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July 31st: Community Engagement Artists and Creatives Grant, December 31st: New England Presenter Travel Fund, December 31st: Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet Scholarship, December 31st: 24 Seven Dance Convention, December 31st: National Theater Project Presenter Travel Grant, December 31st: Breck Creek Artist-in-Residence Program

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"The Devil Ties My Tongue" by Amy Seiwert performed for the SKETCH Series, 2013. Photo by David DeSilva. Courtesy of Amy Seiwert's Imagery

Up to date announcements of company seasons, featured artists and special programming as well as grant of awards such as Princess Grace, or artistic appointments

NYU: The Center for Ballet and the Arts and National Sawdust Collaborate to Support Women Composers and Choreographers

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3 December 2020

The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation has created a new program between the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU and National Sawdust to foster collaboration between women composers and choreographers with the aim of creating new works in the virtual medium.

The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation today announced the creation of a new program to foster collaboration between women composers and choreographers with the aim of creating new works in the virtual medium. The $300,000 gift supports a one-year partnership between National Sawdust and The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU (CBA). Beginning in November 2020, the program supports 45 appointed women choreographers and composers to help develop their skills, create and present new work, and build a community of like-minded artists that will enhance their careers. At least half of the participating women represent BIWOC (Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color) communities.

Alexander Sanger, a Trustee of the Toulmin Foundation, on behalf of his fellow trustees, William Villafranco and Walter Montaign, said: “In this time when live stage performance is not possible, composers and choreographers need to explore new ways to create, collaborate and present their work. Creating for the virtual world is fundamentally different than creating for the stage and involves skills and partnering in the fields of film, sound, set design, lighting and computer technology that are in many cases new for the choreographer or composer. This program aims to fill that need. Further, the program will continue the Foundation’s efforts to bring increased diversity and support a wide range of talents in the performing arts. Mrs. Toulmin, a passionate supporter of the performing arts, believed in fairness and equity for all women, and we are proud to carry on her legacy.”

This appointed program will feature five “Toulmin Fellows” and forty “Toulmin Creators”. Each will receive a package of financial, intellectual, and creative resources to support development of new work.

The five Toulmin Fellows will spend the winter in residence at The Center for Ballet and the Arts and the spring at National Sawdust, building toward participation in National Sawdust’s Digital Discovery Festival (DDF). They will receive financial support, office and studio space, and access to videographers, sound engineers, AV equipment and marketing support. Each fellow will be paired with a carefully selected mentor who will support their creative processes throughout the year.

Read the full announcement here.

Harper’s Bazaar: How Three Women Produced a Ballet Gala in a Pandemic

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By Erica Gonzalez

17 December 2020

Ballerina Melanie Hamrick wanted to do something to help the dance community months into a pandemic that put many of them out of work. “I hate seeing my friends and colleagues not getting to dance,” she tells BAZAAR.com. After lockdowns and social distancing measures were introduced this year, live performances went on hiatus. Prestigious companies like the New York City Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre had to close for the season. But Hamrick also thought about the audience members who wouldn’t be able to watch their favorite performances in person, especially during the holidays. “How can we also help them?” she thought.

The former ABT ballerina teamed up with ABT principal dancer Christine Shevchenko and choreographer Joanna DeFelice to produce a unique performance during the COVID-19 pandemic that gave dancers a chance to work while adhering to health and safety guidelines. Through their new production company, Live Arts Global, they created A Night at the Ballet, which features dancers from a variety of troupes: ABT, New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Alvin Ailey, Dance Theater of Harlem, and even Mariinsky Theatre of St. Petersburg, Russia.

The one-hour streaming event goes live on YouTube on Live Arts Global’s channel starting at 7 p.m. ET on December 17, and lasts through December 20. The set will include pieces from The Nutcracker, Romeo & Juliet, Don Quixote, and more. And it’s completely free to watch; though, they’re asking for donations to benefit the performers and crew of the production.

While many dance companies are already showing virtual online performances to make up for their closed seasons, A Night at the Ballet was produced entirely during the coronavirus era rather than using footage from older performances. But that’s where the challenge came in: How does one do that safely?

Read the full article here.

Mass Review: The Offending Classic

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By Nicole Duffy Robertson

10 December 2020

What makes a ballet a classic? Is it earning a permanent place in the history books, or is it being worthy of the Herculean investment of hours in the studio, the tireless work of the dancers and coaches, the resources, media and marketing machine required to bring it to life, or both? Who decides, and more importantly, what goes into that calculus? Today the re-evaluation of the Western theatrical dance canon continues as ballet and modern dance are challenged in the academy.[1] In concert dance, these questions are a matter of survival: the performed repertory consists mostly of “classics” and “new work,” and everything else tends to disappear. So, the question of what makes a dance a classic, i.e., a dance worth remembering, either by restaging or through written discourse, takes on a bigger significance.[2]

Two works by the founders of the Joffrey Ballet, Robert Joffrey’s Astarte (1967) and Gerald Arpino’s Light Rain (1981), provide a lens for exploring the question of what qualifies as a “classic,” while also addressing ideas about shifting cultural definitions of violence, taste, and timelessness. A closer look at these works may complicate our ideas of what dances should survive, be studied, and/or be performed. These ballets exist outside of conventional ballet’s classic/canonic paradigm, in part because of their sexually explicit, “anti-balletic” underpinnings.[3] First as a dancer, and now in my work as a répétiteur for the Gerald Arpino Foundation, and as a co-founder and director of New York Dance Project, I continually wrestle with these questions. Which dances to teach, pass on, and present to the public is not a trivial matter for our art form.

Each of these ballets has a different sort of existence today: Astarte is in the dance history books, and Light Rain lives onstage. One is for the most part critically respected, while the other tends to be dismissed. But there is another reason I propose that these ballets have significance beyond their roles in ballet history and performance: they provide an essential bridge from foundational “classical ballet” training (the particular methodology or school is irrelevant) to understanding and mastering key elements of the current, multi-genre contemporary dance world. In other words, these ballets persist, whether as classics or “in the canon” or not, based on their unique pedagogical value, for both dancers and audiences.

Ballet canonicity has been largely determined by success in institutional promotion and financing, coupled with plentiful support from the critical establishment. For example, Royal Ballet founder Ninette de Valois’s astute creation of a “ballet tradition” in the 1930s (with the help of Arnold Haskell’s writing)[4] and George Balanchine’s unassailable status (protected by Lincoln Kirstein, the Balanchine Trust, and the New York City Ballet) continue to survive and thrive through uninterrupted institutional support and critical writing. These two main drivers of ballet survival (the institution and critical attention) create a somewhat narrow discourse that keeps a firm grip on what gets performed, and therefore have an outsized influence on the creative direction of ballet today.

Read the full article here.

Hacks for Virtual Holiday Rituals: Nutcracker Goes Digital

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From Hacks the Newsletter

By Alyssa Rapp

I have the fondest of lifelong memories of a ritual of going to see the Joffrey’s Nutcracker ballet or The Goodman Theater’s A Christmas Carol (streaming on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day here!)as a child growing up in Chicago, and later, as a parent with children of her own.

It was shared love of dance, shared battle wounds as MBA women and moms managing organizations, and more, my deep admiration for her charisma and capacity as a leader that sparked my friendship with Kara Medoff Barnett, the indomitable executive director of American Ballet Theatre. It is because of Kara that I agreed to join ABT’s Global Council. While the memories of taking Audrey and Henriette to see ABT kids performances at the Harris Theater or Whipped Cream ballet’s premiere cannot be relived in person in 2020, the nostalgia, beauty, and flawlessness that characterize ABT’s virtual Nutcracker performance is a close second. (Find an excerpt here on YouTube!)

For this week’s Hacks Newsletter, we gain ABT Executive Superstar Kara Medoff Barnett’s leadership hacks, about what’s it’s been like to lead America’s national ballet company through this pandemic – and to what she looks forward to in 2021.

AJR: Our family tradition has included going to the Nutcracker, and in more recent years, also traveling to see ABT’s “Whipped Cream” full-length fairytale. How are you bringing these seasonal greats to audiences virtually amidst Covid-19?

KMB: ABT’s Nutcracker production includes over 100 performers on the stage and close to 100 people behind the scenes, even before you add thousands of children and families in the audience. Clearly, live performances at epic scale are not happening this holiday season.

Instead, we are exploring the most powerful ways to share the magic of ballet on digital platforms. For The Nutcracker, we created a short film of the pas de deux between Clara and the Prince. With the help of our partners at Matador Content and LG Signature, we shot ABT principal dancers Isabella Boylston and James Whiteside in 8K, and we premiered the film on a billboard in Times Square as a gift to New Yorkers this holiday season.

In more normal years, ABT performs The Nutcracker—created by MacArthur Genius and ABT Artist in Residence Alexei Ratmanksy, with costumes and sets by Lion King designer Richard Hudson—for audiences in Orange County, California. This year, we’ve shared a climactic highlight of the production – for free—with millions of fans on a variety of digital platforms (billboards, YouTube, etc.). I think that screen fatigue is real, and ten minutes of extraordinary artistry is the perfect dose of holiday joy.

During the pandemic, we’ve focused on commissioning and creating new work in Covid-safe, NBA-style “ballet bubbles” for dancers and choreographers. In 2021, we’ll continue to build on this experience with additional bubbles and collaborations for digital capture and distribution. We’ll also rehearse and film excerpts from several of our beloved classics, deploying cutting edge technology to vivify these performances in ways that will dazzle audiences. We’ll explore and share the behind-the-scenes narratives and human stories of ABT’s extraordinary artist-athletes in docuseries and podcasts. And we’ll present live performances to safely distanced outdoor audiences in communities nationwide, sharing ballet with families who might not have access to digital devices and high-speed internet, as well as individuals across America who have been staring at screens for far too long.

AJR: What has been the biggest “silver lining” and learning opportunity for you personally as the Executive Director of American’s National Ballet company throughout the pandemic?

KMB: The biggest silver lining in my family life has been daily dinner with my parents, husband, and children (and sometimes my siblings). As the leader of an arts organization, I’m usually out in the evenings attending performances and events. It’s nice to spend more time barefoot and less time in high heels, more time reading bedtime stories and less time sitting in traffic on my way to Times Square or Lincoln Center.

Subscribe to the newsletter here.

Learn more about ABT here.

Dayton Ballet The Nutcracker - Paul Gilliam as Cavalier - photo credit Scott Robbins.

DDP’s Holiday Picks

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Instead of streaming the same old Nutcrackers this year, we’d recommend exploring something outside the usual male-choreographed, big city productions…

Read more

AJC: When will Black ballerinas take center stage?

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By Chandra Thomas Whitfield, For the AJC

Karla Tyson, 32, remembers well the early days of her ballet training when she and fellow young dance students performed in the ensemble cast of Atlanta-based Ballethnic Dance Company’s “The Urban Nutcracker.”

Her favorite part of each performance of the African American-inspired and Atlanta-focused adaptation of the classic Tchaikovsky ballet was when prima ballerina Nena Gilreath would take to the stage as Brown Sugar, with her husband and fellow lead, Waverly Lucas, as the handsome Chocolatier at her side.

The sight of Gilreath twirling gracefully across the stage in a rust, marigold and chocolate-colored tutu ensemble, her mahogany-colored skin glistening under the stage lights, would literally take her breath away. The standing ovations and encores audience members gifted Gilreath afterward, Tyson remembers, were “definitely inspiring.” She says it was validating and made her believe as an African American, I can be a ballerina too.

“Watching her, I definitely knew I wanted to do ballet,” recalls Tyson, a Henry County resident. “I wanted to be just like Ms. Nena.”

This month in her fifth reprisal in the lead role, Tyson, a Ballethnic graduate, hopes to recapture some of that same “Black ballerina magic” that Gilreath so effortlessly commanded during her 13-year tenure. For the first time, the signature production was recorded at the Legacy Theatre in Alpharetta without a live audience and streamed virtuallySaturday, Dec. 19 at 7:30 p.m. It’s yet another COVID-19 casualty that forced the cancellation of all previously planned festivities in celebration of Ballethnic, metro Atlanta’s first and only African American-founded “classically trained, culturally diverse” school. It’s the professional dance company’s 30th anniversary year, which officially wraps up Jan. 15.

Read the full story here.

Pointe: Tess Voelker Is Only 23, but She’s About to Premiere Her First Work for the Paris Opéra Ballet

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By Laura Cappelle

12 November 2020

Not many 23-year-olds get commissioned by the Paris Opéra Ballet. For Tess Voelker, who grew up between Chicago and New Jersey before moving to Europe to start her dance career, 2020 has turned into an unexpectedly charmed year: In addition to getting a contract as a dancer with Nederlands Dans Theater, she created a pas de deux, Clouds Inside, for POB corps members Marion Gautier de Charnacé and Antonin Monié, as part of a contemporary-choreographers’ evening.

While a second national lockdown in France means the November performances have been canceled, Clouds Inside will still get an audience. On November 13, the Paris Opéra Ballet will stream a closed performance of Voelker’s work, along with creations by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Mehdi Kerkouche, on Facebook Live at 8 pm Paris time for €4,49. (Tickets are not available in the U.S.)

Pointe recently spoke with Voelker to learn more about how she landed this remarkable opportunity.

 

How did this collaboration with POB come about?

It all started with the social media world during quarantine. I rented a yoga studio down the street and I kept publishing lots of improv videos on Instagram. And one day, a dancer said he’d found my account thanks to Aurélie Dupont [Paris Opera Ballet’s artistic director]. I sent her a message to say it was an honor. She asked me if I ever choreographed, and I said no.

Then a few months later, I get a call from her. Due to coronavirus reasons, they were having a smaller show and she thought to use this time to reach out to more risky artists. I certainly am a risk, and I’m a cheap risk, too [laughs].

Read the full story here.

Dance Magazine: Kyle Abraham Is Dance Magazine’s Guest Editor This Week

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By Jennifer Stahl

16 November 2020

During my first year at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, there was a grad student in my ballet class who mystified me. At the end of almost every across-the-floor combination, he’d drop the classical positions and improvise for an additional count of eight, mixing hip-hop swagger with contemporary abandon. In ballet class! As a sheltered bunhead who’d always strictly followed the teacher’s combinations like they were The Law, watching him find his own groove in the corner blew my mind. Partly because it felt so rebellious, but also because his movement was simply mesmerizing to watch.

That guy was Kyle Abraham. And even back then in 2003, he was already making his own rules.

 

He would go on to win a MacArthur “genius” grant 10 years later for his bold, haunting works about police brutality and violence, intimacy and vulnerability. And he endeared himself to the dance community by using that money to help fund his A.I.M dancers’ 52-week contracts (with health insurance and vacation days—even through a pandemic). Then he became even more beloved by refusing to be presented on any rep program that didn’t also include a work by a female choreographer.

I’m thrilled to announce that this week, he’s Dance Magazine‘s first-ever guest editor for our website, taking over starting today with stories that were all his ideas. Stay tuned for pieces about what it’s like to join a new company during the pandemic, what goes into titling a dance work, how directors choose rep, what happens to a choreographer after they “emerge” into mid-career and more. It’s an exciting lineup with lots of insight for anyone in the dance field.

Read the full story here.

The Guardian: Royal Ballet Live: Within the Golden Hour review – sheer, ravishing class from top to pointed toe

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By

15 November 2020

Planned for a live audience then switched to a streamed show, the Royal Ballet’s latest gala is pretty much an all-killer no-filler programme with a company of dancers who, if anything, seem to have benefited from their hiatus away from the stage.

Valentino Zucchetti gets the honour of opening the show with a world premiere, Scherzo. Zucchetti has been choreographing for some time without making huge waves, but this confident piece of neoclassicism shows he knows what he’s doing. It’s set to Rachmaninov, as, coincidentally, is the evening’s other new-ish piece, Cathy Marston’s In Our Wishes. Extracted from her ballet Three Sisters, this pas de deux was debuted at the Royal’s first post-lockdown performance last month. I found it more compelling this time round, perhaps thanks to the dancers (Romany Pajdak and Calvin Richardson), perhaps because the camera’s lens brought us closer to Pajdak’s haunted expressions. In a short duet they find gravitas, stoicism, desperation and great love between two people who just can’t melt the barrier between them.

Elsewhere, we get to explore the company’s history, with three Frederick Ashton works, including Dance of the Blessed Spirits, originally made for the opera Orpheus in 1953. William Bracewell dances the solo as if it’s a stream of consciousness. Full of feeling but never OTT, his dancing has an honesty about it that’s very moreish. Ashton’s divine Monotones II from 1965 is a trio that depends on absolute control and synchrony, plus Melissa Hamilton’s ability to do vertical splits – toe pointed to ceiling, head clasped to knee – while Reece Clarke and Nicol Edmonds rotate her on pointe. It’s extremely exposed, and skilfully pulled off. Staying in the 60s, Yasmine Naghdi and Edmonds bring seriousness and a scrupulous precision to the stark beauty of Kenneth MacMillan’s Concerto, the combination of choreography, Shostakovich’s music and glowing sunset backdrop quite ravishing.

Read the full story here.

The Free Lance- Star: Fredericksburg-area dance studios struggle during pandemic

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By Adele Uphaus

15 November 2020

Khalia Harris said dance saved her life.

Growing up as a military child, she moved often and her father was frequently deployed. She struggled with sadness and a sense of not belonging anywhere—except for at the studio where she took dance lessons.

“Dance was really a healing thing for me, and it changed the trajectory of my life,” Harris said.

Her own experience with the therapeutic and community-building power of a local dance studio inspired Harris to open Umbiance Center for the Performing Arts in Stafford County five years ago.

“I wanted to bring that healing opportunity to other children, especially those who are at-risk, have special needs and that sort of thing,” Harris said.

Umbiance students have performed at many community events, such as the annual Martin Luther King Day celebration at James Monroe High School and the first-ever Black History Month celebration at Brock Road Elementary School last year.

In 2019, the studio received a Best of Fredericksburg award for best area dance school.

Harris also established a nonprofit—Leading Education Arts Program, or LEAP—which has provided scholarships to Umbiance for economically disadvantaged children.

Read the full story here.