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

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

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

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

A Little More Mascara

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not a Place We Have to Hide

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes Sweet and Sometimes Bitter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Are What We Are

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It’s a lot for anyone to cope with, but especially those newer to the industry. What can you expect at auditions—and how can you cope with their unique pressures? I asked two experts to share their advice.

How to Audition Well

If you want proof that Shannon Lewis knows how to audition, just look at her resumé. She performed in 10 Broadway musicals, was a Radio City Rockette, and has danced on “The Today Show” and at the Tony Awards. Now, she’s on the other side of the table as a choreographer, director, and educator. Through her experience in the industry, she has discovered various tools for auditioning well.

First, recognize that the people at the front of the room want you to succeed. “I want everyone to come in and blow me away,” Lewis says. “I am actively wanting you to be the best you can possibly be and to have the best day ever.” Rather than looking at casting directors and choreographers as scary judges, see them as cheerleaders, and your energy will become more inviting and magnetic.

Second, the best way to enter auditions feeling confident and prepared is by honing your skills in class, fine-tuning technique and learning to pick up choreography.  “That’s where dancers build their toolbox throughout their entire careers,” she says. “So when you’re in the room and the choreographer wants a triple that stops on five, you can do that, because you have been working on it yourself.”

Third, build relationships through networking. “Someone will be more likely to take a chance on you if they know your work already,” she says. If you’re new to the professional dance world, a good place to start that process is the classroom. “If you really connect with a teacher, it’s great to be in that class as much as possible, because it will give you the chance to build a relationship,” Lewis says. “Loyalty and consistency are really important words in our world.”

Even if you go into auditions well-prepared, you’ll still likely face a lot of rejection. But remember that every experience is setting the groundwork for future opportunities. “Even if I’m auditioning someone for something they are completely not right for, if they come in the room and do an incredible job, I will absolutely remember them for the next thing I’m doing,” Lewis says.

How to Cope With the Emotional Strain of Auditioning

Terry Hyde, a UK-based psychotherapist and the founder of Counselling for Dancers, is also well-versed in the challenges of auditioning. Like Lewis, he started out as a performer, dancing with The Royal Ballet and London’s Festival Ballet (now English National Ballet), and performing in musicals in London’s West End.

I’ve worked with Hyde briefly myself as I’ve grappled with the myriad emotional challenges that come with returning to dance after 10 years of illness. Here are his tips for coping with the specific stresses of auditioning.

First, Hyde recommends taking 15 minutes to practice meditation as part of your daily routine. “This will prepare you to have a clear mindset on the day of your audition,” he says.

Next, he recommends finding a private space at the audition—a dressing room or bathroom—to do breathing exercises. Sit for five minutes and breathe slowly: inhale on the “and,” exhale on the “one,” inhale on the “and,” exhale on the “two,” until reaching the count of four; then reverse the count. “If any thoughts come into your mind as you do this, just tell them, ‘Hang on a minute, I want a quiet moment,’ ” Hyde says.

Hyde also wants you to reframe words like “nerves” and “rejection.” “You have probably been told that butterflies and tension before a performance are nerves, but the physical feelings of anxiety are identical to the physical feelings of excitement,” Hyde says. Rather than saying “I’m so nervous,” before an audition, say “I’m so excited.” “Our minds are so powerful that they create the reality in which we live,” Hyde says.

If a dancer doesn’t book the job they are auditioning for, Hyde wants them to know that it’s not a true rejection of their talent or who they are. “Auditions aren’t rejections. They are very subjective,” he says. “You might not be what they are looking for, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t got talent.”

For more audition tools and advice from Lewis and Hyde, watch their full interviews in the latest “Begin Again” vlog over on Dance Magazine’s YouTube channel.

The post Begin Again: Auditioning With Confidence appeared first on Dance Magazine.

On April 5, 2023, The New York Times published a response, “Finding Freedom and Feminism in Ballet. (It’s Possible.),” by dance critic Gia Kourlas. In promoting Balanchine’s choreography as a practice of “freedom,” Kourlas fails to address multiple experiences detailed within these two works and beyond of people who witnessed in- and out-of-studio practices that harmed women.

In noting what she calls a “myth” of ballet as “suffering, pain and blind subservience to patriarchal leaders,” Kourlas supports a system that has historically ignored the first step to ending abuse: Believe the survivors’ stories. Far too often, women in ballet have been disbelieved, gaslighted, judged, or blamed for the harms inflicted on them by their abusers. Kourlas continues this trend, but attaches these behaviors to words like “feminism” and “freedom” in a way that diminishes them.

Other authors have approached the same subject with more nuance. Throughout her book, Robb acknowledges the ways that women, historically and currently, have sought Balanchine’s and other men’s approval. Although Balanchine died in 1983, his leadership style has survived through actions and attitudes adopted by some of his protégés and other directors. Such leaders handwave alleged abuses in the name of tradition, excellence, or, as Kourlas phrases it, “freedom,” while continuing to validate the patriarchy and misogyny still rampant in some ballet settings.

The power dynamics at play in ballet are not specific to artistic institutions. It’s dangerous to dancers, as well as to women, female-identifying and gender-nonconforming people, when gendered abuses of power are confused with acceptable working conditions. The Duluth power wheel (used in cases of domestic violence) outlines approaches similar to those that have been used by some ballet directors to isolate and control women.

Perhaps the uncomfortable question is: Can we continue to appreciate artistic works with an awareness of the harm done by their creator? Can we even rely on a single person to hold the answer to this question? Kourlas suggests that we situate histories of abuse in relation to liberatory moments onstage—that we look to the brief moment of freedom a dancer has when performing. But is it really “freedom” if that fleeting success relies on discounting or dismissing the suffering of other women?

Many writers and teachers are wrestling with how to bring attention to ballet’s intersecting racist and patriarchal foundations. For example, Episode 8 of Season 2 of The Turning, on “American Ballet,” examines Balanchine’s statement that a ballerina should be “the color of a peeled apple,” and cites scholarship by Brenda Dixon-Gottschild to analyze Balanchine’s appropriation of other artists’ (Katherine Dunham) and communities’ (jazz and tap dancers) steps and styles.

There’s a wealth of women in leadership roles as choreographers and directors who are advocating for women’s rights and questioning/dismantling institutional norms, even within New York City Ballet. In an April 18 New York Times article, Virginia Johnson, outgoing director of Dance Theatre of Harlem, says ballet “is a living art form that needs to be true to the time that it lives in.” If the reduction of women, dancers of color, and especially women of color to lesser-than status was acceptable in ballet in the 20th century, these gendered and racialized biases must shift in the 21st.

As a critic for the New York Times, Kourlas holds the power to shape these histories and narratives. Our past continues to inform the present, and we should invest in respectful treatment for all dancers to pursue collective freedoms within and beyond ballet.

Rebecca Chaleff is an assistant professor at SUNY–University at Buffalo; Michelle LaVigne is a senior lecturer at Cornell University; Kate Mattingly is an assistant professor at Old Dominion University.

The post Op Ed: What’s Possible in Writing About Ballet? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

I began acting in college while in the depths of my illness. At the time my body was barely functioning well enough to accomplish basic tasks, let alone sustain grand allégro. But my heart yearned for performance and creative expression, so I decided to try my hand at something dance adjacent—acting.

I was terrified on my first day of class. I had no idea what to expect or how to prepare. I wanted to be respectful of the customs of an acting class, and I didn’t want to look silly. (Spoiler alert, there is no way to avoid looking silly, so just lean into it.) I wanted a play-by-play of what to expect, but instead, I had to jump in blind and hope everything went okay. (It did, but I could have done without the added anxiety.)

So for those of you who are looking to improve your dancing through acting, I caught up with my teacher, Andrew Polk, who leads the class I’m taking on on-camera technique at The Freeman Studio. You may recognize him from films like Armageddon Time and television shows like Billions, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, House of Cards, and more. Here, he shares what to expect, how to prepare, and what he thinks dancers could take away from a class like his.

What to Expect

First, it’s important to know that every acting class is going to be a little bit different. Each teacher will have a unique approach, and the medium (theater or on-camera) will change the experience entirely. For example, Polk wants dancers to know that they are not at a disadvantage in an on-camera class because they don’t have heavy theater training as actors. “Working on camera is like another art form. It’s like you were playing basketball your whole life and then someone asked you to play the violin.”

That said, you can likely plan on a few things regardless of the teacher or medium. First, you will likely perform a scene at the front of the room with your teacher and class watching. Then the teacher will provide feedback for you to apply to your work (just like in a dance class). You will then have the opportunity to watch other class members perform their respective scenes, as well.

How to Prepare

For Polk’s class, scene assignments are sent out a few days before the first day of class and we are expected to have done text analysis and be off-book (memorized) by the time class begins. Each subsequent week follows this same pattern. In other courses I’ve taken in college or at The Freeman Studio, the first day of class has been more of an introduction to the course while the teacher outlines their expectations, and then we’re expected to be off-book by the next class. If your instructor doesn’t send out an email ahead of time to let you know what to prepare, I recommend reaching out and politely asking what their expectations are for your first day.

You can prepare by reading the scene, digging into the given circumstances, and familiarizing yourself with your character (and, of course, your lines). “Preparation is necessary—you need that kind of discipline,” Polk says.” Even more important than that, he wants you to bring your instincts. “A lot of what I teach is to trust your instinctual response to the material,” he says. “Often that is hard. A lot of people want to approach things the right way, but there is no ‘right way.’ Dancers are really in touch with their instincts and their bodies, and I think that would be very helpful.”

Classroom Rules

Each acting teacher will have different expectations for classroom etiquette, but for Polk, he wants students to be prepared, on time, and void of judgment. “Don’t judge your character or other actors,” he says. “In my class you spend a lot of time watching others. We are not there to perform for each other, we are there to work. So when you see other people work, you shouldn’t judge them, you should imagine you are them. It’s a really great way to learn.”

How Polk Believes Dancers Can Benefit From Acting

When students finish a cycle of his class, Polk hopes they know what it feels like to successfully act for the camera. “I want them to have progressed,” he says. For dancers specifically, he would hope that a class like his would expand their performance. “Can you tell a story that is not technical? Can you let go of your technical ability and lean into the story and into the character and be messy? If you are creating life, if you are creating a moment, that is what you are aiming for. That is the main challenge and reward for a dancer who is not used to that.”

Curious about what an acting class actually looks like? Head on over to Dance Magazine’s YouTube channel. There I share a day in my life as I prepare for, and attend, one of Polk’s “On Camera Technique” classes.

The post Begin Again: Acting for Dancers appeared first on Dance Magazine.

As a child, I found a similar groove in reading. I remember devouring the Harry Potter books and getting in trouble for reading in bed under the covers when I was supposed to be asleep. I was obsessed with the calming feeling that reading brought me, and how words on a page could steal me away to a magical world where anything was possible. Ballet became that escape for me as I got older, and I found a calmness in the daily routine and tunnel-vision focus that it requires.

Starting ballet at the age of 5, I never really saw any other way of life and left home at the age of 14 to train pre-professionally in Philadelphia. I developed in my career and danced with Houston Ballet’s second company, and this all led to me being where I am today: a company dancer with Atlanta Ballet. The hard work that goes into this art form has always captured my focus in a way that nothing else has been able to, and my brain and my body began to crave the flow state of mind that it brings me. When my attention is completely attuned to the movements of my body, the strain in my muscles and lungs falls away and I find a feeling of serenity and an out-of-body experience.

Every day, I chase the headspace that ballet gives me, and my genuine appreciation for the art has only grown. The best moments in our lives are when we are challenging ourselves, pushing our limits in an effort to accomplish something that is hard to attain yet worthwhile. It brings me joy and fulfillment to devote my time, energy and focus to the never-ending goals and challenges that come with being a professional ballet dancer. I have come to appreciate that it is truly a gift to be able to step into a studio and leave everything outside for a few hours, to step onstage and become a different character, and to give audiences the immersive experience of seeing us convey stories and emotions through movement and music. Dancing leaves me feeling ecstatic, inspired and fulfilled—and always coming back for more.

The post Jessica He on the Joys of Being a Professional Ballerina 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.

It is one of the great loves of my life, it is my heart.

The very unromantic reason why I dance is because it is my vocation, my entire adult life’s work, it is what I do. But back to the heart…

Since my beginning, my beginning, beginning, I had (and still do) two modes: constant motion and stillness/staring/observing. Skipping, flying, rolling, running, climbing, dancing down supermarket aisles, cartwheeling…that led very quickly to aerial cartwheeling, and front and back flipping was a perfect fit for my childhood as a competitive gymnast. Those big, moving expressions elided into a greater love for dance, tap, jazz, and to my infatuation with gesture. I’m from Brooklyn, grew up in Long Island, and my dad would take me to New York City Center to see Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. I’d watch the dancing scenes from West Side Story and Singin’ in the Rain over and over again, and choreograph my way in and out of the town pool. In college, I was again constantly falling in love with movement—Limón, Cunningham, Graham, then improvisational forms and, boom, I was hooked.

Dancing can be supremely solitary, especially when you love to be alone for hours in a studio, loneliness being a downfall. But with that comes autonomy, individuality and how I learned about myself. It’s strange to spend one’s life dedicated to creating experiences that vanish as soon as they are constructed—but those experiences forever stay with the body.

Dance brings me pleasure, friendship, expands the shimmering relationship between people and collaborators that has shaped my life. It is expressive of the exact time we are in, full of endless potential, trust and teaches me about continual change. It is freedom, it is community, not to be taken for granted. Dance has been generous; more importantly, it has given me a way in which to be generous—teaching, sharing experiences with my students, continues to push my own dancing and choreographic voice.

The dance community is intense and specific. It is how I have socialized myself in the world and learned the most about myself and how I am best productive and honest.

Dance is the experience of adrenaline and melancholy, wildness and restraint, what is beautiful or terrifying, articulate speechlessness. It is constant, vigorous motion that keeps on going.

I like how dance acts as an intensely active process while watching, making and doing, involving a stream of inferences, hypotheses, predictions and anticipations, and changes on a dime according to one’s stream of consciousness.

Dance is where I locate continuum.

Dance is abundant in form, like water.

A stream, river, pool, coming out of a faucet, falling from the sky, the power of a wave, it is forever changing.

Dance is freedom to be led by my instincts, doesn’t have to be logical; movement can be compared to the infinite sensations I am feeling, a cacophony of ideas, all of them coming from movement.

This dancing life is how I feel rich and embrace optimism.

It is the hardest thing I will ever do.

I’m waiting to wake up and not want to be a dancer. It hasn’t happened yet.

The post Jodi Melnick on Her Lifelong Love of Dance appeared first on Dance Magazine.

When She Knew:
“Ballet was always something that just clicked. It wasn’t until I did my last summer program at Dance Theatre of Harlem, at 18 years old, that I knew this is what I wanted to do forever.”

PreShow Jitters:

“My dancer mentality wants to hit every step perfectly, but then my human side kicks in and I accept that I’m a professional and I’ve got this—and if I don’t, I better figure it out! Then I Tiger Balm everything, take a couple of deep breaths and leave Cira in the dressing room.”

Making Dance More Diverse:
“Things are happening, but not at the rate that they should. People should want diversity, development and inclusion in their schools and companies—it’s more than having one person of color as a teacher or on the board.”

Collaborating With Freed:
“I had always pancaked my shoes, but even though it’s something that needs to be done, it’s tedious. I went to Freed of London to inquire about having a custom brown shoe made for me, and they told me that I needed to find the proper brown satin for the shoes, so I did. I went to seven different fabric stores before I found the perfect swatch of brown. When I informed my director Cassa Pancho about customizing a shoe, she sprang into action with Freed, and a collaboration was birthed.”

Her Turn as Teacher:
“I try to keep the values, etiquette, and ‘good stuff’ that I grew up with that helped me to navigate through this dance world, but I also know that I have to adapt to this generation of students. There’s a level of respect that should be there amongst the teacher and student, but ultimately, I like to be as appropriately real as possible with the older students while helping to feed the imagination and dreams of the little ones.”

Growing as an Artist:
“Diving deeper into the acting side of the various narrative roles I’ve portrayed in the past five years, I’ve noticed that that’s where I thrive and feel full. Being extremely vulnerable and consumed in a role onstage and being able to take the audience with me every step of the way is what I’m recently most proud of and what I try to bring to everything that I dance.”

The post Meet Cira Robinson, Senior Artist with Ballet Black appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Then, one day, I couldn’t breathe. Not easily, at least. I became­ alienated from my body as it failed to do what I wanted and needed it to do. But let’s first back up a bit.

Before I developed long COVID, a collection of lingering negative effects from the virus, I had this subconscious expectation that I would find relief for any suffering I experienced. I have always had privileged access to the world. Being a white Jewish girl from Eugene, a small hippy town in Oregon, I have dealt with the occasional religious microaggression and familial issues, but the world has been available to me.

Last year, after my junior year at Scripps College via Zoom, I spent the summer in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, working on philosophy research and dancing in the city. I had felt bored and empty so often during the pandemic, but that summer I started to feel like myself again. I could finally dance large and uninhibitedly in a studio after over a year spent dancing in my room, banging my knees on the side of my bed. I went out with best friends who’d also migrated to New York City for the summer. Life was good.

Then, like so many others in late July 2021, I tested positive for COVID-19. Although somewhat shocked that I was a breakthrough case, I had a good feeling that my vaccine would save me from serious trouble and that after two weeks, I could return to business as usual.

During those two weeks of isolation, I slept for days. I discovered I had lost my sense of smell after my parents sent flowers. I cried a lot out of loneliness, screamed into my pillow out of anger, and stared into space, stripped and empty. My body had almost immediately weakened, shaky even when I tried to stretch.

On my first day out of quarantine, I tried to purge my body of this virus by renting out a studio to myself in the city. I spoke while I danced, shaking, rolling, sweating. When I left, I was beyond exhausted and felt a deep heaviness on my chest. Maybe that was too much too soon, I thought.

Back in Oregon, I had a week to rest before driving down to Scripps with my parents. I was ecstatic to start my senior year, in person for the first time since March 2020. On the second day of our trip, as I was carrying a lightweight table to the car, I stopped in my tracks, feeling a weight on my chest and the sudden need to sip extra air. I continued a few more steps and stopped again. Sipped more air. In the car, the weight started to feel heavier and my fear grew. I felt thirsty, but for oxygen instead of water. I started to panic, and then to cry. But the crying made it worse, so I practiced stifling my tears so as not to increase my shortness of breath.

My mom kept asking if I wanted to stop at the nearest emergency room. I had never felt so vulnerable; it was the first time I believed that something in my body could fail. We decided­ to pit-stop at the hospital, and learned that my oxygen levels were okay, above 90 percent, but I still felt pressure in my chest. It was safe to continue on our drive.

Finally, I was back on campus. I didn’t feel close to normal, but I told myself that if I took better care of my health, I would make a full recovery. I tried a few dance classes, but found myself gasping for air inside my mask halfway through. Each time I ignored my pain and pushed beyond my limit, the weight on my chest increased and my intense exhaustion lasted for nearly a week. I started sleeping through my 11 am ethics course and forgot to bring my computer and textbooks to class. I just couldn’t seem to get organized.

When my school doctor referred me to a long-COVID outpatient clinic, I was thrilled. To hear the phrase “long COVID” in regard to my symptoms was a relief because it meant I’d finally get help. On my first day at the clinic, I was observed during a six-minute walk, and my oxygen levels dropped so low that the lung specialist told me to absolutely stop dancing for the time being. Instead, I went to the clinic twice a week to get hooked up to the rolling oxygen tank while I walked at a slow pace on the treadmill, rode the bike at low resistance for 15 minutes and did some minimal arm exercises. I was the only person I saw below the age of 70 with an oxygen tank.

Though I’d mostly stopped dancing, I still had to choreograph a piece as part of my senior thesis that fall. In rehearsals, I tried to command the room with a motivating presence, but I often had to stop speaking to catch my breath, and I couldn’t demonstrate the choreography more than once or twice. We did our best and made something beautiful, but what I produced didn’t feel like me because I wasn’t fully there to produce it.

Not only did I have chronically low energy, difficulty breathing, dancing or walking up stairs, but this seemingly random sickness had now turned the world around me rotten. The putrid scent came on suddenly; it took me a week to realize that it wasn’t the things I was smelling, but that my sense of smell itself had changed. Many savory foods, coffee, smoke and my own body odor had started to make me gag. I would plug my nose at the dining hall. I later found out that my new condition had a name: parosmia.

Even though I was always tired, I resisted falling asleep because when I had nothing to distract me, I couldn’t ignore the heaviness on my chest or the fear, however realistic, that I might have died a premature death. 

As I existed in my new state of being, I went through a long period of mourning for my past life, body, mind, smells and movement. I forgot what it felt like to sweat from moving and to be tired at night because I had lived such a fulfilling day.

I had to constantly ask for accommodations (like driving instead of walking to dinner) and to defend why I needed them. I couldn’t directly blame anyone, though. Invisible illness is difficult to remember. And I didn’t always understand what exactly someone could do to make me feel more acknowledged.

Still, there were a few friends who helped me feel less alone, who didn’t seem somewhat put off by my illness—who weren’t uncomfortable staying with it as a topic of conversation, asking questions and trying to brainstorm little solutions. They met me where Iwas, even if that meant sacrificing some of their desires.

This public health crisis has exposed the attitude our country has toward the chronically ill, the disabled, the sick, the dying and the old. Too often we hear sentiments like “It’s only the immunocompromised or elders who are dying from COVID-19. Why can’t they stay home while the rest of us live our lives?” I always knew this mindset existed, but my own health crisis allowed me to see it from a different vantage point.

The attitude is that the chronically ill, the disabled, the sick, the dying and the old are a burden to even think about. That their lives mean less. That they hold us back, instead of teaching us to see more. The truth, though, is that at some pointmost of us will be ill or experience a change in some ability or function, and all of us will die. 

It was easy to see how my chronic illness made me weak. But in fact, it has given me immense strength for patience. The self-compassion required for resilience. The sureness in my own abilities, even when I knew I couldn’t yet use them.

The last year has forced me to see my own fragility but also my own humanity. We will constantly change, constantly develop new ways of moving and being. But we must keep trying to face, struggle with and see these changes. We will never escape the vulnerability of our bodies. 

The post My Experience With Long COVID Forced Me to Acknowledge the Vulnerability of All Bodies appeared first on Dance Magazine.

I respond through my belly. It was there I felt a twinge and knew I should move to New York, knew I should enter my first dance studio, and knew I should perform onstage. It was what convinced me to pursue anything in the first place—the mixture of terror and delight, a weightless moment. It’s the belly that tells you you’re in your lane. Years of churchgoing had taught me the inescapable power of call and response, and how it’s important to voice your recognition. Words must form on your lips and air must push out of your chest to make a sound. There is nothing but movement in call and response, just a matter of degrees. So, I could only—when I think on it—respond with my body when I was invited to dance. This was revelatory and scary, because for years I was troubled by the incongruity of wanting to be an artist but having less than I wanted be available to me as a disabled person, as someone aged 20 just starting out, as someone new. Up until this point, I had strung together swaths of the full picture, enjoying glimpses of nearness to the stage, or a development process, or any variety of artistry.

I must say here that I always knew I could dance, not professional combinations per se, but I knew how to be boundless in my movement if only at house parties. Now, after an invited audition, a choreographer was asking me to join her company. Because dance was so audacious, so out there, I had to do it. On one level, I had no reference and therefore little reason to fear. On another level, I had always known how to be free, leaping in and passionately immersed, so there was a deep reference somewhere that would be my guide to successfully be a dancer. For the first years it was pure osmosis, merely absorbing the environment on the job. And then it became love, as I extended my authentic self across the whole environment. I saw myself in a line where thousands of performers precede me and thousands run after, but I’m taking this point in the timeline of dancers, lending my gifts to our ecosystem. It leaves me breathless to think that every opportunity I have is because I responded to one invitation. Dancing is the physical sign of the ways I say yes to art every day. And see how sweet it was to go back in time? Response is magic.

The post Jerron Herman, Disabled Dancer, On the Power of Gut Feelings appeared first on Dance Magazine.

My main goal is usually to make sure the dancers and band are all one sonic force. If someone comes to a Music From The Sole show, they’re going to get right off the bat that the tap dance is the percussion of the song, and it’s not making it overly complicated. What we don’t want to look like is a dance company with a back-up band.

A unique part of our process is seeing how the musicians move. We do a lot of body percussion—slaps, claps and snaps—and give everyone movement to do together, so we embrace what the nondancers, including myself, add to it. We found out that our drummer is a fabulous mover and just naturally adds these little flourishes and hip movements. He’s extremely fun to watch, so we incorporated that. He’ll be spotlit in the next show.

We blur the lines when it comes to who is composing, too. There have been pieces where I wrote out a percussion part, recorded it, took it to Leo, and he choreographed the movement so the taps could replace the rhythm of the song. On another song, Leo came up with a melody, and I was able to notate, arrange and put chords behind it. That’s turned into this huge, beautiful piece. So, we’re both doing melodic and rhythmic work.

When you’re collaborating, you never get to use every single one of your ideas. But since Leo and I really get to have the final say, it’s the first time I’ve been able to stake out certain priorities that I simply don’t sacrifice. It’s a lot of pressure, but it’s also a lot of fun.

I’ve learned to trade drafts often. If you rehearse the band and dancers separately and things evolve, you can start to get on different pages. You can be totally enamored with what you’ve made, but when you come back together, it’s dissonant and someone has to give up more than they’d like. As soon as I’m excited about something, I show it to Leo right away. 

Traditionally, a musical director makes sure the music is being executed right, runs the rehearsals and takes care of personnel issues with the band. But Michelle is such a killer musician, dancer and percussionist, she’s at the helm in a full rehearsal with Dorrance Dance, stopping the musicians to adjust tempo or dynamics. She has a vision for what she wants the whole show to be—and good instincts—and that just makes my job easier.

Michelle has definitely been my model for growing and leading a company with integrity. Like when you go into a new venue, introduce yourself to everyone from the front-of-house manager and sound engineer to the lighting assistant. Bring them in like they’re your team, and they’ll be excited to help execute your vision. And when someone gives you an opportunity, you better wring it for every drop it’s worth. If they give you a week of residency time, you better be in there for 10 hours a day.

The post Gregory Richardson on Music From The Sole appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Starting the Conversation

It was as if Tennessee Williams had an intimacy professional in mind when he wrote scenes depicting sexual assault, mental illness, suicide, homophobia, sexual physicality and plain nastiness. Simulated sex, nudity and aggression in performance have to be processed through today’s much-needed requirement of consent. Dance historically has been last at the table in these conversations and yet is the most physically and emotionally charged of the performing arts.

Creating Safe Spaces

The challenge was to help each artist make the provocative material work for them within their own boundaries. Give them space to vent, dialogue, question and make the choreography their own and something they consented to…the antithesis of what the play is all about.

Defining Consent

For the performer, the questions are personal. How do we show consent in an onstage kiss that is meant to be consensual, when there are no lines? Consent matters, and today’s performance environment requires sensitivity and recognition of the performer’s individuality and boundaries.

It’s About the Audience, Too

My lens also filters care for the bystanders in the studio or onstage who watch, listen and are affected emotionally by the weighted acts being performed by their colleagues. I created content warnings for the program and website to mitigate unwanted surprise in the theater.

Respecting Confidentiality

NBoC participated fully and created a collaborative environment for all players in the production. In this groundbreaking approach, I was mandated to have confidential conversations with artists throughout the process and performances, and communicate concerns up the chain.

A Growing Effort

An intimacy professional is invaluable to new creations and remounted works with challenging themes. Scottish Ballet recently hired intimacy coaches for their adaptation of Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling, and Rambert engaged Yarit Dor as an intimacy director for Rooms in 2021.

Moving Art Forward

This is a new, exciting and powerful time for performance. A time where voices can be heard, where an individual’s boundaries become a creator’s opportunity, and where those of us who have a passion for storytelling and onstage magic can support artmaking in a way that protects and nurtures performers as they reach new heights.

The post How Intimacy Consultant Anisa Tejpar Coaches Sensitive Dance Scenes appeared first on Dance Magazine.

It was the late 1990s and I was in college in Manhattan, where I took (and still take) classes at Steps on Broadway, and where Baryshnikov or any number of dance superstars might roll in. It’s not as though he wasn’t incredible; that’s a given! But when Karole Armitage showed up for Simon Dow’s class one day, taking her place at the barre along the Broadway-facing windows in Studio 2, with her signature spiky platinum pixie cut and wearing a pair of red sweatpants, I paid attention. She was already a legend in my mind—she had danced with Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève in the mid-1970s before switching gears and returning to New York City to join the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for five years. Her own choreographic debut in 1979—costumed in fur pants and performed in a high school gym—garnered her the nickname “Punk Ballerina.” And although she’d been directing and choreographing prolifically for some of the most prestigious dance and opera companies in Europe since the mid-’80s, she’d come back to the city to test the waters—not long after we first overlapped in class, she established the latest incarnation of her own company, Armitage Gone! Dance (AG!D), in New York.

Soon after that chance encounter at the barre, I holed up at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to catch up on her riveting early performances on grainy black-and-white videos. The founding members of the new company, and those who came after, were quiet riots, pulsing with rich interiority and laser-cut technique. As a child, Armitage split her time between the small university town of Lawrence, Kansas, and the wilderness of Colorado. And yet her directorial aesthetic so clearly reflected the energetic urbanity and diversity of New York City, as it still does today. Her movement vocabulary is at once calligraphic and off-kilter, formalist and influenced by street dance and pop culture. Armitage’s restless intellect propels the work to unexpected, unconventional places, but with the integrity and undergirding of rigorous research. The nonnarrative choreography is often rooted in art, fashion and science, as in her 2008 collaboration with theoretical physicist Brian Greene about string theory, in which I danced as a guest performer.

Although 2021 was the first year since its inception that her company didn’t perform live, it soon became clear that she was still hard at work. Early in 2022, I started seeing publicity materials for the New York AG!D season in March, which included such foreshadowings as “Karole’s first performance since 1989, likely her last” and “the final season of new work.” A turning point was at hand. As a fan of this insatiably curious iconoclast whose artistic journey presaged aspects of my own, I invited Armitage to shed some light on her inner workings in the weeks leading up to the performances of A Pandemic Notebook. The twist was that I asked her to keep a diary rather than participate in an interview. I offered her the proverbial mic. While she confessed to never having done anything like it before, she was game. What she has shared is a window into the logistics of putting on a performance, the wisdom gained through hard experience, and questions about what her future holds. I’m thrilled, but hardly surprised, to say that her incisive writing voice is every bit as compelling as her choreographic voice. 

2.22.22

The date is auspicious. 2.22.22. Maybe this way I can get myself to start a diary. I’ll begin with quotes to explain why a diary is just not my thing.

As Joan Didion once wrote, “Our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’”

Author Helen Garner, who burned her notebooks, wrote in The Guardian in 2019, “I was so bored with my younger self and her drowning sentimental concerns that there was nothing for it—this [expletive] had to go.”

2.23.22

What do you do when someone in the subway asks you for money? My philosophy is to give to anyone who asks, because, as I see it, if someone is in the subway asking for money, they must need it. I keep dollar bills for that purpose. And on the subject of money, I finally faced up to buying enough COVID tests so that everyone can do a daily rapid test prior to rehearsals. The bill for the season is about $2,500. That’s hard to swallow, but it feels good to see negative tests line up as each dancer and our company class teachers send in the results. We always start the day with ballet class and then rehearse for six hours. We also spent a lot of money this year going into three dance bubbles, in order to create the work for our March season at New York Live Arts. A five-second commute is a nice feature of a bubble, as well as a company dinner. I invited some wonderful Italian friends of mine to become cooks for us daily. There’s nothing like having Italian food prepared by a real Italian unleashing the genius of Italian cuisine. 

2.24.22

I read with interest that Mark Morris goes to the studio three times a week these days. Beato lui [“lucky him”]. That’s as far from my life as imaginable.

2.25.22

We’ve had fantastic classes this past week from former NYCB dancer Antonia Franceschi. I’m thrilled to see that she, like Paul Boos, who’s also one of our regular teachers and a former City Ballet dancer, has the willpower and knowledge to demand the highest level of aspiration from us in mind and body. This means aiming to master the technology of the body, and the musicality of that technology, while unleashing one’s personal imagination. That’s how I was raised and that’s what I believe in. I’ve had unwavering willpower in aiming for that over all these years. This rigor applies to all of it, from dance classes, to costume and lighting design, to the choice of music, to treating dancers and collaborators well. I believe in working only if I can provide a living wage in the form of a serious salary and planning every detail, so that everyone knows what to expect. But lately, I feel exhausted by these aspirations. There are so few who care about these things and keep the faith. There are so few who believe that in the silence of dance, that in pure movement, we can grapple with existential and spiritual questions, finding solace and connection. 

2.28.22

Today we have a costume fitting with a wonderful artist and our wardrobe manager, Aaron Cobbett. The dress for our dance Beautiful Monster is based on the fabulous dress that Silvana Mangano wore in the Italian film La Strega Bruciata Viva, by Luchino Visconti. It was made by a great seamstress who teaches tailoring at a well-known university. However, something with the dress went completely awry. It hangs on dancer Sierra French’s body in a way that is pinched and corseted, particularly egregious given that the fabric is very stretchy. I spent hours and hours ripping it apart and resewing it by hand. But it is still lousy. It’s interesting how people can get an idée fixe in their head and not see reality. I learned long ago that what I felt while dancing or choreographing was not objective. I learned to mistrust myself. One must let go of one’s ideas and, with a very cool eye, examine the result.

“Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.” Wendell Berry

3.1.22

Yikes, it’s March. Two weeks till showtime.

It seems like costumes never get done. It’s so hard to find the simplest things, like socks that fit right, or socks with mainly cotton fiber, so they’re not slippery. Thanks to Amazon, all the old standby stores have gone out of business. Ugh! Not to mention the harm to the environment in fuel use and throwaway packaging. What does the Amazon phenomenon have in common with small dance companies? The biggest thrive and the smallest disappear. It’s pretty insane that dance companies with a $500,000 budget are competing with the dance companies that have a $25 million budget for precisely the same resources—the same very small pool of New York City patrons for dance, the same granting agencies and even the same studio space. I’ll never forget being thrown out of a studio a few years ago when a major ballet company needed extra rehearsal space for one of their special programs. Even though I had paid two months in advance, we were kicked out. 

Although all of the dances we are presenting live have been filmed, one would think that means that the costumes are finished, but that isn’t the case. There are so many costume elements that must be adapted for quick changes. Snaps, Velcro, new rigging and myriad other extra bits to make things faster. Every second backstage counts.

3.2.22

A lot of challenges with the technology today. First it was the JetBlue website not working. But then it escalated into almost everything seeming to be hard to do. The most important is for the dance 6 Ft. Apart. The sound is generated by accelerometers taped onto bodies to create a soundscape in real time. I was having trouble with the coding, but that got solved thanks to the genius of sound engineer Agnes Cameron, who guided me via screen share from London. Now, for some reason, the feather that is part of the equipment isn’t communicating with accelerometers to respond to momentum. More to untangle. The more I work with hardware and software that isn’t human, the more I appreciate the extraordinary technology of the human body. Dancers are a trillion times more reliable than all the other stuff.

3.4.22

What will today bring? Worries about technology continue. Should I buy seed pods that we could mic as a backup, in case the receiver and accelerometer system does not fire up?

Apparently, The New York Times plans to review the show, which brings forth a dark dread. There is consistently a gargantuan gap between those reporters’ perceptions and mine.

3.6.22

Jock Sotohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jock_Soto arrived in New York from his home in Eagle Nest, New Mexico. We had a great rehearsal. We made minor adaptations to make the dance work on the stage, rather than in the wilderness landscapes where the work originated. Frankly, it’s a lot easier to dance on marley than on snow, sand, lava and rock. 

3.20.22

I forgot to write during the entire week we were at the theater for tech and performance. It’s always very intense when preparing and rehearsing for a season, given the requirements of fundraising, administration, publicity and marketing, logistics and the art itself. Last week, though, everything outside of the theater flew out of my brain.

So, to recap: As expected, I was preoccupied with the complicated jobs outside of my own dancing—lighting, projections, sound and new staging. There are always surprises. During tech, the Baroque wigs for Louis shed bobby pins dead center stage. How to deal with that? We came up with an amusing solution: Alonso Guzman, wearing the accelerometers, came out to center stage carrying a broom and dustpan and proceeded to do a violent shimmy, setting off cascades of sound while sweeping, a fairly comic and bizarrely existential moment.

As for my own dancing, I had one really great night out of four. The core company members, Sierra French, Alonso Guzman and Cristian Laverde-Koenig, were magnificent every night, as were the newer members, Isaac Kerr, Kali Oliver and Kara Walsh. There was only one day that I had no insanely stressful, urgent problems that had to be dealt with. On Friday, I could calmly take class, rehearse, warm up right before the show and then perform. I could feel the magic of playing with time and consciousness. That is the great gift of live performance, for both performer and audience.

I always kept in shape, at least vaguely. My body is my sketchpad. I’m generally dancing all day, every day, at a low technical level, to practice choreography. For 25 years, however, I stopped taking class in order to let some of my mild injuries heal. I did intense yoga and Pilates to realign. But this season I had to go back to ballet. Like an 8-year-old child, I worked like a fiend at the basics—placement and turnout—trying to acquire strength once again, so that at age 68, I could dance with some dignity. It worked out pretty well. My circle of dance life became complete. My first professional job was dancing in all-Balanchine repertoire in the company Mr. B directed in Geneva, Switzerland, at the Grand Théâtre de Genève in the ’70s. Though he wasn’t there all year long, he taught us class, staged the ballets, worked with the orchestra on colors and tempo, and took the “girls” (as we were called then) out to dinner for fondue. My circle became complete by dancing with Jock Soto, who very generously lent his years of experience as a principal dancer at New York City Ballet to our cause and was my partner last week during our season. Thank you, Jock! 

On the night of our last show, March 19, the craziest thing happened. The electric grid was struck by lightning. All power failed, except for one computer controlling the stage lights. The other computers, lights, fans, backstage lights, monitors, the projector and the sound went out. Luckily the sound came back pretty quickly. But nothing could get the projector going again. I had to improvise two spoken interventions to cover the time needed for costume changes so that we could finish the show. 

At least half of the audience stayed in the lobby every night to cheer us on. Everyone loved the show, except some of the press, as expected. I do things that are new and different, that challenge dance culture and that aren’t yet accepted. I’m used to bad reviews because I was the first person to put a man in a skirt onstage as a matter of style and identity rather than drag, the first person to deeply entwine the technique and sensibility of modern dance with ballet and street influences. I worked in film, on Broadway and with pop stars, when doing anything outside of strict theater dance was taboo. I paved the way for others.

The lightning strike on the building also struck my brain. Self-producing is a no-win game. 

Self-producing is the only option if one wants to maintain a company by having an annual season, because the very few institutions that commission or present dance in New York City are not in a position to present a company annually. Without institutional support there’s no way to reach an audience, get funding, get previews in the press, get into the cultural priorities of the moment, et cetera. The season we just finished encompasses 2.5 years of mostly very intense work and hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses. 

The difficulties are not just financial. Working with freelance collaborators means that the cherished minds you hope to continue to work with aren’t available and you have to spend weeks, if not months, finding a way to replace them. You perform for four nights and many who want to see it are out of town. There’s no way to actually get the message out that the performances are taking place. Our internet society is diffuse and without authority. Thus, there’s the great challenge of finding an audience, exacerbated by on-demand culture, the disappearance of representation in dance, a staid and unadventurous mindset in the dance world and continuing pandemic paranoia. We had a roughly 35 percent absentee rate in people not showing up who’d purchased tickets. I’m very grateful to everyone who bought tickets, to those who came, and am especially gratified by the unbridled enthusiasm that greeted us nightly. 

Everything about self-producing is punishing, except for working with the dancers and communicating with an audience. That is exhilarating. I’ve done it, against all odds, since 1981, when I quit the Cunningham company. Self-producing means leading a life so perverse and out of balance that I just might not be able to face the preposterousness of it anymore, mainly because everything has become that much harder every year. 

That would mean essentially letting go of my company now, and that is very hard. I’ve had an extraordinary group of dancers. Those who made up the relaunching of the company in 2004 when I returned from 15 years abroad, until today—yes, nearly 20 years—have been incredibly gifted dancers both creative and technically remarkable, as well as generous and thoughtful human beings. I am at peace with letting go, though it is not my desire. It seems like it is time to swerve, but in what direction I do not know. 

I had a fulfilling end to my dance and choreographic life in New York City with this last season. We demonstrated resolve and resilience through the terrible challenge of COVID. I was able to pursue a rewarding experience as both a dancer and a choreographer, and even as a filmmaker. I will continue to work in opera, in film and live with dancers, if and when we’re commissioned to create. Our next project is a site-specific work for the James Turrell installation Twilight Epiphany, on the Rice University campus in Houston on April 22 and 23. Ciao! Enjoy life! Fight for what you believe in. 

The post Karole Armitage’s Diary of “A Pandemic Notebook” appeared first on Dance Magazine.

It started in 2020, when I felt free to do something I had wanted to do for a long time: disengage online. I thought, If the reason I came to social media was to promote my company, there’s no reason to do that, because right now there’s no work. Everything I had was canceled. So I took a four-month social media hiatus starting in August 2020. In 2021 I deleted Instagram and Facebook from my phone. I could still post from my computer. My latest break, which started in November, has been about trying to reimagine my relationship to social media in a way that’s healthier. And professionally, in researching my work, I’m trying to be conscious of this intimate relationship.

What I had noticed is that I was disassociating from the world. I wasn’t engaging in social media in a meaningful or sincere way. It was like a bad relationship. Social media and I were just passing the time together rather than finding a deeper intimacy.

I also noticed I never had an opportunity for my mind to wander, which is important to me creatively. That felt so sad. Whenever there was a quiet space, there was my phone. I need a couch for a piece—go to my phone. Haven’t talked to a friend in forever—go to my phone. Instead of calling her, my instinct was always to reach for social media. And when that wasn’t possible, I would think, Wow, who do I talk to?

I wondered, What are the questions, the answers, the fears I am asking social media to solve? Every time I’m questioning something, I want my phone to answer. That’s a lot to ask of a little object. So me and my phone are in couples counseling.
I also feel we’re in such a divisive time. I was starting to think what I was seeing online was a part of my life. And it wasn’t. I want to engage in a way that’s meaningful to me. Even if it’s just videos of cats that bring me joy—which they do, incredible joy, because I’m allergic to cats and I love cats. Everyone wants what they can’t have.

The piece I’m making right now is about what we devote ourselves to and how we cast a more reverent gaze upon the things that occupy our mind and time. How do we navigate intimacy with technology? Where am I mentally, psychologically and emotionally when I engage with it? Imagine kissing someone and then asking, “So what did you think?” That’s what social media feels like sometimes. Or I’ll have this profound moment in rehearsal and think, I need to post this so people can see it. That’s bizarre.

I’m reimagining my relationship to my phone. How did it become a sacred object? Because if you’re in a long-distance relationship, your phone is a sacred object. I’ve practically wanted to make out with it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about physically integrating these concepts. You can curate a persona for yourself online. But if you haven’t taken time to integrate that identity into who you are physically, it only exists in the ether. When you’re a dancer, you use the idea of integration in a lot of ways. Dancing is so ephemeral. But, in dancing, what I feel and think becomes visible to you—the audience—when we’re together. It’s felt deeply and understood deeply.

What do we hear when we have space and time enough to listen, whether to the outside world or to what’s coming from inside of us? You can find beautiful truths. Or ugly truths that are important to confront.

The post Reconsidering the Relationship Between Social Media and Creative Practice appeared first on Dance Magazine.

My life in dance encapsulates all those feelings and manages to reproduce them in limitless combinations. But what happens when life beyond the stage becomes incredibly unpredictable, as it inscrutably has as of late? What becomes of our post-lockdown commitment and vigor towards a better system when, after the curtain falls on our first performances back, we feel the sting of a world that just wants to snap back to “normal”? I know that I am not the same person I was in 2020, and I certainly am thankful for the growth. But I won’t lie that the sunburn blisters hurt, as much as the sweet-sounding yet empty lip service that touts change is hard to swallow.

As you may know, experiencing the life-affirming zest of adrenaline is one of my preferred states of being. But that adrenaline can also induce the most sensational fear. Fear that perhaps change is not what gatekeepers want. Fear that, perhaps, all we have individually done is not enough. Fear that with every minor shutdown, time keeps ticking away. Will it run out for me and my career?

At the end of the day when I weigh all the fantastically wonderful and the incredibly putrid aspects of our world, the scale in my mind tips toward hope. I am, after all, an unabashed romantic. My life, our lives as artists, has always embraced the wildness of the unpredictable.

I’m thankful for my discipline, honed from my very first ballet class. And I turn to dance now, and most likely will again and again until the very last moment my vessel will allow me to, because that’s one way, through pent-up social anxiety and PTSD, I am able to reconnect to the experience of living. The practice of dance has saved my life many times over. Sharing my gift with audiences has heightened and expanded its healing reach. My relationship with dance has taught me more about life and being present than I ever imagined it would. And as I enter the next chapter of my artistic exploration, I’m certain dance and its lessons will be right there with me.

The post New York City Ballet’s Georgina Pazcoguin on Dancing Through the Hardships of Life appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Embodying New Characters

“In many bharatanatyam pieces, you’ll embody as many as 10 different people to tell an epic story. A lot of my process for physically becoming a character comes from that training.”

Understanding Jasmine

“There’s a stillness and power about Jasmine’s physical presence—and softness, a compassion for those who didn’t grow up with the privilege she has. Then there’s this exuberant, excited­ energy to see the world beyond the palace walls. As Jasmine, I have a strong stance. My shoulders are pulled back, my feet are firmly grounded to the floor, and my chest is presented as a ballet dancer’s would be.”

Performing Bharatanatyam

“My favorite thing to perform in bharatanatyam is the varnam: a 30-minute journey between intricate, pure-dance sequences and storytelling. It tests physical energy and stamina, and your ability to hold a story for a very long time—which I now do as an actor. Doing the varnam taught me to sustain the emotional and physical stamina for two-and-a-half-hour performances.”

Revisiting Aladdin

“When Aladdin came back last fall after 18 months of shutdown, there was an openness to revisiting parts of the script and choreography that were no longer sitting as well as they did in 2014. With Disney’s blessing, I was able to tweak some Bollywood-based movements and hand gestures, or mudras, in a workshop with the entire company. What was a closed, squeezed gesture is now the alapadma mudra: a beautifully curved gesture of the hand that mimics the petals of a lotus.”

Staying Grounded

“I still take a ballet barre daily because it’s great conditioning that aligns me really well. Afterwards, I feel warm and my joints are lubricated, but I’m not so depleted that I can’t do the show.”

“I stay plugged in to bharatanatyam by teaching middle- and high-school students over Zoom. And I’m constantly choreographing and performing Bollywood dances for various weddings, which is so much fun.”

Playing the Violin on Broadway

“I never could have anticipated that in my Broadway debut—Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812—I’d have to play a violin solo. There’s something to be said for maintaining skills that you’re passionate about. It doesn’t hurt to keep in touch with all the facets of your artistic background.”

The post Shoba Narayan is Bringing Bharatanatyam to Broadway and Beyond appeared first on Dance Magazine.

As a small budget organization that has largely self-produced its creative and community work, no one is dictating to SLMDances whether or not we have to wear masks or get tested. Protocols from various studios, performance spaces and event producers are inconsistent; as an individual freelance performer, I find myself frustrated by invitations into rehearsal and performance processes that don’t offer any kind of health, needs and accessibility check-ins right away for participants. Not to mention that COVID protocols for public events and indoor spaces can be hidden on websites, or just vaguely named as “COVID-safe,” as if we have actually come to a unified medical and legal agreement on what that means. It’s as if there is still no pandemic at all. As if almost 1 million people haven’t died in the U.S. alone, and millions more have not been infected and perhaps will never fully recover.

Since 2020, I’ve observed how others restart their creative processes: asking questions, collecting COVID-protocol documentation, and generally learning from others’ trial and error, all the while remaining virtual in my own creative practice. With an eye toward restarting an in-person creative practice in February 2022, SLMDances started check-ins with our collaborators last summer about vaccination status, testing frequency and accessibility, and any other needs with regard to health and safety.

We were lucky that one of our Creative Partners had experience tracking CDC guidelines and building COVID-protocol as a part of her role at a local New York City dance studio and was willing to do that work with us. She titled her role “Health Accountability Partner” and, based on our group conversations in relationship to city, state and federal guidelines, drafted a protocol that we collectively reviewed and agreed upon in order to begin in-person rehearsals.

As a first step back into a studio practice, here is what we devised: Our twice-weekly virtual rehearsal became a shortened virtual rehearsal one day, and an extended in-person rehearsal on ​​our second day to maximize our time together. Everyone in attendance must be vaccinated, get a PCR test within 72 hours of the in-pers​​on rehearsals and wear medical-grade masks. If a person has had a lot of exposure to the public, we ask them to also take a rapid test. In addition to a daily health survey for contact-tracing protocols, we check in at the top of each rehearsal about our comfort with physical t​​ouch and distance. We maintain a virtual rehearsal room during in-person rehearsals for creative collaborators who are not l​​ocal, are sick with or have been exp​​osed to COVID, or for any other reason that prevents in-person attendance.

Our strategy for a deeper studio practice toward getting our work to stage in 2023 is to do so in a series of creative “bubble” residencies where we can spend time together without the threat of the virus that might be transmitted in our daily commutes in New York City. And as we moved through our first pandemic performance this spring, we have tended to the roles of understudies with more rigor, preparation and care than ever.

As SLMDances talks about our approach to collective care and COVID protocols, I’ve encouraged artists to release the descriptive language of “strict,” which might connote what can’t be done or being denied something. Instead, we use phrases such as “abundance of caution” or “abundance of care.” We know that we are taking a risk when we come together and our protocols not only protect one another in the studio as much as possible, but also extend as much protection as we can to the most vulnerable in our communities, including immunocompromised folks, elders and young children who can’t yet be vaccinated. We know that what is allowed legally, what an individual feels comfortable with and the actual calculated risks that a person takes in order to attend to whatever is essential in their own lives does not equal what is actually scientifically safest. And so, we stay in dialogue and continue to check in on a consistent basis, setting our own internal community standards for shifting protocols despite the fluctuations in external COVID mandates. Our collective responsibility to keep one another safe has been handled by each Creative Partner with a beautiful integrity. I hold so much gratitude for my creative collaborators.

The true challenges we continue to meet happen outside our collective. Based on my experiences and observations in the pandemic thus far, here are some further behavior shifts that may protect the most vulnerable in our field seeking the safest possible return to an in-person practice:

Lead artists: Normalize stating your COVID protocols in the first communication to hire or collaborate with people, and then stay in dialogue about their health and safety needs. This frees potential collaborators from making decisions based on partial informati​​on, ​​or searching for what they need to make an informed decision. This means that your COVID considerations cannot be an afterthought.

Venues and presenters: Communicate early and often to artists and audiences. Normalize publicly stating your COVID protocols and policies, and continuing to publicly update them. For performances, make information readily and easily available on websites and social media, and at the point of purchase. These actions allow people to more easily discern personal risk.

Funders: Build ongoing resources into your infrastructures to support COVID safety. Who gets to dance safely, with the lowest possible COVID risk, is a question of who has access to resources to ensure this safety. The fundamental nature of where and how we rehearse has shifted and funding must shift with it. Designate access to a significant amount of funded bubble-residency opportunities through lotteries or first come, first served sign-ups in order to ensure more COVID-safe opportunities to artists that are not curated.

I recognize that there is a significant level of privilege I have in being able to thoughtfully choose how to dance in person again. I am self-employed. I wield a multitude of skills, and while I do make money as a performer (and was counting on that income at the moment of the 2020 shutdown!), paying my bills has never been fully reliant on my being onstage.

I also recognize that if we don’t take the current moment to thoughtfully reimagine systems and structures for in-person creative practice and performance, a significant number of folks in our field will be left out.

The pandemic isn’t over just because we’re over it, the streets are calling, we’re vaccinated and mask mandates are easing. We must be intentional about navigating our new world, so that every artist who wants to dance can dance.

The post The Pandemic Isn’t Over (and Maybe Won’t End?), but Yes, We’re Gonna Dance. Here’s How. appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Alas, time travel has not been mastered just yet, and all I can do is share my experience with you. Hopefully you will all be wiser than me and return to your training (or continue it) hiccup-free.

The Situation

Back in October 2021, I started to feel a bit of irritation in my right big toe while on relevé. I only really noticed it while doing left en dehors pirouettes, balancing on my right foot or dancing in my LaDuca heels—and even then, it didn’t bother me too much. So I decided I’d write it off as a normal ache and pain that would go away on its own.

Spoiler alert: It did not go away on its own.

Fast-forward to February 2022: I began taking full ballet classes in my pointe shoes and finished each class with throbbing pain. My podiatrist took an X-ray and determined that the toe isn’t fractured (phew!), but thought that I might have tendinitis. Ice, rest and a cortisone shot did nothing to improve my pain, and he finally recommended that I see a physical therapist. Cue Heidi Green, the magical unicorn therapist in New York City who specializes in dancers. (She even worked as the therapist on the Lion King tour at one point!)

The Diagnosis

It didn’t take much time in Heidi’s office before she knew two things: One, there were many funky things happening in my body that she thought were contributing to my injury; and two, she wanted me to take some time off from relevé and jumps. Ugh.

When I asked her if I could have done anything differently to prevent this she said, “If someone is returning to dance after a long break, it is definitely ideal to get a screening or an evaluation by a PT to detect any potential imbalances or precursors to injury.” Of course, that won’t be financially realistic for many people—frankly, I would have put myself in that camp. But I got injured and was forced to go to PT anyway, so I suppose it’s sixes in the end.

The second thing we all know I could have done differently? Say it with me now! 

“GET TREATMENT AS SOON AS YOU FEEL UNUSUAL PAIN! WAITING FOR CARE ONLY EXTENDS THE RECOVERY PROCESS AND MAKES YOU FEEL SAD!”

The Treatment Plan

Though Heidi thinks it’s possible that I have tendinitis, she also thinks there are likely a variety of problems that could be contributing to the problem. Therefore, she is looking at my body holistically and recommending treatments that go beyond my right foot. 

Once a week for the foreseeable future, Heidi wants me to go into her office for a variety of assessments and treatments, including soft-tissue mobilization, joint mobilization, asymmetry corrections and strength training. “Anywhere up the chain of that leg that’s injured, I’m working to correct those asymmetries,” she says. 

Between visits, she gives me homework. So far that includes massage, TheraBand foot exercises, weightless relevés (I sit in a chair with my feet on the ground and a ball between my knees while I raise and lower my heels), clamshells (an exercise where you lie on your side in the fetal position and open and close your top leg) and icing my toe.

The Bad News

Heidi doesn’t want me jumping until my toe feels better. Which makes me spiral into an everlasting pit of darkness because I’ve already spent 10 years off of dancing, and any additional time feels like an eternity. Too much? All right, I will tone down the drama.

Hopefully, addressing and treating the challenges within my entire body will make me a stronger dancer as well as help heal my toe, and it will all be worth it in the end. Everything happens for a reason, right? Man, I hope so!

The post Begin Again: Injuries—Gosh Dang It! appeared first on Dance Magazine.

But the pandemic put so many roadblocks on that life. Locked down in my apartment, I couldn’t tap dance (too loud), and I couldn’t swing dance (no partner). There were no social dances to attend, no in-person classes to teach or take, and there certainly were no gigs that obligated me to “be” a dancer. There were very few occasions where I even felt like dancing, and so, for the first time, I didn’t.

I did other things: I played piano. I biked around New York City. I read 30 books that had sat in my home for years. I was surprised to feel satisfied by these dance-less days. Without dance, I still felt like me.

But when the world “reopened,” I returned to my usual routine of performances, dance festivals and work meetings. I was ready to do something, and work (miraculously) came back. I was eager to reconnect with my chosen family of artistic collaborators, and I was excited to become, again, a dancer.

But something has changed. I feel different—I don’t feel like the dance-obsessed pre-pandemic version of myself. My new self loves dance, but my new self also loves biking, reading and playing piano.

My first ballet teacher said to me, “Dance is a sickness of sorts. It’s not something you choose to do; it’s something you must do.” I used to agree. But now, it feels like something I choose to do, and I like that.

The decision to dance has been, and continues to be, so good for me. I’m glad I have dance; it’s the constant. It’s the lens through which I experience everything else. It’s simply the most interesting thing I’ve ever chosen to do.

The post Caleb Teicher on Choosing Dance After the Pandemic appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Her Path to Educator:

“I was always a teacher. I was the oldest of four; I taught my siblings, I taught the kids in the neighborhood, and when I was 15 I had the keys to my teacher Erika Thimey’s studio to open it on Saturday mornings and teach the 5-year-olds. I came to New York after college to dance, and I needed a job, which led me to being a classroom teacher.”

Dance Equals Education:

“I’ve come to the point where I just really don’t want to hear dance without hearing dance education—they go together, and can’t be separated. Any dancer who doesn’t think about where they came from, and how they became who they are without thinking about their responsibility to the next generation, I think has missed an opportunity for personal growth.”

On Arts Education:

“We need systemic change to institutionalize arts education. There’s still writing that says “Music and the Arts”; that’s not right. Arts education is, in alphabetical order: dance, media arts, music, theater, visual arts. So I’d like to see everywhere people say “The Arts,” and start with dance.”

The Similarities:

“Dance has historically been overlooked, but if you look at it, dance and education have the same agenda: cooperation, community, problem solving, individual voice—all those important things.”

Teachers College Columbia University:

“The doctoral program at Teachers College is a pathway for people who are interested in developing themselves as leaders in the field, and taking it to the highest level, whether it’s K–12 or higher education or working in departments of education. Those people and others like them are going to be the ones that solidify this work and bring it forward.”

Her Purpose:

“I have a goal: dance for every child. And that means dance education in every public school. I started by creating the Dance Education Laboratory and that led to working with the Department of Education to educate teachers, and then there weren’t enough teachers, so Hunter College started the Masters of Dance Education. And then we needed the leadership, so the Teachers College doctoral program. I don’t know what will be next.”

Looking Back:

“Looking back, it looks like I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t have any idea. I was just lucky enough to always know what to do next. And I’m always looking for a big idea.”

The post Jody Gottfried Arnhold Has Devoted Her Career–And Philanthropy–to Bringing Dance to Everyone appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Biggest change from the early years: less worry, more enjoyment. Hold up! Also not quite right. Though of course, yes, I worry less about how a work will come together. (There’s a lot to be said about faith in strategies that have worked before, even when the content is new.) And, yes, dancing in the last few years has been deeply satisfying even as my physical range has shifted. But my physical interest has also shifted. There is so much, still, to feel! So much to notice in the intricacies of timing and rhythm through one’s body. So much to respond to, whether you’re performing or figuring out what a specific sequence might involve. Or just dancing.

I love dancing; always have, always will. We get to be fully available, fully transcendent, deep in memory as well as the now. We get to share all of this in performance, and, when we’re lucky, we get to embody it all in the present moment, wherever we may be.

The post For Bebe Miller, Dance Is How She Understands the World 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.

My first introduction to dance was at my audition for the Baltimore School for the Arts, and from there a love bloomed. It didn’t happen on the first day; it grew gradually, up until that one class where I was finally able to successfully execute a combination that we had been working on for a month—something that, at first, I didn’t fully believe I could accomplish. The recognition came from my teacher, but the real reward was for myself. That confidence brought about a self-awakening. Dance made me believe that I could achieve anything. 

Fast-forward a year, and I met someone who turned what I thought about the world of dance upside down: Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell. At that time, she was a principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. After seeing her, I made a mental checklist: Black girl from Baltimore. Check. Performing in front of thousands of people around the world. Check. Getting paid to dance. Check. People accepting and being inspired by her artistry. Check. There were no more excuses for me to not take this dance thing seriously.

Once I made up my mind that it was possible to have a professional relationship with dance, my life changed. Dance taught me so much: Respect for my body, commitment, freedom of self, a strong work ethic, self-reflection. It taught me to love myself not “flaws and all,” but completely and uniquely for who I am. There is only one me, my story is different, and in this world I can be rewarded for it. I am a beautiful, Black girl from Baltimore and also a principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Representation matters.

The post Ailey’s Jacqueline Green on Representation in Dance appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The ballet job market is what an economist would refer to as a “matching market”—you cannot simply choose where to go, but you must also be chosen. What makes the ballet market peculiar is that, unlike most professional athletic markets, directors have vastly different preferences for dancers and they mostly do not (and cannot) compete for hires with salaries. Rather, dancers are first and foremost committed to finding their best artistic fits and are often willing to work for less than their worth.

This phenomenon would not be quite as problematic if dancers and directors were nonetheless matched efficiently. Unfortunately, there are two major failures that plague the current system.

First, although many, but not all, major ballet companies in the U.S. operate under the dancers’ union AGMA, there is virtually no regulation in terms of hiring. Deadlines to hold auditions, renew or cancel contracts are company-specific and are not standardized industry-wide. This is problematic because when streams of dancers are released into the audition market at different times, both companies and dancers can end up with undesirable results.

Here’s an example: A dancer knows she will be let go early in the season and begins a job search right away. Other companies, ones that hold auditions later or whose dancers have several months to return their contracts, do not know how many places they will have available and so they tell her they might—or might not—make her an offer down the road. She may then feel pressured to accept an offer that expires in a matter of weeks from another, less preferred company.

Still, she’s better off than the dancer who’s let go after auditions have already passed. I’ve also known directors to rescind verbal offers to dancers very late in the season, instigating a chain reaction that not only leaves the dancer worse off, but also the other companies that would’ve preferred to hire her but were unable to do so.

This coordination failure is made worse by the fact that many dancers wishing to leave their current jobs typically do not announce their departures until they’ve secured other positions—and for good reason. But directors at saturated companies cannot make additional offers until they know who is definitively leaving. This is what I refer to as “holdup.” There are many favorable “trades” available across companies, but either someone has to first give up their job without a guarantee of another, or a director needs to seek out additional funds in order to start the trading process.

This is where market design comes in. This field, which seeks to find economic engineering solutions to practical problems, has studied similar failures in markets like the medical residency matching program, public school choice and vaccine allocation.

One of the central tenets of good market design is creating market “thickness,” or bringing together as many people as possible at once so the best outcomes can be achieved. By centralizing industry-wide contract renewal dates and audition time-frames, not only would companies avoid coordination failures, but this would also eliminate the unnecessary anxiety that dancers face by not knowing when they might receive an offer and when they should accept one.

This practice has become commonplace in other highly competitive settings in the U.S., such as legal clerkships and PhD programs, which do not require students to accept any offers before a standardized date. It is also the reason why most markets that bring together various traders, including the New York Stock Exchange, open and close at the same time each day.

In other settings, centralized clearinghouses have been enormously effective in eliminating similar market failures. Specifically, what I have in mind is a variant that I’ve designed of the well-known top trading cycles algorithm. It would work something like this: After all company departures have been announced and auditions held, dancers and directors would simply submit their preferences to a centralized algorithm that would quickly determine final assignments based on those preferences. While this may sound radical, variants of top trading cycles have been used in school assignment settings and most notably in the kidney exchange system in the U.S., an innovation for which economist Alvin Roth was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2012.

The assignments resulting from this process are guaranteed to be efficient. The process also encourages all dancers to submit their preferences over companies truthfully, eliminating another major element of anxiety. By streamlining hiring in this way, both parties get their best shots at their most preferred counterparts, while trades across companies at capacity can happen swiftly and without the need for additional expense.

Of course, centralized clearinghouses are most effective when the majority of the market agrees to partake in them. While leaders may fear that this would require them to relinquish some control, they would only make offers to the dancers who they would under the best possible scenario, and the gains they would achieve by thickening and coordinating the market would far outweigh any perceived losses.

As new leaders begin to take the reins at companies around the globe, time will tell whether they will be brave enough to challenge the status quo and reshape the marketplace in a way that truly works for both dancers and directors.

The post The Ballet Job Market Needs a Market (Re)Design 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.

Unfortunately for me, the last legit video I have of myself dancing was taken 10 years ago at JUMP Dance Convention. (Did I still use the footage? Obviously. Seventeen-year-old Haley was on fire that day! Was it enough to fill an entire reel? Absolutely not.)

So I recently took on a humongous task: I rehearsed, filmed and edited five different individual pieces that I combined into a single dance reel. Then, I went through a similar process for my acting and vocal reels.

Whew—it was a lot!

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Haley, we talked about this: You can’t do too much or your health will regress.” Don’t worry—I spread my projects out, I scheduled shoots at mostly reasonable hours (when I couldn’t be reasonable, I went to bed super early), and I accepted help from a bunch of wonderful people.

And it was worth it: I was really happy with the result! Here’s how I made personal promotional content that I’m proud of, using tips from industry experts.   

Prep Work

When I began ruminating on this project in September, I interviewed talent consultant Leesa Csolak, CEO of lbctalent.com and director of Launch Talent, on crucial dos and don’ts for creating reels. First, she let me know that any assets I send to agencies need to be concise. “Your reel should be roughly one minute long, and even then, they likely won’t watch more than 10 seconds of it,” Csolak says. She recommended including clips from a variety of genres so that agencies and casting directors can see my range, then separately share full videos of each piece on social media or through Dropbox/Google Drive folders in case agents or casting directors want to explore my work further.

I started with a contemporary piece I choreographed titled “I Lived,” which is about my experience living with chronic illness. It’s personal, and important to me, and I am so grateful I was able to capture it. I also did a jazz piece titled “Oh Darling,” choreographed by Sabrina Phillip, a musical-theater combo titled “Call Me Irresponsible,” choreographed by Scott Fowler, a “jazz-plus” combo titled “Kokomo,” by Dana Wilson, and a jazz-funk combo by Bobby Newberry to “Good For You.” (The last three combinations came from virtual CLI classes.)

For the most part I prepped these numbers on my own in an affordable rehearsal space, but as the shoot dates loomed closer, I rehearsed with my friend and Broadway performer Libby Lloyd at Ripley-Grier Studios to get feedback on my dancing and clean things up a bit.

For acting and voice, Csolak recommended including two or three juxtaposing monologues and songs that fit my casting type. Once again, she said they should be short, and that I should get some expert advice on choosing material. I worked with my acting coach, Andrew Dolan from the Freeman Studio, to choose a comedic monologue from the film He’s Just Not That Into You and a dramatic monologue from the play Mary Jane, by Amy Herzog. Then I worked with a rep coach (someone who can listen to my voice and send over material they think would be a good fit) named Abby Middleton, and my voice coach, Rebecca Soelberg, to prepare a pop song, a golden-age ballad and an upbeat contemporary song.

Filming

I started my shoots with “I Lived,” at sunrise on a rooftop with the Manhattan skyline in the background. The videographer I worked with, Jacob Hiss, shoots for Steps on Broadway. I had been following his work on social media for a while and decided to shoot my shot by direct-messaging him on Instagram. I let him know the details of my project (how long the shoot would last, how long the finished video would be, how many cuts of the video I wanted) and asked what his rates were for something like this. He responded with a ballpark estimate, and graciously accepted the opportunity to work together. Then, I reached out to a friend who lives in a building with rooftop access and asked if she would let us use it. I brought along my husband and my dear friend Hannah Nixon to assist with lights and music. The shoot began at 5:45 am (hello, 4 am wakeup call!) and lasted 45 minutes in the freezing cold. (Barefoot dancing on a windy rooftop in the middle of November is not for the faint of heart.) I cannot wait to show you the results!

For the second video, “Oh Darling,” I worked with Broadway Dance Center videographer Jeremy Davidson. Once again, I reached out through social media, and he took me up on working together. Jeremy is an incredibly talented dance videographer, and a warm and encouraging human being. This shoot was so good for my soul! We filmed in a beautiful studio at Gibney (a little pricey, but worth it for the final footage). I brought another friend along to assist with the 90-minute shoot.

The next two videos, “Call Me Irresponsible” and “Kokomo,” were filmed by two of my photographer/videographer friends, Katie Gallardo and McKall Dodd, and they absolutely crushed the assignment. We filmed in a beautiful studio at Arts On Site in the East Village at 8 am on a Saturday morning. The price was reasonable and the space was perfect for what I needed. The fifth video, “Good For You,” was once again filmed by my friend Katie, this time in Central Park at the Naumburg Bandshell on a Thursday afternoon. (It’s always fun to put on a little show for the tourists walking by!)

For my acting and vocal reels, I borrowed a backdrop structure from a photographer friend and hung my sheets over it for a solid background. I set it in front of my bright windows at home and filmed over three consecutive days. (I probably could have gone faster, but the trouble with self-taping is you can always film again to try to make it better!) My vocal coach joined me for one of the shoot days and helped me set up my framing and work my microphone.

Editing

Let me tell you—I have mad respect for all the creators who edit footage for a living! Thankfully, “I Lived” and “Oh Darling” were edited by the videographers. I edited the other three videos, as well as my reel, with help and feedback from friends and loved ones. I went down a YouTube rabbit hole to see what kinds of music most people use for reels and found that electronic songs seem to be a favorite. So, I decided on Paradise, by MEDUZA, featuring Dermot Kennedy.

The Portfolio of Work

And voilà! I have a portfolio of work that I am prepared to send to agencies. This was a true labor of love made possible by kind people who shared their time and talents with me.

I am bleary-eyed and exhausted and ready for the week-and-a-half break I am giving myself after this.

Check out my latest YouTube video on Dance Magazine’s channel to see a full version of my final reel.

The post Begin Again: The Real Deal With Creating a Dance Reel appeared first on Dance Magazine.

How did we get here? How did we go from doing so great that I pitched a comeback story to the preeminent dance magazine in the country to crying on the studio floor? To answer this question, I need to explain “The Spoon Theory,” a term coined by a blogger with lupus named Christine Miserandino.

It goes like this: Imagine you have 12 spoons in your hands—each visually represents a unit of energy. When you’re chronically ill, everything you do takes more energy (spoons) than it takes the average person. Showering takes a spoon, commuting to the studio takes a spoon, a dance class might take three spoons. This pattern goes on and on until there are no spoons left in your hand. You might be able to reach over to the table next to you and borrow a spoon from the next day, but then you will have fewer spoons to use tomorrow. Eventually, if you keep depleting your spoons, you will run out and crash completely.

Over the past year, I have planned my days meticulously, slowly adding more physical activity to my plate only when it can match the additional spoons I’ve been given through improved health. Unfortunately, with my last column, on training, I did too much and ran out of spoons. I didn’t crash completely, but I started seeing shades of my old symptoms, like fatigue, inflammation, migraines and nausea, creep up, and I had to do something about it.

I took a few things off my plate (RIP Dance Spirit editor position), prioritized sleep (9 pm bedtime for the win), told myself it was okay if I couldn’t make it to ballet every day (at least for now), and tried to give myself grace during class when I was able to be there. In a Dance Magazine article on returning to dance post-injury called “When the Body Betrays,” sports psychologist Dr. Alan Goldberg says recovering dancers should keep their focus on the progress they’re making. I can’t realistically expect my body to be able to move the same way it did when I was 18 years old—that is setting myself up for failure.

Honestly, I’ve been pretty disappointed. When I was a young dancer, a teacher once told me that a day off in dance was like a week off in any other passion. Although this is a myth that’s been debunked (taking time off can actually be a great thing for your dancing!), those words have still haunted me every day for the past nine years. I didn’t want to take two steps backward, even if just for a month. I wanted to go full throttle—to chase my big plans.

Thankfully, though, the decision to be respectful of my body’s physical boundaries has paid off, and I’m beginning to feel better. And if the past year has shown me anything, it’s that it’s never too late to try again.

As many dancers return to their first big runs of performances like Nutcracker and other holiday shows since the onset of the pandemic, I’d imagine some of you might also be realizing that dance is taking a bigger toll on you than it used to. It’s terrifying to be in a new body with new physical and emotional challenges. Let’s give a little space to the need to prioritize recovery, listen to our bodies and acknowledge that progress is not linear.

So that’s it for today. No milestones. Nothing flashy to show. Just a spoonful of setbacks to push through. That’s life, right?

The post Begin Again: Dealing With a Spoonful of Setbacks appeared first on Dance Magazine.

At the Dance Magazine Awards the previous night, Judith Jamison, in presenting the award to Battle, said, “I love watching Robert’s bravery.” I think she meant both his bravery as a choreographer and as an artistic director. As the latter, he has expanded the Ailey repertory with so many interesting choices—Aszure Barton, Wayne McGregor, Johan Inger and Kyle Abraham—that we tend to forget about Battle himself as a choreographer.

Well, the program at City Center reminded us in a big way. Robert Battle is a choreographer of masterful restraint and sudden explosiveness. He is a choreographer who has definite musical tastes and finds a different, original movement vocabulary for each of those music choices.

With a disciplined sense of suspense, he makes us wait for the big moment. In Mass (2004), a devotional piece of skittering, swirling and vibrating and a modernist sense of design, the 16 dancers sometimes lock into off-kilter positions of stillness. And then a burst of momentum pushes these monklike figures across the stage in an agitated, unstoppable herd. In his portion of Love Stories (2004, originally a triptych with contributions from Judith Jamison and Rennie Harris), we crave to be carried on a high by Stevie Wonder’s songs, but Battle reins the dancers in with strict unison until the very end, when he unleashes a torrent of wild revelry.

In Unfold (2007), the extreme attenuation for the woman—in this case a ravishingly arching Jacqueline Green—is sustained throughout this short work to the operatic voice of Leontyne Price. Green’s partner, Jeroboam Bozeman, seems like a lost soul clinging to his memories. With a slow développé to the side, toes pointing upward, Green hits the high note just when Price does. It’s the kind of satisfying convergence that Battle is careful not to overuse.

The evening’s emotional range went from the desperation of In/Side (2008)—which finds Yannick Lebrun staggering and spiraling to Nina Simone singing “with your kiss life begins”—to the giddiness of Ella (2008), in which two dancers (Renaldo Maurice and Patrick Coker) physicalize Ella Fitzgerald’s speedy scatting that ricochets between popular tunes of the 50s and earlier.

The work that premiered this season, For Four, laced its full-bodied jazz moves with chaîné turns and cabrioles, and somehow it all fit into the robust Wynton Marsalis score. The projection of an American flag onto one dancer seemed to suddenly curtail the dancers’ freedom and make them feel trapped.

Takademe (1999) never fails to excite. With crackling energy, Kanji Segawa mirrors Sheila Chandra’s staccato stutterings, deep exhalations and vocal spurts. A brief, enchanting masterwork, Takademe is where language, voice and movement mingle—at top speed and intricacy.

In his opening speech to this program honoring him, Battle graciously pointed out that David Parsons gave him his first chance to choreograph, and he, Battle, has given Jamar Roberts his first chance. And so the chain of extraordinary artistry continues.

The post Robert Battle at Full Throttle appeared first on Dance Magazine.

This moment was more than 15 years ago. Despite my own efforts to address mental health issues in dance, I have tried to comfort myself with the knowledge that something like this would certainly not happen today.

But recently, a colleague who also advocates for the well-being of dancers shared a story with a group of dance medicine professionals that one of her dancers was weighed in front of her peers. I expected total shock from the group, but what poured forth was absolute confirmation that dance institutions are still weighing their dancers.

Why does this practice continue to be accepted? You can decline to be weighed by your medical doctor. But dancers line up without question to have their weight recorded by artistic staff with zero medical training.

I beg an answer to the question “Why do you need to know?”

The post Op-Ed: Please Stop Weighing Dancers appeared first on Dance Magazine.

And yet, when Thimmaiah was younger, he was so unsure about being upside down that his mother, attempting to help, would sometimes hold him by the ankles to get him comfortable with the feeling.

Indeed, going upside down can be intimidating—whether it’s the fear of falling, the rush of blood to the head or just the disorientation of seeing the world from a different angle. But “if you can go upside down, it provides you more options to express and to move without limitations,” says Thimmaiah. And that’s not just for breakers—modern dancers need this tool for inversions, for instance, and ballet dancers for partnering.

So what does it take to become as confident moving upside down as you are right side up?

The post Heels Over Head: 5 Tips to Get More Comfortable With Inversions appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Now, with nine years of life and my illness (mostly) behind me, I’m returning to dance with a whole new perspective—one that is centered on seeking out happiness.

When I find myself disappointed by slow technical progress, or anxious about my odds after nine years away, I ask myself, “But is it fun?” As ABT principal Devon Teuscher told me in a 2018 interview for Dance Teacher, “If it ever stops bringing me joy, I can always give it up and do something else. This job is too hard to do if you don’t love it.”

At 18 years old, when illness dragged me kicking and screaming off of the stage and into my bed, I felt as though I’d lost myself entirely. The physical pain was stunning, sure, but it was the loss of dance, of what I saw as my identity, that I struggled to cope with.

Now, with nine years of life and my illness (mostly) behind me, I’m returning to dance with a whole new perspective—one that is centered on seeking out happiness.

When I find myself disappointed by slow technical progress, or anxious about my odds after nine years away, I ask myself, “But is it fun?” As ABT principal Devon Teuscher told me in a 2018 interview for Dance Teacher, “If it ever stops bringing me joy, I can always give it up and do something else. This job is too hard to do if you don’t love it.”

In other words, I’m working to find joy in the journey.

But that can be a difficult thing to do when you can’t afford it. Over the past year, I have been disappointed to discover how high the financial barrier to entry has become for a professional dance career. Most of us don’t have angel investors offering to fund the training it takes to get stage-ready.

So, I’ve come up with some options for training without completely breaking the bank. Of course, everyone’s financial situation is different. This works for me and my budget; something different will likely work for you and yours.

First, in-person classes are expensive. (As of this writing, most in Manhattan hover around $25.) Six days a week of classes is a major burden (don’t even get me started on the cost of taking multiple per day!). Still, in my opinion, having a teacher in your immediate space observe and correct you is the best way to improve safely and quickly. Plus, you can’t beat the inspiration of watching a room full of passionate dancers doing their best.

I take in-person classes, but only as my finances allow. I reserve those hours for teachers who inspire me, uplift me and correct me, which is exactly what my personal go-to Steps on Broadway ballet teacher Nancy Bielski says to do. “Look for someone you trust, who really knows what they are doing, and who can set your body up to dance correctly,” she says. “That will really streamline the process and keep you safe.”

At the moment, I take two classes per week (three if I’m able to pick up extra work or save in other areas in my budget that week). I’m a bunhead at heart, and I feel my best if I’m prioritizing my classical technique, so I make sure at least one of my weekly in-person classes is ballet. I like to return to the same teacher each week (Bielski) so that she can track my process, and we can build a relationship that leads to more corrections and industry guidance.

Because I’m interested in musical theater opportunities, I like to have my second class fall in that realm. This is where things get tricky: Sticking to the same teacher each week can lead to more corrections and establish a strong relationship, but if you don’t branch out you close yourself off from other amazing choreographers and a broader industry network. My current solution has been to attend class with the same teacher for three to four weeks in a row before shifting to a different teacher for the following three to four weeks. (And I plan to cycle back through the list.) My current musical theater class is Josh Assor at Broadway Dance Center—he brings me joy, and challenges me musically. Next up is Billy Griffin.

A lot of the musical theater classes fill up quickly, so I try to register for them in advance when I can. That said, if I am feeling sick (my healing is not linear), I give myself the flexibility not to take in-person classes that week. If I’m having a hard day and need a class that fits super-naturally on my body or allows me to work through some hard emotions, I will change directions and sign up for a contemporary class. I want to make sure I can get the most out of every class I pay for.

On the days I can’t attend classes in person, I like to take virtual classes through CLI Studios and YouTube. (I used a hefty discount code to get a year’s worth of training from CLI, and it paid for itself within weeks.) Check out this Dance Magazine article to find other places to train online.

Although virtual classes are affordable, once you stack on the cost of a studio rental, you may as well just take regular, in-person classes. (The studio rental space closest to my home costs nearly $50 per hour.) To get around these high fees, I’ve sought out space in a religious community center that often goes unused during the day. The room doesn’t have mirrors or quality flooring, which is less than ideal. So, I got my hands on a vinyl marley roll and a glassless mirror from Harlequin Floors.

I also have a dear dance friend who works at a gym in the city and is allowed to bring friends in during off-hours. Class is always more fun with a friend, so don’t be afraid to ask others if they would like to join you for virtual class and split the cost of a studio rental fee, or have access to a free space of their own.

You might also consider seeing if a dance studio near you has a work-study program that will allow you to take classes at a discounted rate or use the space after hours. And don’t overlook dance jobs that offer company class or class reimbursements as a perk. Even if it’s a small gig, or not quite your style, sometimes the opportunity is worth the training benefits alone.

Since I’m interested in landing musical theater, film and television jobs, my training also includes acting and vocal training. For affordable voice training, I asked around to find a teacher, Rebecca Soelberg, who was both talented and within my budget for weekly voice lessons. I have also joined a semi-professional community choir, called Lux Mea, that rehearses for two hours every Thursday and has been a fun and affordable way to work on my voice.

For acting, I have taken advantage of some pre-COVID classes at The Freeman Studio I was registered for but hadn’t yet had the chance to cash in on. Classes are held every Friday for two and a half hours, and I always leave on a high.

I’m of the opinion that we could all benefit from saving a buck in this industry, but at the end of the day, finances are a deeply personal matter, and you need to find a strategy that works for you as you pursue your own joy. Consider giving some of these tips a try and then go comment what your personal money saving hacks are over on Dance Magazine‘s Instagram—we’re all in this together!

Check out my most recent vlog on Dance Magazine’s YouTube channel, where I take you through a week in my life of training.

The post Begin Again: Figuring Out How to Train on a Budget appeared first on Dance Magazine.

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The goal of these efforts is to cultivate the dancers as leaders, activists and entrepreneurs—a radical step in an industry that has for so long called professional dancers “boys” and “girls.”

When Gina Gibney founded her single-choreographer pickup troupe, then named Gibney Dance Company, in 1991, she never could have imagined that 30 years later it would be doubled in size; financially secure; housed in a thriving, community-centric organization; and poised to make its Joyce Theater debut. But while many would see this as a pinnacle, Gibney thinks of it as the start of something new. “This is the beginning of a very clear, dynamic and forward-focused future,” says the founder, artistic director and CEO.

Rehearsing Sonya Tayeh’s premiere Shantel Prado, Courtesy Gibney

The post Inside the Gibney Company's Radical Reinvention appeared first on Dance Magazine.

As part of a shared research project with Dr. Heidi Boisvert and Melissa Painter through the Guild of Future Architects, we spoke with a number of dancers, choreographers and scholars thinking through the ramifications of COVID on our lives, and what comes next. What we found was galvanizing and unsurprising: that dancerly folks are abundantly contributing to the reimagining of civic and cultural structures in anticipation of an eventual, post-COVID moment.

Kate Elswit, Reader in Theatre and Performance, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

“Simple respiration data doesn’t capture people’s breath experience. When the pandemic came, experiences of breath changed the extent of our bodies. People were talking about how their world was getting smaller, but actually the big issue was as you’re walking the street, as you’re walking in the grocery store, that your body was bigger. So how do we start to train ourselves to engage with that heightened feeling of breath when others are in proximity? That’s already a social choreography.”

Sara Wookey, Dance Artist, Researcher and Consultant

“This time has really thrown up a great opportunity to look more closely at something that is always there. It’s not just a relational practice; it’s this real ability to be in the room together with others and to create a sense of connection and belonging. Dancers have something to offer here.”

Silas Riener, Performer, Choreographer and Teacher

“It would be deeply comforting to seek solace and certainty in the foundations which built the work and artists of the 20th century, and the innovation of the early 21st. I feel the momentum to return, to get back, to go back, to be back. Maybe that is part of an insidious collective delusion. It’s so seductive to return to what was, but there was so much wrong. I suggest we take advantage of this moment to be aware, to be better. This is a moment of unlearning, of undoing. We are traumatized, we are brand-new little babies. We don’t know how to do anything.

“For those of us who teach and touch down in the university (and move through the reality of freelancing and making our own work), the empty promise of releasing young artists into a field we all know cannot support and employ most of them feels more hollow than ever. We rely on young artists who graduate to define the field. We hope they break the mold. We hope they find ways to live, but I worry we are not being honest about the tools we give them.

“I don’t have answers, I only have questions. Restlessness, uncertainty, unsettled-ness drive the works that feel the most important to me. So with utmost suspicion—and reverence—for the power of the past, I offer you Merce Cunningham, who said before nearly every class, ‘Let’s begin again.'”

Vanessa Chang, Senior Program Manager at Leonardo, The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology

“What does it mean to move or not move in the world? The last year has called attention to who owns place and space. It’s very important to me to attend to the specificity of location, and work that does that, and that can invite people to move through it. Artistic practice can invite a different form of moving through that sustains attention that isn’t just spectacle. I think we really need to invite reflection.”

Teena Marie Custer, Street Dance Theater Artist in Pittsburgh

“I think there were already cultural shifts happening in how concert dance was presented even before COVID-19. The circumstances that exist now will give the concert-dance community a chance to reassess equity in terms of who and what is seen.

“Although I feel that humans will always have a need for live interaction with an audience (I have felt this through the absence of my street/social-dance community), we have normalized watching dance virtually, from TikTok to The Joyce livestreams. After having all my touring work canceled or moved to a virtual platform, I am reassessing what skills the new generation of dancers will need to navigate the new normal.”

Jessi Stegall, Dance Artist and Graduate Student at Harvard Medical School

“During the height of the pandemic, many members of the dance community found themselves out of work, questioning the sustainability of their role as artists, and considering, perhaps for the first time, the ever-present boundaries of their work. As someone who is consistently grappling with my own duality of ‘artist’ and ‘nonartist,’ I resonate with the seemingly mass identity crisis.

“This is not an obstacle—it is an opportunity to dig deeper into values. Let’s reestablish our communal and individual values of creative making. What does it mean to flourish as a dancer? As an artist? As a human? As writer and choreographer Andrew Simonet so eloquently puts it, ‘It’s better for the world to keep your mission and change your tactics than if you lose your mission and keep making art.'”

Ariane Michaud, Lead Producer at The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces

“I used to find that interactions within the community existed in relation to the amount of work and play that we could get in every day. Many conversations revolved around ‘the hustle’ and the constant drive to do more, see more, be more. During COVID, artists, choreographers, producers were able to assess the imbalance that this placed on our lives and on the community as a whole. This pause did not come without hardship, however; taking a moment to reflect on the constant motion has created space to re-enter and re-create according to not only new physical standards but mental and emotional standards, as well.

“What should follow is a restructuring of the ways funding can and should support dancers, choreographers and arts administrators through this shift. The number of career pivots we are already seeing, alongside the fight to elevate the minimum wage, will affect the ways in which we gather as a community. In the current economy, it is no longer enough to do what you love.”

Ryat Yezbick, Assistant Director of the Shared Futures Program at the Guild of Future Architects

“Coming out of social isolation has felt both exhilarating and daunting; being amongst other people again has often left me feeling fatigued from a shared heightened sensitivity to ourselves and each other. To ‘catch up’ with others coming out of COVID is a somatic and emotional experience as much as it is an intellectual endeavor. The physical touch and proximity we were collectively denied, the nonverbal comforts we derive from being amongst each other, now feels like an ecstatic experience full of presence.

“‘Catching up’ has therefore occurred through long-held hugs or impromptu dance parties, moments in which our bodies can collectively release all of the shared grief through the ritual of shared physical expression. How do we take this heightened presence and care for our inner worlds into all that we manifest in the future? How do we let this newfound sensitivity inform how we relate to ourselves and one another?”

Andrea Miller, Founder and Artistic Director of GALLIM

“The threshold of the theater or museum—that’s not where art and creativity start or stop. We’re hopefully entering into a more ready climate to think about creativity and artistry without needing an invitation to enter the theater or museum. I wonder if we’re set up for it in terms of how schools teach dance. It might be a stretch. I’m really excited to see the kind of artistry and creativity that this time has invited people to value and adventure in, because I think that there’s more chances to become part of a conversation. We need strangers to dance. Strangers need you to set the conditions to dance.”

The post How Dance Experts Are Reimagining the Post-COVID World appeared first on Dance Magazine.

A dance giant fell, and yet, if one paid close attention to news outlets and social media, taking notice of who acknowledged her loss, one could have easily drawn a line between the separate, parallel societies of the “Black dance community” and the larger body that is dance (the implied white being silent).

Indian freedom fighter Jawaharlal Nehru said, “History is almost always written by the victors and conquerors and gives their view.” And Philip Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post, spoke only truth when he stated “journalism is the first rough draft of history.”

Today all aspects of history are being reevaluated through the lens of anti-racism and equity, and hopefully being crafted anew.

Yet the dance world still mirrors the inequity of the world at large where whiteness is the dominant culture. There are, however, a multiplicity of parallel societies (Black, Asian, Latinx, LGBTQ+, etc.) derived from marginalized communities. They are full and fecund, organically reflecting the value systems of their respective cultures. They crown their own leaders, heroes and martyrs, measured by their own barometer of greatness and excellence developed independently, but in full acknowledgment of the standards of the culture of whiteness.

Chase-Hicks was a game changer, an inspiration, an example for generations of dancers. Her sweet blend of technical prowess, artistry, integrity, grace and humility in classic roles in Talley Beatty’s Stack-Up, Ulysses Dove’s Episodes, George Faison’s Suite Otis, and Alvin Ailey’s For ‘Bird’ – With Love and Masekela Langage as well as the iconic solo Cry, garnered her the respect of her peers.

She was an anchor in a cohort of dancers who raised the standard of American modern dance. In the 1980s, she, along with fellow Philadelphians Gary DeLoach, Kevin Brown, Deborah Manning and David St. Charles, in addition to the likes of Marilyn Banks, Sarita Allen, Donna Wood, April Berry, Raquelle Chavis, Neisha Folkes, Sharrell Mesh, Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson, were some of the final dancers handpicked by Mr. Ailey. It was this generation that set the model that has become the brand of excellence associated with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Debora Chase-Hicks was a blue blood of the Black dance world, a descendant from the lineage of Joan Myers Brown and her Philadelphia School of Dance Arts and Philadelphia Dance Company (Philadanco).

“Her movement quality,” muses Philadanco alum and recent Guggenheim fellow Tommie-Waheed Evans, “her captivating essence, her stage presence—she was as smooth as ice, so crystal-clear and so consistent. She had a deep understanding of her port de bras and also this deep understanding of what she was doing in space. She could get buck with it, or she could be soft and graceful. She was so diverse. And she was just gorgeous.”

“It was Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. It was not just ‘American Dance Company,’ ” says Raquelle Chavis, who was Chase-Hicks’ tour roommate and closest confidant. Reflecting on her friend, she says: “She made good choices. That acting, that dance-theater thing—she knew where she was in the space and how she’s going to utilize that space and bring you with her on that journey.”

We speak often of cultural appropriation, but less of cultural segregation. As the dominant culture, whiteness dictates the standard, assigns value and has power to ration and control access to opportunity. It has the authority to define how people of color are permitted to present themselves within their constructs, like the “urban” section in bookstores (where is the “suburban” section?) or the subdivision of Black, Asian or Latinx movies or shows (we don’t call them “white shows”). Lacking access and the ability to self-define, people of color empower themselves by creating their own spaces (BET Networks, Ebony, Essence, Netspan/Telemundo, La Opinión).

When we compare the legacies of George Balanchine and Alvin Ailey, two juggernauts in American dance history, the rolling imprint of systemic racism is quite evident. Both choreographers created dance companies and signature works, and they cultivated world-class dancers. Their divergent origin stories illustrate the role racial inequity played in the building of their careers. Balanchine came to the U.S. highly pedigreed via his work with the Ballets Russes, which led to his financial backing by elite arts society. Ailey climbed the ladder without much of a boost, and the tiny one he received in 1962 from the U.S. State Department came with huge caveats. The first was the insistence that the company be marketed as an “ethnic,” not a modern, company. The second was more insidious: The government threatened that if he “displayed” homosexual or effeminate behaviors on tour (in Asia and East and West Africa), it would bankrupt the company.

This same inequity can be read through the different ways dancers are presented with opportunities post-retirement. White dancers of pedigree are often headhunted for positions in leadership, sought out by legacy organizations to partner or collaborate, their projects supported by funders, presenters and the press. The extension of access and opportunities is an act of preserving and carrying on these ordained artistic bloodlines. The system determines what is “important” enough to preserve (this bias is markedly evident in the world of archiving).

The same cannot be said of the Black modern dancers who carry Ailey’s legacy, and for that matter the Dance Theatre of Harlem alumni who danced under Arthur Mitchell. Artistic directorships are not offered, full-time faculty positions can be hard to come by. When they do capture roles in leadership, it is often after paying a high tariff of work in the trenches of the dance field or academia, which often renders them overqualified while paid a fraction of the salary and, often, standing on a glass cliff. Meanwhile white dancers from prestigious ballet companies seemingly waltz into leadership straight from the stage; some are given multiple times to fail in such positions and are paid handsomely to do so.

In our racialized society, it could be argued that Black excellence is valued equally to white adequacy. Standards and criteria apply in a more fixed manner for people of color (specifically Black people) than for their white counterparts. One could argue that some of this is due to the hierarchy of dance, with ballet positioned at the apex. However, white modern and postmodern dancers also benefit from their proximity to what is deemed white genius.

And what of the genius in Blackness? The ingenuity of thwarting a system built to deny you can be categorized as little else. Philadelphia School of Dance Arts and Philadanco have consistently trained and prepared generations of dancers for professional careers in a variety of dance genres. Joan Myers Brown built a metaphoric underground railroad to possibility, not only for Black artists but for anyone who crossed the threshold of her organization. (Note the organic diversity and inclusion, no initiative required.) “We counted the other day. There were 22 dancers who went to Ailey from ‘Danco,” says Myers Brown. It makes you wonder if there’s something in that Philly “wooter.”

For years there was an urban legend that Myers Brown was resentful that her dancers left for Ailey. However, the opposite is true: The two directors worked together to create a pipeline of opportunity. Myers Brown remembers getting a call from Alvin Ailey. “He said, ‘I have two girls here from Philly.” It was Chase-Hicks and Deborah Manning, and he was asking which he should take. “‘I know you don’t want me to have both,'” Myers Brown recalls him saying. “I said, ‘You got to take both.’ That’s when they got to be ‘the two Debbies from Philly.'”

Which brings us back to Chase-Hicks. When asked where she acquired her formidable and versatile technique, Chase-Hicks proudly proclaimed “Joan Myers Brown was my ballet teacher,” Raquelle Chavis recalls. Myers Brown was classically trained by Sydney King and Marion Cuyjet; both women were known for exposing their students to a myriad of techniques and teachers. Following her mentor’s blueprint, Myers Brown amassed a cadre of master teachers for her students: Delores Browne, Marion Cuyjet, John Hines, Pat Thomas, Fred Benjamin, along with white teachers like William Dollar and Karel Shook. Denise Jefferson, while the director of The Ailey School, traveled from New York City weekly to teach at the Philadelphia School of Dance Arts, as did Milton Myers.

Courtesy Philadanco

“It was a time before Horton,” says Myers Brown. “I studied with Dunham, so I started them with ballet, jazz and Dunham. The kids talk about how it gave them that strength and perseverance and determination.” Her company dancers were built by choreographers like Fred Benjamin, Talley Beatty, Billy Wilson and Eugene Sagan. The result was a dancer who could do everything and anything.

“There was never a hierarchical understanding of dance. Ballet, Graham, Dunham, all the things were always treated with the same amount of respect,” recalls Robert Garland, director of the school at Dance Theatre of Harlem and resident choreographer, and a Philadanco alum. “The first time I saw 32 fouettés was Deborah Manning and Debora Chase-Hicks turning to a disco song called ‘Ring My Bell.’ I’ll never forget it,” he says with a chuckle. Everywhere the students looked they saw their likenesses in Black excellence.

This flattening of the hierarchy of genre is a crucial component to the “decolonization of ballet” the dance world is calling for in 2021. It has been a practice in the Black community for decades. It was the thinking that allowed for classically trained Black pioneers like Myers Brown, Katherine Dunham, Louis Johnson, Talley Beatty, John Hines, Delores Browne, Janet Collins and Billy Wilson to seamlessly move through the genres when opportunities opened up. Wilson started his professional career in musical theater and later transitioned to a soloist position as a founding member of the Dutch National Ballet (when usually it works the other way around). Ironically, a byproduct of the restrictions of systemic racism is versatility: Not only does it make Black folks twice as good but in twice the areas.

A great number of these Black dance educators had their dance career dreams deferred or truncated due not to a lack of talent but to segregation. They poured that desire, passion into their students. They held high expectations, and did not mince words; they prepared their dancers for the real world onstage and off.

All artists are encouraged to have “something to fall back on,” but for dancers of color for whom the options are slimmer, it is seen as even more crucial. Myers Brown was adamant about students having a skill that could pay their bills. Chase-Hicks had been a bank teller while she danced with Philadanco, and when she retired from Ailey she enrolled in stenography school. When she returned to Philadanco as rehearsal director, her stenography skills served her well, allowing her to type notes while never taking her eye off the dancers. She missed nothing.

She did not consider herself to be a rehearsal director. She was once quoted as saying: “Rehearsal director? I’m a coach. The ultimate goal, of course, is to keep the ballet intact. But, I love to work one-on-one. Coaching is nurturing—teaching, actually—and I love that so much.” In a competitive field where younger dancers can be seen as a threat to seasoned veterans, and a rite of passage in old-school company culture is for newbies to “figure it out on their own,” Chase-Hicks did not subscribe to this mentality or behavior. “In the two years I got to share the stage with her, she would give me little tips and hints: how to secure a headdress or, in Blues Suite, how to hold the pink fan at the end,” says former Ailey dancer Danni Gee, one of the 22 who came through Philadanco. “One beautiful moment was when I was doing her track in House of the Rising Sun, she showed me this is how you bring the stool out in the dark, how to place it and get the scarf off on the chair, quickly.”

“She was your biggest cheerleader,” adds Chavis. “She never wanted to see anyone be defeated or fail. She was always pushing you to be the best that you can be. And if she saw something that might help you, it could be just a little thing, like what your pinky finger’s doing…”

Her process of welcoming a new dancer into Philadanco was a one-on-one rehearsal on her own time. “She came up to me and said, ‘I want to rehearse with you on our own.’ She went through that entire track with me, she told me what to expect in rehearsal later that night. She would get inside the work as if she were dancing it,” says Tommie-Waheed Evans. “She would talk to you about the character work that you were building and the nuances that you were stumbling on. She made us all artists, not just simply dancers.” In a way, she became a conductor on Myers Brown’s underground railroad, developing in them the skills they would need on their journey.

But it was her artistic eye and attention to detail that truly made her a great. “Debora Chase-Hicks was a master class,” is what choreographer Camille A. Brown says wistfully. Brown recalls working beside her while setting work on Philadanco. She was awed by Chase-Hicks’ ability to see, hear and reinforce her choreography’s intention and details as rehearsal director. When Brown returned after a hiatus, she recalls, “The piece was exactly how I left it in the best of ways. I didn’t have to reinforce all the stuff that I had said before I left. Walking in and seeing it felt like, ‘Oh, she cared for this piece while I was gone.’ And that’s so powerful because she provided a space for you to move to the next level of whatever you want to do. She held it so carefully that I didn’t have to think of all the extra stuff. I just had to focus on challenging myself and challenging the work.”

The institutional knowledge that Chase-Hicks literally embodied and the level of integrity in which she worked to preserve the intention of the choreographer’s work would have been lauded had she been a stager for a choreographic trust. Most choreographic works by Black masters are not held in trust but by family members. This is because most Black dance companies were founded out of passion and necessity—creating a space to dance and tell our stories. Often the nuts and bolts of business were cultivated on a need-to-know basis. Most organizations had to stay in the present, working to survive, leaving little bandwidth to think about the future (archiving, trusts, etc.). Historically, the contributions of artists of color have been sorely under-documented and when these incredible artists, with invaluable experiences and knowledge, die, the institutional knowledge dies with them.

If “journalism is the first rough draft of history,” and if we recognize history as a pillar in the process of creating equity and leveling the field, then it is incumbent on journalists and the media to use their pens and platforms to assist in correcting the narrative.

The post What the Reactions to Debora Chase-Hicks’ Death Revealed About Divisions in the Dance World appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Love emphatically states that dance is “the place where I name myself in a way that I can feel connected.” This type of wisdom has become essential during more than a year of a global pandemic and racial reckoning, during which for the first time, maybe ever, people have truly been sitting with and observing their emotions and where they are located in their bodies.

Created in response to the sociopolitical events of 2020, but reflective of a foreknown reality for Black dance artists, this week the series celebrates its one-year anniversary of documenting voices that are often unheard, perspectives that are not often prioritized, and ways of telling that are often overlooked.

The post One Year After Its Launch, Black Dance Stories Remains Required Viewing appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Social media didn’t tread quite so carefully. For days after, speculation about the circumstances of Scarlett’s death abounded, alongside tributes to his gifts. After a charmed decade as a rising star of the ballet world, allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced in 2019, when The Royal Ballet was alerted to concerns related to students at The Royal Ballet School. After an internal investigation, in March 2020, the company declined to pursue legal action but stated that it would no longer employ Scarlett.

A number of other companies followed suit and dropped his work from their repertoire, including Australia’s Queensland Ballet, where he had been artistic associate. Shortly before Scarlett’s death, the Royal Danish Ballet also announced that his Frankenstein—scheduled for 2022—had been canceled following another investigation, which found evidence of “unacceptable behavior” by Scarlett during rehearsals in Copenhagen in 2018 and 2019.

Suicide is how Scarlett’s death is being discussed, although his family has not confirmed it as the cause of death. I’m not going to hazard guesses based on this chain of events, as only those closest to Scarlett can speak to his state of mind over the years. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has sound advice on the matter: “Avoid reporting that a suicide death was ’caused’ by a single event, such as a job loss or divorce, since research shows no one takes their life for one single reason, but rather a combination of factors.”

In that sense, the idea that “cancel culture is killing,” as the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky put it in a widely shared social media post, with dozens of major dance artists weighing in and indicating their approval, is a troubling simplification. First, “canceling” is a vague concept, applied to anything from social media slip-ups to proven assault. While some harmful tropes associated with it, such as essentialism and the lack of forgiveness, have been well analyzed by the vlogger and philosopher Natalie Wynn, among others, it doesn’t mean there should be no consequences in the case of allegations that are difficult to prove, as sexual misconduct ones are by nature.

Statements like Ratmansky’s also place a burden of guilt on victims who may have come forward during the investigations, at a time when the ballet world is finally reckoning with the way it has normalized abuse over time. Based on its press statement, the Royal Danish Ballet identified clear-cut issues. The Royal Ballet’s 2020 statement was carefully worded to say “there were no matters to pursue in relation to alleged contact with students of the Royal Ballet School,” but neither confirmed nor denied the allegations first made public by The Times, some of which involved company members.

Multiple things can be true at once: It is possible for Scarlett to have been a stunningly precocious choreographer and beloved colleague to many, and for him to have been an employee whose behavior led directors to opt for caution. There is no doubt that he was hugely talented. His first main-stage work for The Royal Ballet, 2010’s Asphodel Meadows, immediately stood out as an extraordinary debut, full of sculptural light and shade.

In the decade that followed, he made narrative as well as abstract ballets for companies around the world, and tried his hand at several evening-length productions. Frankenstein, a co-production between The Royal Ballet and San Francisco Ballet, is the most well-known, but I’d argue his Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal New Zealand Ballet and Dangerous Liaisons for Queensland Ballet and Texas Ballet Theatre, which I saw in Australia in 2019, were among his finest achievements.

When it came to the misconduct allegations, however, there may have been reasons on all sides to avoid going to court. Parting ways discreetly with an employee without opening a company up to lawsuits is a common corporate strategy, and victims don’t owe us their accounts of abuse.

Was it an ideal basis for companies other than The Royal Ballet to drop Scarlett’s works? No, and not all of them did: He worked with Munich’s Bayerisches Staatsballett in the fall and was due to revive A Midsummer Night’s Dream in New Zealand next winter. But if you were an artistic director in 2020, and had probable cause to worry about a guest artist’s impact on the dancers in your care, what would you do?

Bruno Bouché, the artistic director of France’s Ballet du Rhin, found himself in that situation a few years ago. After initiating talks with one choreographer, he was alerted to the fact that the artist in question had repeatedly harassed female dancers during past engagements. He privately reached out to victims and, after hearing their accounts, declined to hire the choreographer.

“My priority is to protect the dancers and the company,” he says. Bouché, a former dancer with the Paris Opéra Ballet, adds that he had firsthand experience of sexual harassment as a young corps member. “It paralyzes dancers, especially teenagers who are faced with one of their idols. You lose your bearings and wonder: Did that person like me for my dancing, or for another reason?”

Bouché now worries that reactions blaming cancel culture for Scarlett’s death will set back recent efforts to protect dancers and redress power imbalances in the studio. “The end can never justify the means,” he says.

Was Scarlett’s case handled correctly by The Royal Ballet and other companies? It’s impossible to tell without firsthand knowledge of the initial investigation and other testimonies. The lack of institutional transparency here, as in the case of Peter Martins, who left New York City Ballet in 2018 despite the company stating that accusations about him were “not corroborated,” ultimately does everyone a disservice. If a mistake or a failing is never even acknowledged, what path is there to rehabilitation? What’s left instead is a limbo—much like the Asphodel Meadows, the in-between part of the ancient Greek underworld Scarlett once explored so eloquently.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at

800-273-8255. Resources for friends and family members, survivors and others are available at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.

The post Why Blaming Liam Scarlett’s Death on Cancel Culture Is Troubling appeared first on Dance Magazine.

I open my eyes as, one by one, the digital faces of former colleagues turn off their cameras, with only a name appearing in place. I am launched back into real time, sitting in my bedroom, alone. It is the now all-too-familiar Zoom call, coming to an end. There is no audience, no theater and no post-show thrill. No costumes to throw in a pile. No feathers or painted roses or black ink to clean. No shattered tea cups to sweep up. No Hatters. No Queens. No Alice, peering into the eyes of another human, waxing poetic about the mysteries of falling in love. No rabbit hole to fall down.

Like so many theater and dance productions around the world, in August 2020 Third Rail Projects’ award-winning immersive theater show Then She Fell closed its doors for the foreseeable future after a run of seven and a half years. Seventy cast and crew members, along with our fearless artistic directors, came together that Thursday last November to laugh, to recollect, to grieve. We never had the bittersweet luxury of toasting to a final show, so this will have to do for now. One last tip of the hat, you might say.

The post Immersive Theater Thrives on Closeness. Where Does It Go From Here? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

I understand. Trust me, I do. The pandemic arrived smack in the middle of a performance project I’ve been creating since 2017. I had hopes of getting it to the stage in 2021. Considering that 2021 is here, I’m clear that’s an unrealistic goal. I’m also clear that my dance work is about being in the room with people. It’s about the breath and the sweat and the touching (actually, full body contact with) each other. It’s about talking to folks and stirring up energy and vibrations for every person in the performance space. But that breath and sweat transmits coronavirus, and, frankly, all those vibes don’t translate to video.

I’m not interested in suddenly becoming a dance filmmaker and learning new technological platforms that are not necessarily in service to the work. Last March, without so much as a beat, the dance community “pivoted to virtual,” moving classes, rehearsals and performances (where we could) online. Abruptly, we were engaged in crash courses on Zoom teaching and livestreaming in efforts to “keep up with the Joneses,” maintain relevance, assert dance as essential, and hold on to our financial livelihoods, which, for many, evaporated overnight.

I’d like to offer another perspective: What if we rested?

As musician Mrs. Smith stated recently in a popular Instagram meme, “A pandemic is not a residency.” We are living through a collective trauma, a once-in-a-lifetime historical moment, and taking “time off” is not a symptom of laziness. In fact, I see this time as a gift. I am thrilled to see folks develop other interests and skills that support their income. I am inspired to see artists explore other parts of their creative practice. I am encouraged by those cultivating systems that foundationally sustain making our art. I am affirmed in caring for the people who facilitate our dancemaking, including dancers, musicians, company managers and even our families. I am heartened to see investment in the communities for which we dance.

I’m also grateful that rehearsals with my core collaborators, Sydnie L. Mosley Dances, have continued as planned. When I’ve received the pointed question “What are you rehearsing for?,” I remind people that: 1. Rehearsal is a ritual, and we hold that time in our calendars as sacred, 2. We believe in process over product, and 3. Our business structure is predicated on paying people to be in a process which has not stopped, even if that process has taken a new shape.

Have I done some virtual dancemaking this year? Sure. Who hasn’t? I made a 75-second video as a part of a friend’s project to get out the vote, and I directed a short dance on camera for a virtual residency with high school students. I am even showing a previously filmed solo in a virtual dance festival with a live emcee and talk-back event that I am delighted to participate in. Will I start to make a habit of this, especially with SLMDances? Nah. Nothing beats sitting live in a theater—God, I miss it! I’m not going to pretend like a two-camera shoot is a worthy replacement.

I do think there are some moments where it makes sense to create a virtual experience, or even a live experience (enacting the best of COVID-19 safety precautions). I’ve been overjoyed to see how dancers have taken to the streets in acts of protest. I’ve watched my share of dance films and magical Zooms, thoughtfully curated events that wrangle the digital space. I think that if your curiosity and aesthetic are at the intersection of dance and digital media, now is your time to shine. I can’t wait to see what you are creating.

As we embark on year two of the pandemic, here are some questions you might want to consider:

• Am I creating digital work because it’s truly in service of my mission and values or just because that’s what everyone else is doing right now?
• How am I creating space to honor grief for the projects that were lost/canceled or are shapeshifting?
• How might I benefit from sitting still for an extended time and listening to my body?
• How might my skills be transferable and useful toward causes that will fortify the lives and labor of dancers?
• What is my definition of success?
• As I return to in-person dance activities, how can I foreground intentionality, care and collectivity to ensure everyone’s health and safety?

I invite you to consider how you are making space for rest, grief, rage, joy, pleasure, dreaming and breath during this moment of global transformation. Our field can be competitive and we need to pay the rent, but in this unprecedented year, I invite you to let go of the pressure to produce something just for the sake of it, especially if it does not feel authentic to your practice.

As for me, I know I live in the land of the tactile, analog, ephemeral and you had to be there. Until we can be together safely again to create that kind of alchemy, I’ll wait.

The post I Have No Desire to Produce a Performance, Live or Livestreamed, Until the Pandemic Is Over. I’ll Wait. appeared first on Dance Magazine.

As a child, whenever I heard music, I instantly disconnected from the present and vanished into a world of myth and fantasy. A swing of an arm created a painting that only I could see; a hand gesture gave birth to an Indian god; continuously spinning while looking down at the carpet made my eyes see patterns spring to life. I remember coming to and all the adults reacting, some clapping, some laughing and a few just looking at me weirdly.

The post For Aakash Odedra, Dance Is a Way of Looking Within and Observing the World appeared first on Dance Magazine.

I was sure that this meant there was much more to come. That the funding (and other) gates would flood open, and that I would never again face the debilitating fear that I might not have a future. It goes without saying that this amazing recognition changed my life in ways I would never have imagined: Besides funding through the mirror of their eyes at New York Live Arts in early 2020, it supported me and my family through many dark COVID-19 months. But, like all funding meant to take care of a single project or moment in life, as soon as the money was spent, I was back at zero.

The post It's Time to Reimagine Dance Funding appeared first on Dance Magazine.

That is, of course, the artist-statement answer. I think, for me, the question is more “Why do I make dance?”

The post Rosy Simas on Using Dance to Unite Identity, Ancestry & Culture appeared first on Dance Magazine.

I’m full of feelings, although some people may not know it because I am quite reserved, private and almost shy at times. Dance is the way I express whatever I’m feeling, or let go of any emotions I may not want to feel. It’s the one thing that removes any inhibitions that make me too meek to express myself.

The post What's Shirlene Quigley's Love Language? Dance appeared first on Dance Magazine.

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Despite clear talent, I grew up with teachers who ignored me in class; it made me work harder. I went on to a performance career with Oakland Ballet, North Carolina Dance Theatre and BalletX, among others, despite being ignored by some directors who seemed to have hired me simply to check off a box. I became the visible token while feeling completely invisible.

The post My Life as an
Invisible Black
Choreographer appeared first on Dance Magazine.

It may seem like a simple change, but this could be a watershed moment—one where the aesthetics of ballet begin to expand to include the presence of people of color.

With all the work being done worldwide to increase the number of black dancers in ballet, it was only a matter of time before we got here. Bare legs and flesh tone shoes are commonplace in contemporary ballet but in classical and neoclassical ballet, pink tights and shoes remain a linchpin.

Dance Theatre of Harlem first debuted flesh-tone tights and shoes in 1974 on the back leg of a European tour. Dancer Llanchie Stevenson was the catalyst: From her first days in the company, she consistently implored Arthur Mitchell to allow them to wear tights and shoes that matched their skin color. Stevenson explains, “One day I noticed that my arms were a different color than my legs, I thought that I looked so disjointed. I started wearing brown tights over my pink tights.” Mitchell liked it so much he decided that all dancers had to wear tights to match their skin. The decision was a declaration of ownership of the art form, and a redefinition of classism.

Where did the tradition of pink tights come from anyway? In the 1790s, Austrian ballet dancer Maria Viganó shocked Parisian audiences when she and her brother Salvatore performed in sheer white muslin tunics, her legs covered by flesh pink hosiery that gave the appearance of nakedness. At the time, the Paris Opéra banned “nude pink” due to social concerns, but by the end of the 19th century, pink tights were the norm. The intent was to have both the hosiery and shoes disappear, and back then, pink was as tastefully close to nude as they could get without having the theaters burned down in scandal.

Since then, little thought has been given to this tradition, but it is safe to say that the sole reason ballet tights and shoes are pink is because at the time the tradition started, all of the dancers were white. As racial uniformity decreases, should we not reevaluate the relevance of pink tights and shoes? Could it not be argued that the actual “tradition” is that the tights and shoes should match the dancer’s complexion?

Most of the arguments against flesh-tone tights center around the preservation of the classical aesthetic of uniformity. It could be said that brown tights work for DTH because they are a group of dancers of color, therefore the brown tights are in a sense uniform. But when there are only one or two dancers in the corps wearing brown tights, some believe that it “breaks the line.”

This begs the question: How much difference is there between a brown arm and head and a brown leg in a line? Not much. But there are directors who still see discernible brownness in the corps to be problematic.

In the mid-1980s when Houston Ballet’s Ben Stevenson (not related to Llanchie) cast an up-and-coming Lauren Anderson in his ballet Peer Gynt, it was the first time her skin tone was artistically discussed. “The costume was a unitard that went from (white) flesh tone to green, when I put it on it didn’t look right, so they dyed the legs to match my skin, and that was the first time that it was done,” says Anderson. Stevenson was also open to her wearing her natural hair in the role so long as it was thematically tied-in.

Later, during a Nutcracker tech rehearsal, Stevenson found that Anderson’s legs in pink tights as Sugarplum appeared grey under the lights. They decided to test a few shades of brown but none looked right. “Finally, Ben said, ‘Call Dance Theatre of Harlem and find out what they use.’ That was music to my ears,” Anderson recalls.

Once she had done Sugarplum with brown tights and shoes, she says, “It didn’t make sense for me to go back.” As she rose through the ranks to principal, Anderson wore a variety of shades depending on the role: pink if she was in the corps or in a Balanchine work, tan for classical ballets or a richer brown—more her real complexion—in her principal roles.

Tights are just the beginning when companies are seeking to truly honor diversity. The myriad technical considerations for dancers of color extends to costuming, hair, make-up and lighting. “You light the set and costumes perfectly, you have to light the dancers as well,” says Anderson. “All of my partners had to contend with an extra spot on them when they danced with me.”

If companies want to be inclusive, artistic teams can no longer be on auto-pilot. It requires seeing productions with fresh eyes, possibly reconsidering the blonde wigs, certain hair hairstyles, and even scenery (when Anderson danced Cinderella, Houston Ballet created new portrait of a black mother). “As part of my artistic vision, I wanted to find a natural look for all my dancers. Pink tights are traditional, but it was important to me that we found something that was natural for Lauren,” says Ben Stevenson.

Pacific Northwest’s artistic director Peter Boal learned the impact of having an open dialogue with dancers of color when he asked student Samrawit Saleem how she wanted to wear her natural hair for the role of Clara. The Nutcracker photo of her double strand twist went viral.

Samrawit Saleem, photo by Angela Sterling, courtesy PNB

A by-product of inviting others in is that you have to engage with them and take their feelings and experiences into consideration. You must ask people what would make them feel included, not assume you know. It requires that you authentically, with empathy and compassion, examine the conditions that you have been operating out of and be willing to let go of some and redesign others.

When you are seeking change, you can’t expect things to stay the same. When ballet organizations started their journey toward diversity, most were solely focused on increasing the number of brown bodies on stage. However, it is becoming clear that the issues run far deeper. Inclusion requires integration. Ballet is learning that you can’t just add brown bodies, you have to change the culture. But we can start can start to rebuild from the ground up with shoes and tights.

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Although many disabled communities were previously finding social interaction online, in recent months our able-bodied peers have joined in. As a result, more dance resources have gone virtual, with classes streaming daily. This recent shift towards dance through digital formats has offered a great deal to the disabled/CI dance community.

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I shrugged. I’m used to it. People imply that dance isn’t a real job all the time—especially when they find out that my income comes from a mixture of dance, freelance writing and personal training. Juggling multiple jobs is the norm for most artists, but to many nonartists, it’s confusing. And while some people might find my dance career more legitimate if I had a full-time job with a company, I know that many would still see it as a “fun” thing I’d grow out of eventually.

The post Stop Asking When I’m Going to Get a “Real” Job appeared first on Dance Magazine.

For my first-ever class, intermediate ballet for my fellow college students in 2011, I was armed with little more than my own experiences as a student. I certainly wasn’t prepared for all the needs competing for my attention, nor equipped with strategies to differentiate my teaching approach for each student’s learning style. I must have missed that day in technique class.

There is a pervasive idea that if you are a great dancer, you are automatically qualified to teach, whether you have training or experience in education practices or not. There is also an assumption that training to be a dance educator is only valuable if you’re working with children—that you don’t need it when teaching anyone over the age of 16.

Amber Star Merkens, Courtesy Mark Morris Dance Group

Today, I am the community programs director with Mark Morris Dance Group, overseeing faculty and curricula throughout more than 40 partnerships in New York City. And I still teach modern for The School at the Mark Morris Dance Center. I can now say, with confidence, that I am a good teacher. And teaching well is difficult, so it’s okay that it was hard for me in the beginning. But the question I come back to is: Did it have to be so hard?

What if college students were told that pursuing dance education doesn’t mean giving up on being an artist, but, in fact, supports it? The field seems to understand this in regards to yoga, Pilates or personal training. Dancers invest beyond their degrees to get certified, knowing it can bolster their financial security while also developing deeper understandings of their kinetic interconnectivity—ultimately making them more desirable hires as performers. Training to teach dance effectively would provide similar benefits, though this does not seem to be as explicitly understood.

Christopher Setter, Courtesy Mark Morris Dance Group

To help graduates bridge the gap, our 16-week teaching artist training program allows them to assist classes, observe others, take workshops and have personalized advisors. In short, it’s the type of program I wish I’d had before I found myself in charge of a classroom.

We need to recognize as a field that just because no one prepared us before we began teaching, it does not mean we should inflict the same under-preparedness on the next generation. We can do better!

We can start by ensuring dance students understand that teaching artists are a vital part of the community—and then walk our talk by supporting those who pursue this career path.

The post Being a Great Dancer Doesn’t Automatically Mean You’re a Gifted Teacher appeared first on Dance Magazine.

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