How did you discover that you loved pole dancing?

I don’t even remember how I found out about pole. I think I had some friends who did it. Having a background in Irish dance, there’s not a lot of opportunities to connect with your body. I’m someone who’s been through a lot with my body in terms of being a trans person, so I was like, This seems like something that will be really good for reconnecting with my body in a positive way. I also wanted to work on my upper body strength—Irish dancing is all in the legs.

Why is it that Irish dancing doesn’t allow you that connection to your body and pole dancing does?

Irish dancing does bring me so much joy. But you’re covered from head to toe, you don’t show any skin. The more you advance in pole, the less clothes you have to wear, because you need your body to grip the pole. I struggled with that at first. I would always wear a crop top, and that made me really dysphoric because it reminded me that I had breasts and that they shouldn’t be there. At my first showcase at the studio, I did it just with trans tape and pole undies. I was so nervous. I was like, All these people in the audience know that I’ve got boobs. Then I performed and it was just so joyful. I just felt like I was like every other guy.

I got gender-affirming surgery in September, and did my first performance topless without any tape early this year. It was truly one of the happiest moments of my life. I was like, I am dancing with my dream chest on display, in front of all these people. That’s not something I could do in Irish dancing, to have my scars on show and to be who I am and have everyone there cheering me on as a trans-masc person.

How has your pole dancing community welcomed and helped you?

I was a bit nervous when I first went because I’m quite often the only trans person in the room. I remember having a chat with one of the owners and saying that in the past I hadn’t always felt included in spaces. She was like, “If anyone says anything negative to you, tell me, because we will not allow that.” That made me feel so incredibly supported and safe.

In terms of accessing surgery, I needed it physically and mentally. Physically, the damage to my body from binding had hit a level where I needed surgery. I had been binding for six years and it was not good. And mentally, my chest dysphoria has always been really debilitating, and it was really affecting me. It was halting my progression in pole and my performance in Irish—I wouldn’t practice because I couldn’t deal with seeing my chest.

I saw a surgeon and got a date, and it was a lot sooner than I was expecting and I just didn’t have the money. I was panicking and I brought it up at the studio to some of my friends, and one of the owners overheard. She called me over and was like, “When do you need the money? Why don’t we have our next showcase be a fundraiser for your top surgery?” I had so many emotions. I had to take time to think about it because I was so shocked.

The showcases that we do are called “Category Is,” and the category gets decided a week or two out from the show. They named it “Category Is: Trans Pride,” and you had to dress in the colors of the trans flag. I felt so incredibly held by this community and this dance studio.

What has the response been to sharing your journey with pole dancing?

I struggled when I first started pole, thinking, Is it weird if I do pole as a trans guy? Are people gonna judge me? But representation is so important. Hopefully, there are some femme trans guys out there who can see me performing or see me at a competition, or see me online. And if they want to pole dance, or they want to wear eight-inch heels, or they want to wear makeup, or they want to grow their hair, they can do that, because they can see, Oh, he’s doing it, and he’s celebrated, and he’s accepted.

The post How Trans Irish Dancer Hayden Moon Found a New Home in Pole Dancing appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Tell us about what drew you to teaching and your early experience. 

I started training at age 10 with Mr. Mitchell at DTH, and I saw how he had a way of getting whatever he needed out of a dancer. He knew exactly what to say. I was so fascinated by that, and it drew me to wanting to be in the front of the room. I started teaching at Lula Washington Dance Theatre, and then did the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet teacher training that summer, 2013. I was on CPYB’s summer faculty from 2018–22, and I also taught for Ballet Academy East. I’ve taken every opportunity I could to teach, like giving community master classes while on tour with DTH. 

What was your exposure to SAB and NYCB as a young dancer?

Growing up at DTH, I thought ballet was for Black people. But then I learned why Mr. Mitchell was famous, and why what he had achieved was so incredible. But I didn’t think those institutions were for me, although I did later audition for SAB twice. 

What was your journey to becoming an SAB permanent faculty member?

Participating in the National Visiting Fellows program was eye-opening. Seeing Katrina [Killian, Children’s Program manager who guides the Fellows] on the floor just so carefully shaping a child’s foot, seeing the pedagogical through-line from Level I to the most advanced, and to the company—it gave me so much respect for the organization. I’d also been worried about how welcome I’d feel, but everyone was so nice to me. 

I stayed in touch with the school when I returned to New York to rejoin DTH the following year, but I was still shocked when Jon [Stafford] called to offer me the teaching apprentice position. He had asked Virginia [Johnson, then DTH artistic director] for permission first because I’d still be dancing for her. That showed respect for DTH and the character of someone I wanted to work for. 

It was good timing that I was ready to retire from DTH when a permanent position opened at SAB. I’d learned so much during my two years as an apprentice, I felt blessed to be able to keep going. 

How do you bring your background into your teaching?

I’m very proud of my career and I love sharing it with the students. Growing up a churchgoer taught me that people are moved by your testimony. Mr. Mitchell used to tell stories about his career, including Balanchine. Talking about NYCB will never be what I have to give, but I have another story to tell them. Sharing my experience with DTH and Mr. Mitchell, and other companies, expands their view of what a career can be. 

What’s most enjoyable to you about teaching at SAB?

It’s a team effort. We talk to each other about where we are in the syllabus; if the students needed more time on a certain thing and I didn’t get to something else, I can pass that on to the next teacher, and we get the kids there together. 

What does the state of diversity efforts in ballet look like to you?

I’m very proud to be Black, but I’ve certainly faced racism in my career outside DTH—just as Mr. Mitchell warned me. So I’m proud to show that programs with diversity in mind are successful and important. If SAB wasn’t living its diversity commitment, I wouldn’t be here. I talk a lot at the school about my ideas for outreach and relating to students with backgrounds like mine. Change can take time, but it’s coming. Look where I am! God is good. The future is bright. 

The post Christopher Charles McDaniel Blazes His Own Path at SAB appeared first on Dance Magazine.

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

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

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

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

Studying the Dancing Brain

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

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

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

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

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

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

What We Know About Dance and the Brain

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

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

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

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

Beyond Neuroscience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She ended up discovering a new passion. “I had never really found myself in something, and pole was so different from anything I had done before,” Shoeira says.

Today, Shoeira is an enthusiastic proponent of pole dancing as an art, a sport, and a means of self-expression. But not everyone in Shoeira’s life has been happy about her dancing. Her dad, especially, needed convincing. “We’d have fights,” she says. “But eventually, especially as I had started coaching, he became more okay with it.”

In many Western countries, pole dance classes achieved mainstream popularity years ago. Egypt’s pole dancing culture has been slower to grow—partly due to the country’s conservative society, and partly because it can be perceived as a Western take on “provocative” belly dancing, an art still facing its own stigmas.

Though social media has helped Egyptian pole dancers tackle taboos, misunderstandings persist. Egyptians wanting to try pole dancing are sometimes suspicious, for example, of its shorter outfits, seeing them as unnecessarily revealing. Shoeira encourages her students to experiment with their clothes for their own confidence, but also emphasizes that bare arms and legs make it easier to move on the pole.

Sharoubim and Shoeira have different opinions on the women-only rules that shape dance culture in Egypt. Shoeira is among the few pole instructors in Egypt teaching mixed-gender classes. They have proved highly successful despite some initial negative reactions, and sometimes even draw more men than women. Sharoubim, on the other hand, believes that women-only spaces are crucial in Egypt, as they typically help women feel safer and free to take off their hijabs or wear form-fitting clothes.

Sharoubim’s students span a wide age range; she says she’s had several older pupils who were dedicated from the start. “One 62-year-old woman told me pole made her feel like she ‘was flying’ and that she became ‘20 years younger,’ ” Sharoubim says. A 45-year-old told Sharoubim that pole and its sensuality helped her love her body and herself. Across generations, Egyptians are finding a new kind of freedom in pole dancing.

The post The Rise of Pole Dancing in Egypt appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Years ago, another low-profile word, “my,” caught my attention. I started bristling at the equally commonplace phrase: “my dancers.” And I find it increasingly problematic, especially in light of our woefully overdue national reckoning with systemic racism and the most recent stripping of women’s agency over their own bodies.

So here’s my gripe with the possessive pronoun “my.” It suggests ownership. And authority. Efficient as it may be, the term indicates ownership not just over dances but, more alarmingly, over people and their bodily labor.

While the phrase “my dancers” may not deliberately subjugate dancers, the notion of ownership over other bodies, their work and their ideas is linked to patriarchal traditions and the legacy of slavery. With that in mind, the linguistic habit, used mostly as a shorthand—or even a term of endearment—becomes rather alarming. I can’t ignore the histories and politics of race, class and gender that underscore any inclination to discount the physical labor of people with less power.

Performer Sarah Parker has written about the structural problem in choreographic credit attribution. Despite fluid boundaries between dancers and choreographers, presenting structures and educational models tend to rely on a single-author model to credit choreographic ownership, even when work is highly collaborative. In practice, however, the term “choreography” has expanded to suggest a mode of inquiry rather than a practice of arranging. But we don’t yet have an adequate system of discussing the exchange between choreographers and dancers that is so central to the creative process.

In the U.S., with some notable exceptions, most dancers work with multiple choreographers, and many concurrently create their own work. Whereas codified movement techniques used to be tethered to a single creator (Martha Graham, Katherine Dunham, Merce Cunningham, for example), the closest things to codified techniques in recent years include William Forsythe’s Improvisation Technologies or Ohad Naharin’s Gaga, both of which offer strategies for developing complex physical skill (aka dance “technique”) by exercising independent agency in improvisational explorations. Many choreographic processes leverage such improvisational techniques as they rely on lateral dialogues rather than top-down processes.

Now, when students in my classes use “my dancers,” I usually say something like: “Even though it is a norm in this field, I don’t use that term anymore and here’s why…” Then, I encourage them to think critically about what to call their peers in a process. In essence, the dialogue between choreographer and dancer operates as an exchange that is much more lateral than hierarchical. My friend Betsy Miller deliberately reverses the traditionally assumed dancer–choreographer power dynamic in her american/woman project, in which dancers do not serve a predetermined vision. Instead, she tries to help dancers unearth their own solos through a collaborative process. This kind of mutual inquiry characterizes artists’ creative processes much more often than we may think. Dances could not happen without the dancers. They do not carry out a choreographer’s singular vision, they co-create it.

As a choreographer, I seek out dancers I admire, whose skill and intellect will enrich our process. When I developed Bigger, Faster, Better with Kendra Portier, her physical prowess made my dancing better. And I’m not sure I’ve had more fun in the studio than with Jenna Riegel and Kellie Lynch in developing Lies Come Easier, which structured playful one-upmanship inspired by the basketball game HORSE. They layered awe-inspiring—and sometimes actually impossible (they spot each other in that case)—physical feats with absurd challenges: diving into a handstand, then slowly lowering to a headstand, while singing Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” and upside-down stomping a rhythm on the studio wall. Now that those pieces have been performed by several other casts, the choreography is additive. The pieces contain the permanent stamp of the original collaborators and each new dancer inhabiting the structure. In performance, embodiment and identity are bound, visible and powerful. Dancers make physical choices that reflect the particular physics of their bodies, training histories and subjective experiences in the world. That is just as true in my work with students as it is with professional artists, none of whom are “my dancers.”

Choreographers and dancers alike should, of course, celebrate what they do. Continuing to attach names to choreographic products allows us to recognize marginalized voices in a field that has embodied identity as its center. We can, however, retire language that positions dancers as metaphoric tools used to execute a work. Might we, instead, adopt new habits that more accurately reflect the distributed process of intellectual and physical labor of dancemaking? It might require more words—“the dancers I work with” or “the dancers in this piece,” for example.

When else do the words we use betray—even undermine—the ways we understand our field, functionally, ethically and structurally? For example, the rhetoric of passion and love we so readily assign to the drive to dance sometimes makes us forget that it is indeed real work. We co-create dances with, about and because of bodies beyond our own. Now, let’s get back to work!

The post Why it’s Time to Stop Saying “My Dancers” appeared first on Dance Magazine.

People would hear my narrative and say, “You should write a book.” I have read every book by every ballerina and I have lived the life. I thought I should wait a bit to tell my story because­ I knew that I would have to tell the truth. So I had been putting it off. I met this wonderful woman, Tamara Washington, who is my manager now. She wanted to get a timeline and plan together. I wondered, Who am I going to trust with my story? I started to request the recordings from all my interviews. I figured I would put them together and make a book.

And then I got an email from poet Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton. She had done a spoken-word piece with Houston Ballet after Hurricane Harvey, so I knew her work. She wanted to have a meeting with me. I assumed that she wanted to pick my brain about an education project, so I said sure.

When she told me that she wanted to write a theater piece based on my life, I literally shrank down in my chair to make myself as small as possible. “You want to write about me?” It wasn’t what I was expecting. Why? My usual ballet story is so boring, because I had not told anyone the real story—which includes my struggle with addiction and eventual recovery—especially to someone not in the recovery community.

In the beginning, Deborah was so respectful of my time. I told her about my childhood, we talked about surface-y things—I am good at telling a story. What was interesting is that she asked me how I felt, not just what happened. That brought me closer to her. I started thinking, Wow, she really wants to know my story. When the media asks me about my life, they want juice, they don’t care how I really feel. They want to focus on fame.

After a year and a half of interviews, I felt like we could go deeper. We met sometimes twice a week. This was around the time that George Floyd died, so it was a charged time, and my emotions were right at the surface. I was being asked to speak on a lot of panels about how we feel as Black dancers. Then I got tired of talking about that. “I am not here to tell you how you should feel. Your feelings are legitimate.” After saying that so many times, it started to work on me.

I am not a choreographer. I can re-create a production, but I don’t have that gene. Deborah, though, is a choreographer of words. As we spoke, I kept seeing idea bubbles explod­ing over her head. One of the most flattering things she said to me was that I made things easy for her. Because I am descriptive, and that’s because I am an actress, a dancer and a performer. I have to have that running dialogue in my head to make an audience believe what I am doing. She turned my words into a full-blown dance-theater piece. When she handed me what she had written, it was like a road map of my life, including exact moments from my childhood. Young Lauren enters and turns around, plays with a ball, flips over the handlebars of a bike. There were dancers coming on- and offstage. She literally had written out her total­ vision with complete stage directions, even some lighting cues. I just thought, Wow, this is spectacular.

After a second reading, we corrected a couple things, switched some timing around, little bitty things. She wanted it to be accurate and authentic, so she sifted through every word. She had this desperation to get it right. At some point, I had to let the script go because it’s her theater piece. But she got it right. One scene even portrays a time when Carlos Acosta and I went salsa dancing, and it absolutely changed our partnership onstage. I had to relinquish control to him, which had been uncomfortable to me until that night out with him!

The story is told through the lens of recovery because that is where I am right now.

If you’d asked me to do this 20 years ago, it would have had a different flavor. But I am 57 now, and recovery has given me a solution-oriented point of view. I don’t think there are problems, just solutions. If I was still in addiction, I would have to leave all this stuff out and only tell one part of the story: my dance life. But in Plumgshuga, addiction and abuse are shown strongly through dance and, of course, spoken about. I was coping with all kinds of pressure, not necessarily success—because I never really felt successful, and that was part of the problem, not liking myself. At first it was just fun, but then I drank and did drugs to feel better about a lot of things, to forget about some things and to not care about others. I know that sharing this will help other people.

I can tell you that when I watched the performance workshop, it was devastating. It was beautiful and wonderful, but at the end I was emotionally exhausted. I was so proud, proud of the piece, proud of myself because I know what I went through. I was amazed with Deborah, and Stanton Welch and Harrison Guy for their choreography, and so honored knowing what everyone poured into it.

Afterwards, I sat on a panel in front of a group of people who’d watched the most amazing parts of my life and the jankiest parts of my life, and felt all the feels. Then came a barrage of compliments that I could not handle. I turned to Stanton and said, “I don’t know how to do this.” Then I told Deborah that I needed to go back to therapy to learn how to say “thank you.” It was interesting because usually I love applause.­ Plumshuga makes me feel everything, and that’s a lot. Oh, about that book, Deborah will be writing it.

The post The Iconic Lauren Anderson’s Life Story Onstage appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Taking advantage of the faceted atrium’s unusual acoustics, Park’s original score for electric guitar, percussion and eight laptop computers emanated from small amplifiers distributed throughout the skylit room, whose tall panels of teakwood resonated with every whisper and rhythm. At one point, the entire ensemble of dancers rushed from one end of the space to the other, as if the McGregor Center was a cruise ship rocking and rolling in turbulent seas. Cloud cover during the 3 o’clock performance brought somber qualities to the action, but, when repeated at 5 o’clock and lit vividly by the setting sun, it was an ascension.

Every dance is site-specific in some sense, but, in a warming world changed by war, political upheaval and a pandemic, some choreographers forgo traditional venues entirely. Whether their work is about climate change, social dynamics, systemic oppression or community vibrance, they’re all drawn to the friction between moving and staying in one place.

Fields of Infinite Potential

“Sites outside of a dance studio are fields of infinite potential that can be very generative as places we have relationships with,” says transmedia artist d. Sabela grimes, a professor at the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, who grew up on California’s central coast and attended UCLA. While he lived and worked in Soweto, South Africa, and Philadelphia, grimes maintained a connection with the Leimert Park Village neighborhood of Los Angeles, where the community weaves performance—both planned and spontaneous—into daily life along Degnan Boulevard.

Before COVID-19 vaccines were available, “when we were all in our homes—do you remember?—I can’t explain to you how important it was, how valuable it was, how special it was, to be in public space with people making music, to see them dancing, to be in communion and fellowship,” grimes says. Even as in-person classes and shows resumed indoors, grimes stayed involved with the vibrant scene around Degnan Boulevard’s street vendors and businesses, like Anthony Jolly’s Hot and Cool Cafe and its adjacent alley. “The streets continue to be a driving force and wellspring of knowledge production and transmission,” he says. One night reminded grimes how performance can be not only site-specific but a way to bring the essence of one place to another: TOB, a band that plays go-go, a variant of funk music specific to the nation’s capital, played Leimert Park Village from a stage on top of a bus booked by Jolly and Long Live GoGo DC. Dancing ensued. “I had no idea so many people from Washington were living in L.A.,” says grimes, who remembers the southeast District well from summertime visits with his mother’s family. “It literally was like the spot turned into a street in DC.”

As a continuation of his series called Dark Matter Messages, grimes is currently developing PARABLE OF PORTALS (POP), supported by a National Dance Project production grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts. By apply­ing augmented-reality technology to intentionally chosen, real-world locations, grimes says one question POP asks is, “How can the experience of dance happen in a variety of sites simultaneously?”

At a May 2022 work-in-progress showing in Chicago of reorientations, by SLIPPAGE resident artists Kate Alexandrite, who is white, and Thomas F. DeFrantz, Ayan Felix and MX Oops, who are Black, Alexandrite wore virtual-reality goggles while the other three interacted and made eye contact. The four artists might technically have shared space, but, experientially, Alexandrite was often somewhere else. A large screen periodically displayed a live feed of video from inside the goggles, revealing to the audience where Alexandrite “was” and what they were doing there.

Site as Body, Body as Site

As a choreographer of mixed European and Moose Cree First Nation ancestry, Starr Muranko’s work as co–artistic director of Raven Spirit Dance in the Canadian city of Vancouver is informed, she explains, by Indigenous values. “A lot of our research is land-based and takes place outside,” says Muranko. “Even though the work might eventually end up on a stage, it’s often rooted in a particular place or in going home.” For a piece titled Before7After, about seven generations of Cree women, Muranko traveled to an island in the Moose River in northern Ontario, 500 miles from Toronto. “The idea that I wouldn’t go back to the land for that project made no sense. How your body moves is influenced by certain surfaces, by the land around you, by the temperature, by the climate, by the time of year.” After developing material on location, Muranko and her collaborators sometimes return to the studio, where “we then have that landscape and that map within our bodies, as well as within the space. It’s not a ‘blank studio’ or a ‘blank theater.’ It’s where that river is, where that mountain is.”

In creating The Sky Was Different for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s Season 43: A Virtual Homecoming, the company’s 2020–21 virtual season, company alumni Jonathan Fredrickson and Tobin Del Cuore collaborated with Hubbard Street’s dancers on a 50-minute film, shot in and around the 1938 home and studio of architect Paul Schweikher in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg. “For me, site-specificity is about utilizing a space by being aware of it and letting it dictate what happens,” says Fredrickson, a choreographer now based in Germany and a guest artist with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. “The house itself was a character, this body in which the dancers were its organs, its bloodstream, its brain, its heart. The narrator of the piece was the house itself.” In long, meticulously choreographed takes, Del Cuore’s eye-level camera glides through the house’s rooms, giving The Sky Was Different a sense of actively involved curiosity reminiscent of movies like Roma, by Alfonso Cuarón.

Fredrickson choreographed a solo for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Jamar Roberts in director Bram VanderMark’s I Carry Them, produced by Jacob Jonas The Company. Released in May 2022, the five-minute film uses an editing technique called cross-cutting to move Roberts from place to place, while his fluid dancing continues uninterrupted.

Site as Signifier

In addition to honoring or recontextualizing a place, site-informed performance can be a way to raise awareness of threats to a community’s existence, says Millicent Johnnie, founder and CEO of Millicent Johnnie Films and chief visionary producer at 319 productions. In 2013, Johnnie and her collaborators, including New Orleans–based companies ArtSpot Productions and Mondo Bizarro, won a Creative Capital Award to develop Cry You One, which addressed the impact of climate change on wetlands in southeast Louisiana. “I’d always done site-specific studies and generated choreography in connection with the land,” Johnnie says, “but Cry You One is when I really started to sink into making dance in relation to site and started using the term ‘site-responsive,’ which was introduced to me by Mondo Bizarro, which came from the principle ‘You cannot walk into a space and impose yourself on that space.’ ” Johnnie says that Cry You One asked the question “What happens to art and culture that’s tied to land when that land disappears?” After premiering in St. Bernard Parish, the project toured for two years, bringing with it the artists’ embodied knowledge of its source.

Sometimes, site-specific research plants seeds for works that bloom elsewhere. During the four years Johnnie lived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, she would often visit the Tijuca rainforest­ to write, improvise movement and develop studies for future projects. When Toshi Reagon, then the festival curator for the Women’s Jazz Festival at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, paired Johnnie with Ethiopian American musician Meklit Hadero, “that wasn’t intended to be a site-responsive work,” Johnnie says, “but there were certain sounds and textures I kept hearing in Meklit’s music that paralleled sounds and textures from the Tijuca rainforest. That helped me create and build the world that I needed to improvise with Meklit.” Johnnie recently collaborated with Urban Bush Women founding artistic director Jawole Willa Jo Zollar on Where Water Is Not Thirsty, responsive to Tallahassee, Florida’s Lafayette Heritage Trail Park and Lichgate on High Road, and captured on video by a camera built into a remote-controlled drone.

Before the pandemic, the Bay Area dance company FACT/SF presented work in both traditional dance venues and places that resist the ways dancers’ bodies can be abstracted,­ generalized or objectified onstage. For Invidious, a sextet custom-created­ in 2014 for a patron’s San Francisco home, choreographer and artistic director Charles Slender-White staged solos in the bathroom and kitchen, and duets in the bedroom and living room. Audiences of 16 people at a time, divided into four groups of four, encountered these dances at different times, making each attendee’s experience of Invidious fairly unique—and each role an exercise in energy modulation.

“We talk a lot in our practice about adopting a disposition that allows people to view you, not as a set of ideas or shapes or even kinetic factors, but as a person, occupying the same space,” says Slender-White. “When the dancers do that, it invites the audience in and then, probably because of mirror neurons and social empathy, the exchange becomes more generous and supportive.” Since FACT/SF uses live performance to investigate group dynamics, Slender-White says the company is continuously challenged by the ongoing, ever-evolving COVID-19 pandemic. “The relationship between an individual’s concept of self and experience of self, and the way that those things interplay with others’ perspectives or perceptions of self, have been central to my work since the beginning.” The fall 2021 premiere run of FACT/SF’s Split comprised 248 performances for audiences of one, present either in person or virtually.

Exploring sites of a certain type can prompt touring pathways outside the presenting networks that link similarly sized, like-minded venues. The Consumption Series: Part II brought Slender-White and FACT/SF colleague Emily Woo Zeller to every single Walmart store in the state of California—173 at the time. But that project wasn’t about the stores themselves, Slender-White explains. “We weren’t really interested in the structures, the cars in the parking lots, the lighting fixtures over the aisles,” he says. “It was specific to a certain context, a type of sociocultural site, an economic site, a site of commerce, where we could ask, ‘What is happening here?’ ”

They Got Out—But Will They Stay Out?

Dance companies large and small pivoted to site-specific, digital filmmaking as part of their pandemic responses. At New York City Ballet, this widened the spotlight to showcase more of the company’s home, the David H. Koch Theater, than just its storied stage. New works in 2020 and 2021 by choreographers Kyle Abraham, Sidra Bell, Andrea Miller, Justin Peck, Jamar Roberts and Pam Tanowitz brought at-home viewers backstage, into pools in the plaza at Lincoln Center, and up to the ceiling of the theater’s Promenade to look straight down on dancers below—a screen-based amalgam of Modernist architecture, Busby Berkeley and contemporary ballet. Time will tell whether major dance institutions continue such location-based experimentation.

The post Exploring Site-Specific Performance Here & Now appeared first on Dance Magazine.

My name is Stefanie Batten Bland. I am an interdisciplinary director and choreographer. An American of African and European heritage, I am a woman of brown tones and reddish-brown bushy, curly hair that has volume and unapologetically takes up space. I’ve lived the better part of my life in spaces that weren’t necessarily designed for me, and yet I’ve thrived.

Being seen for who you are—with casting, lighting and costuming choices that support that—is an incredible feeling. But it is a state with which I have a complex relationship. I grew up needing to negotiate familial spaces and, as such, was always hired as a type of hybrid mover, sprinkled in hybrid genres. I know how a person’s identity is tied to their reality—and how that spills into their work, whether a production is thematically abstract or a fictional narrative.

Inside of ballet, I was an inaugural choreographer for ABT’s Women’s Movement, for its Studio Company in 2019. I see the ballet industry beginning to examine its hiring practices and role-distribution policies. Now, further spurred on by the theatrical justice movement during the pandemic, it is immersive theater’s turn to change patterns as we move with pride into the rest of this century.

Outside of my own work with my Company SBB, I am casting and movement director, as well as performance and identity consultant, for Emursive Productions, the producers of large-scale immersive theater in New York City and across the globe. Immersive work is a form that often engages with being seen and not—through mysterious lighting, enticing characters and stories that center audience members and set them free to chase, follow and choose how close they get to the cast.

However, there is a profound difference between BIPOC immersive­ performers not being seen by choice and not being able to be seen at all. This is where I come in. I aim to ensure that directors, producers, scenographers and designers dream up shows with a lens of inclusivity. How can they meet diverse performers in auditions, imagine them in all roles, and then make sure audiences can see them, literally? How do light levels, instruments, costuming, approaches to character description and all the other visual cues, from the space to the sound, help performers play their best fiction while living their truth?

Art-making is complex, controversial. I know what I am doing cannot fix everything nor please everyone. This theater practice has been mainly made for and by people of European ancestry. Not to say BIPOC performers weren’t in these shows. But they weren’t centered around us, our tones, our skin bounce. My work inside of Emursive is profound as it shifts what “absence in plain sight” means in this proximity-based work. My weapon of choice is what great performance is rooted in: imagination. I open up our framework of imagining people by how we see them to also include how they see themselves. Our daily life biases are present in all we do, so I start where I see absence.

In our new show, I help develop characters that previously would have been considered supporting roles. (Just think about how BIPOC performers are often cast as exotic, magical or humorous characters who are short-lived or featured for only a few minutes—like the Black kid in the horror movie who gets killed first.) Some of my approaches to moving beyond­ “traditional” character decks include shifting to BIPOC-centered imagery in lieu of past predominantly white typecasting patterns. Then I explore the first- and second-degree resources (real people, living or dead, who share a character’s bio or archetype similarities) and ensure they are also BIPOC. I focus on finding the best performer for that character.

From the moment a BIPOC performer walks into a space, they/we should feel empowered. During auditions, the hiring process and the special walk to the dressing room, we should feel normal because our space is made for all to succeed. My work centers on putting into practice a majority–minority cultural shift in performance and identity.

In shows that are already up and running—and this is where the unicorn again raises its head—I apply the same techniques to move a production into present/future time, as opposed to the past. I’ve been in these shows myself and noticed as patrons saw me as an “angry Black woman” instead of the character I was portraying. I saw their fear because of my proximity to them—a result of their biases, even though they’d paid to be inside of a fictional theatrical space. It was humiliating to lose an audience at moments when my colleagues of Euro-based heritage did not.

I help shows rework material in ways that simultaneously honor the scripts while addressing the many complicated facets of life here in the U.S. It has been a lonely labor, but now I am seeing immediate changes. I am needed once again for my hybrid sensibilities, and I not only feel good in my skin, but I can ensure all who come after me will feel good in theirs. When I see the success of this work, it is reflected in the performers, the shows and the spectators. It is thrilling. Creating and re-exploring productions in partnership with people of different skin tones makes more performance opportunities for all.

Race is imaginary. The representation of all in our performing arts shouldn’t be. So says the unicorn.

The post Why Crafting More-Inclusive Immersive Theater Matters appeared first on Dance Magazine.

As part of the ensemble cast of seven Black women, Miller barely leaves the stage for the full 90-minute run time. Directed and choreographed by Camille A. Brown (nominated for two Tony Awards for her direction and choreography), the play is athletic and rigorous—jumping, skipping, stomping, drumming on bodies, rolling on the floor, pushing out breath to communicate through sound in addition to speech. As Lady in Red, Miller goes through the emotional wringer, delivering one of the most tragic poems of the piece, “Beau Willie Brown,” about an abusive relationship and a woman who watches her children die at the hands of their father, her ex-lover. Managing all this is impressive enough, but (as of publication) Miller is also just over 38 weeks pregnant.

“My doctor was like, ‘We’ll wait to the 30th [of May], but right now where you are, she’s viable, so she can come whenever she wants,’ ” says Miller. “Getting ready for the show I’m like, ‘Little girl, do not come onstage, do not make your entrance onstage.’ ”

Miller wants to give herself over to every last performance of this work (which was set to close early, on May 22, but has been given an extension until June 5—thanks to the boost from a Twitter campaign and seven Tony nominations, including one for Miller). Still, she says that listening to her doctors and her body is the priority.

“I wanted to be a part of this production for a long time, and my husband and I have wanted a child for a very long time,” says Miller. “It’s just so many dreams coming true. I don’t take it for granted at all. The nomination is a huge gift, but she’s the prize.”

Miller and her husband have been married 17 years and had “given up” on conceiving a child, but her community and cast have carried her through this moment of great surprise. “I’m so grateful, and to have such a tribe of women that every day—from day one—they have lifted me up, made me feel really strong and supported.” Brown leads that tribe.

Miller and Brown worked together on the Broadway revival of Once On This Island, and Brown asked Miller to do a workshop of for colored girls before casting the production. That’s when Miller found out she was pregnant.

Miller discreetly shared the news with Brown, who said they’d take it one step at a time. “I still had to audition for it. It really came down to the ability to tell the narrative as well as do the physicality. But from the beginning, she expressed her belief in me.”

“I had never been pregnant before, and she’d never worked with a pregnant woman before,” Miller continues. “But she said, ‘As long as your doctors say it’s okay, if you’re safe, then let’s [go].’ ”

This exchange in and of itself is an anomaly in theater—certainly on Broadway. “I had a woman come up to me after the show and she said, ‘You don’t know what seeing you up there pregnant did for me, because I stopped performing because I got pregnant, because I didn’t think I could do it and I didn’t think I would be hired,’ ” Miller recalls. “You have in your mind: You’re pregnant; you got to sit down at this point. But she said, ‘To see you up there just made me like ‘Wow.’ That was really special to me.”

Miller’s presence on the stage of Broadway’s Booth Theatre, with her visible nine-month pregnant belly, declares: Artists do not have to “sit down” while their bodies change. They do not have to surrender their artistry to pregnancy and motherhood. Miller is proof that creative teams, and mothers themselves, must reconceptualize what is possible.

Since the early rehearsal process, Miller hasn’t modified her choreography beyond making minor adjustments to accommodate the baby bump. Her body, even while changing, is used to it. In fact, movement has been beneficial to Miller and her baby. “Before I started this job [and early in pregnancy], I was not doing anything and my body felt awful. I felt stiff. I didn’t feel connected to my physicality at all,” Miller says. Now, “I feel like I have more energy. I feel like I’m listening to my body more closely than ever, which makes me feel closer to my baby. Even talking to my doctors and staying in communication with them so much, they’re always asking ‘How active is she? Is she moving?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, she moves a lot.’ ”

It’s a different take on for colored girls for audiences, too, as no major production has featured a visibly pregnant woman. “I don’t know the show any other way, except to think that these are archetypes of women and there’s so many different types of us and that me being pregnant is just a representation of another side of a woman,” Miller says. “That’s a beautiful thing about the colors of the rainbow—even the primary colors have different hues.”

These hues add nuance and stakes; a pregnant woman crying out for the loss of her children lands with profundity. The image shakes viewers into noticing the process of creating life as we talk about losing it. The end of the monologue—a ritual known as the “laying on of hands,” where all the women of the rainbow touch Miller to heal and empower her—reads with new sacredness.

“She’s a little human being who’s going to not just experience joy, but she will experience pain,” Miller says of her baby. “But it is the resilience and the strength…It’s about how we pick ourselves up or how we, innately as women, always find a way to lift another woman up. That’s what I’m hoping she absorbs. That’s what affects me.”

The post This Broadway Star Dances 8 Shows a Week—While 38 Weeks Pregnant appeared first on Dance Magazine.

I was posing this question to a group of some 80 dancers auditioning for my company, The Victory Dance Project.

The air in the room got tense. There was nervous fidgeting.

To me, this wasn’t merely a hypothetical question. My role as choreographer and director of The Victory Dance Project and CEO at Amy Jordan Speaks was not planned. My dream as a girl and young adult was to dance professionally. I trained tirelessly in high school, moved to New York City, then Los Angeles in pursuit of my dream.

What I didn’t realize then was that my lifelong training as a dancer was preparing me with tools to later overcome life-and-death obstacles as I built a new dream. 

At 21, it seemed like my performance career was ending prematurely. Visual complications from Type 1 diabetes had cost me much of my sight, and I became legally blind. Unknowingly, this was my first foray into transforming trauma into triumph, the start of my first reinvention. I write about the concept of acceptance in my book, Dance Because You Can. We don’t have to like the circumstances that may occur in life, but we do have a choice in how we respond.

My heart and soul were still that of a dancer. It took me a long time to get back to class and find a new way to work around my visual impairment.

On May 1, 2009, things took a dramatic turn. While crossing the street in New York City, I was hit and run over by an express bus that pinned me under a tire. I had no feeling in my right side, and my first thought was, Oh no, there’s no leg, and that I would never dance again. My second thought: If I survived the night there would be a “victory dance.” I vowed that if I lived, I would dance again.

Though I was graced with surviving, my right leg was nearly amputated. Twenty surgeries later, my leg has been literally rebuilt. During the many months I spent in a burn intensive care unit, my physical therapist told me over and over that, due to my training as a dancer, I was much more likely to have a positive outcome and walk again.

Dance training had given me an inherent discipline and determination to push through the challenges and the pain to achieve the goal of walking again.

When I was in the ICU, I would get into trouble due to my flexibility. I didn’t want to bend my knee because it hurt too much, so I bent over my straight leg, reaching my feet to put on my socks. My rehab team simply rolled their eyes, saying, “Dancers.”

The rehabilitation was grueling, but my single focus was to move again. I literally took one step at a time. While learning to walk again, I treated it like choreography and counted to 8. 1, 2: push walker; 3, 4: move right foot; 5, 6: move left; 7, 8: stand straight. I continued this over and over until I could walk down the hall using my walker without assistance.

Five years after the accident, I lived true to the vow I’d made while pinned under the bus tire. The Victory Dance Project premiered on May 31, 2014. Its mission: to make the impossible possible with the power of movement. Though I wasn’t performing yet, I was finding a new voice as a director, producer and choreographer.

In 2017, I did my actual “victory dance,” performing with the company for its third-year gala. The evening also honored Broadway legend Chita Rivera and was a tribute to my doctors and medical staff for saving my life and rebuilding my body.  

My victory performance, along with auditions, rehearsals and testimonials, was chronicled on film and became Amy’s Victory Dance, a multi-award-winning documentary feature film directed by Brian Thomas, himself a dancer and former choreographer for Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, Whitney Houston, Liza Minnelli and a host of entertainment icons.  

Today, my essence and spirit as a dancer continue to keep my life moving. With each new obstacle, I was able to put my dance training to work to help create a new pathway.  

Little did I know that the accident and rebuilding my body would also prepare me for life in a pandemic. When the COVID-19 lockdown hit, every artist I know had their lives and livelihoods wiped out in an instant. Sometimes our dreams get derailed, and we are faced with the task of reinventing ourselves as artists and people. The question then becomes: Will we create a new pathway or focus on what was lost? 

This was a fierce challenge, but the alternative was to give up or become a victim of the present circumstances. If I had learned anything from having lost most of my vision and mobility, it was that there is life after trauma. I developed the fundamental courage to meet the challenge of the moment and support others to do the same.

Since Amy’s Victory Dance premiered in 2017, it has amassed 39 nominations, awards and official selections from film festivals across the globe. Now available for preorder on Apple TV/iTunes ahead of its May 13 digital release (on additional platforms, including Amazon, Google Play and Vudu), the film represents hope, possibilities and the power of the human condition. This message is timelier now than even a few months ago. Once again, the power of dance represents a never-give-up spirit, no matter what is happening in our external environment.   

Frankly, if I was not a dancer, I don’t think I would have survived the bus accident and the challenges that followed. While the ways in which I dance and spread dance have changed, one thing remains clear: We should dance because we can.

The post Making the Impossible Possible With the Power of Movement appeared first on Dance Magazine.

“Decolonizing flamenco” is a label used to describe this movement. K. Meira Goldberg’s 2019 book Sonidos Negros—On the Blackness of Flamenco and Miguel Ángel Rosales’ 2016 film Gurumbé: Afro-Andalusian Memories help us understand the deep, sub–Saharan African roots in Spain’s and Portugal’s history and culture. Frequently, flamenco is described as a melding of Roma, Arab, Jewish and Iberian elements; the Black African imprint is rarely credited, although it is indelibly stamped on these Mediterranean nations that sit near the African continent and were major colonizers in the African slave trade. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, up to 10 percent of the Spanish population was Black. Many of the enslaved were retained by their captors and over generations assimilated and contributed to the culture.

Today, a cadre of Black artists, including Phyllis Akinyi, Aliesha Bryan and Yinka Esi Graves, personify why, dancewise, flamenco is their native language. In leaning into this genre, they are tapping into their cultural roots and embodying a sea change in the art form, one that is more a calling than a trend. All have trained in Spain with esteemed maestras. Launching their unique international careers, they utilize flamenco as the basis for traditional and experimental work. Like the impasse facing Black ballerinas, they are on a path posted with “no trespassing” signs. Yet, they persist.

Phyllis Akinyi

Raised in Copenhagen by Danish Kenyan parents, Phyllis­ Akinyi describes flamenco as “a melting pot of outcast cultures.” Trained in college as an anthropologist, she now lives in Madrid­ and performs internationally while pursuing a graduate degree­ in flamencology at Barcelona’s Conservatory of Music.­ Calling flamenco “divine intervention,” she turned to this form for rehabilitation in 2003 following an injury dancing hip hop for a concert in Denmark. With a laugh, she explains: “When I discovered flamenco and the variety of emotions that I’m allowed to have while dancing, that changed my life, because it was a home—a home I didn’t know that I didn’t have, and a home I didn’t know that I could have!” Anthropology studies and Kenyan ancestry help her probe Africanisms in flamenco—its polyrhythms, ancestral respect, movement sense and use of the counterclockwise circle.

Yinka Esi Graves

Afro-British Yinka Esi Graves grew up in London, Nicaragua, Guadeloupe and Cuba, and now lives in Seville. She came to flamenco by chance after having studied ballet and Afro-Cuban genres. As a student at the University of Sussex, she started taking weekly flamenco classes off-campus as a diversion. She completed her degree in art history and began her career in the arts, but flamenco eventually became the unanticipated priority and focus of her attention. After an internship at the Studio Museum in Harlem was derailed due to visa problems, she found herself more interested in dance than in museum and curatorial work. Graves makes a serious claim to her flamenco rights, declaring that, spiritually speaking, she encountered “the long-forgotten Afro-Spanish ancestors who I now understand to also have their part to play in the legacy of flamenco. Bringing this to the surface, in my own body, is what today informs and inspires my work.”

Aliesha Bryan

Aliesha Bryan’s path to flamenco began fortuitously while she was a French/English/Spanish translator for the 2009 UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Seville. The convocation’s gala featured an authentic flamenco performance in a traditionally intimate, improvised setting. Bryan was enthralled to see a voluptuous woman, empowered and self-possessed, dancing and singing. “The fullness of her figure was satisfying and affirming,” declares Bryan, “and I understood that, in flamenco, all bodies are accepted, as well as emotions” beyond the standards of behavior and presentation she was taught in conventional dance training. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jamaican parents, she has studied ballet, modern/contemporary, continental and diasporic African genres, as well as Pilates and somatic practices, like Gyrokinesis. With an MS in dance/movement therapy from Sarah Lawrence College, she fuses her movement knowledges­ with her primary calling as a flamenco artist. Bryan adopted Pájaro Negro—”blackbird”—as her professional name.

There is gravitas combined with a joyful delight as these women recount their “coming-of-age” stories, having embraced flamenco in their 20s and now pursuing it for 10 to 15 years running. Following in the master–apprentice relationship that applies across flamenco studies, they cite specific teachers and cities—Seville, Madrid, Granada—as key to their loving, learning and adopting the form. Adept in dancing traditional flamenco styles—soleares, siguiriyas, bulerias, alegrias—each of them has branched out to improvise and choreograph, collaborating with other dancers, singers and musicians (generally guitar and percussion) in the communal aura that is an essential ingredient in flamenco.

Moving in unique trajectories inspired by the spirit of tradition and innovation, these exceptional artists represent a growing international community of Black dancers staking a claim in the land of flamenco. Experienced in the genre and unswerving in personal commitment, they extend, enliven and enrich flamenco’s flavors and futures. They deserve a hearty Olé!

The post Decolonizing Flamenco Through Exploring Black Influences appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Noticing how the choreographer gravitated towards some dancers and away from others, Nelson became focused on creating something worthy of approval. “But as someone new to the choreographer, I never felt like I got to learn her personal aesthetic or movement style,” she says. “I didn’t really know what was expected of me, and it felt like a stab in the dark.”

Nelson’s exchanges in the room made her question whether choreographers and dancers are always on the same page when it comes to movement development—and, in turn, credit for what they create together. “What are we calling this process?” she asks. “Are we making it a hierarchy with a choreographer and dancers, or are we all collaborators, and you’re just the person who brought us together in the room with an idea?”

Opening the Conversation

In a time when many old systems in our industry are being reevaluated, dancers are taking a closer look at how the dynamics­ among collaborators and creatives seem to be shifting; the boundary between dancer and choreographer is not always as clear as it once was, and the common hierarchy of choreographer/associate choreographer/dancer does not always accurately reflect what is happening in the room. While the desire for choreographic credit can seem territorial, the conversation happening throughout the community is generally less about ownership and more about clarity and respect. Stories from a diverse range of artists on both sides of the table show that projects can vary widely in their creation structure and leadership, and an expansion of dance industry terminology and job titles could be a first step toward building a more inclusive space where everyone’s contributions are recognized.

Another dancer, who asked to remain anonymous, crafted a striking movement phrase during the creation of a new piece for the company he’s a member of, and it ended up as a prominent motif in the final work. As he watched the choreographer receive praise for that specific part, he silently wished he had kept it for a project of his own. “Obviously as a dancer you walk into the rehearsal room and you’re ready to offer your creativity,” he says. “But it’s not like they came up with the movement and I enhanced it with my artistry. I came up with the movement and I also enhanced it with my artistry, and all the other dancers enhanced it with their artistry too. So I can’t help but wonder, what did the choreographer do?”

Defining Terminology

The accepted definition of “choreographer” is the person who composes the physical steps—not necessarily completely on their own, but the majority of the movement creation stems from that individual. So when the process is more of an exchange, other terms could help properly distinguish everyone’s roles and relationships to the material. “Movement director,” “movement stager,” “editor” and “collaborator” all mean different things, and one might be more appropriate in a certain situation than another. A single label is not applicable to every creative project. In the above dancer’s case, he feels one solution could have been to credit it as “choreography by the dancers, staged or directed by X.”

“As a collective, there needs to be a clarification and accounta­bility of these roles, what they entail, and the financial and career rewards that come with each of them,” says Betty Weinberger, a dancer and choreographer who has worked as an associate and collaborator alongside many choreographers. “There are dancers who don’t have a desire to be a part of the creative conversation,” she says. “But then there are also dancers who are innately extremely creative and conversational. They care a lot about the storytelling; they’re willing to voice their opinions and ideas. It’s a completely different skill set.” 

Even though many, if not most, choreographers rely on creative contributions from dancers and are often happy to say as much, the lack of formal, written acknowledgment of dancers’ concrete input can create barriers for artists, like Weinberger, who are interested in advancing their careers further into choreography. Without specific recognition in printed programs or choreography credits on their resumés, it can be difficult to prove the depth of their experience to potential employers and funders.

“Unfortunately, dancers get taken advantage of,” she says. “It’s frustrating that we often feel like we don’t have a voice, but then when we’re asked to have one in a creative space, we don’t get credit for it.”

A Structural Problem

All these artists emphasize that the discourse is not driven by malice. They deeply respect the choreographers they’ve worked with, feel grateful for the opportunities and think the shows they’ve created are beautiful. The issue isn’t personal, it’s structural. 

“It’s not about how much we’re going to really break things down and claim ownership over each move,” says Amy Gardner, a freelance choreographer and director who is now working primarily in film and commercial dance. “It’s more about changing the environment and removing some degree of the capitalistic hierarchy, to level the playing field and honor all parties.” This issue gets highlighted when it’s time for the industry to give out awards, such as the Tony Awards for Broadway shows and the Bessies for New York City concert dance. The honors go to the credited choreographers whose work stood out most during that season—not to the dancers and assistants who may have helped create the movement—and the winner gains prestige and greater opportunity.

Brinda Guha, a New York City–based South Asian dance artist, is commonly brought onto projects as a “cultural consultant,” an ambiguous term that implies she serves in an advisory capacity to ensure the work is culturally appropriate. But she often ends up choreographing a portion of the movement that gets presented onstage or in live workshops, without any credit.

“This has been the age-old problem,” says Guha. While many artists of color are excited to share their voices and knowledge with big industry names, the contributions and compromises often don’t lead to the further work they hope for. “There were limited resources coming in for us to build our own craft,” she says. “So we would go toward these gigs as a networking or door-opening opportunity that would then lead nowhere, but would benefit everybody else.”

Steps Forward

In 2019, Actors’ Equity Association—the union representing theater performers—and The Broadway League—the trade group representing theater owners and operators, producers, presenters and general managers—agreed on a new contract for developmental labs, which are used by productions in the early stages of a show’s creation. The contract stipulates that dancers, actors and stage managers who take part in that developmental process will split 1 percent of the show’s profits for 10 years after it recoups 110 percent of its initial investment. While 1 percent is a small number to a successful show making a million or more dollars a week, receiving a consistent portion of that can make a big difference in the life of an artist. In the concert dance realm, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham offers ongoing royalties to its dancers who participate in both the creation and premiere of a piece, even if they leave the company and the work continues being performed by others.

More administrators and presenters are also prioritizing clarity, says Clarissa Soto Josephs, the executive director of Pentacle, a management support organization that helps dance and theater artists with the business side of running their companies. A decade ago, many dance artists weren’t even using contracts, and if they were, the agreements were often very informal. “But now I’ve seen choreographic or collaborative credit become much more important,” she says. “And I’ve seen some artistic directors embracing that from the start and automatically stating it as part of the job.”

And artists like Guha are feeling more empowered to advo­cate for themselves. “It’s trying to balance what to be grateful for and what to speak out for,” she says. Along with others in the community, she is in the process of crafting language around asking for credit as well as for more clearly defined­ differences between the roles of associate, consultant and co-choreographer. “But everything still doesn’t have a place,” she says. “And if that means we need to create more language and create more roles, then that’s what we have to do. But we have to start with definition. What is everyone actually responsible for?”

The post Credit Where It’s Due: Handling Credit on Collaborative Creations appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Personally, I don’t think time spent on technology is actually more valuable than time spent on art, but these narratives persist. Consider the myth of the starving artist (that you have to be long-suffering and poor to make good art) or the apprenticeship myth (that mastery of craft requires indentureship to an established, i.e., financially successful, artist). The stories we tell about artists’ labor are in pointed contrast to folks in tech: They get to move fast, break things and get rich.

The disparities between the dance and tech communities can seem pretty vast, yet the two have found an odd, contemporary synergy in NFTs: non-fungible (as in, one-of-a-kind) tokens (as in, a thing). NFTs are digital items that—despite the fundamental, unlimited duplicability of virtual media—can notionally be owned by a single individual. This ownership is documented by a cryptocurrency proof-of-purchase enabled by a technology called “blockchain” (a public, digital ledger that documents online transaction data). NFTs are thus digital objects defined by artificial scarcity. In contrast to the JPEGs and video files they are virtually indistinguishable from, NFT art is supposedly scarce, making it ostensibly collectable and valuable.

You’re not alone if you find this convoluted. Since the first NFT was minted in 2014, nerds across the art and finance worlds have argued about whether literally any of this makes sense. It’s not really clear that it does. Press coverage of multimillion dollar NFT sales by already prominent digital artists have had the effect of making NFTs appear like a means for artists to monetize their work, while simultaneously serving as a winner-take-all cash grab. Both perspectives have their merits.

Since then, several high-profile dance artists have minted NFTs of their work. Tap dancer Savion Glover is selling an NFT video of himself discussing his creative process; as of publication, this costs about $90 and includes a physical, signed commemorative print. Ballet star Natalia Osipova recently sold an NFT video of a solo from Giselle for about $15,000. That similar media is available, for free, through platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and libraries, hasn’t stopped folks from paying for the right to claim ownership of stuff graced—however contortedly—by Glover’s and Osipova’s aura. NFTs are an emergent expression of an old dance-world tradition. The image of 19th-century ballerina Marie Taglioni, for example, appeared on collectible snuffboxes, and her pointe shoes were hocked to fetishists. Selling stuff associated with famous dancers is a pastime almost as old as the Western dance tradition.

Controls built into NFTs grant artists unique means to maintain authorship and fiscal transparency. I, for one, believe artists having financial power is a good thing, and I support dancers maintaining agency in their careers as well as the ability to monetize anything they want. (Grab that cash, Glover and Osipova.)­ It is, however, worth noting that these artists were international stars before releasing NFTs. This technology works for Glover and Osipova because they were already demonstrable commercial hits, an economic phenomenon referred to as a “winner-takes-all market.” There is little evidence that NFTs are a practical means for most dancers to make money.

Still, the complex procedural qualities and algorithmic labor contained within NFTs have already provided useful compositional grist to many choreographers. Michelle Ellsworth and her colleagues have minted NFTs that are “owned” by a fake rock that they made and left in a desert (the digital key is inside cement), essentially preventing the transfer of ownership of her work. Choreographic technologist and Dance Magazine “25 to Watch” inductee Maya Man recently sold an NFT titled “can I go where you go?” to scrutinize software as a form of choreography. Artist and dance culture warrior Lisa Niedermeyer takes 3-D scans of subjects and creates NFT portraits that in effect concretize each person’s ownership of their own bodily data. Dancer and physicist Mariel Petee created an artificial intelligence that choreographs in response to her dancing body, and is selling NFTs of the resulting media to pay for a performance of AI-generated choreography. These examples, among many others, illustrate the potency of NFTs as a platform for creative exploration beyond the transactionality of digital dance pay-for-play.

While there is much to be excited about where NFTs meet dance (or, more broadly, where choreography meets computation), the story I’ve heard most frequently centers on the hope that dancers’ NFT sales might be a salve for our recessionary, COVID-inflected moment. Such uplifting narratives can be read darkly, though, and reveal the longstanding desperation of a creative community unable to save its least empowered members from precarity. Whether you think NFTs are a way for artists to manage authorship, an emergent performance platform, or a metastatic outgrowth of tech-bro capitalism, you’re right.

The post The Unlikely Pairing of NFTs and Dance appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Native American dance is often believed to be a purely “traditional” style, and while tradition is reflected and preserved in the dances, the form is so much more than that. For generations, dance has been a central mode of emotional expression, leading to a diverse array of dances rooted in the heritage and cultures of the many Indigenous tribes of North America. There are religious and ceremonial dances not open to the public, traditional dances, and social dances such as many powwow dances. Dancers’ responding to their environments is inevitable, as is young dancers’ interest in mixing in contemporary ideas that reflect their current experiences. In the past few decades, this has given rise to the growth of a new fused style: Native American hip hop.   

This innovation has produced a style of steps and movements that are not discernably different from hip hop. There is, however, a distinct flavor which is created by hip-hop music fused with Indigenous song and by movements that expand the distinct urbanism of hip hop’s repertoire with an expressive embodied reference or reverence to nature. It’s a contemporary storytelling of the Indigenous experience in the U.S. that bridges rural and urban, oppressed and empowered, individual and collective.

Native American dance and hip hop began weaving into a unique urban and contemporary form in the late 1990s. Yet dancer Anne Pesata, who is Jicarilla Apache, notes that there were already internationally recognized Indigenous hip-hop dancers, such as b-boy Ariston Ripoyla (aka “Remind”), who were building their careers even earlier. In an interview with the multicultural platform Rep Ur Tribe, Remind describes himself as being activated through hip hop to recognize his Native roots and remember his culture: “Breaking is not so far out from what tribes were doing already,” he says.

Pesata describes the fusion in similar terms. “In neither powwow nor freestyle are steps taught,” she says. In the context of competition, both styles encourage dancers to showcase their best moves and signature phrases to illustrate what they can do, rather than relying on the lens through which Eurocentric forms understand dance steps. Pesata regards movement as existing in a fluid state rather than the solid state of permanence that conceptualizing “steps” creates.

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Nakotah LaRance, a champion hoop dancer who toured with Cirque du Soleil, became known for incorporating modern elements, such as hip hop and moonwalking, into his hoop dances. Often dancing in modern casual clothing to EDM/Indigenous-fused music, LaRance switched seamlessly between traditional and contemporary hoop-dance performances.

More recently, Native American hip hop was brought into the spotlight by the crew Indigenous Enterprise when it appeared­ on Season 4 of “World of Dance” in 2020. Although­ founder Kenneth Shirley clarifies that it’s not a typical style for the troupe, “For ‘World of Dance,’ we included a section to draw in the audience and the judges with music and dance they would relate to.” (Although he felt the approach­ was effective, the crew was nonetheless eliminated in the qualifiers round.)

Yet fusing other styles into the movement isn’t something that’s out of the ordinary for Indigenous dancers: Shirley notes that hip hop is not absent from his traditional dance. “I have integrated hip-hop or ballet steps that have inspired me into my fancy dance,” he says, of the popular powwow dance. “Adding contemporary movements is part of natural evolution of the tradition.”

Those unfamiliar with this practice, however, often view fusion as a form of inauthenticity, which has become a challenge to widespread acceptance. “Mainstream narratives tend to relegate Native peoples and practices to the past and view them as ‘inauthentic’ when they incorporate aspects of modernity,” says UCLA assistant professor of dance studies Dr. Tria Blu Wakpa. In contrast, Blu Wakpa says the fusion can more realistically be understood as “an extension of Indigenous practices.”

From the perspective of the hip-hop community, Indigenous­ dance fits right in. “Long ago, hip hop’s architects envisioned a creative community where anyone’s heritage, culture and identity could be grafted onto a core set of artforms and principles: deejaying, emceeing, breaking, graffiti and knowledge,” says Ben Ortiz, assistant curator of the Cornell Hip Hop Collection, which collects and archives historical artifacts of hip-hop culture at Cornell University. “Traditional powwow dancing collaged with popping or breaking is not only dope, it feels completely natural and at home in the hip-hop community.”

Pesata describes the crossover being possible because “both communities share a similar socioeconomic experience, so both communities relate to one another.” The diverse people of color who make up the hip-hop community and the Indigenous communities have both dealt with appropriation and being tokenized, oppressed and marginalized. And both have remarkable parallels in cultural practices: Drumming parallels the deejay, chanting the emcee, and petroglyphs the graffiti art. Pesata points out that the concept of “battle” is core in both styles. Historically, there are war dances in Indigenous tradition and today, there’s high-stakes competition powwow dancing. In both hip hop and Native dancing, the competition inherent in battles has pushed innovation, driving the forms’ evolutions.

Blu Wakpa sees Native American hip hop as part of Indigenous futurism: “The weaving of hip hop and Native dance can be viewed as an innovation, an indigenizing of hip hop that provides generative possibilities for Native creativity, expression, healing, joy, resistance and connection.” By evolving tradition to reflect the world these artists live in today, they’re becoming more visible as part of contemporary society, changing the narratives fueled by the reservation system while also reconnecting with pride to their own history.

The post Evolving Tradition With the Fusion of Hip Hop and Native American Dance appeared first on Dance Magazine.

This becomes tricky in a professional dance context, where anything from costumes to casting is frequently organized in male/female terms. When I was in college for dance in the 2010s, audition calls were very clear about how many men and women were desired. Today, there is a marked shift in audition-announcement language: You now see traditional calls for male or female dancers (some of which make conscious space for transgender dancers with “-identifying” in their language), open calls that specify no identity stipulations (but might have them anyway), and more pointed calls specifically looking to uplift nonbinary performers (which may or may not be ultimately tokenizing in nature).

I myself only came into a gender-nonconforming identity this past summer, and not much has changed. I make my own work, and regularly perform with a few groups, generally collaborative in process, that allow me to exist onstage in a way that feels true to me. When I have to perform an idea of a boy, I put on that costume, though my experience at male open calls has told me that, by showbiz standards, it’s not the most convincing.

But just like all the permutations of gender identity and expression that exist between two diametric poles, there are just as many experiences of dancing with them.

For some, validation comes from rejecting formative structures. Aeon Andreas, a resident artist at House of Yes in Brooklyn, New York, created their drag persona, God Complex, after a long road of formal training in ballet and modern that shifted to postmodern dance and acting in college. “No one would cast me,” they say. “I actually received a lot of negative feedback from teachers and peers.” Andreas took to choreographing, devising and directing to forge their own path, finding mentorship, collaboration and friendship through Dan Safer, with whose company, Witness Relocation, they still perform.

As a dance artist, Andreas is inspired by rock ’n’ rollers.­ “The physicalities of rock stars are so queer, often very androgynous, demanding and generous,” they say. “I try to encapsulate that with God Complex—a harnessing of power.” Reflecting on finally debuting their persona, they recall, “It was extremely affirming. People were saying ‘yes’ to me after years of hearing ‘no’ constantly. My understanding of myself, my gender, my personality—everything opened up with drag.”

Growing up in tap and ballet, Holly Sass was trained to be delicate and light. In the freelance concert dance world, they often felt confined within the vision of others. Masculinity was only available as a costume. A game changer was encountering contemporary partnering, first at a summer program and subsequently more in-depth in college: “It didn’t matter the size, strength or gender of a person. If you knew how to share weight and communicate, verbally and somatically, anyone could play any partnering role. That blew my mind,” they say.

Disclosure: I frequently collaborate and perform with Sass under the moniker BREAKTIME. Our duo is a playground for subverting formal training. “Any formerly rejected ideas in our other creative processes have a home with us,” they say. Outside of performance and work in film, Sass, who is also a bodyworker, founded bodies for bodies, a sliding-scale somatic-healing community of and for queer and trans individuals.

Maxfield Haynes grew up determined to pursue their interests­ within classical ballet’s strictures, but “I didn’t like big jumps and turns; I wanted to dance on pointe.” Haynes recalls a teacher at San Francisco Ballet School explaining a section from a variation for Albrecht from Giselle: “He claimed, ‘You have to carry yourself with pure masculine regality.’ In that moment something snapped in me,” they say. “No part of me saw myself in that role, or portraying that characterization.”

While Haynes was attending NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, former American Ballet Theatre soloist Jolinda Menendez invited them to take her pointe class after seeing them work diligently and independently on developing their technique. This self-guidance and continued dedication have led to Haynes dancing a breadth of roles they aren’t so much stepping into as actively co-creating, from having been a member of Complexions Contemporary Ballet to working currently­ with more explicitly queer troupes, such as Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo and Katy Pyle’s Ballez. No matter the project, Haynes’ goal remains consistent: “I’m trying to actively queer ballet every chance I get,” Haynes says. “The entire lexicon of ballet steps has no defined gender. They’re just a means to an end.”

Caleb Teicher operates under a similar mindset within another traditionally gendered form. “Lindy Hop is quite literally a binary dance—there’s the lead role and a follow role,” they explain. “Historically, leads have been male and follows have been female, but the lead/follow binary does little to illustrate the diversity of power balance and role performance in Lindy Hop.” Teicher has observed that most Lindy Hop classes today allow anyone to lead or follow regardless of gender, and many teach both roles to each participant. They credit a role-swapping swing dance group, The Double Troubles, with bringing them more fully into their preferred dancing role—as a follow.

Growing up, Teicher recalls not feeling comfortable with the “boy” or “girl” options for recital costumes in jazz classes, finding more expressive freedom in the aural focus of tap dance. Today, by focusing on the vernacular of tap, jazz and Lindy Hop, they constructively infiltrate those traditions, furthering them instead of dismantling them. One example is Meet Ella, a duet Teicher made with Nathan Bugh. “It’s in the continuum of jazz dance duets, but it doesn’t fit in the existing idioms very clearly,” they say. “It’s not a ‘brother’ act, or a class act, and we’re not Fred and Ginger. Nathan and I are there, dancing together, in conversation with the music, our bodies and each other.”

For Hans, growing up with dance as culture rather than training set them up to choose affirming movement. Hans was raised amid Caribbean communities in Miami, where salsa, merengue and bachata were standard fare at family functions and dancing was integral at parties and clubs. It wasn’t until grad school that they took on formal dance training, curating a contemporary blend of flamenco and street styles. Flamenco satisfied a search for a way to nurture their lived duality of softness and strength.

“I use my multiple modalities to formulate a circular dialogue between all my ways of creating,” says Hans, who also has a visual art practice encompassing printmaking, digital media and tattooing. They maintain a direct parallel between their queerness and their work, from how they identify as an artist to the venues in which they feel at home performing. “It makes sense that alt spaces are generative for queer folk,” they say, citing Brooklyn’s Starr Bar as an example. “These clandestine spaces have been our refuges for so long, and tend to always be the places where we can explore freely.”

As there is no one way to be nonbinary, there can be no expectation of what sort of work might come from an artist who identifies as such. What is common to these experiences, however, is that these multifaceted performers and makers are as wary of arbitrary boundaries in how they engage with their practices as they are in their personal navigations of gender.

The post Beyond Male/Female: Nonbinary Dancers Forging Their Own Paths appeared first on Dance Magazine.

I was diagnosed with autism a few months ago, at age 25, but I’ve been autistic my whole life. In many ways ballet class has been a safe place for me, even before I knew why I craved routine, envi­ronments with explicit rules, and social situations that don’t necessitate talking.

Ballet class’ standardized structure offered me stability as I learned the art form, starting at age 12. Autistic brains don’t automatically filter out unimportant information, rendering routine critical. Parts of my day need to be familiar if I’m taking in every sound outside my window, every leaf on the sidewalk, the way my curls feel different on my head each morning. Because the order of ballet class is consistent, I’m better able to process new information, including combinations and corrections.

Parts of class even helped my social development. Most social settings come with a high number of implied rules that can feel elusive and ever-changing to autistic people. During adolescence, I’d intuit that I’d broken a social rule but be unsure of what my mistake was. In ballet, the rules were stated directly. Once, some girls were standing in front of my teacher while she taught a combination, and she told them, “The student stands behind the teacher when they’re teaching.” Her specificity was clarifying. These explicit ballet-etiquette lessons set me up for greater success in the studio.

Because class resembles parallel play—a stage of social development when children prefer to play independently beside each other rather than interactively—it also provided me with fulfillment that I struggled to find in unstructured environments, like hanging out with friends. Autistic people can find parallel play rewarding into adulthood, unlike many of their allistic (non-autistic) peers. During the pandemic, my roommate took virtual ballet classes and, with little else to do, I started taking them beside her. I realized­ ballet is a way to feel close without language—to feel part of a community without having to navigate complex social interactions.

Along with the ways ballet has enriched my life, however, there are plenty of elements of studio culture that alienate autistic dancers. Before my diagnosis, I internalized shame about how my brain and body work, because many assumptions made during ballet class didn’t apply to me—that people swing their arms in opposition to their legs while walking, for example, which I don’t. Growing up, one of my studios banned skirts because students would fidget with them. Autistic people (and other groups, like people with ADHD) need to “stim” to regulate themselves physically and emotionally. “Stim” is short for “self-stimulatory behavior” and can include things like rocking, hand flapping and other repetitive motions. While correcting extraneous movement during dancing is justifiable, criticizing a student for fiddling with their skirt while waiting to go across the floor is unnecessary. When I let myself stim during ballet class, I learn combinations more quickly and can better regulate my emotions. While some teachers may argue this doesn’t prepare dancers for the professional world, I believe that the professional world should make reasonable changes to become more inclusive.

Ballet also comes with a host of sensory stimuli—unique fabrics, hairspray-filled dressing rooms, loud music—that can be a nightmare for autistic dancers. Sensory issues, which are unique to each individual’s nervous system, can register as physical pain and aren’t merely dislike. For example, my childhood studio’s dress code required a specific make of leotard, and the sensation of the sleeves on my skin sometimes triggered sensory overload. When a dancer complains about uniforms, costumes or music, I encourage teachers to investigate the reason. Whether it is a sensory issue, a body-image issue or something else, a nonjudgmental and open conversation will get closer to the heart of the problem.

Unaddressed sensory processing difficulties can even have dangerous effects in the long term. For most of my life, I’ve had hip discomfort while dancing that I thought was just related to muscle engagement. However, I recently learned the sensation is a chronic injury. Autistic people struggle with interoception: the perception of sensations inside one’s body. It’s hard for me to differentiate between soreness, pain and engagement. I’ve started seeing a physical therapist who helps me identify the differences, but talking about pain identification is a conversation teachers should have with all of their students.

Changes like these will include not only dancers who have requested accommodations but also those who may not know their disabilities or have the language to ask for what they need. Autistic women and people of color are much less likely to be formally diagnosed with autism as children, or ever, because of gender and racial disparities in research and bias in the diagnostic process. Each individual’s needs are unique, and there will never be a one-size-fits-all accommodation. But the first step to making sure everybody feels safe and included in a classroom is to value dancers’ autonomy. Allow input from students when solving problems; ask before touching a student and respect their answer; when a dancer expresses a need, consider creative solutions to meet it.

It would have helped me to have conversations about why certain rules existed. Discussing the reasoning for uniforms might have given me permission to approach a teacher and explain why it was difficult for me to wear the class leotard. But in my experience, the only talk of uniforms was dancers being reprimanded for not wearing them, which made me afraid to ever mention my discomfort. As Keith Lee, director of diversity and inclusion at Charlottesville Ballet, put it in a conversation with me: “Don’t discourage the artist. Take notice and act on their discovery. Their honesty, approach and involvement is their contribution to the art.”

After seriously considering a career in dance as a senior in high school, I decided not to pursue one because of the parts of dance institutions that ostracized me. I feel unwelcome in the art form when I see companies and studios perform for autistic audiences while failing to accommodate autistic dancers in their classrooms. Still, I continue to love ballet, and I regularly take classes from teachers who are patient, respectful of my needs and nonjudgmental of my differences. I hope that all autistic dancers can find teachers who celebrate them and that, as time goes on, more of us find safe and welcoming places in the field.

The post Ballet Could Be a Home for Autistic Dancers Like Me appeared first on Dance Magazine.

How did you begin choreographing for figure skating?

Figure skating is not my background. I was able to move on ice with skates, but just for fun. Seven years ago, I was introduced to the sport through my ballet teacher, who was already coaching athletes at the Ice Academy of Montreal. It was one of the first years that hip hop was used. The owner of the school asked me if I wanted to play with their skaters, and they loved the job that I did.

What was your dance background?

I was trained in contemporary, jazz, musical theater and hip hop. I was not a master of any of them, but I was a good chameleon for any type of show. That was very helpful when I started to choreograph for ice skating, synchronized swimming and gymnastics. Working with Cirque du Soleil touched all of those dance styles.

What was it like helping Nathan Chen move from a more balletic style to hip hop on ice?

This guy is a genius, he’s just so brilliant. For sure, we wanted to bring the party vibe out of this program. It’s the Olympics—you want to make people feel something. When you know your competitors, if you want to stand out, you need to think differently.

What is your process like?

We always start with a bunch of choreo and mapping it to the music. Once we have a big enough chunk of moves, we go and play on the ice. When I started, I had the tendency of wanting to put dance breaks everywhere, but it was just cutting the flow. I realized that what looked the best in figure skating is that speed and glide.

Do you find choreographing for figure skating challenging?

There are so many rules. The biggest challenge is making sure we can score the notes and then elevate the dance to another level. So, they can dance the technique and not look like they’re trying to replicate a dance, but really dance it. That is one of our strengths. I feel like the Russians are very strong technically, but when you take a look at their programs, the way the choreography is made, it’s more based on the technical side of it.

How do you help skaters develop their artistry?

It’s really the work of making them understand the weight transfer and being grounded. How can you feel your rib cage, your core, and use it so we don’t look too straight or stiff? The more you dance, the more you sell your program and the more you sell it, the more you can polish your technique.

What is it like to choreograph for skaters who are competing against each other?

That’s really hard for me because I want to give myself 100 percent to all of the couples. But it’s up to them what they’re going to do with the material I give them. It’s fun to see my moves, but then it’s fun to see how they digest it and make it their own.

What are some of your favorite programs you’ve choreographed?

Moulin Rouge for Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir has a special place in my heart because it was my first Olympic program and we won gold. One of the coolest to create was the Chock/Bates free program. Another was the Janet Jackson one. The Great Britain one to The Lion King was very fun to choreograph to a Broadway vibe, and then there’s Gabby/Guillaume with the waacking.

How did you also start choreographing for the Canadian synchronized swimming team?

The Olympic and sports world is a small world. I knew nothing about synchronized swimming, but I watched a lot of videos, and even if I’m not physically able to do it, I can have a big enough imagination. We work on formations and cleanliness of the arms. At the Olympic Stadium in Montreal where they train, if you go down a couple of stairs, there’s a window underneath the pool, so I get to see underwater.

What are you working on now?

We’re still with our teams that are not at the Olympics but are going to Worlds and we are also prepping the junior teams. I booked a Disney movie as a choreographer—it’s going to be a Christmas movie. I also booked a Cirque show in Montreal. The most exciting thing recently is I’ve been hired to be the main choreographer of a full season for a TV show in Japan. They also asked me to be the artistic director, which is my first time being an artistic director. I’m so excited and nervous but also ready to jump into the challenge.

Any advice for dancers?

Don’t limit yourself. Dance can be used in many different ways and many different artforms. Figure skating is not the lane I thought my life would go, and it turns out by just being open, it brought things into my life I never thought would be possible.

The post Meet Sam Chouinard, Choreographer for Olympic Gold Medalist Figure Skaters appeared first on Dance Magazine.

To put it another way: Can we dance in space?

I’m a dancer, scientist and aspiring astronaut, which means I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this question, and what I’d do if I got the chance to try to answer it for myself. Getting to set the first site-specific work on the International Space Station is a big pipe dream of mine—just imagine using the low-gravity environment and three-dimensional layout of the ISS to explore movement in an entirely new way, zipping past the Earth below at nearly 18,000 miles an hour!

Or, more accurately, it used to be my big dream, before I studied enough astronauts to realize that most of them beat me to it.

We don’t often think of astronauts as dancers. They’re test pilots and engineers, scientists and medical doctors, sent beyond our atmosphere to spend grueling, 12-hour days doing everything from analyzing zero-gravity plant growth to fixing the ISS’ space toilet. But most of the astronauts spend their free time on one universal activity: having fun with weightlessness.

New and old residents of the ISS alike have cited their fascination with how the low-gravity environment transforms their world. You can’t jump in space—once an astronaut pushes off of a surface, they’ll keep traveling forward until they collide with something else. Meanwhile, every inch of their new world can be used, every surface a potential point of contact; “up” and “down” are no longer relevant constraints.

In short: Living in space means relearning, and, in some cases, redefining, how the body moves. Astronauts must develop entirely new ways of choreographing their living space. Because the ISS has been active for more than 20 years, its inhabitants have built a movement vocabulary suited to their environment. “Standing still” is now a process that takes thought—astronauts will stick a toe or two under handrails, helpfully distributed across the walls, floors and ceilings, to hold themselves in place. Something as simple as moving from one place to another, which might be accomplished on Earth by walking or running, becomes controlled, directed propulsion—a single push off a handrail sends the mover gliding outward, a process that can make the astronauts look (and feel) like superheroes.

There is an art to these motions, and a corresponding desire on the part of astronauts to perform “living in space” with both poise and intent. On long-duration missions in the ISS, astronauts can watch each other adapt, learning the right amount of force to apply to use a big toe as their stability anchor, the pressure needed to redirect mid-transit through a module, and, of course, the new, three-dimensional sense of where their partners might be in space. When the walls, ceiling and floor can all be used with the same degree of efficacy, enhanced spatial awareness is key to avoid whacking a fellow crewmember who’s working. Moving together is an additional challenge; a simple grab and pull on a shoulder or a hip goes a long way, making fun games of chase up and down the ISS’ chain of modules.

Through all these modes of motion, astronauts work to ensure that they look as graceful as possible when captured on film. They’re conscious of the job behind their job: They have to do the work of science and engineering, but they must also do it with an ease that’s convincing to those watching from Earth. The fluidity (or not) of their motions is a demonstration to the world that humans can adapt to space.

The way astronauts live, work and play may not seem like dance in the traditional sense—it lacks both the performative trapping and any familiar movement vocabulary we might seek to recognize—but when we consider who they are, and where they live, the legacy of the ISS comes much closer to a 20-year-long, site-specific performance piece than I expected when I began to study it. It uses a specially developed movement framework to captivate its audience. In this case, the audience is the rest of humanity, and the astronauts are the performers, tasked with building a vision of low-Earth orbit as a place where the lack of gravity liberates us, where the idea of what movement, and, thus, dance, can be is completely transformed.

If I manage to make my way to space, I won’t be the first person to make art out of motion up there. But I’ll get something better—the chance to build on a long and proud legacy of low-gravity movement. It’s a fascinating new realm for dance, one that’s been fun for me to watch astronauts explore. Maybe one day, I’ll get the chance to join in.

The post Dancing in Space? Here’s How Astronauts Are Reinventing Movement in Microgravity appeared first on Dance Magazine.

At the time, I was in the early stages of my transition from ballet to contemporary dance. I’d known how to be a ballet dancer, was well-versed on how to lead that daily life. It wasn’t easy, but it was familiar. And while discovering the contemporary, postmodern scene was invigorating, it was also disorienting. I’d walked away from the aesthetics, routine and people that I’d known.

Our field requires commitment, and for people who don’t want to disappoint, breaking up—with a director, a company, a show, a genre—can be a challenge. As dancers, we lovingly invest in relationships and repetition, but this can also render us creatures of habit who are particularly resistant to doing things differently.

I hadn’t realized it when I was in the thick of it, but my knowledge of the dance world then was myopic. Even though I’d left one chapter to begin the next, I was still looking backwards more than I was able to look ahead. I kept comparing myself to the dancer I’d once been, in part because other people kept pointing out how much I looked like a ballerina when I’d execute contemporary work. I did myself no favors by getting stuck in the labels I let others put on me, and the labels I put on myself.

Sometimes when we work exclusively on behalf of a singular idea of “right,” one way can easily become the only way. Devotion can be a vacuum. We become so laser-focused that we exclude the possibility of options,­ and we might find ourselves stuck, whether it be in a particular style or a certain work situation. But when you don’t—or can’t—allow space for change, you impede your growth as an artist. Even when we say we want to “improve,” we often forget that that itself is a form of change!

With an expansive mindset, change doesn’t have to be so precipitous or vertiginous. Allowing ourselves to be insatiably curious can help to unzip narrow notions of success and identity, thereby softening our perceptions of what’s at stake in a career transition. The words “pivot” and “resilience” have gotten a lot of airtime during the pandemic, yet their definitions are invaluable. In this era of the Great Resignation, many dancers are rethinking their career paths. It’s easy to forget that while change is most commonly considered reactive, it can also be proactive. What if moving forward could be less about negating prior experiences and more about pulling back the layers of an onion? It’s all part of a whole.

I took my first improvisation workshop at age 27. The opening prompt was to move in response to elements in the ornately decorated room. The instructor, Todd Williams, offered a sample demonstration, during which he endowed the smallest body parts, like his little toe, with the same power for expression as the more obvious parts. In a mere 15 seconds, I experienced a radical paradigm shift that helped dislodge a mental block that had been holding me back. I’d never considered that my own body could be a spontaneous, generative force, or that I had the agency to invent movement that still celebrated the clarity of line that I spent so many years honing in ballet.

When I did venture back to a ballet class after five years away, it was with a newfound peace. At that point in my contemporary work, I was no longer adamant about breaking away from or disguising my past. I let it carry me forward, and my artistry deepened. As de Kooning once said: “After a while all kinds of painting becomes just painting for you—abstract or otherwise.”

What artistic adventures will be found on the timeline of your retrospective?

Making Growth Manageable

With micromovements, we can start small and invite fluidity in on a daily basis.
Postmodern choreographer Deborah Hay is known for sounding her wakeup call in blunt language: “Turn your [expletive] head!” If that doesn’t resonate, consider these concrete, actionable steps to become more comfortable with change:

1. Cross-train your brain. Investigate something you know nothing about.
2. Reinvest in action verbs. Be purposeful in how you taste, touch, harvest, concoct, share.
3. Reacquaint yourself with wonder. Be moved by the beauty found in unexpected people, places and things

The post Shifting From a Creature of Habit to an Ever-Evolving Artist Revitalized My Career 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.

Shah started b-boying when he was 6 years old in parks and beaches (and, occasionally, uninvited at weddings). Five years later, his brother, Nizamuddin, gave up his spot at The Danceworx Mumbai so Shah could get proper training. Although he began by studying hip hop and contemporary dance, he caught the attention of Yehuda Maor, an Israeli-American teacher who was leading the ballet division. Maor saw Shah’s potential, and his arched feet.

Maor taught in English, which Shah did not speak, nor did Shah even know what ballet was at first, but he took to it quickly. “I just understood the ballet language so naturally,” Shah says. At the same time, “It was really overwhelming with the amount of attention that I was getting. I couldn’t really comprehend that intensity, but I could sense what he was trying to do with me.”

Ludovic des Cognets, Courtesy The Royal Ballet School

The post From Mumbai to Miami Beach: Amiruddin Shah’s Journey to Becoming a Professional Ballet Dancer appeared first on Dance Magazine.

“Everybody forgot about Afghanistan,” says the breaker and teacher, who goes by his b-boy name for his safety. “Afghanistan was hiding in the map of the world. For years, nobody saw us.”

Things changed when his student and crewmate, Manizha Talash, began getting international press attention last year for being “Afghanistan’s first female breaker.” The newfound recognition of the breaking community in Kabul was a welcome change—except for the fact that some articles made obvious the location of the club where the crew, called Superiors, was training, putting them in danger.

Earlier this year, a man came to the club pretending to be interested in watching them practice. Suddenly, dozens of military officers rushed in to apprehend the man, who turned out to be a suicide bomber. Informed that they were now under imminent threat, Superiors shut down the club, where they had been training over 60 students. “We didn’t train anymore—we didn’t have any good training places,” Makhloot says. “We all left everything we’ve got.”

Today, Makhloot and many of his crewmates have had to leave behind not only their training club but their country, as the government collapsed in August and the Taliban has taken over. “We were in danger even when the government was still active,” he says. “When the government fell apart, there was no chance to do this.”

Sema dancer and teacher Fahima Mirzaie was about to tour a theater program to four provinces of Afghanistan when Kabul fell to the Taliban. Sema, a Sufi spiritual dance performed by whirling dervishes, is seen by the Taliban as heretical, especially when performed by women. Though Mirzaie is told often that she shouldn’t dance sema as a woman, and that dancing altogether is haram—or unlawful under Islam—it is the way that sema allows dancers to transcend categories like gender that draws her to the practice: “In sema, there’s not any borders for the human,” she says.

Like Kabul’s breakers, Mirzaie and her small school were in danger even before the collapse of the government—in 2019, she narrowly survived an attack while on the way home from dancing in Balkh, a town in northern Afghanistan and the birthplace of Rumi, the originator of sema.

In September, Mirzaie quickly pivoted from planning her tour to planning her evacuation, and was able to get on a flight to France just a day before the Kabul Airport bombing, which killed several of her friends. Many of her fellow dervishes and students haven’t been able to get out. “Our team is not safe,” she says. “And I have some worry for them. Everyone knows that the vision of the Taliban is not the same as us.” Mirzaie was able to bring her drum and her sema clothes with her, but her school, where she was teaching men and women, adults and children, was ransacked.

Makhloot emphasizes that while there were challenges to running a dance crew and school in what he calls a traditional society, for many years, Kabul was a thriving cultural center. “Everything happened in Kabul,” he says. “Kabul was a place you could feel everything. People were all together, they were kind. Suddenly everything changed—suddenly Kabul got empty.”

Indeed, Makhloot and his crew (he’s been a member of several over the years) held lots of events—ciphers, competitions and more—that often incorporated music and other art forms. “We just wanted to unite people and make them interested in becoming the next generation of hip-hoppers,” he says. “And we wanted to show them that this is the good face of Afghanistan.”

When it was announced that breaking would be included in the 2024 Olympics, Makhloot and his crew began setting their sights on such an international stage, striving to clean up their technique and enhance their creativity, to “make movements of our own—we don’t want to copy other people,” he says.

Makhloot says that Superiors are on par with the global breaking community despite the lack of resources that often made training difficult. Finding a safe space, especially one with a proper floor, was always a challenge. Several months before the attempted suicide bombing, a car exploded on the street outside a cipher, forcing the crew to temporarily shut down operations.

“Even though we had students, we couldn’t find a lot of money to pay the bills,” Makhloot says. “We were just paying the rent from our own pocket. Sometimes we didn’t have money to eat food, but we were training. We didn’t have money to give to our families. I was used to hard labor to find money, and breaking at night. This is why we’re gone from Afghanistan. I don’t want to live there again.”

Like Mirzaie, Makhloot worries about his crewmates and fellow breakers who are stuck in the country. “We were in danger because we were doing something unlawful,” he says. “We said that in this situation, we’re not going to survive because they will find us and they will try their best to do anything that they can against us.”

Mirzaie is thankful to have landed in a country that is supportive of her dancing. She lives with a friend, a fellow dervish, and has already had several opportunities to perform. “I find such a good thing with this dance,” she says. “I find myself. I find peace. It is a special thing—those people who do sema, they know what I’m saying. Sema is love for me.”

Though Makhloot is not yet in a place where it is safe to dance, he hopes to one day cultivate undiscovered breaking talent around the world. “Maybe someday I can travel to other poor countries to find their talents, to find their dancers,” he says. “They’re doing it, but nobody knows about it.”

He still has high aspirations for his crew, too. “If we had the chance, we could be so much bigger than this. My crew, they’re all professional breakers. And you’ve never seen them before. Why? Because we live in Afghanistan.”

The post The Afghan Dance Teachers Who’ve Had to Leave Their Country Behind appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Finally, Garcia couldn’t take it any longer. “In my view, it was a typical abuser testing the waters, and getting away with it,” she says. So she spoke up and was met with resistance from the perpetrator, and a timid deflection from the female breaker. “She thanked me for what I was trying to do but asked me to stop, and nothing changed,” Garcia says. “As young b-girls deal with complex power dynamics, it can be really hard.”

In an industry dominated by men, b-girls have long faced an uphill battle. Physical differences, historically masculine origins, ingrained cultural bias and blatant sexism have made the mission to bring large swaths of women into the breaking world a slow and strenuous one. But as the popularity of the genre grows, so do the number of women interested in joining the ranks.

The post The B-Girl's Battle for Equality in a Male-Dominated Style appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Then, over the course of a few years, this network of writers melted away. The New York Sun ceased publication in 2008. The Village Voice eliminated the position of full-time dance writer that same year. Dance Magazine stopped running reviews in 2013. The New York Post and Miami Herald got rid of their critics. Tragically, Ballet Review, a truly intelligent and in-depth dance journal, closed. The New York Times, where I was by then contributing as a freelancer, decreased its arts coverage, though it still has a dance critic on staff. The Goings On About Town section of The New Yorker, for which I also wrote (and continue to), did the same. Since Acocella stopped writing dance reviews for the magazine in 2019, the dance coverage has shrunk almost to nothing. I used to freelance for The Guardian and The Boston Globe, as well, but they stopped using New York–based freelancers and reduced the reach of their coverage.

The post The Reality of Dance Journalism Today 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.

From Chorus Girl to Leading Lady: Angie Schworer

Jayme Thornton

It’s the classic story—a chorus girl steps in for a star and becomes an instant leading lady. But for Angie Schworer, who starred in The Prom after 27 years on Broadway, it wasn’t quite that simple. Sure, it was a dream come true, especially since she was playing a veteran ensemble dancer named Angie waiting for a long-overdue break. But Schworer’s big moment had come 16 years earlier, when, after 16 months dancing in the ensemble and understudying Ulla in the 2001 phenomenon The Producers, she did the role in the first national tour, and then, already into her 30s, played the Scandinavian sexpot on Broadway for the musical’s last four years.

“Had I been that person saying ‘I only do roles now,’ I would have missed out on probably five more shows,” she says. Instead, she went back into the chorus—when Susan Stroman asked if she’d be a replacement in the Young Frankenstein ensemble, she said, “S-u-u-u-re. If my body can do it, I’ll do it.”

Tall and lanky, Schworer had been doing it since the age of 5, when she began classes at the Ziegler Studio of Dance in Covington, Kentucky. Her road to Broadway included theme parks and Atlantic City stage shows, and her showgirl chops—not to mention those showgirl legs—landed her an ensemble slot in The Will Rogers Follies in 1991. The body feels “creakier” now, but she credits Debbie Roshe’s jazz classes at Steps on Broadway, and regular swimming, for maintaining it. She didn’t warm up in her 20s—”I didn’t need to,” she says—but in The Prom she spent the whole intermission warming up for her big Fosse-style number. She imagines the young dancers in the company wondered why, going ” ‘Pffft—she’s barely doing anything.’ But I had to warm up to do it,” she says, “because you’re using your pelvis, you’re using your lower back.”

Much has changed over her three decades on Broadway, but one thing has stayed the same: “That joy and excitement of someone wanting you to be a part of their Broadway show.” —Sylviane Gold

Inviting More to Dance: Antoine Hunter

RJ Muna, Courtesy Hunter

“Dance saved my life,” says Antoine Hunter, who was sometimes made to feel alienated growing up Deaf in Oakland, California. But in his high-school dance class, “I realized that through dance, I could communicate.” Dance became a spiritual and artistic mission that led him to found Urban Jazz Dance Company in 2007 and the Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival in 2013.

Now in his mid-30s, Hunter is seeing his endeavors flourish in choreographic commissions; company tours to the UK, Turkey, Russia and Africa; speaking engagements at Harvard University, the Kennedy Center and APAP; and honors like a 2019 Dance/USA Fellowship. He has helped start international Deaf dance festivals as far afield as Turkey and Hong Kong. He’s even collaborated on an invention that allows dancers to feel music through their shoes. Most satisfying of all, he says, is “teaching people how to use dance to save their own life.” —Claudia Bauer

Finding Fresh Potential in Flamenco: Olga Pericet

Olga Pericet in Pisadas. Photo by Paco Villalta, Courtesy Pericet

Although she’d long been a key collaborator in other choreographers’ works, flamenco dancer Olga Pericet didn’t see her solo career take shape until her mid-30s. “I chose a difficult career path,” she says, “slower but surer.”

At 32 she won the Pilar López Dance Prize, which opened the door to present her first solo work, Rosa, Metal, Ceniza at the Jerez Festival, where she was awarded the Revelation Artist Award at age 35. Since then, Pericet has enjoyed a whirlwind of global engagements and yearly recognition, garnering top dance prizes such as the 2018 Spanish National Dance Award. Pericet masterfully recontextualizes flamenco’s past repertoire with humor, sensitivity and skill, fueled by her boundless imagination to challenge and meet our times head-on.

Now in her mid-40s, she says that with more maturity, “I am able to love every detail of my work and appreciate the people working alongside me, free of insecurities. I have confidence in myself because I know who I am as a creator and performer.” —Bridgit Lujan

He’s Not Done: Miguel Gutierrez

Miguel Gutierrez in This Bridge Called My Ass. Photo by Ian Douglas, Courtesy Gutierrez

Ever since his 2005 Retrospective Exhibitionist/Difficult Bodies earned him critical acclaim and his first big tour, Miguel Gutierrez has been a darling of the downtown New York City dance scene. But that designation doesn’t always come with the typical trappings of success (read: broad recognition and money). For Gutierrez, those came five years later, when at ages 38 and 39, he won a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award, a United States Artists Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. (He used much of the funding to pay off credit card debt and five years of owed taxes.) His name has since become synonymous with making it big as an experimental artist, as he continues to create and tour and rake in awards—including four Bessies.

“Don’t forget about us middle-aged artists,” he says. “There’s such an emphasis on youth. Artists get to a certain spot and it feels like the field turns on them. Why should I feel like I have to clamor for relevance at this age? There’s this sense of dismissal, of ‘Oh, you had this experience and you’re done.’ I am not done.” —Lauren Wingenroth

Questioning, Yet Assured: Leslie Cuyjet

Leslie Cuyjet in A Salient Theme. Photo by Scott Shaw, Courtesy Cuyjet

Though Leslie Cuyjet has built a career out of dancing for seemingly everyone in the experimental New York dance scene—she won a Bessie Award in 2019 for her work with Jane Comfort, Juliana F. May, Niall Jones, Cynthia Oliver and Will Rawls—it’s only in the last four years that she’s felt her own choreographic career blossom.

Cuyjet considers her 2017–18 stint as a Movement Research artist in residence, begun when she was 36, as transformative. “I’d been getting little things independently, here and there,” she says, “but this was the first time an organization said, ‘We support you as an artist, and we’ll give you the resources you need.’ ” Having the space to mine questions of identity and what it means to be a Black woman—both hallmarks of her assured, character-driven work—gave her permission to fail, to experiment, to listen.

When the pandemic struck, Cuyjet, like many other artists, watched as opportunities dried up. “Everybody was faced with what artists have been facing all the time,” she says, “which is: You make something out of nothing.” She ended up creating virtual works for the EstroGenius Festival and The Kitchen. Now, The Kitchen is bringing her previously canceled show back, and she is working on a new piece for The Shed. —Rachel Rizzuto

From Dancer to Activist: Theresa Ruth Howard

Saya Hishikawa, Courtesy Howard

After retiring from a successful career dancing with Dance Theatre of Harlem and Armitage Gone! Dance, and guesting with Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Theresa Ruth Howard came into her own as an activist. It started in 2015 when she wrote a viral blog post calling for information on Black ballerinas who came before Misty Copeland. The outpouring of data organically evolved into Howard’s Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet (MoBBallet.org), which includes a “roll call” of more than 560 Black ballet dancers. Today, at 50, Howard is an in-demand diversity strategist for ballet companies dealing with issues like colorism, implicit bias and systemic racism.

She encourages dancers today to “broaden their aperture,” she says. “Your value does not hinge on a tendu; your intellect is as important as your développé.” —Nancy Wozny

Lifelong and Steady: Ryan Heffington

Courtesy Heffington

Choreography titan Ryan Heffington describes his success in the dance industry as a slow burn. When he began creating work in his mid-20s, he was embraced only by the art world. His major breakthrough didn’t come until he hit 40 and landed Sia’s “Chandelier” music video—which instantly went viral. “I’m quite thankful that happened when it did,” he says. “I felt like I put in the work and laid the foundation for this success. Now, I’m looking forward to a lifelong and steady relationship with dance.”

So far that steady relationship looks more like a passionate romance. As one of the most in-demand choreographers in Hollywood, his resumé includes two Grammy nominations; feature films, like Baby Driver; Netflix’s “The OA”; commercials for Target, Nike and Under Armour; and collaborations with Paul McCartney, Lorde, Florence + the Machine and Arcade Fire. Still, he admits to moments of doubt: “The voice that says, ‘Will I ever work again?’ is still there when I have a few months of downtime.”

One of the biggest things he’s learned with experience? The power of cultivating his own voice. “When I was younger, ‘doing me’ meant being more of an outcast,” he says. “My friends and I were more punk—creatives who gained inspiration from clubs, rock music, fashion and partying. We didn’t need money, just an outlet. Eventually, I started working more because my work was unique. Directors and clients now want ‘Heffington’ instead of re-creating something that has been done before.” —Haley Hilton

In It for the Long Haul: Pam Tanowitz

Pam Tanowitz in rehearsal at NYCB. Photo by Erin Baiano, Courtesy Tanowitz

Pam Tanowitz keeps a folder full of her rejection letters. “A thick folder,” she says. Although she began choreographing during her junior year at Ohio State University, she didn’t receive a single grant until age 40. For about 15 years, she held a day job as the studio manager at New York City Center so she could have a steady income and access to studio space while making just one new work per year. “A choreographer came to rent space once and was like, ‘Did you know there’s a choreographer with your same exact name?’ ” Tanowitz says, laughing.

Then, just before she turned 50, her intricate, technique-driven works were suddenly in demand. In 2019 alone, she got commissions from New York City Ballet and The Royal Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company and Paul Taylor American Modern Dance, and booked an international tour with her eponymous company. “Looking back, not being noticed for 15 years was a gift,” she says. “Once I realized my career path would not be that of the hot, young choreographer, I just blocked out the noise of who was getting what, and focused on making good dances.” —Jennifer Stahl

Expanding Across Borders: Rosy Simas

 Rosy Simas performs Skin(s) Uche Iroegbu, Courtesy Simas

Rosy Simas, 54, has lived, worked and danced in Minneapolis, Montreal, New York City and Santa Cruz, yet western New York state is also an area she considers home, as a Heron Clan Seneca within the six nations of the Haudenosaunee. Simas occasionally answers questions about place with stories of artist displacement: “When I was 30, I was living in Santa Cruz and running a dance studio I started. We ended up closing because of the dot-com boom that priced us out.” Later, she ended up in Montreal, drawn in by the city’s dance improvisation community. “There was no way for me to get grants, though people were generous about letting me teach and present my work,” she says.

Eighteen years passed between the sunset of her California studio and the incorporation of Rosy Simas Danse in Minnesota in 2017. In the meantime, she primarily worked as an independent choreographer and artist. In recent years, she’s focused specifically on building long-term relationships in the field, and expanding the mission of her organization beyond producing her own shows. “This is really the first time I’m doing it in a way where we’re directly supporting other artists,” she says. —Zachary Whittenburg

Arriving in One Leap: Abby Zbikowski

Abby Zbikowski teaching at Focus Records. Photo by Focus Films, Courtesy Festival Un Pas Vers l’Avant

Abby Zbikowski seemingly burst onto the contemporary dance scene in 2017 with abandoned playground, a work drenched in her signature style: aggressive, punishing somersaults and thwacked kicks that wouldn’t look out of place at a sports meet. It won her a Juried Bessie Award, and toured throughout the country. But Zbikowski had actually formed her company, Abby Z and the New Utility, five years earlier. This was just the first time people were paying attention.

Zbikowski, now 37, didn’t let that bother her. “For as many heartaches I might’ve felt at not being recognized at an earlier age, I think it helped me really create and hone this movement out of the public eye,” she says. “By the time people came to know my work, it was ripe—there had already been a lot of research, a lot of trial and error. And understanding.” —Rachel Rizzuto

Galvanizing Ballet: Jennifer Homans

NYU Photo Bureau: Hollenshead, Courtesy Homans

Little did Jennifer Homans know, in 2010, when she wrote the anguished words “I now feel sure that ballet is dying” at the end of her nearly 700-page ballet history Apollo’s Angels, what a galvanizing effect that sentence would have. Ever since, the matter has been discussed, rejected, invoked as gospel truth and used as a springboard for creation. Four years later, Homans channeled her energies into the founding of the Center for Ballet and the Arts, a think tank and artistic laboratory based at New York University that brings together writers, dancers, set designers, choreographers and scholars of all types to think, discuss and create.

Homans, 60, started out as a dancer with companies including Pacific Northwest Ballet. She retired at 26 following an injury. “When I stopped, I had a serious crisis of identity, and a couple of years of real depression,” she says. But after completing a PhD in modern European history, she found her way back to dance. “I reconciled writing and dancing through the study of history,” says Homans, who is now The New Yorker‘s dance critic. But all her activities and achievements have been driven by the same thing. “I just love dance,” she says. “It is a life force.” —Marina Harss

Never Too Late to Be a Principal: Stella Abrera

Quinn Wharton, Courtesy Kaatsbaan

It took Stella Abrera 14 years to rise from soloist to principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, at the age of 37. But nothing really changed on the day of her promotion. For years, she had been dancing with the grace and integrity of someone who puts in the work not for accolades but for its own sake. “I knew that I had a finite number of years to enjoy this enormous gift,” she says of her five years as a principal, “and I also knew that every single time I went out onstage, I was giving my absolute best.”

After retiring from performing in 2020, she seamlessly transitioned to her new role as artistic director at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, an institution in upstate New York devoted to dance instruction, creative residencies and performances. It was her idea to create an outdoor dance festival so that her fellow dancers, sidelined for months by the pandemic, could get back to what they loved best. Her approach to leading Kaatsbaan, she says, is similar to how she danced: “I feel like I was always a good worker, and I know how to work efficiently,” she says. “I’m learning to translate those processes, which I used as a dancer, to my new role.” —Marina Harss

Finding Freedom as a Freelancer: Bijayini Satpathy

Allan Mathew, Courtesy Satpathy

Bijayini Satpathy’s dancing encompasses all the qualities of great dance: musicality, incisiveness, focus and something larger, a kind of cosmic flow. For 25 years, as a member of Nrityagram and as the director of its unique training program—which she developed—Satpathy was one of the most distinguished dancers and pedagogues of the Indian classical dance form Odissi.

But, she says, in the last two years, since setting out as a soloist and choreographer at the age of 45, she has felt empowered to apply her research on expanding the limits of the Odissi language within her own work. “I see how my body moves,” she says, “and it tells me that I have a command of this language that I have studied and performed for so many years. I know the nuances of it, and yet I move in my own way. I’m writing my own story.” —Marina Harss

Exposing the Underrepresented: Raimund Hoghe

Raimund Hoghe (downstage left) in Si je meurs laissez le balcon ouvert. Photo by Rosa Frank, Courtesy Hoghe

Based in northwest Germany, Raimund Hoghe began his professional life as a journalist. His articles brought visibility to marginalized communities; recurring subjects included sex work and the human impact of the AIDS crisis. Though as a child he appeared in plays by Brecht and Shakespeare, he was in his 30s when he began working professionally in the performing arts, as a dramaturg for Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. Only in his early 40s did Hoghe begin making his own dances, guided by advice he said came from the soprano Maria Callas: “Keep going in your own way, not with fireworks and not for easy applause, but with real feeling.”

In addition to creating and performing solos, Hoghe collaborated with artists such as Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula and Japanese dancer Takashi Ueno until his death in May, at age 72, just as the issue in which this feature originally appeared went to print. His lifelong sympathy for the underrepresented, whether on paper or onstage, stemmed in part from living with a congenital deformity of his spine he simply called a hunchback. He was always mindful about stepping into other people’s shoes and vice versa. “A solo for me is always more political than a solo for another dancer, because I can’t ask someone else to perform my political statement,” he said. —Zachary Whittenburg

The Dance Theater Whisperer: Annie-B Parson

 Andrea Messana, Courtesy Parson

Choreographer Annie-B Parson co-founded Big Dance Theater in 1991, and she’s been making clever, inventive and critically acclaimed genre-pushing work since. But about a decade ago, when Parson was in her 50s, that work was introduced to a much larger audience through collaborations with an ever-growing list of performing arts celebrities, including David Byrne (for whom she recently choreographed a Broadway-concert-turned-Spike-Lee–directed HBO special), Mikhail Baryshnikov and St. Vincent.

“Forget about your career for a good long while, and get in the studio and choreograph,” Parson suggests. “Choreography is a lot like being a pianist—you have to sit down and do your scales every day. That could be taking a walk and looking at the compositional elements around you. It might mean I look at my kitchen table and restage the salt and pepper. It’s a practice that needs to be attended to daily.” —Lauren Wingenroth

Growing Humor, Sparkle and Grit: Monica Bill Barnes

Monica Bill Barnes performing with Hunter College dancers at Fall for Dance. Photo by Paula Lobo, Courtesy Monica Bill Barnes & Company

Though Monica Bill Barnes founded her troupe, Monica Bill Barnes & Company, in 1997 and has steadily choreographed and performed ever since, the past decade has brought with it attention on a much larger scale. Touring to more than 100 cities worldwide, Barnes and her close-knit team have collaborated with luminaries including radio host Ira Glass and illustrator Maira Kalman. In 2019, Barnes made the leap to the silver screen, choreographing Greta Gerwig’s Little Women.

In line with her company’s mission to “bring dance where it doesn’t belong,” Barnes approaches each project—whether it’s working out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or dancing to Neil Diamond at a luxury mall—with her trademark blend of humor and compassion, sparkle and grit.

“The day-in-and-day-out work that I did in my 20s was very similar to how I worked in my 30s and now my 40s,” says Barnes. “I think being in such a constant practice is the reason why I’ve really been able to understand myself as an artist.” —Chava Pearl Lansky

Making Life Into a Dance: Michelle Boulé

Audrey Hall, Courtesy Boulé

At 43, Michelle Boulé finds that one of the greatest gifts to come with age is clarity. “What really started to happen in my 30s is that I got clearer on who I am and what I want to do. I’m not living with this external notion of who I should be,” she says. “I’ve learned how to turn everything that seemed like a disappointment into an opportunity.”

Shortly after turning 30, she won a Bessie Award for her performance as James Dean in Last Meadow, a collaboration with Miguel Gutierrez. Since then, critics have hailed her as a “force of nature” in collaborations with Bebe Miller, John Jasperse, Doug Varone and Deborah Hay, among others. Meanwhile, her contemporary choreography has graced stages at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Movement Research at Judson Church, and The Chocolate Factory, and toured internationally.

Today Boulé also channels the creativity, tenacity, compassion and collaborative spirit she’s gained from her illustrious dance career into work as a life coach. “I am harvesting the gifts that my 40-year practice in dancing has given me,” she says. “How can I help other people feel like their life is dance?” —Rachel Caldwell

Capturing the Moment: Nel Shelby

Christopher Duggan, Courtesy Shelby

A sturdy braid of dance, filmmaking and entrepreneurship runs through the center of Nel Shelby’s story, from training in ballet, jazz and tap during her Colorado childhood, to studying broadcast media at Stephens College in Missouri, to her arrival at Jacob’s Pillow as a videography intern. Nel Shelby Productions opened for business in 2004; four years later, she stopped teaching Pilates part-time to focus on her company and two kids.

Today Shelby manages 40-some concurrent projects, with help from up to a dozen employees and contractors. The pandemic-inspired shifts to virtual led to greater demand than ever before. Fall for Dance, Jacob’s Pillow and Vail Dance Festival are just three of her company’s nearly 100 clients.

With movement in her bones, she’s developed a unique approach to dance documentation that can capture the moment as well as communicate at the speed of contemporary culture. “Words like ‘archivist’ and ‘documentation’ can feel dry, so it’s taken me a while to see myself as an artist,” says Shelby, now 44. “I love being in my 40s and I love having been around the dance world for a while, realizing that we all did grow up together,” she says. —Zachary Whittenburg

An Eternal Evolution: Mia Michaels

Courtesy Michaels

Today, Mia Michaels is basically a household name. But she was mostly working unnoticed until she was 32, when she founded her company, RAW, in New York City. At age 35, she was creating work for Madonna, and two years later, she earned an Emmy nomination for her work on “Celine in Las Vegas: Opening Night Live.” What has followed is a nearly two-decade boom that includes three Emmy Awards for her work on “So You Think You Can Dance”; choreographing Broadway’s Finding Neverland; directing/choreographing the 2016 New York Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes; writing a memoir; and teaching dancers around the world. At 55, she is still embracing each new opportunity.

“The ebbs and flows of a long career are real and intense,” she admits. “Jobs come and go—I’ll experience long periods without work, followed by a stretch of being double-booked. So I set my life up as a master teacher. It brings in consistent money and keeps me in the studio. I’m always working on movement for class so I don’t get stale, stuck or afraid.” —Haley Hilton

Creating What Tap—and the U.S.—Is Calling For: Dormeshia

Jayme Thornton

When a New York Times headline in 2019 proclaimed Dormeshia the “Queen of Tap” and asked “Is Her Moment Now?”, the question seemed both rhetorical and prescient. Sure, she’d appeared in the star-studded Imagine Tap!, toured the international tap festival circuit and earned a 2014 Astaire Award for Outstanding Female Dancer in After Midnight—no doubt in recognition of the Fosse-like combination of highly technical dancing and unflappable grace for which she is known. But it’s her choreographic talent that’s garnered recent acclaim. In addition to co-creating The Blues Project with

Michelle Dorrance, Derick K. Grant and Toshi Reagon, in 2016 she debuted And Still You Must Swing, which enjoyed successful runs at Jacob’s Pillow and The Joyce Theater. A tribute to Black excellence and to tap’s cultural and musical roots, it was the show that the art form itself, and the country’s sociopolitical context, had been crying out for.

Her advice for those stuck in a rut? “When tap dancers aren’t working, they need to be shedding, listening to music, building their stamina and keeping their tools nice and sharp, so when the phone rings they’re ready to go,” says Dormeshia, 45. “Your actions in the ebb will determine the flow.” —Ryan P. Casey

The Chameleon: Sonya Tayeh

Jayme Thornton

Though she became a favorite choreographer on “So You Think You Can Dance,” Sonya Tayeh doesn’t think of the show as her breakthrough. Rather, it was a cross-country leap in her mid-30s, when she moved away from her West Coast commercial career for an unknown future in New York City, after getting hired to choreograph Signature Theatre’s Kung Fu, a play about Bruce Lee.

“To be an evolved artist involves taking big chances,” she says. In the years since, Tayeh’s kept opening doors with commissions from Jacob’s Pillow, Fall for Dance and the Martha Graham Dance Company. At 42, she earned her first Broadway credit with Moulin Rouge!, and in 2020, she snagged a Best Choreography Tony nomination for the show. Earlier this year, she choreographed a digital premiere for American Ballet Theatre.

Next up, her choreography for Sing Street is Broadway bound, and she’s working on a major motion picture. “I’ve never thought, I dream of this. I want to do this,” she says. “I have a dream of having a versatile, consistent career that holds true to my artistic integrity—whatever room I’m in.” —Madeline Schrock

Crafting Singular Projects: Gesel Mason

Joe Frantz, Courtesy Mason

Over the last two decades, Gesel Mason’s power as a kinetic storyteller has ramped up with a string of strikingly original projects, including her ongoing No Boundaries: Dancing the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers. In this one-of-a-kind performance and web-based archive of prominent African-American choreographers’ works, Mason uses dance to explore both resilience and the ongoing history of silencing, erasure and appropriation. Last year, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant worth just under $100,000 to support the project.

Her most recent opus, Yes, And, poses the question, “Who would you be and what would you do (or make) if, as a Black woman, you had nothing to worry about?”

As an associate professor of dance at the University of Texas at Austin, Mason, 50, encourages her students to trust that their paths will be unique. “No one has the voice that you have,” she says. “Follow your heart, intuition and curiosity. Dancing is more than being onstage; it’s how you are in the world.” —Nancy Wozny

From Sports to Dance: Kris Lenzo

Kris Lenzo with Mei-Kuang Chen in Insomnia, Photo by Sarah Najera Tanya Schmidt, Courtesy Lenzo

Until 2003, Kris Lenzo says he only danced “once or twice a year at a party.” More an athlete, Lenzo swam and played basketball, football and softball growing up. He followed his brother into long-distance cycling, completing his first thousand-mile ride at age 16. After a work accident three years later, both of Lenzo’s legs were amputated. Within months of his recovery he was practicing with the Detroit Sparks, then a highly ranked wheelchair basketball team, and shortly after that he began wheelchair racing.

Around 2002, he asked for accessibility improvements at his daughter’s Oak Park, Illinois, preschool, also home to the Academy of Movement and Music and the dance company MOMENTA. To celebrate the completion of the building’s retrofit, Lenzo made his debut as part of a physically integrated cast that included disability dance advocate Ginger Lane. Since then, Lenzo has performed 34 works by 18 choreographers and participated in workshops with AXIS Dance Company. “I was 43 when I started performing. Most dancers are at the tail end at that point, if not finished,” says Lenzo, now 61. “I’m really grateful for it. Dance has brought me a lot of joy.” —Zachary Whittenburg

With the Diligence of a Dramaturg: Melanie George

JD Urban, Courtesy George

On the surface, it may seem like Melanie George suddenly arrived in 2020. The founder of Jazz Is… Dance Project (dedicated to raising the visibility of jazz and its roots), she’s a new associate curator at Jacob’s Pillow, an in-demand teacher, a speaker and a facilitator for digital events at such venues as Jacob’s Pillow, SummerStage NYC, the Guggenheim and more.

But according to George, 48, her rise to national prominence was a result of “strategy, diligence, hustle and determination.” She attributes her current career momentum to a confluence of events, including her former job as the full-time dance dramaturg at Lumberyard in Catskill, New York, from 2016–20 and her (spectacular) contribution to the 2020 documentary Uprooted: The Journey of Jazz Dance.

“You will have a lot of careers in dance, so have multiple visions for your life,” she tells younger artists. “If you want it, do the work.” —Nancy Wozny

Intercontinental Storyteller: Cathy Marston

Cathy Marston at Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal. Photo by Sasha Onyshchenko, Courtesy Marston

Drawn to telling stories and bringing literature to life onstage, Cathy Marston gleans inspiration from everything from Greek mythology to Ibsen to Nabokov. She created her first piece, for The Royal Ballet’s UK tour, while still dancing and barely in her 20s, and has worked continuously across Europe since, including stints as associate artist at The Royal Opera House and director of Bern Ballett.

In 2018, Marston entered a new chapter of her career, making a name for herself in the U.S. A San Francisco Ballet commission was followed by the American debut of her full-length Jane Eyre by American Ballet Theatre. Marston’s newest ballets, Mrs. Robinson for SFB and Of Mice and Men for The Joffrey Ballet, will premiere next year. Now, she will become the next director of Ballet Zurich, starting summer 2023.

“Don’t feel that you need to have achieved x, y and z by the time you’re 25,” says Marston, now in her mid-40s. “I’m so glad that didn’t happen to me. You need to allow yourself time to explore and slowly digest the things that you discover, and distill your own voice.” —Chava Pearl Lansky

Still a Muse: Jodi Melnick

Paula Court, Courtesy Melnick

From the minute she graduated SUNY Purchase, Jodi Melnick got a string of gigs with postmodern choreographers. Her stylish, nuanced dancing turned heads. She enjoyed being a catalyst to help choreographers realize their vision. Melnick remembers a moment when, working quietly one-on-one with the legendary Sara Rudner, “I understood something physically, philosophically, mentally, cerebrally, enzymically, molecularly that became mine in my body that allowed me to step into her essence—like capturing what light is,” she says. She’s also served as muse for Trisha Brown, Vicky Shick, Twyla Tharp and Susan Rethorst.

Melnick didn’t choreograph in earnest until 20 years ago, when she was 37. Now she is sought after by some of New York City’s starriest dancers. Sara Mearns, Taylor Stanley and Lloyd Knight, among others, want to soak up her mind–body process, and she’s been working collaboratively with Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener. Melnick, who teaches at Barnard College and Sarah Lawrence College, has not left her muse identity behind. “I’m proud to be called a dancer,” she says. —Wendy Perron

Multidisciplinary Late Starter: Onye Ozuzu

Onye Ozuzu and Qudus Onikeku improvise as part of danceGATHERING in Lagos. Photo by Jovan Landry, Courtesy Ozuzu

Growing up, Onye Ozuzu would dance in the living room with her father, a behavioral psychologist and Nigerian civil war survivor who loved music. She also remembers hearing him say, ” ‘You have a chance to get an education that can guarantee income. Don’t throw that away on dance lessons,’ ” she says. “My dad did give us tennis lessons. ‘If you’re that much of a talent at something physical, you’ll be able to win Wimbledon.’ “

Free to choose her own classes at Florida State University, Ozuzu caught up in dance quickly thanks to Darrell Jones and Trebien Pollard, her castmates in works by Nia Love, then a graduate student. “I didn’t decide I was going to be a dancer until I was 20,” she says. “I was majoring in English literature and economics and setting myself up to become a lawyer.” Ozuzu, now 50, has been active in academia ever since, in leadership at Columbia College Chicago and the University of Colorado Boulder prior to her current role as dean at the University of Florida College of the Arts. All the while, she’s advanced her multidisciplinary creative career, convening collaborators from practices as diverse as urban farming and woodworking.

“I don’t think of myself as a ‘late bloomer’ so much as I was a late starter, so I focused on influences like Les Ballets Africains, where it’s very clearly women in their 40s dancing the lead roles,” says Ozuzu. “Those images helped reorient me.” —Zachary Whittenburg

Raising Latina, Chicana and Indigenous Voices: Vanessa Sanchez

Kelly Whalen, Courtesy KQED Arts

Shortly before turning 30, Vanessa Sanchez founded her San Francisco–based ensemble, La Mezcla, as a platform for the voices of Latina, Chicana and Indigenous women and youth. In 2019, the Chicana-Native percussive artist—whose main forms include tap, traditional Mexican Zapateado Jarocho, and Afro-Caribbean traditions from Brazil and Cuba—won both a Dance/USA Artist fellowship and an Isadora Duncan Award.

But her national profile skyrocketed the following year when the Bay Area public media outlet KQED highlighted the company in its “If Cities Could Dance” series, with excerpts of Pachuquísmo, Sanchez’s signature work chronicling women of the 1940’s Zoot Suit era. Since then, the gigs keep coming, including livestreams from The Joyce Theater and Lincoln Center’s virtual #ConcertsForKids. Most recently, a 2020 Hewlett 50 Arts Commission grant helped fund her new work, Ghostly Labor, which explores the exploitation of female labor in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Her advice? “Learn, research and train with the long game in mind,” says Sanchez, 36. “Never let society tell you how to express yourself. Never stop being a student.” —Nancy Wozny

Never Not Expanding: Camille A. Brown

Whitney Browne, Courtesy LSG Public Relations

Camille A. Brown’s career is like its own universe, steadily expanding. A year after joining Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, she began choreographing for an ever-growing list of companies and, in 2006, she started her own. Ten years ago, she branched out into theater and opera. Mainstream recognition came with her choreography for Broadway’s Once On This Island, and recently she’s also picked up film credits.

It may seem like a swift progression, but “to me,” says Brown, “it was a 20-year climb.” Now 41, she’s about to become the Metropolitan Opera’s first Black director to create a main-stage production, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, and is slated to be the first Black woman to direct and choreograph on Broadway, with the revival of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.

“People don’t see defeat; they just see the successes,” she says. “The same day that Once On This Island was announced, I got a call from another theater saying they weren’t going to move forward with me on a show because I didn’t have enough musical experience. In the ‘nos,’ I go through my hurt, but then I have to look ahead and see ‘Well, what opportunity does this provide?’ Because you’re released to do something else.” —Madeline Schrock

Creating With a Reason: Kenny Ortega

Kenny Ortega (right) on set. Photo by Kailey Schwerman, Courtesy Netflix

Kenny Ortega attributes much of his career to a night in his mid-20s spent on the dance floor of a club in San Francisco, where he was discovered by the art-punk band The Tubes. The group invited him to choreograph their shows for the next 10 years, and his work caught the eye of artists like Madonna, Cher, Bette Midler and The Pointer Sisters. In his mid-30s, Ortega capitalized on these connections with seemingly endless national and world tours. He booked the 1980 roller-skating movie Xanadu, where Gene Kelly mentored him in creating movement for the screen. That’s where he found his sweet spot, choreographing some of the most iconic dance movie scenes of all time: the “Twist and Shout” sequence from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; “Try a Little Tenderness,” from Pretty in Pink; and “The Time of My Life,” from Dirty Dancing. He’s choreographed for Michael Jackson, the Super Bowl, the Olympics and the Academy Awards. He directed a 2006 Disney TV movie which would eventually become the mammoth High School Musical franchise. In 2019, at 69 years old, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“The first night I had dinner with Gene Kelly, he asked me, ‘What is your raison d’être?’—my reason for being,” Ortega remembers. “I had to think about it really hard and long. From then on, I made sure there was something significant about opportunities that made them worth getting up every day and putting my all in. With that came the success.” —Haley Hilton

The post 30 Over 30: Dance Pros Who Prove Success Can Happen at Any Age appeared first on Dance Magazine.

They took that to heart. Before their presentation, they removed the table and chairs from their conference room, and my colleagues and I stood while dozens of their staff, dressed all in black, paraded through the space with large placards. There was drama and choreography as they cycled through a point more than once or disrupted the timing by flipping a placard over, sometimes revealing a second statement on the back. Our company loved it! Afterwards, the head consultant told us that in order to perfect the presentation, the firm had learned to rehearse, and the experience doubled as a team-building exercise.

The post Let’s Ditch “Best Practices” and Embrace More Artist-Centric Administrative Habits appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Since her time at UBW, her cerebral, dancerly ferocity (and choreographic kick-assery) landed her a Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellowship and an associate professorship of movement, computation and digital media at Arizona State University. Her expertise spans choreo-robotics, computation and somatics, resulting in genre-exploding performances and a singular pedagogic approach. I spoke with Coleman about her work and the future of dance in the emerging, post–COVID-19 moment.

What is your dance history?

My adult art life started as a member of the Urban Bush Women. I did that for four years, which was life-altering and specific. There was no other postmodern Black women’s dance company in the U.S. at the time. I was experiencing what it meant to make work in process with Black artists at the peak of their powers—it was access to an unbelievable dynamic hurricane of Black artistry.

Then I created my own ‘”group” with my close friends Viola [Sheely], Johnathan [Stone], David [Thomson] called Hot Mouth. We were all from the dance world, but the choreography was coming out as music! I began to compose and to lead. I made my first solo piece, Black Alice, on commission from Mark Russell at PS 122, and the second half of the evening was Hot Mouth, and we received our first review, from Deborah Jowitt. That was a turning point. Hot Mouth became popular; we had chances to bring it to Broadway or the West End—it was nuts—but I was not feeling it (much to the chagrin of my dad). I did wish we had gone on Letterman, though!

I went to get a master’s degree in music composition from California Institute of the Arts. The dancers thought I was a musician; the musicians thought I was a dancer. CalArts opened up the use and legacies of electronics in music and art making, and somehow California created open spaces in terms of cross-collaboration with the sciences.

After that, I got into Carnegie Mellon as a fellow at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. That continued this expansion—the position required liaising with human/computer design, robotics, which informed my project echo::system. In a way, that’s when I stopped being a dancer, or, more specifically, I had a dancer’s mind doing these other things, synthesizing through the body, as we tend to do.

How did you make the decisions that resulted in these career moves?

At the time, for me, the concept was not about career. I was deeply webbed in art practice and in that networked New York community. It was how we were collaborating, how electric and live it was, this art making and living. I didn’t care if it was right. I didn’t care if I didn’t have any money. I was motivated by what interested me. The basic thing is, I could move, and so I did. I moved towards my interests because I didn’t have fear of immediate starvation or imminent homelessness. The community of folk supported each other. I understood—I understand—myself as part of a lineage, as part of a movement.

Now I am an associate professor of movement, computation and digital media at Arizona State University…how did I get here?! It was just as much about constraints and blockages as it was about “decisions.” For example, in most music schools, the idea of a conservatory is linked to concepts of virtuosity inside a European Western classical music tradition. CalArts has a history of electronic music, world music, contemporary jazz—experimentation. I was inspired by this, and it wasn’t just music I was engaged with there. It was design, animation—kids doing insane, non-Disney stuff.

In the School of Arts, Media and Engineering, where I am, I was hired, but I didn’t have a computer science degree. The amazing director, Thanassis Rikakis said, Come on! You teach our motion-capture class! And so, I learned about that. And then I co-taught Understanding Activity with my engineering colleague. And I designed Hybrid Action: Physical Intelligence in Digital Culture and then later on Somatic Prototyping.

For a long time, I’d build my classes around automata, cellular automata and flocking. So I would do flocking constantly, physically! Those kids hated me, but I was like, “We’re gonna do this.” It covered systems thinking and it covered computation—but it’s all pure movement studies, every improvisor knows this: orientation, interaction, responsivity, timing, everything. I felt the students had to feel it.

Then fast-forward to this semester; co-teaching “Expressive Robotics” with a sculptor, and I co-designed a course for COVID (just kidding) called Sociotechnical Futures: What Are We Building? Culture, Methods and Alternative Visions for a Sociotechnical Future.

How does your expertise feature in your interdisciplinary practice?

Movement lends itself to interdisciplinarity. Hybridity is a natural state for me—to be singular takes a ton of work!

I want to include human movement in the critical conversations around environmental degradation, around social justice, around technology and inequality. It’s a reach, across my fields. I find many engineers don’t think it’s important. They tend not to consider how we move, let alone how to make a robot move. But they know the benefits of having artists on the team—because they result in better, more interesting, more robust, more complex projects.

What would conversations around polyrhythm and improvisation in the context of robotics look like? I did this work with a PhD student: He built a robotic djembe and I choreographed to it—but we [the robot-drum and I] were both improvising. It was cool and produced new scholarship—certainly considering more than just whether or not the thing worked.

Can you tell me about the Radcliffe project?

The project at Radcliffe is called the Movement Undercommons (Technology as Resistance/Future Archive), or something like that. We each have our own movement fingerprint, and you can be recognized with a very small amount of data. There’s much good and critical work around facial recognition, groups addressing all sorts of critical issues—I am part of a consortium of African diasporic Black scholars called AI 4 Afrika. But this whole-body motion capture is something else.

This project looks to create a vernacular movement lexicon—to take data governance and embodiment and social justice conversations to another level. Movement itself is the last bastion of commodification. It’s a different code, a different mode of exchange. Choreography studies this. Movement artists study this.

The post From Urban Bush Women to Robots: Meet Grisha Coleman appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Gradually I added in contemporary, Pilates, Gyrokinesis and a sprinkling of yoga.

It looked like the equivalent of the food pyramid for dance, which is reflected in the curriculums of most performing arts high schools and college dance programs. Up until fairly recently, the hierarchy remained firm: ballet, modern, then everything else (that is, if you could find an adjunct to teach hip hop, African or classical Indian dance).

While I was maintaining this Eurocentric line of study, I was also deeply immersed in the work of La Meri, the first American to travel extensively to learn dances from all over the world and perform those dances back to the world. La Meri was looking right at me when she said, “Ballet is just another form of dance,” in documentary video footage I recently viewed at the Jacob’s Pillow Archives.

The post What Dancers Can Learn From La Meri’s Focus on the Global Spectrum of Dance appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Through the door on the left, he could follow his passion for math and science, attending a university for civil engineering and leaping into a structured life of equations and innovation.

Through the door on the right, he could appease his persistent dance teacher by confirming his acceptance to Juilliard and trying to make a hobby into a career he didn’t yet understand.

Everything was pulling him left, but with enough convincing, he eventually swerved right.

What followed was an undeniably successful career as a performer. His bespectacled baby face may be most recognizable from his stint on two seasons of “So You Think You Can Dance,” but he also danced in Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, the hit immersive show Sleep No More, José Navas/Compagnie Flak in Montreal and a Britney Spears music video, all while choreographing his own work and teaching across the country.

But even as his dancing took off, he couldn’t stop wondering: Why did it have to be only one door or the other, anyway?

Amy Gardner, Courtesy Bell

Most of us have been taught that our brains have two separate sides: The left performs tasks based on logic, while the right is responsible for all things creative. Generally, we think one of our halves is stronger, more dominant. Artistry and science are naturally competing paths—choosing one must surely mean abandoning the other.

But Bell, now 30 and living in Los Angeles, has learned to see it differently.

In 2014, he was set to join the cast of Sleep No More and attended the show every night to study the role he’d soon take over. “I would watch the track I was supposed to be learning, but then every other show, I would just sit there, I would just wait and watch the environments pass me by and watch the audience interact with space,” he says. “And it was fascinating.”

How the room’s structure and form affected the experience of both the performers and the audience became as interesting to him as the dances themselves. He saw how the movement was inspired by tangibly interacting with the set; dancers and crowds pushed past each other to get through doors or run up stairways. The loud, energetic scenes occurring in one area were as captivating as the silence and stillness that hung in a room nearby. “It fully changed the way I had perceived performance,” he says. “There are huge swathes of time when you don’t even see a performer. And there are still ways to really understand beautiful narrative. That intrigued me immensely.”

This awakening allowed his analytical interests to reignite inside a space of art, and he decided to keep fanning the flame. He had recently gone back to school at the Fashion Institute of Technology to get a degree in advertising and marketing communications, with a focus on visual presentation and exhibition design, and decided to keep expanding on that. When he left Sleep No More in 2016, he moved to Georgia to get his BFA in interior design, focusing on themed entertainment design from Savannah College of Art and Design.

Today, Bell’s multidisciplinary artistic firm, Cinereal Productions, started in 2014, produces its own work and also curates immersive experiences, consulting and collaborating with other production, design and marketing firms. The company conceived and produced The Unbrunch—an immersive, theatrical dining experience that led guests through the five floors of New York’s Norwood Club—and before last year’s shutdown, they were developing The Acey Deucey Club, a Cold War–era, submarine-themed immersive pop-up bar that hopes to dock in multiple cities next year.

Recently Bell’s career has continued down an even more unconventional path. Since 2019, he has worked as a project designer and choreographer for the environmental architecture firm WET (Water Entertainment Technologies), the company behind the famous Bellagio fountains. He programs the movement of water and fire in large-scale spectacles by writing code and blending technology with architecture to compose the overall experience an exhibition delivers. Recent international projects include the 2020 and 2021 New Year’s Eve celebrations on The Dubai Fountain at the Burj Khalifa, and the show Aquanura, at the Efteling Theme Park in the Netherlands.

It’s a long way from a dance studio, but he’s learned that the principles of creating movement remain the same. “When you’re choreographing on a fountain, the equipment itself is your dancer. However, that dancer, that equipment, is fixed in space. It’s not going to move. It’s hundreds and hundreds of pounds and bolted to cement underneath eight feet of water. So we work with what’s called ‘expressions’—a simple stream of water, a fan of water,” he says.

“As a choreographer, I’ve really learned that an audience is quite patient, actually. We think about developing material so the audience doesn’t get bored, when in reality, if you watch a show at the Bellagio, there’s quite a few phrases that are pure duplicates, that you just watch over and over because it’s satisfying enough of a pattern that you really settle into it.”

This abstract work pushes him to be a better creator overall, he says. Grand, ethereal designs fit neatly into calculated structure. Most recently, he applied this by blending water, projections and dance in a series of music videos with Lachlan Turczan and Travis Chao for Grammy-nominated artist Phoebe Bridgers.

Ali Castro, one of Bell’s oldest friends and the operations director of Cinereal, told me she’s never been fazed by his atypical direction. “He always, in a really positive way, does what he wants,” she says. “If he’s interested, he’ll bite. He can always find the value in what’s presented to him, whether it’s a completely realized version or an idea about a shoebox. Everything’s valid.”

Bell looks on while filming a music video for Phoebe Bridgers
Jim Doyle, Courtesy Bell

On an individual level, Bell has created a life for himself that erases the left door/right door dichotomy altogether and leaves one big open space where ideas are free to mingle. On a larger scale, everything he’s built is a means of proving that dancers are more expansive than most people think. When asked if his unique career path was possibly a conscious or unconscious slap in the face to the all-too-common stereotype of dancers being one-dimensional, his answer is quickly “Yes, very consciously.”

“I think dance training creates the perfect employee for any field,” he says. “We’re incredibly obedient. We have the ability to lead a group, but also be flexible and trust the group, fall back into it. We’re idea generators, we’re very creative. Brainstorming tends to be very easy with dancers involved.…We’re great at presenting work, we’re great at selling work. That’s what we’re doing already, just in a very specific way that’s tailored to selling a choreographer’s idea to an audience. We are the perfect workforce, in my opinion.”

Cinereal serves as a home where his movement background, design education and business savvy can all come into play. After years of dancing in environments he felt were inequitable towards performers, Bell also structured the company to give them greater power.

“Businesspeople should not be creating art,” he says. “Artists should be creating art, and then understanding the business of art. I want to empower dancers to understand that what they do is valuable, incredibly valuable, not just on an emotional and societal level, but on a monetary level.”

His versatile toolbox allows him to see that artistic solutions can help solve business challenges. “If you orient a show a little bit differently, you can have more people in that space, or you can have more of a turnover, or it can be reset quicker. Really clear design choices can affect the business of art.”

Kamille Upshaw, who attended Juilliard with Bell and later toured with him in Hugh Jackman’s international arena show The Man. The Music. The Show., says she could always tell he was itching for more. “His brain moves a mile a minute. Yes, he’s focused on what he’s doing in the moment, but you can see from the outside he’s also thinking about a million other things.”

This idea of never getting too comfortable, and the pull to deconstruct, rework and change courses has always felt natural to Bell. It reminds him of his father’s work as a general contractor, and he laughs remembering his family’s constantly evolving home. “We renovated the kitchen. When we finished the kitchen, we did the living room. When we finished the living room, we went to the master bedroom. But then by the time you got to your final room, it had been so long that you needed to go back to the kitchen again. It was always a fully functioning house, but it was never finished. I think that sticks with me subconsciously.”

The post When Your Choreography Is Literally Fire: Billy Bell Combines His Dance Career With Design appeared first on Dance Magazine.

When I interviewed her ahead of the premiere, Tharp talked about how her relationship to the audience had changed. In the early days, she cared little for the audience’s opinion.

“It was not about the audience,” she said. “It was about what we were doing to make progress in our study of dance. The public was welcome to look, but whatever the public might be thinking about was not our problem, it was theirs.”

Many dancemakers today echo Tharp’s sentiments of the late ’60s, taking a Field of Dreams approach and making the dances they want to make with little to no interest in who comes to see them or why.

But by 1973, Tharp had already started to think more pointedly about the audience while making Deuce Coupe for The Joffrey Ballet. In an interview with Terry Gross earlier this year, she said she chose The Beach Boys’ music knowing it would be “very good for innervating and energizing both the dancers and the audience.” In the five decades that followed its creation, Tharp became increasingly invested in her viewers. “Bit by bit,” she said to me in 2017, “I’ve realized that subtext is of great interest to an audience, but they need to be directed to it.”

Artists have long grappled with the concept of “audience.” Add to this the capitalistic construct of art as a commodity and it gets even more complicated. To what extent should artists care what ticket buyers think? Does the power within a patron’s purse determine an artwork’s worth?

Some, like Tharp, see their relationship with the audience change over the course of their careers. Others look at the audience not as market research but artistic playthings, part and parcel to the work itself. (A few examples: Faye Driscoll’s Thank You for Coming: Attendance, d. Sabela grimes’ ELECTROGYNOUS and Urban Bush Women’s Hair & Other Stories.)

Improving accessibility as an equitable business practice—gender-neutral restrooms, relaxed performance atmospheres and captioning, as examples—has opened theater doors more widely so that more people may participate as audience members. The concept of “accessibility” as it relates to legibility, however, can be fraught. Artists of color are often unfairly and disproportionately burdened with explaining their work, asked to provide context at every turn, particularly when performing for a “general audience.”

Miguel Gutierrez has written about how white audiences are more comfortable with ambiguity and abstraction when it comes from white artists. This can and does privilege white artists whose work intentionally does not attempt legibility but is still deemed acceptable in larger, “mainstream” venues.

In a lengthy essay for Rescripted, an artist-led theater website, writer-director Monty Cole suggests that the financial model for theater is built by and for white people. If I apply this idea to dance, the concepts of “general,” “mainstream” and, even, “audience” are essentially euphemisms for old, white, wealthy ticket buyers perceived as propping up outdated financial models of larger dance institutions (mainly, ballet and ballet-adjacent contemporary companies).

Cole suggests artists reject this notion and cease trying to appeal to the white gaze. Make the art you want to make and seek out the venues, presenters and audience members for which you don’t have to explain that art.

Another alternative? Reject the idea that artists are beholden to ticket buyers. Paraphrasing Tharp, the public is welcome to look, but whatever they might be thinking about is not the creator’s problem. Still, all artistic products, even the ones made in a vacuum, have to be paid for.

Two Chicago companies navigating these muddy waters are Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre and Natya Dance Theatre. In 2015, Cerqua Rivera—a contemporary and jazz-based company led by Honduran choreographer Wilfredo Rivera—shifted its approach away from the churn-and-burn repertory-company model they’d followed for nearly 20 years. Now, for multiyear projects spanning topics like immigration, gender identity and social justice, they thrust open the studio doors and utilize audience feedback to steer the creative process.

When Hema Rajagopalan, artistic director of Natya Dance Theatre, started teaching more than 45 years ago, there were very few Indian immigrants living in her suburban community. To attract audiences, she started incorporating English translations in many of her bharatanatyam productions. As an influx of Indian immigrants has moved to Chicagoland, the imperative to explain intention and cultural context has become less important.

Cerqua and Natya are but two examples of dance companies using engagement as a road to sustainability. Thinking about a patron’s experience—and your capacity to grow your audience—is not necessary to make good art, but it can influence both what you make and your capability to continue making. Let us neither fault artists who desire a broad, multicultural, multiracial audience nor chastise those who reject notions of legibility, popularity and accessibility, which are sometimes misconstrued as synonymous.

As Adam Kirsch wrote in The New York Times in 2015, “Artists who are immensely popular in their day are not ‘following’ the audience in a mercenary sense. They are, rather, people whose spirits happen to find full expression in established, conventional forms. Such artists take their reward in the present, while the others, the ‘leaders,’ have no choice but to postpone their reward into the hypothetical future.”

There is risk and reward within each and every artistic choice. Artists ultimately have to decide what inspires them most, and with whom they want to share it.

The post Audience Appeal: How Much Should Artists Care About Viewers’ Opinions? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Who do you imagine in your audience? For whom do you make work? Who performs in your work?

Let me be blunt. Do you imagine disabled people as part of your world?

I believe that how we answer those questions directly correlates with how we rebuild the arts after the pandemic. For and with whom are we designing, creating? Who do we teach, fund or present?

Disabled people are likely already in your audiences, in your classes, possibly on your team, maybe even in your company. But do you imagine us there with you? And if you do, do you know if you are responding to highly mediated mainstream images and ideas about disability—which often focus on whiteness and wheelchair users—or are you alive to the rich and generative intersectional culture of disability itself?

The post Do You Imagine Disabled People as Part of Your World? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Since retiring as a principal dancer with Miami City Ballet and moving to New York City in 2017, Delgado, now 38, has taken on a variety of new artistic challenges. She’s set Peck’s ballets on companies in the U.S. and abroad; she’s taught at Juilliard; she’s danced for Pam Tanowitz, Christopher Wheeldon and Peck. In June of 2018, she began a two-year dive into West Side Story, beginning with work on the film and, later, as associate producer on the recent Broadway revival choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.

Delgado’s empathy and willingness to learn on the fly allowed her to thrive in these unfamiliar roles. She emerged from both West Side Story projects “a changed person without a clear plan, but I knew I wanted to devote time to my own dancing,” she says.

Saying yes first and asking questions later can be scary. But Delgado has been able to quickly adapt to new challenges. While she is blessed with connections, it is her ability to utilize her lived experience to facilitate further growth that makes her a person people want to work with on and off the stage.

While focusing on her own return to performing, Delgado received an invitation from Alicia Graf Mack, director of Juilliard’s dance division, and joined the faculty part-time in the fall of 2019, teaching ballet. She is also a member of the school’s mentor program. “My heart was trying to get back to my own performance, but the minute she called, I said yes.” For Delgado, the school had long carried an allure. She had worked closely with two Juilliard graduates, Jason Collins and Victor Lozano, on Tanowitz’s Blueprint, and crossed paths with many other alums through various projects. “Juilliard-trained dancers have a sense of self, purpose and a grounding versatility to their dancing.”

The school’s supportive atmosphere allows Delgado to continue to stretch herself beyond the studio. The faculty includes many other active artists. “Teaching reminds me of a performance,” says Delgado. “You have to make game-time decisions. Even if I prepare a class, the students dance and I immediately engage in dialogue with them. It’s like responding to a partner onstage.”

Delgado’s enthusiasm for these give-and-take dialogues has also proven useful when “jumping into the deep end” of production work. Late in the development of the 2020 Broadway revival of West Side Story, she was brought on to offer a Latinx perspective to De Keersmaeker’s choreography for the Sharks. Her respect for De Keersmaeker initially made her apprehensive about the task at hand. Delgado was excited by both the choreography and the dancers, but could sense miscommunication was acting as a disservice to the process large. Spending a few hours going through the Shark choreography with De Keersmaeker, Delgado found her suggestions were met with enthusiasm.

“It was about connecting artists,” she says. “I wanted to empower her to allow the Sharks some freedom for their own authenticity to come out. It’s like translating a language. I was able to figure out a way to explain to her what the Latinx actors in the cast were craving.”

A genuine curiosity about what will serve others best has been a guiding light for Delgado as she takes on more leadership roles. Working on the West Side Story film, she helped add authenticity to Peck’s movement vocabulary for the Sharks, but found her “real role was to translate Justin’s style and choreography for dancers with a wide array of training and experience. I had to figure out, on an individual basis, what 60 different people needed in order to make the choreography look not just in unison but in the same world.”

Her concerns were not only with what happened on camera, but also with much of what happened behind the scenes. She was fortunate to work with a production team that was open to giving the dancers exactly what they needed, but it was Delgado’s responsibility to identify every potential crisis before it happened.

“It was translating the needs of the dance world to the film world,” she says. “They were so eager to get it right. The most inspiring producer, Kristie Macosko Krieger, said, ‘What do you need? I want to know everything you need so that we can get it for you because we want this to be the best.’ I remember going to bed at night and thinking to myself, Have I thought of everything that these cast members might come into contact with?”

Finding a common language between creator and interpreter is not always easy. Delgado is deeply attuned to the simultaneous processes of the individual artists involved in a creative process. “I’ve never been a choreographer, a writer, a music director. I have so much to learn from how they do what they do and how, by asking them about what they are going through, I can figure out a way to help them.”

As a dancer, Delgado had struggled with feeling pressured to re-create rather than fully take ownership of her work, and has come to recognize the necessity to lift up the voices of performers. “I think the more I empower the artists to find themselves within the choreography, text or song, it’s the best thing I can do. I can share all the information I have studied—all the analogies, stories and research I dive into—but in the end, how do they find themselves in the work and can I assist them in that journey?”

These new experiences have changed her approach to her own performing. In early September of 2020, after nearly seven months of lockdown, Delgado performed Peck’s Dark Side of the Gym with her husband at the Kaatsbaan Summer Festival. “I sometimes wondered if activating all these other sides of my brain and analyzing performance, dance and training so intensely would negatively impact how I interact with my own dancing,” she says. “It’s the opposite. I’m less judgmental of myself and more creative. I can surrender completely.”

Her return to the stage was also a touching signifier for a new journey in the Delgado-Peck household—Delgado is pregnant with the couple’s first child. “It was our first pas de trois, and I’m so grateful I got to experience what it feels like to dance with a little being growing inside of me.” Delgado and Peck share a palpable chemistry when performing together, but the knowledge that they were dancing for three heightened the moment. “Justin always takes care of me onstage, but that show was extra. He was so present and getting such a kick out of getting to dance with me and our little baby.”

The post Patricia Delgado’s Second Act: Film, Broadway, Juilliard & More appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Researcher/dancer Huang Lei performing in “Convergence”Courtesy Hong Kong Dance Company

The Practice

In April 2018, HKDC artistic director Yang Yuntao launched a series of dance and martial arts interactive-training workshops. These workshops saw a dozen professional dancers immersing themselves in several southern-Chinese martial-arts traditions over two- to three-hour sessions that were led by local masters of each specific style. The selected methodologies ranged from baguazhang (dynamic, undulating whole-body maneuvers) to choy lei fat (fast, powerful arm punches) and Fujian white crane (graceful and focused on agility).

The goal was not necessarily to achieve proficiency or mastery in any of these disparate traditions—as dancer Chou Jo-yun came to realize, “It is no surprise that the martial arts masters practice each routine for three years!”—but rather to use martial arts as an access point for new kinesthetic experiences. For example, “When practicing the white-crane style,” says dancer Pan Zhenghuan, “as I concentrated the power of my entire body into one singular point, I was able to feel the body’s opposing force, and also the pressure and power brought by the sense of physical space.” In extensive discussions following the workshop series’ conclusion in late 2019, participants agreed that imagining an invisible sparring partner, as required for martial-arts practice, led them to respond to their surrounding physical space in unprecedented ways.

The Insights

Dancer Ong Tze-shen hesitates to use the term “mindfulness” to describe the changes he observed internally and personally over the course of the study. Still, “I feel better prepared to perform,” he says. “It’s almost like something has woken up inside me from going through the martial-arts training. Martial arts sometimes asks you to hold a posture for 20 minutes or more. That’s like meditation that really activates your mind, your body, everything.”

Impressive as it is, the dancer-researchers believe that the internal transformation is just part of what they gained as artists and athletes. Over three years of embodied inquiry, just a few of the research study findings were: increased leg and knee strength, greater ability to contract and relax muscles quickly, more efficiency of energy dedicated to any given step or phrase, and a game-changing new understanding of how brute muscular strength can be applied for maximum results—especially where partnering is concerned.

The Synthesis

Throughout the embodied-research process, the HKDC team gave periodic informal showings of the techniques they’d studied so far. These mini performances culminated in Convergence, a work that brought Chinese martial arts and Chinese dance together in a wholly contemporary way. While both are obviously traditional practices, it’s clear from the final piece (portions of which can be viewed in virtual reality) that dancers everywhere could stand to embark on their own intensive course in martial arts. With dizzying speed and cut-glass specificity, the dancers whirl through challenging sequences that are downright thrilling but executed with ease—this is no dry lecture-demonstration.

What with HKDC’s repertoire consisting mostly of classical Chinese dance and adaptations of Chinese literature or folklore, it could be argued that the study of martial arts is primarily useful to their own dancers. Not so, believes Ong: “As a classical dancer, I’m always thinking about gracefulness. But in this practice, I’ve discovered whole new levels of strength and speed. My dancing has a new power and fluidity to it, without losing any of the beauty my prior training has built.” Versatility, focus, endurance: What more could any movement artist want?

The post Here’s What Happened When Hong Kong Dance Company Trained Its Dancers in Martial Arts appeared first on Dance Magazine.

She started out by improvising, as she often does when choreographing for TikTok. Between popular moves like the Woah and the Wave, she mimed releasing a basketball into the air and dribbling it between her legs, picking up on themes in the sound (which samples the 2002 Lil Bow Wow song “Basketball”). “Then I cleaned up the moves,” she says, “because I was like, ‘I don’t want to make this too hard.’ ”

Though she didn’t know it yet, Cannella, 22, had struck a perfect balance for TikTok dance virality: something eye-catching and rhythmically satisfying but still accessible, not outside the reach of amateur dancers. She filmed the dance in her bathroom and posted it with a call to “try it and tag me.” By the next morning, to her surprise, the video had already received 10,000 likes, and soon the dance was all over TikTok. Among those who tried it was the 16-year-old dancer Charli D’Amelio, the app’s most-followed user, who posted it for her then-95 million followers.

The post What Makes a TikTok Dance Go Viral? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

I’ve had this “hook” in my mind for how I’d open an important essay my entire dance career, but I was never ready to talk about it, until now.

I might be the only dancer to say this, but the best change to result from the coronavirus shutdown is company class moving to Zoom.

As a kid, my teachers encouraged competition between students. While it undoubtedly helped push me, all these years later I still struggle with unhealthy levels of competitive feelings in class. But on Zoom, I don’t have to compare myself to anyone, and it feels great. I can dance freely because no one is watching and critiquing my abilities.

The post I'm a Professional Dancer With Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
Here's Why Dance Companies Need to Start Prioritizing Mental Health appeared first on Dance Magazine.

When you are pregnant there is a lot of celebration. You are uplifted and held, but afterwards the focus goes towards the baby. There is such a cultural expectation to just “bounce back,” yet our society is not set up to support mothers in all the ways they need.

In 2013, I had my daughter, Lola, at home with a birth doula. We don’t have family in the area, and though my mom came out for a while, we didn’t have a built-in support network. My husband, Seth Orza, a Pacific Northwest Ballet principal, did take some time off, but he performed just a week after the birth. So I hired a postpartum doula. Having someone to help with laundry, hold Lola so I could nap, and act as a sounding board was hugely beneficial. I knew I wanted to provide the same support for new families, and my experience led me to become a postpartum doula.

The post The Reality of Dancing Postpartum: No, New Moms Don’t Just “Bounce Back” appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Courtesy JPL

“It’s only been in the last handful of years that I’ve been able to really find the balance again. It’s much more fulfilling.” Though she’s currently located in Hawaii, when she lived in Southern California, she’d train at The Sweat Spot or EDGE. “And I love keeping up with tap”—citing Johnnie Hobbs as a favorite teacher.

Meanwhile, during the day, Bottom continues to support Mars 2020 as Perseverance approaches its February 18 landing date on Mars’ Jezero Crater. “I now sit on-console as one of the uplink leads in the cruise operations phase of the mission,” she says. “This work involves gathering information for each of the activities during the cruise phase and helping to create the uplink products (commands/sequences/files) that we send to the vehicle every day.”

Though her work is headed millions of miles away, she feels decidedly grounded. “I went through this long period where I tried to shut down one part of me or the other part of me. I said, ‘Okay, dance 100 percent, no more science.’ And then I did engineering 100 percent, no more dance. Through doing that, I lost a sense of who I was. I thought back to when I was in high school—I was always juggling both, and that was what made me human,” says Bottom. “That’s what makes me me.”

The post This Former Rockette Is Now a Mars 2020 Engineer—and She's Still Dancing appeared first on Dance Magazine.

But until last night, the show had neglected to feature America’s oldest homegrown dance traditions, those of Native American tribes.

The post Meet the First Native American Dance Group to Appear on "World of Dance" appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The post "It's All About Spreading Empathy and Awareness." One Choreographer's Advice for Making Work About Mental Illness appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Dance is going through an important moment of self-reflection right now. Whether it is rethinking dancers using blackface in La Bayadère or modifying the Chinese variation in The Nutcracker, we are (finally) questioning if our stalwart commitment to the classics is tone deaf, and even offensive, in the modern world. And while the ever-complicated conversations around race continue in popular culture, an equally important conversation is happening around mental health. Do we need to change the way we depict mental illness in dance?

The post Is It Time to Reevaluate Onstage Portrayals of
Mental Illness? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

But the pair met on a dating app last year, had their first date at a coffee shop and the rest is history—quite literally, since Russell penned an essay for ESPN in which he came out as bisexual last August, making him the first active NFL player to come out publicly. The duo went public with their relationship at the same time, and have since started a YouTube channel together.

As each are quick to point out, their careers have a lot more in common than you might think. We caught up with the couple to find out how.

What their training looks like

The post An NFL Player and His Dancer Boyfriend Say There Are More Similarities Between Their Fields Than You'd Think appeared first on Dance Magazine.

That curiosity led her to write Strong Like Her, an exploration of women’s strength and involvement in sports, out today from Gallery Books. The book covers milestones from ancient times—like the first woman to compete in the Olympics in the fourth century BCE (because of a loophole)—to the triumphs of today’s household names, such as Misty Copeland and Serena Williams.

Accompanying the retrospective are profiles of 23 current athletes, each at the top of their respective sport, and striking photographs by Sophy Holland. There’s a fencer, a climber, a strongwoman, an ultramarathoner, an endurance swimmer, and, yes, three dancers.

Sophy Holland, Courtesy Gallery Books

Sophy Holland, Courtesy Gallery Books

Sophy Holland, Courtesy Gallery Books

Overall, Shapley hopes that readers of Strong Like Her will find someone they recognize, as well as someone that they can be inspired by. “These women all have very different stories. They come from different places. But they each have something to add to the narrative about women and physical strength.”

The post This New Book Celebrates the Strength of Female Athletes, Including Dancers appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The post Love Dance and Science? Adeene Denton on How They Can Work Together appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Valle has been a trainee at The Washington Ballet since 2016, starting at the same time as artistic director Julie Kent. But only a few months into her first season there, she started experiencing excruciating pain high up in her femur. “It felt like someone was stabbing me 24/7,” she says. Sometimes at night, the pain got so bad that her roommates would bring her dinner to the bathtub.

Courtesy Valle

Even so, the studio remained a safe space. “As long as I was moving, I didn’t notice the pain,” she says. Valle assumed she’d gotten a dance-related injury, like a labral tear. To her surprise, scans showed she had a tumor. A noninvasive surgery relieved the pain for a couple months, but it returned. So the doctors performed the procedure again. And again, the pain returned.

After a year of struggling, Valle went for a second opinion at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York City, and in February 2018 finally got the correct diagnosis: Ewing sarcoma, a rare bone cancer.

The typical treatment? Amputation of the leg. But knowing that Valle was a ballet dancer, the doctors decided to go a different route, blasting the tumor with 14 rounds of chemotherapy—including one chemo that’s so intense it’s nicknamed “The Red Devil”—and 31 treatments of radiation.

As supportive as her colleagues were, Valle struggled. “A week after I was diagnosed I was set to be in Romeo and Juliet with The Washington Ballet. Before I knew how serious it was, I said to my doctor, ‘Are you sure I can’t go back to DC for a week and finish that?’ “

She had to stop looking at social media, where she’d see her friends performing and continuing on with their lives while she was throwing up from the chemo.

But she realized she could use ballet as a motivator. Kent checked in regularly and sent along videos of Valle dancing—telling her that whenever she was ready to come back, her spot was there for her.

“She deserves to pick up where she left off, and pursue the life she wants for herself,” says Kent. “We’re all here to support her.”

Kent says Valle’s handled her cancer journey with aplomb. “When she came back from the first surgery, she was dancing so beautifully and had come such a long way since her first season. Then she got the more serious diagnosis,” Kent says. “But she persevered—she’s been grace under pressure.”

Chiara Valle on her last day of chemo
Courtesy Valle

On November 16, 2018, Valle was cleared as NED—no evidence of disease. Although it takes five years to be declared “cured” since there is a high rate of reoccurrence, Valle has finally, slowly been able to make her way back to the studio.

She took her first ballet barre in March. “I did the most emotional pliés of my life,” she says, now laughing at how she cried through the entire combination.

Though she’s still working on regaining her endurance and rebuilding her calf strength for pointe work, as she heads back to the TWB studios, she knows she’s grown as a dancer. “I’ve learned not to worry about the little things, and I’ve learned patience,” says Valle, now 21. “I hope to carry my story with me to the stage. And hopefully one day a little kid who’s battling cancer can look up to me and know they can do it, too.”

To that end, she’s launched Wings for Ewing Sarcoma, a nonprofit dedicated to raising funds both for research and retreats for pediatric cancer patients.

“I just can’t wait to see her in Waltz of the Flowers in Nutcracker,” says Kent. “That’s my last memory of her dancing. There’s one part where the women jeté across the stage, and because Chiara’s one of the taller dancers she’s always last and does this big dramatic run. You could tell how much she enjoyed it. I can’t wait to see her doing that—and can’t imagine what she will feel when she arrives at that point again after all that she’s been through.”

The post This Dancer Almost Lost Her Leg to Cancer. Now She’s Heading Back to The Washington Ballet appeared first on Dance Magazine.

MichelaMarino Lerman

“I think we are beginning the conversation—the door is cracked open, but we need to confront more,” says international jazz tap soloist Michela Marino Lerman. With mentors that included Gregory Hines and James Buster Brown, Lerman was the only woman (since Sandra Gibson in 1949) to be inducted into the Copasetics fraternity of jazz hoofers. She has long-hosted weekly tap dance jams at Smalls, and is a frequent performer at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, where she is a tap soloist and bandleader for Michael Mwenso and the Shakes.

Lerman confesses that while she has finally arrived at a place of respect, women in tap often get relegated to certain categories—women like Chloe Arnold and her Syncopated Ladies who has allied with pop star Beyoncé and been nominated for an Emmy for her choreography on the “The Late Late Show with James Corden”; women like Michelle Dorrance, recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Award for combining the musicality of tap with the structural intricacies of contemporary dance. “But where are there openings for a female jazz tap solo improviser?” Lerman asks. “Soloists like Jason Samuels Smith and Derick Grant—I look at Savion Glover as a model. I want to be a soloist/musician—there is a difference there.”

Elka Samuels Smith

“I am a producer, manager and arts administrator, and very aware of how I come across,” says Elka Samuels Smith, who founded the artistic management company Divine Rhythm Productions in 1999 to support professional tap dancers, performers, choreographers and musicians. “I am a very direct person by nature, and I can be taken differently than if I were a man. And if I have had to soften my approach, it is because there are people on power trips.”

The daughter of renowned jazz dancers Sue Samuels and JoJo Smith, and sister to tap dancer Jason Samuels Smith, Elka admits that she has had to deal with powerful men in the industry. “And those one-on-one conversations that happen behind the scenes—wow! The reaction is really crazy—complaining you are not being friendly enough.” Samuels credits her survival in the industry to other powerful women who have reassured her about being unapologetic.

So, are things changing? “Yes!” Samuels exclaims. “Men are tiptoeing a little bit more now because they are being accounted for obvious discrimination. Some would say we have come a long way, but others. . .you have to understand the dynamics. The business of tap dance for women may have evolved, alongside of music and culture, but we are still dealing with people taking away our reproductive rights. We have the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter. So it is hard to say that we have shattered anything! The playing field has not been totally leveled because of who holds the power.”

Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards

“Have women been discriminated against?” asks Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards. “Yes. Absolutely. But I am not sure that the doors have ever been closed for women, not really.”

For Edwards, who was the sole female performer in the Tony-winning Bring in ‘Da noise, Bring in ‘da Funk and directed the rave-reviewed And Still You Must Swing which premiered at Jacob’s Pillow, women have always been in the forefront of tap. “I know who I got to see growing up, and I know the male dancers we all look up to—most of whose teachers were women!” Edwards is also keenly looking at the women coming up. “I am trying to look at this next generation, and there are young ladies kicking it out. There are a lot of men out there, but they might be outnumbered right now by the ladies.”

The post Women Rising: Has the #MeToo Movement Smashed the Glass Ceiling for Women in Tap? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

When she became a journalist, her hunger for dance still hadn’t diminished. “I started taking lessons everywhere I could. Tap, salsa, African, ballet, modern—I took everything.” At that point, it was a hobby, but she couldn’t shake her dream: “I always wanted to be a professional dancer.”

Courtesy New York Pacemakers

But soon, she got the idea to launch her own dance team, specifically for seniors. “I put an ad in Backstage and Playbill, and I said, ‘If you’re over 50, come.’ ” A friend who was a former Knicks City dancer volunteered to be the choreographer, they held an audition, and the New York Pacemakers were born.

Their slogan, “We dance with heart,” sums up their goal. “We may not be the best dancers out there, but we’re here because we love dancing. We really do put our hearts out there,” says Avery. “That’s the point: You don’t have to be a professional on Broadway to be able to get off the couch and just move and inspire other people.”

The team ranges in age from 50 to 81—and they proudly sport their birth years on the back of their jerseys. They’re a diverse bunch, including a former Rockette, two therapists, a Wall Street professional, several teachers, a developmental specialist, two professors, a U.S Air Force Vietnam veteran, a yoga teacher and a clergy member.

Courtesy New York Pacemakers

In an ironic twist of events, the troupe made its debut performance last summer at—you guessed it—a Brooklyn Cyclones game. “The crowds love us,” says Avery. “There were overwhelming, rousing cheers from the audience. When I came off the field, I just cried because it was so validating to everything I’ve always wanted.”

At a recent rehearsal, the studio was buzzing with energy. A few newbies were there for a trial, and the troupe was learning a routine by guest choreographer and Broadway performer Afra Hines, who most recently appeared in Hadestown. Her mother, Mary Anne Holliday, is a member of the Pacemakers and a former professional dancer herself.

The team has a flair for the dramatic, not to mention a great sense of humor: Hines had choreographed a tongue-in-cheek number set to a mix of Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated.”

When rehearsal wrapped, Avery reflected on the past few years: “I can’t believe that at this age—I’m going to be 60 in a couple of months—I’ve been able to create what I’ve wanted my whole life.” The New York Pacemakers will be performing throughout the summer, including five appearances at Brooklyn Cyclones games.

The post Meet the New York Pacemakers, a Senior Dance Team That Mingles with Broadway Talent appeared first on Dance Magazine.

There’s a good chance you’ve seen the YouTube video where a doglike robot named Spot dances to a cover of “Uptown Funk.” Spot does a variation on the running man (the running dog?), twerks and sashays. Equally adorable and uncanny, it’s a fascinating piece of choreography. All the more so since it was recently announced that Cirque du Soleil has entered an experimental phase to explore the possibility of incorporating Spots into live dance, theater and circus shows.

The post What Are the Potential Military Applications of Teaching Robots to Dance? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

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But when we had our first casting call, an agency open call in Los Angeles, our top agencies only had two to four dancers on their rosters that they considered plus-size—meaning smaller than your average-sized American woman.

The post Lizzo's Choreographer on Why Plus-Size Dancers Shouldn't Be a "Specialty" Act appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The post How Can Companies Move Past Ballet’s White, Imperialist Roots? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

“Some dancers use mirrors just for vanity,” says Lexine Brooks, a Deaf dancer who began training at age 2. For nearly two decades, she’s learned choreography in all sorts of ways, including an FM system that amplified her teachers’ instructions in her ears. Today, she prefers to learn dance through American Sign Language and counting—as well as keeping an eye on the mirror.

RJ Muna, Courtesy Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival

The post Dancing While Deaf: What It's Like to Move to Music You Can't Hear appeared first on Dance Magazine.

“I honestly was pretty shocked,” says the Dayton Ballet dancer. “But the more I thought about it, I thought, You know what? Clara’s dreaming the whole thing from the battle into the Land of the Sweets. So why can’t she dream of a woman saving her from the rats and taking her on this journey?”

Photo by Expressions Studios, Courtesy Dayton Ballet

Photo by Margot Aknin, Courtesy Dayton Ballet

The post For the First Time Ever, Dayton Ballet Has a Female Nutcracker appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The short answer? Not happening.

The post It's Time to Dispel the Myth of "Ideal" Dancer Weight appeared first on Dance Magazine.

“Is your daughter the dancer?”

“Actually,” I say, “I am.”

“Wow!” they enthuse. “Who do you dance with? Or have you retired…?”

“I don’t dance with a company. I’m not a professional. I just take classes.”

Insert mic drop/record scratch/quizzical looks.

The post Why Adult Ballet Students Should Be Taken Seriously appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Though she’s based in Chicago, where she works in global sourcing for Walgreens Boots Alliance, over the last several years she’s attended summer intensives at American Ballet Theatre in New York City, the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Moscow and, most recently, the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen.

The post This Corporate Manager Still Takes Ballet—and She Says It Helps Her Slay Presentations appeared first on Dance Magazine.

For Purelements: An Evolution in Dance co-founder Kevin Joseph, it’s all about freedom: “That freedom of moving through space on a bike is the same freedom I feel when I’m dancing,” he says. And that sense of freedom—whether it’s in the studio or in the streets—is something that Purelements is determined to give to its East Brooklyn community.

The post Why This Brooklyn Dance Company Is Putting on a Bike Tour appeared first on Dance Magazine.

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