines, Express says: “They expect to have to deflect their sexuality.”

Burlesque, like nearly every performance field, still has work to do when it comes to moving beyond tokenism and successfully integrating performers of color. “I get pigeonholed into always being the representation card,” says Rose. “I’ll often be the only POC visible in shows.”

It’s an audience-diversity issue, too, says Loueez. “Producers will ask me, ‘How do I get my audience to be more diverse?’ ” she says. “Well, you booked 10 skinny white ladies! If you’re not seeing yourself reflected onstage, you’re not going to go to those shows.”

Loueez, who 10 years ago founded Jeezy’s Juke Joint, a Black Burly Q Revue, as a way to shine a light on Black burlesque performers, uses her teaching career as a tool for change. “I started teaching because I was tired of seeing appropriation,” she says. “A lot of people were using it for comedic effect: ‘How hilarious is it that I’m white and I’m trying to twerk!’ But if a Black burlesque performer did the same act, it would be too stripper-y or raunchy. I have to remind myself that burlesque is not a sparkly bubble where racism and ableism and classicism don’t exist.”

It is a space, performers argue, that offers a wider range of self-expression than its concert-dance counterpart—and seems more ready to tackle the problematic issues that need fixing. “We live in a culture that created a hierarchy of bodies that serve the patriarchy,” says Express. “But people are slowly hopping off the train, one at a time. And I get to help them off the train—with burlesque.”

The post Why Some Dancers Are Finding an Outlet in Burlesque appeared first on Dance Magazine.

But that meeting changed my life. Gale listened to my concerns about stepping up as artistic director of Elisa Monte Dance (now EMERGE125). She was kind, patient and knowledgeable, and then gave me the advice that changed everything: “Well, Tiffany,” she said, “you can’t run a New York City dance company from New Jersey and be taken seriously. You need to move.” So I did!

A little about me: I live in Harlem and come from a politically active family. I strongly believe that we as dancers need to train our voices like any other muscle in our bodies, so that when the time comes to stand up for ourselves in the classroom, the community or the boardroom, we are ready. I’ve been invited to speak at universities, artists panels, conferences and political events, and I’m regularly asked: “How did you get so comfortable with speaking your truth?” My answer is always the same: practice. And I’ve had lots of it. But we all need to start somewhere, and 2020 gave us an opportunity like no other.

The post Why Dancers Belong on the Ballot appeared first on Dance Magazine.

When Ailey called off its intensive, Rosario says, “it was the first time that I’d had a summer without work.”

Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter protests were happening in Manhattan’s Union Square, not far from Rosario. She wanted to support the cause, but with ongoing COVID-19 concerns and a newborn daughter, she decided to focus her efforts in a hyper-local way.

Building Bridges

Rosario founded The Good Neighbor Collective, a nonprofit to narrow the wealth gap and inequality in New York City, starting by serving those who live in public housing a block away from her home. As a resident of Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village, a 21,000-strong living community, she got the support of her complex’s CEO and recruited other residents to get involved. “It’s essentially to connect people who are in close proximity to each other but are part of two different worlds. I created a bridge, a way for us to be part of one community.”

Perhaps what’s most interesting about Rosario’s nonprofit is that it’s not dance-based. Instead, she spoke with the New York City Housing Authority to zero in on residents’ needs. “I told them, ‘We want to support you. What can we do?’ ”

A string of initiatives soon followed: Residents donated items for a school-supply drive in the fall and fulfilled 300 winter wishes for holiday gifts. At Thanksgiving, the nonprofit partnered with S’MAC, a mac ‘n’ cheese shop owned by one of her neighbors, and New York City councilmen to raise funds and distribute 750 meals throughout the East Village and Lower East Side.

Boosting Career Skills

Rosario is extremely passionate about The Good Neighbor Collective’s education and empowerment initiatives, including virtual career days, which have connected professionals from Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village with nearly 300 middle- and high-school students.

Earlier this year, Rosario encouraged Beam Living, StuyTown’s property management company, to host a job-shadowing program. “They opened up their doors for low-income college students to spend a week observing and learning from varied professionals there.” Now, many of those students are applying for internships with Beam Living. “It’s another way to give access to students who generally don’t have a network to be part of a company’s hiring pool,” she says. Rosario hopes to expand the job-shadowing program to include companies with employees who live in StuyTown.

During Black History Month, the nonprofit is giving the gift of reading by raising money to purchase books by Black authors from Harlem’s Sister’s Uptown book store. Age-appropriate selections, for infants to adults, will be distributed to residents in nearby public housing units.

The Impact on Her Art

Given the breadth of projects her nonprofit has done, Rosario says, “I keep thinking, How do I bring it back to dance? Whether it’s a dance program that I create post-COVID or I don’t, I feel like, for me, it’s always been important to be a human first before an artist.”

“In the dance community, we’re so entrenched in our own world because we’re so passionate about it,” she says. “But there’s also something about the world outside of dance and letting that fuel our work, so that ultimately we’re able to reach different audiences. Even though I’ve been teaching virtually, I know that this is going to have a deep impact on the way that I create, the way that I communicate and develop as an artist.”

Rosario draws connections between her methods as an artist and her nonprofit work. “The way that I choreograph and teach, community-building has always been at the forefront,” she says. “As dancers, our skills are transferable—there’s so much that we can do.”

The Good Neighbor Collective’s next project will employ the expertise of former HR professionals. Through career-readiness workshops for youth and young adults, they’ll lend help with resumés, cover letters and interview prep.

As the dance world starts to reopen, Rosario plans to continue her nonprofit with additional support from volunteers. Whether she’s in the studio or down the street, she’ll keep building bridges and empowering others.

The post When Dance Work Dried Up, This Artist Founded a Nonprofit to Serve Her Neighbors Down the Street appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Byrd-McPhee became enamored of the form and went on to a career as a hip-hop dancer and choreographer, eventually founding the Ladies of Hip-Hop Festival and directing the New York City chapter of Everybody Dance Now!. Over the decades, she has experienced hip hop’s growth from its roots in the black community into a global phenomenon—a trajectory she views with both pride and caution.

On one hand, the popularity of hip hop has “made a global impact,” says Byrd-McPhee. “It’s provided a voice for so many people around the world.” The downside is “it’s used globally in ways that the people who made the culture don’t benefit from it.”

That includes marketing to sell products, music videos to sell personalities and dance classes to sell an attitude. In these commercial spaces, hip hop is distilled to its energy and aesthetics, stripped of its history and significance in black communities as an art of protest. It’s then sprinkled on everything from Broadway shows to fashion campaigns like an exotic spice.

“People think that all you have to do is have certain postures, wear certain clothes, dance to certain music” to make it hip hop, Byrd-McPhee says, pointing out that simply donning toe shoes and tutus and dancing to Tchaikovsky does not a ballerina make. “It’s that kind of disconnect from the origins of the culture and the people who created it that’s problematic.”

That shallow aesthetic borrowing and disconnect is cultural appropriation. It has a long history in dance, from 19th-century “exotic” ballets like La Bayadère and Le Corsaire, to the tap used in vaudeville, to American modern dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis, who found inspiration in the trendy histories, rituals and aesthetics of cultures like those of India and Egypt.

In popular culture, more recent accusations of cultural appropriation have been aimed at Madonna’s use of voguing in her famous “Vogue” video, Miley Cyrus’ adoption of twerking as a way to rebrand herself, and the New Zealand choreographer Parris Goebel’s use of Jamaican dancehall in Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” video.

Michelle Hefner Hayes performing at the Kennedy Center
Andy White, Courtesy Hefner Hayes

Cultural appropriation is “taking the external trappings of cultural traditions and using them as decorations on your own history without developing mutually supporting relationships in the community that you’re taking from,” says Michelle Heffner Hayes, a professor at the University of Kansas’ Department of Theatre & Dance, who has studied the legacy of cultural appropriation in dance as part of her work.

It’s not a question about “ethnic” dances, Hayes points out, because “every dance form is an ethnic form,” including ballet and modern dance. “The power dynamic matters. It’s very different for someone who is in a position of privilege to borrow from a dance form from a marginalized community.”

Hayes’ interest in these issues stems in part from thinking about her own role as a white, queer American woman who was drawn to practice and write academically about flamenco, African diaspora and Latin popular dances. Throughout her career, she has asked: “How do you enter into a tradition that isn’t a part of your various cultural identities in a respectful way?”

That’s something Nic Gareiss has had to learn as an American from Michigan who works with traditional music and dance from across the North Atlantic, including Ireland and Scotland. “There’s been a history of America taking up space and appropriating cultural forms and enacting cultural imperialism,” he says. In an effort to grapple with that, he moved to Ireland to study at the University of Limerick to learn “not only the movement but also the culture around the movement, and to build relationships with movers in that culture.”

Nic Gareiss in Ireland
Darragh Kane, Courtesy Gareiss

Even if you can’t move abroad, visiting a dance form’s country of origin is something that contemporary bharata-natyam dancer and choreographer Preeti Vasudevan encourages of her students. “Go experience the country first,” she says, and learn from different teachers there. Indian dance, she says, “needs to be put in context so you understand what modern India is about.”

Korie Genius
, who was born in Jamaica, teaches dancehall at a number of studios around New York City, and invites his students to attend local dancehall spaces and parties to gain firsthand exposure to the culture. Equally important, he says, is the continuous recognition of the form’s pioneers and the teachers who have guided you.

“Give a shout-out to the dances you’re doing,” Genius says, “where they come from, where you learned it.” Crediting teachers and trailblazers in social media posts, in program notes and in interviews is an easy and critical way to acknowledge an art form’s lineage and your place in it with gratitude and humility. That recognition, Hayes says, “is a step people skip, and it leads to conflict that people don’t intend.”

Korie Genius teaching class
Grainne Images, Courtesy Genius

But immersion and recognition aren’t always enough. As Byrd-McPhee points out, it’s often the entertainment companies, cultural institutions, private dance studios and the artists with a foot in those doors—still overwhelmingly white—that benefit financially from the appropriation of cultural dances due to existing economic structures.

“We don’t benefit from all the money that people make from it,” she says of hip hop’s mainstream presence. “It’s sad.”

If you receive a job involving a cultural art form that isn’t your own, Byrd-McPhee advises, find ways to use your platform to give opportunities to artists who do come from that culture, perhaps as performers and consultants. “That’s under your control,” she says.

Preeti Vasudevan performing her Stories by Hand
Maria Baranova, Courtesy Vasudevan

Broader awareness also requires recognizing the politics and power dynamics that affect cultures, historically and today. B-girl Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie fell in love with hip hop as a young immigrant to the U.S. from Israel and Italy, and she credits her mentor Richard Santiago with helping to open her eyes to the painful history that spawned that art form.

“You can’t be about these forms that come from the African diaspora and the trauma of slavery and not participate in the fight for equality,” she says.

She also acknowledges that her platform to tour and present her art is one that is not afforded to many in the hip-hop community, and that comes with responsibility. “When you are creating with forms from a culture outside of your own, you do have a responsibility to call out issues,” she says, noting house’s LGBTQ roots and how breaking was born from the African-American and Latin communities.

She not only includes the history of street and club styles in her classes and in postshow Q&As, but also supports the struggles that others in the community face. In this way, she’s consciously working to ensure her art is a gesture of appreciation by redirecting the spotlight toward the elders of her chosen dance form. “It’s part of my responsibility to make people care,” she says.

Ephrat Asherie
Robert Altman, Courtesy Asherie

While engaging with dances from other cultures comes with responsibility, it can lead to profound personal and artistic growth. Vasudevan says she loves introducing non-Indian dancers to her art form and sees benefits to any artist willing to put in the time for thoughtful, respectful dialogue.

“If you’re actually engaging with an artist of another culture and figuring out together the building blocks of each other’s cultural language,” she says, “it should shed light on your own questions, your own self-reflection, so that you can go deeper into what you’ve grown up with and you can come up with something that’s authentically yours.”

The post At What Point Does Appreciation Become Cultural Appropriation? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Dance has long been used as a powerful form of protest. So it’s all the more meaningful when that movement shifts from fighting oppression and injustices to celebrating a victory over them. That’s exactly with happened this weekend as people took to the streets when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were announced president- and vice president-elect, putting an end date on the Trump presidency.

From New York City to Los Angeles, Philadelphia to Minneapolis, people danced for joy, for catharsis, to let the stress melt away, if only for a brief moment. After a year stacked with enormous difficulty—from battling the coronavirus pandemic to racial unrest in the wake of the killings of Black people by police—dancing provided a much needed release.

The post Post-Election Dancing Erupts in Streets Throughout the Nation appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Here are just a few of the get-out-the-vote efforts and events happening online and across the country. For more arts-related resources about voting, including the deadline to register in your state, check out Dance/USA’s November 2020 Election Toolkit.

The post The Dance Community Wants You to Get Out the Vote appeared first on Dance Magazine.

This was during the third season of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and the ballet was a hit. Bronislava Nijinska, sister of Nijinsky, described the impact in her book Bronislava Nijinska, Early Memoirs:

“Petrouchka,
Stravinsky’s musical masterpiece, took Paris by storm. Thunderous applause. Triumph for Stravinsky, for Benois, for Fokine. Triumph for Nijinsky, for Karsavina, and for the ballet ensemble. Triumph of course for Sergei Pavlovitch Diaghilev. An unforgettable performance. The magic, the creative imagination, the artistry. . . . The enraptured public poured behind the wings, into the dressing rooms of the artists, onto the stage.”

The post It's Time to Overhaul the Blackface (or Blueface) Puppet in Petrouchka appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The post Dance Companies Are Giving Back by Distributing Meals and Groceries to Their Communities appeared first on Dance Magazine.

“The work might be sensitive,” says Smko, an Iraqi of Arab-Kurdish roots, “but it’s what we witness and what’s going on, and you need to be aware of it.”

In fact, he moved to the U.S. not only to get top-notch training, but also to challenge prejudice through his art. “I could have done something in Kurdistan,” he says, “but it wouldn’t have been as effective. I came here to give a different image from how Muslims are portrayed.”

Smko is one of thousands of dance artists who have come to America from all parts of the world and represent a panoply of races, faiths and cultures. In an era of escalating hate crimes, new laws and increasingly stringent immigration policies, they face unique challenges.

The post Barriers & Bias: What It's Like for Immigrant Dance Artists appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The post How Can We Confront Implicit Bias? The Director of Jacob's Pillow Shares Her Ideas appeared first on Dance Magazine.

But taking class in nature is an entirely different story.

Last September, outdoor barre became the new normal for Sarah Longoria during her monthlong stint at Utah’s Zion National Park. She lived onsite as an artist in residence, the park’s first-ever dancer to be selected for the position. We caught up with Longoria about her time dancing in the shadows of the canyon.

Courtesy Longoria

The director of the Salt Lake City–based Municipal Ballet Co., Longoria heard about Zion’s residency program several years before she decided to apply. She was originally unsure if they’d be open to hosting a dancer, but she was a lover of the Utah desert and several works she’d choreographed for her company had been inspired by nature—including Wilder, which featured performances in the mountains and near a river.

Longoria was one of 104 artists from various disciplines to apply for a 2019 residency. Only four were chosen.

As an artist in residence, she lived alone at a cabin that dates back to 1925. “Since I’m a mom and a wife, I’m not alone very often,” says Longoria. At first, she was homesick, but “eventually I got to like having this alone time. In the morning, I would grind the beans, make my coffee. Do it all nice and slow and open the windows, taking my time because I only had myself to get ready.” After donning her volunteer uniform of khaki shorts and a button-up shirt, she’d head to the nearby Zion National Park Lodge.

Jenna Pullen/Flint and Feather Photography, Courtesy Longoria

Longoria was free to explore her art however she wished, but she had to spend 20 hours a week interacting with the public. Whereas visual artists could easily host an open studio, allowing visitors to browse their paintings, Longoria chose to create her own open studio of sorts: Each day, she retrieved her portable barre from the lodge, set it up near a cottonwood tree on the expansive front lawn and gave herself class outdoors.

“A lot of people would stop and talk to me or ask what I was doing,” she says. Some asked, “Are you doing yoga?” Others told her about their grandchildren who dance, or reminisced about taking ballet themselves when they were younger.

Despite the varied reactions, it was an opportunity to dialogue about the arts. “I tried to not worry about getting through class at a certain pace,” says Longoria. One element was particularly illuminating: Longoria found herself explaining what a ballet barre was and how it was used for daily exercises. “I didn’t think a ton about that before: Most people don’t see ballet class, actually.” Whereas they might see a ballet performance, she explain, class might be totally foreign.

Courtesy Longoria

Longoria admits that, at first, taking barre in such an open environment was a bit uncomfortable. “Class is where we’re working on ourselves, so I had to remind myself that I’m a work in progress always and that this is just me practicing my art, and it’s okay to do it in front of people.” Presenting dance outside of a theater in a different context yielded some unexpected feedback from visitors. “People told me that they felt like they could see the shapes of what I was doing in the landscape, which was cool, because I was just doing a normal barre.”

In the afternoons, Longoria would often hike the trails in uniform. “I got to learn a lot about Zion because people would ask me questions,” she says. Aside from typical chores like laundry and cooking, Longoria filled the rest of her time with letter writing (as a way to keep in touch with family and friends without cell service), journaling about the experience and sewing a prototype of a costume for an upcoming ballet.

Jenna Pullen/Flint and Feather Photography, Courtesy Longoria

“I feel like during my formative years,” she says, “without realizing it, I was trying to be some other dancer or the picture of a dancer or thinking I needed to be a certain way. But I think that the art, and maybe also the technique, loses something when the artist isn’t fully himself or herself. Being in nature, you realize that you are part of nature. Nature, it’s not trying to be anything else. Realizing that can really help a dancer understand that being themself is the truest they can be.”

Longoria believes that authenticity translates to audiences, too. “I think audiences can be impressed with feats of technique and precision, but it isn’t going to bring meaning to their lives unless there’s humanity and generosity behind it. Nature doesn’t care what people think about it—it just is, and it’s beautiful. That’s what we human dancers can learn from it.”

The post This Dancer Spent a Month in Zion National Park as an Artist in Residence appeared first on Dance Magazine.

1. Get Specific.

Scott Shaw, Courtesy Gibney

Choose a particular cause. “When we’re addressing something really large and systemic, it might be hard to know where to start,” Ozumerzifon says. “There are so many issues in the world, but find that passion or key connection to whatever you want to address.” Whether it be climate change, race or gender-based violence, start your project with a conversation, a new partnership or a phrase of choreography. “It’s okay to start small. You’re still making a difference,” Ozumerzifon says.

2. Partner Up.

Ozumerzifon notes that dancers are already experts at taking care of their bodies and at building community with those they work with every day—two critical skills when it comes to social action. But you can’t expect to do the job alone. “Artists, lawyers, social workers—anyone you can think of—all have a part to play,” Ozumerzifon says. Think outside the dance studio and leverage your network. “We can’t play all the roles, and working by ourselves is so much harder.”

3. Practice Advocacy Offstage.

Scott Shaw, Courtesy Gibney

Your work towards a cause doesn’t only have to happen onstage. “Whether we’re explicitly doing socially engaged work as artists, or if we’re holding rehearsals or teaching, we can be leaders in our communities at any moment,” Ozumerzifon says. Ask yourself if you’re promoting the world you wish to see by the way you interact with your peers, colleagues or students. “Are we building and listening to one another?” Ozumerzifon asks. Social change begins with your day-to-day interactions.

The post 3 Tips for Dancers Who Want to Explore Activism appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The post How to Bring Activism Into the Studio—For Any Age Group appeared first on Dance Magazine.

In 2017, as a result of a growing list of letters from audience members, to New York City Ballet’s ballet master in chief Peter Martins reached out to us asking for assistance on how to modify the elements of Chinese caricature in George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker. Following that conversation, we founded the Final Bow for Yellowface pledge that states, “I love ballet as an art form, and acknowledge that to achieve a diversity amongst our artists, audiences, donors, students, volunteers, and staff, I am committed to eliminating outdated and offensive stereotypes of Asians (Yellowface) on our stages.”

Our pledge served to consolidate many conversations already happening on the ground across the country around how to represent Asians in The Nutcracker and other classical works. We are thrilled to have the support of almost every artistic leader from the major American ballet companies.

Since our Yellowface pledge went public last year, we’ve received hundreds of letters from Asian-American students, parents, teachers, and both professional and retired dancers talking about how caricatured “Chinese” dances in The Nutcracker have always bothered them. The most common question we’ve received is, How do we start this dialogue at our own studio/company to make our Nutcracker more inclusive?

We’ve discovered three areas in the divertissement where creative questioning can help productions become more respectful to Chinese culture, while remaining faithful to the artistic visions of the past.

The post A Fresh Cup of Tea: How to Make Nutcracker More Inclusive appeared first on Dance Magazine.

“I got angry when I saw that email, wrote my angry response, deleted it, and then went back and explained to him that that’s exactly why I should be making those works,” says Peugh.

With the current political climate as polarized as it is, many artists today feel compelled to use their work to speak out on issues they care deeply about. But touring with a message is not for the faint of heart. From considerations about how to market the work to concerns about safety, touring to cities where, in general, that message may not be so welcome, requires companies to figure out how they’ll respond to opposition.

Yet many artists find that venturing away from their typical audiences offers an unparalleled opportunity to raise awareness, spark conversations and, in the best cases, even change minds.

The post What It Takes to Tour Politically-Charged Works to Places Where the Message May Not Be Welcome appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Eventually, Kabiri established a performance troupe. Since we could be prosecuted for performing in public, she arranged her dark, damp and dusty basement into our performance space. A few women helped to clear the cobwebs and sweep the floors. Kabiri brought in old wooden benches that were joined together and covered by rugs to minimize cuts and scrapes from the rusty nails and wood splinters that jutted out of them. These rug-covered benches constituted our stage. She also borrowed what seemed to be over 100 rickety dining room chairs from her friends and neighbors to create the audience seating area.

Tickets were sold covertly to women only. The thinking was that if we were outed and the morality police raided the show, we could say that it was a gathering for women to celebrate the prophet Mohammed. At least, without men, the gravity of our crime would be greatly reduced. Our parents and family helped to spread the word to other trusted family members and friends.

Costumes were designed by Kabiri, sewn by a local seamstress and funded by all of us. For lighting, we had extra lamps installed into the fixture directly above the stage. We had one rehearsal on our makeshift stage on the day of the show. For fear of neighbors who may snitch, all attendees were asked to park or get out of their rides blocks away and walk to the basement door. Surprisingly, we sold out.

My memory is a little foggy from the night because I was so nervous. I remember our team-huddle in my teacher’s living room and her husband warning us about never referring to this performance in the future and the potential prosecutions that we might face as a result. They wanted to make sure that we had a single unified story in case of a raid.

One thing I do remember clearly was looking at the audience and seeing tears streaming down the faces. At the time, I did not understand why. But as I write these words, I understand the gravity, and the feeling of oppression and anger from seeing something beautiful hidden, quashed and forgotten.

The post What It's Like to Be a Dancer in the Islamic Republic of Iran appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The groups featured in the show, largely based around clubs and electronic dance music scenes, span the globe and respond to a variety of issues—from inequality and social stratification to racial divides to crackdowns on club culture itself.

The curator behind the exhibit, which runs through September 1, is Bogomir Doringer, a Serbian-Dutch multimedia artist whose own work, “I Dance Alone,” filmed crowds of dancers inside nightclubs. Doringer spoke with us about the emergence of dance as popular protest.

The post This Museum Exhibit Shows How Dance Has Become a Form of Political Protest appeared first on Dance Magazine.

When Garley “GiGi Tonyé” Briggs, a dance teacher and Chicago native, started noticing this pattern, she was preparing her second annual Memorial Day workshop for local youth.

The event’s original aim was simple: “I wanted the youth of Chicago to have somewhere they could come and learn from different dancers and be off the streets on the South Side on this hot holiday,” she says.

Courtesy #Dance4OurLives

Instructors will address gun violence in small groups throughout technique classes, and special sessions will dig deeper.

The “Dance Is Healing” workshop, for example, will be taught by an art and dance/movement therapist, who will use conflict resolution and examine how youth can use movement to “help ground themselves, as well as their interactions with other people,” says Briggs.

The “Men in Dance” session will address stereotypes and encourage men to embrace dynamics spanning from sharp hip hop to graceful contemporary dance. “They’ll explore those different facets and talk about how it’s okay to want to be a dancer or be more creative.”

The post How One Teacher Uses Dance to Combat Memorial Day Weekend Gun Violence in Chicago appeared first on Dance Magazine.

There’s a general understanding that this government support doesn’t translate to endorsements of specific policies or a specific administration, nor is it a calculated attempt to distract from them. If funding came with such strings attached, surely many American artists would think twice about accepting it.

Yet when the Batsheva Dance Company, Israel’s premier dance troupe, comes to the U.S. this spring, it will be met by its many fans and, in some places, boisterous protests as in years past. The protestors oppose Israeli government policy and believe that Batsheva is guilty by association. They convey this message through signs wielded outside venues, flyers handed to arriving audience members and, occasionally, by interrupting performances. It has become an almost expected part of any Batsheva tour.

But why target a dance company? What does Batsheva have to do with Israel’s geopolitical conflicts? The protestors, who tend to be locally organized members of the larger Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, see Batsheva as a tool of the Israeli government’s efforts to distract from political controversies, such as the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. They argue that because Batsheva receives about 30 percent of its budget from the government, it is complicit with current Israeli government policies, as well as with Israel’s branding efforts to make audiences look the other way.

Responding in news articles and interviews, Ohad Naharin, the company’s renowned house choreographer, counters that the funding structure has been in place for decades and is independent of the policies of any particular government. The money comes from the taxpayers, he argues, and has long been earmarked for supporting the arts with no demands made of artists. Naharin is also an unabashedly outspoken critic of the current Israeli government, regularly stating that he sympathizes with the protestors’ grievances, just not their methods and targets.

Why are other prominent international companies not receiving the same scrutiny as Batsheva? The Bolshoi Ballet, which was founded in 1776, has been supported by the Russian government for centuries (approximately 70 percent of its budget). At the moment, the U.S. has accused Russia of ongoing human rights violations and of meddling in our democratic process. And yet, when the Bolshoi pays a visit, there are no protestors to be found. The same goes for dance companies from Cuba, whose Communist government we officially oppose, and from China, who we have also called out for its problematic human rights practices.

In fact, we look to artists from Russia, Cuba and China to find the humanity in countries whose governments we may oppose. Welcoming these companies allows us to see people, not policies. And through this artistic exchange comes opportunities for dialogue and a deeper understanding of the complexities that every nation faces, both internally and in its relationship with the world.

The protests against Batsheva are so frequent and prominent because the BDS movement is a broad effort that advocates for boycotts against all things Israel. It really has nothing to do with Batsheva, yet Batsheva has gotten caught in its web. In other words, just as the protestors accuse the Israeli government of using Batsheva to further its aims, so too are the protestors using Batsheva to further theirs.

And it’s working. If the goal is to get people to talk about Israeli policy, well, here we are, talking about Israeli policy. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We should be connecting the dots between art and politics and the financial relationship between companies and their governments. If we see a troublesome trade-off at play—for example, government demands for loyalty, attempts at censorship or artists defending authoritarian regimes—we should hold those artists to task. But that’s not the case with Batsheva.

And we should also apply our scrutiny consistently. Looking at ourselves in the mirror, we would then have to ask whether an American artist receiving a grant from the NEA today would, by extension, be associated with the actions of our current administration. Most artists would—rightly—balk at the idea. So if we continue to insist on more government funding for the arts at home and also value and assert the separation of art and state here, we should allow conscientious artists abroad the right to do the same.

The post Should Companies Be Blamed for the Policies of the Governments That Support Them? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

But you can’t fully celebrate before you’ve completed your mission. Showing up at the polls is what matters most—especially since voter turnout for midterms doesn’t have a fabulous track record. According to statistics from FairVote, about 40 percent of the population that is eligible to vote actually casts a ballot during midterm elections.

Many members of the dance community are making it clear that they want that percentage go up, and they’re using social media to take a stand. Here’s how they’re getting involved:

The post Midterm Elections Are Nov. 6. Treat Them Like a Performance: Show Up appeared first on Dance Magazine.

A few years back, Houston, who is black, began thinking about how none of the students at her Los Angeles dance studio looked like her. Her desire to use dance to serve her community eventually led her to found The Swan Within, an outreach organization that teaches ballet to girls in juvenile detention centers, many of whom have been sex trafficked.

“I’ve been a dancer my whole life,” says Houston. “I started at the age of 5; ironically the same age that I was sexually abused. I used dance as my vehicle out of the house.” Today, Houston wants to give girls the same opportunity to escape their past, and use dance as a springboard to their future.

We talked to Houston about what it’s like to teach students who’ve experienced trauma, and how ballet is transforming her students’ lives:

The post Survivors of Sex Trafficking and Abuse Are Getting A Second Chance Through Ballet appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Not anymore. This year, teenage dancers throughout the country have started getting involved to highlight an issue that directly affects them in the worst way possible: gun violence. And they’re doing it through dance.

This trend is not limited to YouTube videos. High school students from Houston to Baltimore to the Bronx have also created live performances addressing gun violence through dance. Each, in their own way, is using the art form they love to say, Enough is enough.

The post Teen Dancers Are Unapologetically Protesting Gun Violence appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Most recently, American Ballet Theatre principal Isabella Boylston was scrutinized when she shared this post on her Instagram.

Her post was met with a barrage of insults from commenters who felt she didn’t have the right to share her opinion on topics “outside of her expertise.” Unfortunately, dancers who are brave enough to share their political thoughts receive these comments all the time—so much so that former ABT dancer Sascha Radetsky wrote a whole piece about whether or not dancers should get political online.

But if we look back at some of the most captivating dancers and choreographers in history, we find that dance and activism have always been deeply intertwined:

Katherine Dunham

Had Katherine Dunham not been bold enough to tackle social injustices with dance, she would’ve never created Southland, her controversial ballet that confronted the enduring racism in the South and culminated in the contentious depiction of a black man being lynched. The ballet was performed twice abroad but never made it back to the U.S. as it was labeled “anti-American.” Dunham’s later requests for funding from the U.S. State Department were all denied, but the negative response to the ballet only reinforced the necessity of its message.

Katherine Dunham, courtesy Dance Magazine Archives

Dunham also shatters the idea that dancers can only be activists onstage. In 1993 she led a 47-day hunger strike to protest the U.S. deportation of Haitian immigrants. Following a performance in Kentucky, she announced to the audience that her company wouldn’t return until the theater was desegregated.

Despite the endless backlash and attempts to threaten her into silence, Dunham seized ever opportunity she had to start a conversation about political issues, even if the world wasn’t ready to have them.

Martha Graham

Like Dunham, modern dance legend Martha Graham never shied away from commenting on politics in her pieces, as we can see in her beloved Chronicle. This 1936 work was Graham’s response to the rise of fascism in Europe and the consequences of war. That same year, she denied the Nazi’s invitation for her company to perform in the Summer Olympics Festival in Berlin.

“I would find it impossible to dance in Germany at the present time,” she wrote. “So many artists whom I respect and admire have been persecuted, have been deprived of their right to work, and for such unsatisfactory and ridiculous reasons, that I should consider it impossible to identify myself, by accepting the invitation, with the regime that has made such things possible.”

Alvin Ailey

Alvin Ailey’s politics shaped the very fabric of his company. After growing up in a segregated America, Ailey was determined to create an integrated dance company. “I am trying to show the world that we are all human beings and that color is not important,” he said. “What is important is the quality of our work.”

Ailey‘s Revelations, which he created during the thick of the civil rights movement, put the African American spirit on display like no choreographer had ever done before. Had he been too fearful of making a statement, we would’ve missed out on one of the most widely celebrated modern works in history.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Revelations. Photo by Gert Krautbauer, Courtesy AAADT

Onstage, dancers tackle heavy topics like war, racism and immigration. So why are we surprised when they’re compelled to speak up about them offstage, too? We’re not sure why some people have decided that being a dancer means you forfeit your right to activism, but no one should be disqualified from sharing political opinions just because they can do 32 flawless fouettés in front of a packed theater.

After all, they’re just doing what dancers have always done.

The post Anyone Who Says Dancers Should "Stick to Dancing" Doesn't Know Their History appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Modesty laws in Iran forbid women from dancing in public. Last week, one of the four women arrested for her videos, teenage Insta-star Maedeh Hojabri, made what many believed to be a forced confession on Iranian state TV, according to the BBC.

But the authorities’ attempt at public shaming backfired: Since the confession aired, Hojabri has become the face of a new resistance movement.

Using hashtags like #مائده_هژیری, which roughly translates to #dancing_isn’t_a_crime, people throughout the country and across the world have been posting videos of themselves dancing to show just what they think of these modesty laws.

Gizmodo reports that Hojabri and the three other women have been released on bail for now. It is unclear what sentences they face. In 2014, six Iranian girls received a year in prison and 91 lashes for posting a video of themselves dancing to Pharrell Williams’ “Happy.”

Instagram remains one of the only Western social media platforms still allowed in the country. According to The New York Times, hardliners are arguing that videos like Hojabri’s prove that it should be blocked. Clearly, the public does not agree.

The post Iranians Are Protesting Their Government By Posting Videos of Themselves Dancing appeared first on Dance Magazine.

But nine and a half months into her assignment, a tropical storm grew into what would become Hurricane Maria—the worst national disaster in Dominica’s history.

Students in Dominica taking class at a makeshift barre. Photo courtesy the Peace Corps

The Peace Corps sent her home to South Carolina for two months while they assessed the situation.

“I spent much of the next few weeks worrying what had become of my coworkers, students and community, finding out only bits and pieces through news and social media,” says Warthen. “Many people evacuated to neighboring islands or the U.S. but even more stuck it out through the aftermath without roofs or enough food and water.”

When the Peace Corps asked her to return in December, she instantly agreed, even if that meant living without electricity.

“Some people probably thought I was crazy for wanting to return to a place that people were still evacuating from,” she says, “but I was just excited to round up my students and start teaching again.” So excited, in fact, that she extended her service until January 2019.

Warthen dancing at Dominica School of the Arts before the storm. Photo courtesy the Peace Corps

She shares in a blog post for the Peace Corps that during her first week back, she held a “return to dance workshop” for the kids. She asked the students to write a poem describing their experiences, then had them choreograph to their own words. She writes:

Many students had traumatic tales of what happened during the storm, yet it was the things that were missing they most wanted to talk (and dance) about. Many were staying with neighbors since their homes were unlivable. One girl never found her pet puppy. Another missed the flowers in her garden. And they all longed for the normal things: eating fruits, going to school and taking dance class.

She’s found that teaching them has been transformational: “For these children whose lives have been so disrupted, ballet brings stability, a positive focus, friendship, joy, dreams, goals and something beautiful when much of the outside is still recovering from disaster.”

The dance studio’s roof, floors and mirrors were all damaged. The total cost of repairs is estimated at $30,000. Photo courtesy the Peace Corps

Unfortunately, Dominica School of the Arts’ dance studio—the only one on the island—was completely destroyed. The dancers are now taking class in an art gallery while Warthen raises money through a Peace Corps Partnership Program grant to help rebuild the studio. Fortunately, she just found out that her $8000 fundraiser to repair the floor and mirrors is now fully funded.

“The people living in Dominica have adapted to a ‘new normal,'” says Warthen. “Most schools have yet to be repaired, so students are sharing space on shift schedules. Many businesses have closed and with them many jobs have been lost. Agriculture systems were quite literally uprooted. Maria did a lot of damage, but she also managed to instill a sense of resiliency in everyone that survived her.”

Meanwhile, Warthen’s found that her work in Dominica has not only been a way to empower her students and help them process this traumatic experience, bot it’s also reignited her own love of dance.

“I get to witness the total joy they emit when they dance,” she says. Teaching them has allowed her to feel the wonder of being a beginner again: “It’s the joy of jumping really high and relishing a slow port de bras. It’s synergy and dancing with other people that share your passion. This experience has reminded me how lucky I am that this is my life.”

Warthen is known in the community as “ballet teacher.” Photo courtesy the Peace Corps

The post Meet The Ballet Dancer Teaching Hurricane Maria Survivors appeared first on Dance Magazine.

When Kevin “Iega” Jeff saw Fana Tshabalala‘s Indumba at the annual JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience in South Africa, he immediately knew he would ask Tshabalala to set the work on his company.

“There’s an ancient energy in Fana’s movement, a deep and trusted knowing,” says Jeff, director of the Chicago-based Deeply Rooted Dance Theater. “Because I witnessed the raw humanity of his dancer’s souls, I wanted my dancers to have that experience.”

Indumba
refers to a hut used by Sangoma, or a traditional healer, in South Africa for healing and cleansing in a sacred place. Tshabalala had conducted research for the piece in Maputo, Mozambique, where he learned about cleansing rituals that took place after the civil war there. “Veterans were cleansed traditionally, because they believe they carried bad spirits that might affect the community,” he says.

“Indumba could help in cleansing.” Photo by Ken Carl, via bam.org

He welcomed the chance to create an American-focused version for DRDT because he believes that “the impact of apartheid is the same as what America is experiencing internally…America is going through a social and political transformation and, Indumba could help in cleansing.”

Indumba
is intensely improvisational and is based on artists working together through movement and dialogue in “an open choreographic process” to create their own Indumba—their own sacred place to express their freedom and “to be different from the outside world,” says Tshabalala.

Working with the dancers of DRDT proved special in reckoning this charge. “It was a matter of giving them an opportunity to release what was inside through movement and putting that into an existing structure.”

To watch his African-American dancers work with Tshabalala’s South African dancers, Jeff says, “it felt like home.”

Indumba
runs at BAM Fisher in Brooklyn, New York, April 28 and 29.

The post Why Setting a Dance About Apartheid on American Dancers Makes Sense Right Now appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Channeling the impact that Dr. King’s death had on Mitchell, DTH put together this moving video, directed by Daniel Schloss, choreographed by company member Da’ Von Doane and starring some familiar (and new!) faces. The video begins with a group of young dancers, who gather around a TV to hear former president Lyndon B. Johnson announcing Dr. King’s assassination on April 4, 1968.

As Billy Porter’s “Keep Moving” begins to play, the kids use dance as an outlet while other historical moments mixed with clips from DTH’s early days flash across the TV. Eventually the kids are joined by the current DTH company members for a full-on dance session as the TV in the studio zooms in on former First Lady Michelle Obama saying: “Through dance, they have told the stories of who we were, who we are and who we can be.” If this is just their promotional video, we can’t wait to see what DTH has coming our way once it’s performance time.

The post Dance Theatre of Harlem Made a Powerful Promotional Video Combining Ballet and Activism appeared first on Dance Magazine.

This year celebrates the 100th anniversary of Jerome Robbins’ birth, and a number of Robbins programs are celebrating his timeless repertoire. But it especially feels like a prime moment to experience The Cage again. Several companies are performing it: San Francisco Ballet begins performances on March 20, followed by the English National Ballet in April and New York City Ballet in May.

Why it matters:
In this time of female empowerment—as women are supporting one another in vocalizing injustices, demanding fair treatment and pay, and advocating for future generations—The Cage’s nest of dominant women have new significance.

“It’s very empowering with everything that’s happening right now in society, and to be able to take on this role I feel like there’s a responsibility to bring that into it,” says SFB principal Jennifer Stahl, who will make her debut as the Queen this week. “To stand tall and proud, and not holding back, physically, with a strong powerful woman leader of this pack.”

Jennifer Stahl, rehearsing The Cage with Yuan Yuan Tan, calls the ballet “empowering.” Photo by Erik Tomasson, courtesy SFB

Robbins’ hypnotic choreography, and the potent language he created for these fictional creatures through movement that is as aggressive as it is exploratory, reveals the many layers of this ballet: the female as predator and man as prey (which is what partially enraged audiences when the ballet premiered in 1951), their inclusive behavior as they embrace the young Novice, and the acceptance of our instincts—just as the Novice must when faced with killing the second Intruder despite her complex emotions.

Describing the ballet, Balanchine wrote, “The women are content with their own society and relax without fear of intrusion.” The precision of these females in kill mode is just one part of the story; the other is the connectedness of this tribe.

When Miami City Ballet performed The Cage in January and February, principal soloist Nathalia Arja danced the Novice for the first time and found the role uncovered another side of her dancing.

“The ladies and I, we talked about it,” Arja says of the collective movement toward female recognition we’re experiencing today. “We watched the video together and we said it’s the woman power ballet. Literally the ballet is led by all these strong women and I get goosebumps talking about it because I remember even when I was in the audience watching the other cast I said, how amazing that Jerome Robbins created a ballet that is just all about women.”

Nathalia Arja calls The Cage a “woman power ballet.” Photo by Alexander Iziliaev, courtesy Miami City Ballet

Robbins was inspired to create the ballet after hearing Stravinsky’s Concerto in D for String Orchestra, “Basler,” and the dramatic pulse of the score. At first he wanted a ballet of Amazons, the female warriors in Greek mythology, which he then re-cast as insect creatures unleashing the animalistic and contorting movement that makes The Cage so direct and entirely unforgettable.

As Stahl notes, this is not about being “pretty ballet dancers.” In a video recording of Robbins coaching Wendy Whelan for the role of the Novice in 1990 (which would become one of Whelan’s signature roles because of the authoritative nature and otherworldliness she injected into the young creature) Robbins urged her not to look like a ballet dancer. He wanted her legs to anticipate and strike.

To Robbins these insects examined their world but remained impenetrable to the audience. During that same rehearsal, he mentioned how exciting it was to watch Nora Kaye, who originated the role, because you didn’t know what was “going on in that thing.”

The sharp and precise angles of the body, suspended movements on pointe, and haunting pauses between steps give these women a powerful presence. The Cage also requires deep artistry and individuality. Even the iconic flick of the Novice’s arm and hand, which Robbins described as “a squirrels tale,” lasts just an instant and is so full of character.

“It’s not a ballet that you look at the other dancer and you go, ‘I want to do it like her,'” Arja explains. “I had the freedom to make my own Novice…to bring my Nathalia touch.”

In thinking about the significance of this ballet today, as well as in 1951, Stahl says, “There’s always been strong women. It’s our place in society and how we treat ourselves and treat each other and lift each other up, that’s what really changes.” Then and now, this work gives women command of the stage as well as their story.

The post The Power of Jerome Robbins' The Cage in the #MeToo Era appeared first on Dance Magazine.

What are the double standards that come into play when women try to break glass ceilings? What is the backlash when they fail? What happens when they stand together in solidarity, or when they unintentionally perpetuate misogyny? These are some of the questions the film series asks as four dancers protest in pantsuits, conform in deconstructed hoop skirts and pause to paint their nails. We caught up with Ladenheim to discuss the ongoing project.

What is
Glass?

There are four main forms: a five part series of online films, a film and performance installation, a live performance and a dialogue series. My original idea was that I would build a glass ceiling that an audience would stand on and look down on a community of women. But it’s really expensive to build a glass ceiling! And difficult, and dangerous if you don’t do it correctly. We had to find ways around this idea and expressing this inescapable hierarchy women experience collectively. It’s about how you internalize patriarchy against yourself and fellow female identified folk without realizing it when you’re inside that pressure cooker environment.

What led you to create both a video series and a live performance?

There is a stage that everybody looks at all the time, and it’s your phone or computer. There’s something essential about live work, but also about how live and reactive digital spaces have become. If you’re talking about something so reactive as these topics around women and feminism, you need to be there, online. This is a theme in my work in general: the way live and digital work interfaces, and how dance can exist in digital spaces and how that impacts liveness in general. The story can be told in many ways. I don’t really have delusions about myself as an independent dancemaker: My reach isn’t that big, but I like to provide platforms for engagement in a number of different ways.

What is the relationship between the video series and the concert work?

In live work, there’s a way to build tension. You can be more patient with your work in live spaces than in digital spaces, because in digital spaces people get bored. A lot of my pieces are a slow burn, and about things bubbling up inside you and trying to keep it all in. All humans can feel that, but especially women in professional settings where you don’t always feel you can speak up. So in these films, how do we get that feeling without staying in the same place for too long?

Where did the idea for
Glass come from?

I started building the base material in 2015. I had a residency with a composer—Peter Van Zandt Lane—that took place at The Pocantico Center, the former private residence of the Rockefellers. It’s this lavish property, and there are beautiful gardens, but everything is protected by gates. By the end of the week we had the idea that we would make something around the ideas of barriers and gates. And then the 2016 election happened, and the truly disturbing and overt and horrifying displays of misogyny that were plastered throughout this campaign. Hillary Clinton is a woman who is so privileged in every sense, and to have her constantly slandered for her femaleness was really shocking for me. The thought that you can work your entire life for something, be qualified in every sense of the word and just not achieve it because of your woman-ness—that hit me very hard. That’s a barrier everyone can see past but you can’t get through. So this piece was born.

“There are all these skeletons of perceived femininity in the work,” Kate Ladenheim says of Glass. Photo by Whitney Browne courtesy Ladenheim

The costuming choices across the video series so far have been very evocative—pantsuits, deconstructed hoop skirts. How did you arrive at these choices?

The pantsuits pretty directly referenced white pantsuits and political movements and women’s suffrage. The hoop skirts reference restrictive costuming for women that has been throughout the ages. Also, one of the essays by Rebecca Solnit that was inspirational to me was about silence as a series of concentric circles; basically, how silence works as an oppressive tool to keep people from believing women and to keep violence against them invisible. Looked at from above, women in hoop skirts are constrained inside of concentric circles. They stay in the hoop skirts in the rest of the films. They become obstacles: It’s harder to get close to people, you get stuck in them.

What about the nail painting that is so instrumental to
Glass: Part III?

There are all these skeletons of perceived femininity within the work: nail painting and hoop skirts and leotards and nakedness. They all kind of reference these things that women can reclaim for themselves. My mom would get her nails painted every week when I was growing up. I was never really into nail polish. It made me feel overindulgent, ostentatious; even though it’s such a tiny thing, it made me feel like I was attracting too much attention. But it’s something that my mother and a lot of other women reclaim as something that makes them powerful and fierce and sexy—but it’s created by men, with the male gaze in mind. And you can’t do as many things as first when the nails are wet; it affects your physicality in a very specific way. To research for the piece we would paint our nails and do the movement while they were wet to see how it affects our approach.

Something I’ve really appreciated about this series is how nuanced the ideas feel. It’s not just women in solidarity with each other to crush the patriarchy, or, on the other extreme, women putting down or holding back other women.

There’s something I’ve been interested in while watching the discourse around feminism becoming more prominent: Who gets to claim feminism? Nobody is a perfect activist; there is no such thing as an ideal woman. Everyone is trying to become a better person, and I think that’s what the women in Glass are trying to do. Within this structure, how do they relate to each other, the world around each other, express their feelings? It’s not always kind. I don’t think anyone in this world can say someone came to me with a story and I had the perfect reaction, or I gave them the perfect comfort. So there are nuances to the way we treat each other. There are faults to our discourse. There are faults to our attempts at liberation.

Still from Glass: Part I. Photo by Chelsea Robin Lee, Courtesy The People Movers

Has your perspective on this series changed at all in light of the #MeToo movement?

I don’t think it was anything that I didn’t know before it came to light. Of course I know that abuse is rampant. Every woman and queer person that I know has a story around harassment and abuse. So I guess it’s galvanizing to see things coming to the forefront, and it’s exciting to be creating topical work, but I’m not sure that it changed our approach in any way. It was like, Great, everyone caught up!

How do you go about creating a feminist working environment in the studio?

We’re cautious to care for each other. We started with agreements about safety and what I will ask of them and what they can say no to. We all really care about and value consent. I can’t really take credit for that one. I just have the most amazing collaborators, these incredible women: generous, smart, and capable, and really willing to engage on every level. They’re honest and open and I don’t know that it’s me that’s doing it! It’s us that’s done it.

It’s so funny because there’s so much violence and pettiness and passive aggression in the work, but if you saw us you’d never believe we could do that to each other because there’s so much love and care and admiration between us. I’m so honored they work with me! That they think I’m worthy!

The post How Kate Ladenheim's New Video Series Tackles Women's Internalized Misogyny appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Behind the frequency is a cultural-diplomacy effort designed to increase trust and understanding. What’s unclear, though, is whether or not contemporary Chinese creative output is actually reaching a diverse group of Americans. Ironically, the New York-based dissent group Shen Yun may be reaching a broader audience—with a message opposed to the Chinese regime.

Shen Yun invests heavily in advertising

China’s official cultural efforts have been ongoing for several years, says Shirley Young, who chairs the US-China Cultural Institute, Cultural Associate of the Committee of 100, a Chinese-American leadership resource.

“People-to-people and cultural exchange is critical to the diplomatic relationship between China and the U.S.,” she said. “It’s a national priority, and what comes with that is funding.”

Dance, which presents no language barrier, “is an inherently apolitical way that China can project civility and sophistication,” says Tom Doctoroff, author of “What Chinese Want” and an expert in branding and marketing in Asia.

The open question is how effective the efforts are.

In January, I attended both Shen Yun and the dance-drama Soaring Wings: Journey of the Crested Ibis, presented by China Arts and Entertainment Group’s Image China, a cultural exchange initiative. Both were at Lincoln Center’s Koch Theater.

In Soaring Wings, the performers from Shanghai Dance Theatre were clearly well-trained and the production created effective illusions, especially with bird-like costumes. But the man-versus-nature story—about the rediscovery of a bird thought to be extinct and the dehumanization of industrial society—had no pulse.

The cast of Soaring Wings. Photo courtesy Keith Sherman & Associates

The audience was overwhelmingly Asian. Two parties of New York-based white women that I spoke with said they didn’t know much about the show but liked the images in the advertising.

The audience looked similar back in August 2015, when Legend River Entertainment presented a dance play about Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning writer Pearl S. Buck, who grew up in China then lived as an adult in the U.S.

The production’s wow-factor came from a river created on stage, but the story plodded through the facts of Buck’s life in parallel with segments of a nature poem. Then, in a sharp shift, the finale was an unrelated scene promoting the global appreciation of children.

The flatness of the stories is not an accident. Only content deemed safe is going to be approved to go abroad, says Doctoroff, now a senior partner at Prophet, a global brand and marketing consultancy. “There will be no social commentary and no raciness.”

By contrast, Shen Yun, the cultural arm of the spiritual and political group Falun Gong, presents a show with overt criticism of the Chinese government: Vignettes about their persecuted followers, one of whom is beaten by Communist thugs, are interspersed among dance numbers explaining Chinese historical style and costume.

In the nearly sold-out theater, all walks of life were present. My third-ring seat cost $80 (there are no press tickets or publicity office) and near me was a young white couple on a date, a solo Asian woman, a young sulking boy of no clear ethnicity (seated separately from his friends), a multi-generational black family and group of four or so middle-aged white women.

It was hardly a rally of supporters: People “oohed” and “ahhed” at the beauty and tradition of Chinese culture. They sat politely through the political messages. No trace of anything political is in their ads, which look roughly similar to that of Soaring Wings, with a beautiful dancer in a colorful costume.

While people may respond to ads for both Soaring Wings and Shen Yun, the latter audience is more mixed because its marketing is aggressive in the extreme. As one elderly white woman I spoke with afterward said, “You can’t avoid it.”

Shen Yun advertises on television, radio, outdoor spaces, subway cars—even in print—and with street teams. They also have the benefit of recurring tours.

Ad campaigns for the China-based productions, by contrast, gear up before the tour, but without the extreme canvassing of platforms.

Soaring Wings. Photo courtesy Keith Sherman & Associates

“If the goal is to help Americans understand more about Chinese culture, they need to a do a better job of reaching the public, which they don’t,” says Young.

The key to connecting with Americans, she says, lies in collaborating or working more closely with established American presenters, venues or companies.

Young, a board member of the New York Philharmonic, points to the orchestra as uniquely effective in this effort: The Philharmonic is about to host its seventh Lunar New Year concert, a program that pairs American and Chinese music and talents. And it attracts both the Philharmonic regulars and Chinese music lovers.

“The goal was not to make it an event for the Chinese-American community, but to add them to the Philharmonic’s audience,” says Young.

Doctoroff points to the broad mix that gathered at Asia Society, the educational group that describes itself as “promoting mutual understanding” between Asia and the United States: “A lot of the events are at least 50-50.”

Chinese presenters do know, says Young, that prestigious venues will at least give them the chance at attention. And because they can rent the Koch, they can be at Lincoln Center.

But there is one crucial element to a successful show that does not necessarily come with the use of any rented hall, said Young: “What you don’t get is the audience.”

The post The Hidden Political Messages Behind Chinese Dance Theater Like Shen Yun appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The purpose? To use dance to highlight society’s impact on the environment.

Considering that Culver City is located right in Los Angeles County, it’s no surprise that the festival boasts some A-list dance talent. Highlights include choreography by Comfort Fedoke of “So You Think You Can Dance” and two workshops for professional dancers taught by La La Land assistant choreographer Jillian Meyers.

The headlining event is a live performance by LA’s site-specific masterminds, Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre. Called FishEyes, the piece features dancers performing inside, on top of, around and through a 15-foot steel fish sculpture designed by architect Alex Ward, as a way to explore issues of drought and water conservation.

The festival kicks off at noon. Check out Dance Magazine’s Facebook page around 7 pm (PST) for an exclusive livestream of the headlining performance.

The post These Dancers Are Putting On a Day-Long Festival About the Environment appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The event brought to light some of the questions the dance world is facing, and though we don’t yet have all the answers, it helped lay out the areas we need to address:

What would dance-specific sexual harassment training and policies look like?

Corporate harassment trainings tend to tell employees to avoid touching coworkers and to not wear revealing clothing in the workplace. Obviously, these rules aren’t applicable to the dance world. Many in attendance agreed that everyone in the dance world should undergo training, so what should it include?

How can we protect freelancers working outside an institutional setting?

Dance work is becoming more and more freelance-based. Artists working in these spaces often aren’t protected by any sort of sexual harassment policies or procedures. Who can artists turn to when they’ve experienced harassment in a freelance setting, and how can we hold harassers accountable in these spaces?

How can we protect dancers who speak up from backlash?

The dance world is small, and well-paid gigs are scarce. It makes sense that dancers might fear getting blackballed should they report sexual harassment. How do we ensure dancers can be heard and keep their jobs?

How can we teach young dancers to have autonomy over their bodies?

Essential to combatting sexual harassment is challenging the culture of silence that permeates the dance world. This means teaching dancers from an early age that they have a voice. But how do you teach children to have autonomy over their bodies while simultaneously teaching them techniques that require the utmost discipline and focus?

Let us know: What other questions do you have about the dance world and sexual harassment?

Have you experienced sexual harassment in the dance field? Please
fill out our survey if you feel comfortable sharing.

Read the
notes from Saturday’s event here, and find Dance/NYC’s list of sexual harassment resources here.

The post The Biggest Questions Facing the Dance World About Sexual Harassment appeared first on Dance Magazine.

This is true, especially when it comes to the discussion at the forefront of today’s national dialogue about dance: diversity in ballet.

Arthur Mitchell as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1962. Arthur Mitchell Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Collection, Columbia University.

This weekend, “Arthur Mitchell: Harlem’s Ballet Trailblazer,” an exhibition celebrating the accomplishments of New York City Ballet’s first African American principal dancer and co-founder of Dance Theatre of Harlem, opens at Columbia University’s Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery.

Back in 1975, Mitchell told Dance Magazine, “We have to prove that a black ballet school and a black ballet company are the equal of the best of their kind anywhere in the world.” Both his own performing career and the critical response to DTH in the years immediately following its official debut would have been enough for him to say “mission accomplished.”

But, clearly, Mitchell says, there is still work to be done. That’s where young, up-and-coming trailblazers come in.

Sharing advice he received from George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, Mitchell says, “They said, ‘You’ve got to take the bull by the horns and do what you have to do. You must believe in what you’re doing and, against all odds, against anyone else’s feeling and vision, you must stick to it. And, eventually, know that the world will catch up with what you’re doing and appreciate it.’ ”

Studio outreach class at the Dance Theatre of Harlem, 1970s. Arthur Mitchell Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Collection, Columbia University.

Has the world caught up with his own dreams and visions?

“No,” says Mitchell. “How many black girls are there now dancing in ballet? Name all the companies in America. How many have a leading African-American ballerina? There’s only one in a major company, that’s Misty Copeland in American Ballet Theatre. There’s still work to be done. There’s got to be more training. There’s got to be teachers who are working in the black communities that are taking into account what these dancers have to face.”

While he is no longer director of Dance Theatre of Harlem, Mitchell, now 83, continues blazing trails under the auspices of the Arthur Mitchell Project, which is funded by the Ford Foundation.

Arthur Mitchell shortly after joining the New York City Ballet in 1955. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Arthur Mitchell Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Collection, Columbia University.

The “Harlem’s Ballet Trailblazer” exhibit features an amazing array of treasures from a life well-lived, including the telegram from Lincoln Kirstein to Mitchell inviting him to join the New York City Ballet and an eight-foot-long DTH puzzle created by Frank Bara in 1991 that chronicles the first two decades of the company’s history with illustrative detail of its artists, heroes and friends.

On view also is dancer Charmaine Hunter’s costume and headpiece designed by Geoffrey Holder for Firebird (1982), one of DTH’s signature works. There are posters from DTH’s innumerable tours, photos, performance footage of Mitchell in Agon, Four Temperaments, Midsummer Nights Dream and more. The exhibit also has an online component that will include a detailed timeline and numerous essays, all open to the public.

Dance Theatre of Harlem ballerina Lydia Abarca, 1970s. Arthur Mitchell Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Collection, Columbia University.

“This exhibition pays homage both to Mitchell’s creative magic and to his visionary achievements, revealing to those who never saw him dance his charismatic stage presence and the full scope of his career as an artist,” says curator Lynn Garafola. “At the same time, it places the Dance Theatre of Harlem, which he co-founded and directed for more than 40 years, at the crossroads of political, artistic and racial change in the United States and beyond.”

The show will run through March 11.

The post Arthur Mitchell: "You Must Believe in What You're Doing And, Against All Odds…Stick to It." appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The post Dancing the Resistance: 3 Shows Tackling #BlackLivesMatter and Beyond appeared first on Dance Magazine.

“Alvin was making a statement about African-American cultural experience, saying, ‘Hey, this is who we are, we live here, we were born here,’ ” says Judith Jamison, artistic director emerita of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. “It was a brave action. Civil rights were roaring, and our protest was our performance.”

Even today, Revelations presents a compelling plea for society through its renderings of the highs and lows of our human condition. “When I look at recent events in this country and hear rhetoric that is more than a throwback to the Jim Crow era,” says current AAADT artistic director Robert Battle, “I know that now, more than ever, Revelations is urgently needed.”

The piece has made a profound impact. AAADT dancers perform Revelations hundreds, even thousands, of times in the course of their careers. Their bodies carry not only the steps, but the weight and historical relevance of the piece.

Judith Jamison. Photo courtesy the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation Archives

“I haven’t danced it in years, but I remember every step I ever learned,” says Jamison, whose performances as the umbrella woman helped propel her to stardom. “You feel whole by the time the curtain comes down. No matter how many times you perform or see it, it lifts you.”

While creating Revelations—one of his earliest works—Ailey was searching for personal, artistic and cultural identity. He investigated what he described as his ancestral “blood memories,” and his personal history growing up an only child in rural segregated Texas, attending Baptist churches with his single mother, being overwhelmed by spiritual gospel music.

Divided into three sections, his narrative journeys through a mournful “Pilgrim of Sorrow”; the baptismal second section, “Take Me to the Water”; and “Move Members, Move,” depicting an uplifting spiritual community.

“Revelations began with the music. As early as I can remember I was enthralled by the music played and sung in small black churches,” Ailey described in his memoir Revelations: The Autobiography of Alvin Ailey. He wrote that he was also stirred by the sculptures of Henry Moore, the writings of Langston Hughes, and the technical elements of Martha Graham and his mentor Lester Horton: “Moore’s work inspired the costumes made of jersey in the first part. When the body moves, the jersey takes on extraordinary tensions.”

Linda Celeste Sims and Glenn Allen Sims. Photo by Paul Kolnik, courtesy AAADT

The piece premiered in New York City at the 92nd Street Y on Sunday, January 31, 1960, with nine dancers including Ailey, and live musicians. “The theater was packed,” recalls Sylvia Waters, a former Ailey II director, and current director of the Ailey Legacy Residency. “I was in the balcony, and when the curtain came down there was a moment of silence and then an eruption of clapping, stamping…it was huge!”

The original version was a full hour, which Ailey said he then “snipped, cut, pushed and pulled down to a half hour.”

And it proved hugely popular. “Once, in Germany, we had already gone offstage and into our dressing rooms; I was about to take my eyelashes off, but the audience kept going, so Mr. Ailey had us do an encore, and all the bows, several times,” recalls Jamison. “They closed the curtain, they opened it again—it went on for 15, maybe 20 minutes. We finally put our heads in our hands, like ‘We are tired.’ They had to lower the metal fire curtain!”

Gert Krautbauer, courtesy AAADT

Reaching the pinnacle of his choreographic career early on, Ailey struggled at times with his personal relationship to Revelations. “He sometimes referred to Revelations as ‘the albatross around his neck,’ ” says Waters. “He was frustrated, always being put in that box, because he created 79 ballets and many thought this was the only piece he ever created!”

As Revelations approaches 60 years of nearly uninterrupted performances, Ailey’s hopeful message continues to spread. “Alvin Ailey was able to create a work about faith in God, yet it transcends religion,” says Battle. “Revelations has a way of breaking through spiritual and language barriers.”

Battle has witnessed the passing of the torch firsthand since becoming director in 2011. “I see new dancers in their first performance, or longtime dancers moving into iconic roles—it connects them to the past, to Alvin Ailey himself. It is a powerful, moving experience,” says Battle, who sometimes marks the movement in the wings to interplay with the dancers. “I never danced Revelations myself, so [associate artistic director Masazumi] Chaya has threatened to put me into ‘yellow section’ at some point…I humbly decline!”

Robert Battle and Masazumi Chaya in the wings. Photo by Michael Francis McBride, courtesy AAADT

The post Why We Need Ailey's Revelations Now More Than Ever appeared first on Dance Magazine.